Pacific Vision Newsletter
Pacific Vision Newsletter May 2007
This issue of Pacific Vision Newsletter:
- Interview with Founding Editor Caroline Canafax
- Close to Slavery: The U.S. Guestworker Program (Mary Bauer)
- U.S. Mother's Rights (Kristen Dobson)
- East Timor Hits Potholes on the Road to Independence (Charles Scheiner)
- Women's Health in East Timor (Megan Lavelle)
- Resounding Victory for Democracy in Aceh (Liem Soei Liong)
- Suharto Era Repression: West Papua (Ed McWilliams)
- Book Review: On Venezuela
Interview with Caroline Canafax, Pacific Vision Founding Editor
Caroline Canafax
Interviewed by Mariza Cabral
for Pacific Vision
I met Caroline in the 1990s when I was a graduate student of engineering at the University of Washington. A video of the 1991 Santa Cruz massacre in East Timor had just become public which put East Timor in the international spotlight for the first time since the 1975 Indonesian military invasion and occupation. I felt compelled to use the momentum to inform the university community of the many other attrocities that were taking place there, so I got busy organizing informational events at the university. Caroline, too, was interested in informing the American people about East Timor’s suffering, and printed several articles in Pacific Vision. She was among the handful of people I met in Seattle who was even aware of what was going on there. In contrast to myself, in my late 20s and with no prior experience with activism, Caroline was a veteran and in her 70s. She was also an immensely warm woman who spoke to me as a friend – becoming an important presence in my life, as a foreign student with no family support in the U.S. Our friendship has survived the years that I went to live in Europe, and my less than stellar record at keeping in touch during those years. Thank you, Caroline, for remaining my friend!
Close to Slavery: The U.S. Guestworker Program
by Mary Bauer
Southern Poverty Law Center
Pacific Vision Contributed Article
The debate over immigration reform has spawned legislative proposals to create a vast new pool of temporary foreign workers – potentially millions – who would be available to U.S. businesses seeking cheap labor. President Bush, in fact, has called for a “legal and orderly path for foreign workers to enter our country to work on a temporary basis.”
Happy Mother’s Day! ‘MomsRising’ and the Struggle for Rights
by Kristen Dobson
Reprinted from Parent Map Magazine, May 2007
Selena Allen thought she had it figured out. The Kent mother was pregnant with her second child, and she and her husband had good jobs. They were excited about the new baby and had carefully worked out finances so that Selena could stay home for a month after the birth to bond with her newborn.
"I had two and a half weeks of paid leave saved up, and we could afford another week and a half unpaid by cutting corners," Allen says. "We were set for the birth at the end of May. But, lo and behold, Connor had other ideas."
East Timor Hits Potholes on the Road to Independence
by Charles Scheiner
Reprinted from Estafeta, Winter 2007
Four centuries of colonial domination, capped by 24 years of brutal military occupation, leave deep scars. Indonesian troops have been out of Timor-Leste (East Timor’s official name) for seven years, and the new country has been self-governing for more than four, but legacies of poverty, trauma, patterns of violence and criminality, injustice and isolation will take decades to overcome. Over the last year, Timor-Leste’s people have painfully learned just how difficult this process can be. National visions, shared struggles and promises of prosperity no longer suffice to unify the one million citizens of one of the world’s least developed countries.
Beginning last April, the country’s capital unraveled – regional schisms and political machinations, manipulated by ruthless individuals and mishandled by government officials, led to fighting among and between Timor-Leste’s army and police. On May 25, soldiers massacred nine unarmed police officers, the most deadly day of a week of killings. Most police went into hiding, and gangs of jobless young men, alienated by exclusion from the benefits of independence, filled the security vacuum with street fighting.
Women’s Health in East Timor:
by Megan Lavelle Pacific Vision Contributed Article
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| Mother and child in a camp for displaced persons. Photo by Megan Lavelle (7/11/2006). |
I am excited to have been invited to contribute to this issue of Pacific Vision. I was asked to write a short piece on women’s health in East Timor, and given the crisis of violence that began in May 2006 and the recent round of elections, the topic couldn’t be more germane.
Resounding Victory for Democracy in Aceh
by Liem Soei Liong
TAPOL, The Indonesian Human Rights Campaign
Reprinted from the TAPOL Bulletin, January 2007
Under Indonesian law, there is no place for independent candidates in elections but the recently adopted LOGA (Law on the Governance of Aceh) made provision for such an option. As a result, independent candidates who obtained the necessary initial number of supporters were able to stand and they gained considerable support from the electorate. It is understood that LOGA will be amended to enable local parties to contest future elections. This is a precedent that is bound to reverberate in other parts of Indonesia.
Suharto-Era Repression Survives in One Corner of the Indonesian Archipelago: West Papua
by Ed McWilliams
Pacific Vision Contributed Article
For many concerned about the plight of people living under severely repressive regimes that receive military and other support from the United States, Indonesia has been a prime case. For decades during the cold war, and even after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Suharto dictