Volvo equipment: effective tool in the Israeli occupation of Palestine

Over the past few years, the use of Volvo equipment in Israel's demolition of Palestinian homes and the construction of the wall has been documented. The vice president of media relations & corporate news of Volvo Group, M. Wikforss, responded to an article in the Electronic Intifada on 2nd July 2007, saying that Volvo Group does not condone the destructive use of Volvo equipment and would regret the use of its products for destructive purposes. Wikforss also claimed, "we do not have any control over the use of our products, other than to affirm in our business activities a Code of Conduct that decries unethical behaviour." By Adri Nieuwhof.

In its advisory opinion on the wall of July 2004, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) reaffirmed the illegality of the construction of the wall and Jewish settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories, including East Jerusalem. According to the ICJ, construction activities should stop immediately and the wall and settlements should be dismantled. Palestinians who lost property because of the illegal construction activities should also be compensated for their loss.

The Volvo Group Code of Conduct states that "within its sphere of influence, the Volvo Group supports and respects the protection of internationally proclaimed human rights and ensures that it is not complicit in human rights abuses." The use of Volvo construction equipment in illegal activities is a breach not only of international law, but also of Volvo's own Code of Conduct. Volvo Group is informed about the illegal practices of Israel in the occupied territories and knows about the Israeli military's use Volvo equipment in a destructive way. It is not sufficient to sit back and refer to a Code of Conduct. Volvo should be concerned and rather investigate how construction equipment can end up this way in the hands of the Israeli military. The company should enforce its Code of Conduct in its dealings at all levels. Volvo Group's Code of Conduct becomes a meaningless piece of paper when the company is not acting upon it. Meanwhile, the list of documented use of Volvo equipment in illegal activities of the Israeli forces is growing.

In January 2007, Volvo equipment was used in home demoltions in Silwan, a neighborhood of East Jerusalem. Activestills photographer Keren Manor took a picture of the equipment, which can be found here.

In March 2007, Volvo equipment was used in several home demolitions, including that of Abu Snena's house in Wadi-Qadum neighborhood in East Jerusalem.

On 25 June 2007, the unrecognized Bedouin Palestinian villages Atir and Um Hayran in the Naqab (Negev) were attacked by more than 1,500 Israeli soldiers. Hussein al-Rafay'a, head of the Regional Council for the Unrecognized Villages (RUCV) in the Naqab, was arrested because he tried to block the Israeli forces and machinery from approaching the villages and its inhabitants. His colleague managed to take pictures of the demolitions, showing how the big, powerful, yellow Volvo bulldozers razed the homes of the Bedouin villagers to the ground (see picture here). At least twenty houses were demolished and properties were confiscated, leaving over 150 men, women and children homeless.

On 12th October 2009, Israeli bulldozers accompanied by dozens of armed forces arrived at the house of the Teriaqi family in Beit Hanina. Within two hours, they turned the home of the family into a pile of rubble. Next, the bulldozers and their armed entourage convoyed to a neighbouring 50 square meter oven bakery that belongs to Mr. Jehad Siam. The same procedures were followed: the area was sealed and evacuated, anybody who showed any sign of resistance would be detained and the way was cleared for the Volvo bulldozers to carry out the demolition (Report by the Coalition for Jerusalem, 12 October 2009).

In April 2010, Volvo equipment was seen being used by the Israeli forces to prepare the construction site for the wall around al-Walaja. The residents protested the confiscation and demolition of their property. The Israeli settlements of Har Gilo and Gilo, established in the 1970s, are built on land confiscated from the village. While Israeli forces try to silence the protesters with harsh measures, Volvo and Caterpillar equipment is used by the Israeli forces in the illegal construction of the wall on the village's land.

On 13 June 2010, Activestills photographer Anne Paq documented Volvo equipment performing its destructive job on the occupied Palestinian land of Al-Walaja (see picture here).

The Volvo Group is also involved in another activity in Israel. Through its Volvo Buses branch, the Volvo Group is providing armoured buses to transport Israeli settlers in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT). Volvo Buses is co-owner of Merkavim Ltd., an Israeli transport technology company. Another shareholder in the company is Mayer's Cars and Trucks, the exclusive Israeli representative of companies from the Volvo Group. According to Merkavim's website, the company was chosen by Volvo as "its major body builder in the Middle East." The 'Who Profits from the Occupation?' project has reported that Merkavim manufactures an armoured version of Volvo's Mars Defender bus for the Israeli public transport company Egged. Egged uses the Mars Defender to provide bus services for illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank. The 2004 advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice on Israel's wall in the West Bank confirmed that settlements violate Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention. Article 49 explicitly states that the Occupying Power is not allowed to deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies. Bus services facilitated by Volvo subsidiaries facilitate the maintaining of illegal settlements in the OPT.
Adri Nieuwhof is a conultant and human rights advocate based in Switzerland.

~ Source: Corporate Watch ~

DFID in India VI: False promises

The final part of the Dodgy Development: DFID in India series by Eshwarappa M and Richard Whittell, published by Corporate Watch over the past few months, focuses on the British government's Department for International Development's funding of civil society organisations. This part comprises a film and two interviews. The film, False Promises, looks at the 'Business Partners for Development' project, funded by the DFID, which convinced people to allow a coal company to mine their lands with devastating results. In the two interviews that conclude the series, two people's organisation activists discuss why groups like theirs should not take the DFID's money and argue for the importance and necessity of international, people to people solidarity. Preceding parts of the series can be found here.

FILM: Dodgy Development: False Promises



INTERVIEWS

In this interview, Roma, a member of the Kaimur Kshetra Mahila Mazdoor Kisan Sangharsh Samiti, a land rights movement in Uttar Pradesh, talks about why it refuses to accept DFID funding and the compromises made by other groups that have accepted it.

Richard Whittell: The DFID lists ‘civil society’ among its partners in India and argues that by working with civil society groups it can give poor people a voice and help them in advocating their rights. As part of this approach, the department has given £25 million of British aid to the Poorest Areas Civil Society (PACS) Programme, which it says is partnering with civil society in India to improve the uptake of rights and entitlements by women and socially excluded communities. Do you want the DFID’s money?

Roma: No, we don’t need that funding. Why should we need it? Through the kind of struggle that we are in, women have taken possession of many acres of land, thousands of acres of land, and we didn’t have any funding. They [the women] are coming with their own conviction that the land is theirs and it cannot be traded, it is not a commodity, it cannot go to companies. So they are recapturing their lost political space and they are raising their own resources. They are saying if we have land we can raise everything for ourselves: food security will be there, we can look after our education, our health, our water, sanitation, everything. And for that we don’t need any funding.

So why they are coming and funding women’s groups I don’t understand. And groups should not take that kind of funding. It’s really a trap. If we get into that trap we lose our struggle and our political movement also.

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Psychological research conducted in WEIRD nations may not apply to global populations

According to the study, the majority of psychological research is conducted on subjects from Western nations, primarily university students. Between 2003 and 2007, 96 per cent of psychological samples came from countries with only 12 per cent of the world's populations. The U.S. alone provided nearly 70 per cent of these subjects.

However, the study finds significant psychological and behavioral differences between what the researchers call Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic (WEIRD) societies and their non-WEIRD counterparts across a spectrum of key areas, including visual perception, fairness, spatial and moral reasoning, memory and conformity.

The findings, published in Nature tomorrow and Behavioral Sciences this week, raise questions about the practice of drawing universal claims about human psychology and behavior based on research samples from WEIRD societies.

"The foundations of human psychology and behavior have been built almost exclusively on research conducted on subjects from WEIRD societies," says UBC Psychology and Economics Prof. Joe Henrich, who led the study with UBC co-authors Prof. Steven Heine and Prof. Ara Norenzayan. "While students from Western nations are a convenient, low-cost data pool, our findings suggest that they are also among the least representative populations one could find for generalizing about humans."

The study, which reviews the comparative database of research from across the behavioural sciences, finds that subjects from WEIRD societies are more individualistic, analytic, concerned with fairness, existentially anxious and less conforming and attentive to context compared to those from non-WEIRD societies.

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Scholar claims to have unlocked 'The Plato Code'

A scholar unlocks a code buried within ancient Greek texts to discover secret messages left by a long-dead philosopher. This isn't the plot of the next Dan Brown novel, but the result of an English academic's five-year-long study of Plato.

Jay Kennedy of the University of Manchester claims that Plato (who died around 347 B.C.) wove a complex musical and mathematical cipher into the text of famed dialogues like "The Republic." According to Kennedy's research, which is published in this month's edition of the respected classics journal Apeiron, that code was used to hide the fact that the Athenian was a secret follower of the philosopher Pythagoras and shared his belief that the key to understanding the universe lay in numbers and math.

"Plato's books played a major role in founding Western culture, but they are mysterious and end in riddles," says Kennedy, a historian and philosopher of science. "In antiquity, many of his followers said the books contained hidden layers of meaning and secret codes, but modern scholars rejected this. I have shown rigorously that the books do contain codes and symbols and that unraveling them reveals the hidden philosophy of Plato."

Other academics aren't quite so certain that hidden meanings lurk beneath Plato's ponderings. "It's not impossible in principle, but I think I would need further persuasion," says Dr. James Warren, an expert in early Greek philosophy at Cambridge University's Corpus Christi College. "The question is, why should it be there? And what difference does it make to our understanding Plato's dialogues?"

Kennedy says he unwrapped the Platonic puzzle using stichometry, measuring the number of lines in the original text. Using a computer program, he was able to convert the most accurate contemporary versions of Plato's manuscripts into their original form, which would have consisted of lines of 35 Greek characters, with no spaces or punctuation. He found that the restored texts followed a curious pattern and had line lengths involving multiples of the number 12. "The Apology," for example, has 1,200 lines, "The Symposium" has 2,400 and "The Republic" has 12,000.

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The New National Security State

Editor's Note: In this exclusive excerpt from his forthcoming spy thriller, "Inside Out," former CIA operative turned bestselling author Barry Eisler "takes us on a tour of the darkest crevices of the new National Security State." As constitutional scholar and Harper's contributor Scott Horton notes, "Inside Out" is "a brilliant work of fiction - but is it really so fictional? Eisler's plot lines move dangerously close to real life; they are animated by a reality behind the headlines." -jl/TO

By definition, establishments believe in propping up the existing order. Members of the ruling class have a vested interest in keeping things pretty much the way they are. Safeguarding the status quo, protecting traditional institutions, can be healthy and useful, stabilizing and reassuring.
- Evan Thomas, Newsweek

Of course, the United States is unique. And just as we have the world's most advanced economy, military, and technology, we also have its most advanced oligarchy.
- Simon Johnson, The Atlantic

L'état, c'est moi.
- Louis XIV
 

PROLOGUE
December, 2007

Ulrich stared at Clements, wanting to believe he'd misheard. Even in the grand panoply of CIA incompetence, this one would be a standout.

“Let me get this straight,” he said, deliberately speaking slowly and clearly so Clements and the rest of the Langley contingent assembled before him would understand exactly what Ulrich made of their collective mental acuity. “Ninety-two interrogation videotapes, and you're telling me they're just… missing?”

Clements shifted his weight from one foot to the other, the frozen grass crunching under his wingtips. “We think there were ninety-two. We're still trying to get an accurate inventory.”

Ulrich looked past Clements at the precise rows of thousands of white markers, their expanse dazzling in the brilliant morning sun. Well, at least now he understood why Clements had wanted to meet here. No one was going to notice, much less overhear, a small group of men paying their respects to the honored dead of Arlington National Cemetery. No records, no witnesses, no proof this conversation had ever happened.

“All right,” Ulrich said, running the fingers of a gloved hand along his thick gray beard. “First thing I need to know. What's on these tapes?”

Clements glanced at the man to his left and then at the one to his right. Stephen Clements, Michael Killman, John Alkire. The deputy director of the CIA, the director of the National Clandestine Service, and the director of the Counterterrorism Center. Half the bureaucratic firepower of the entire Agency, huddling in their dark overcoats like an incipient union of funeral directors.

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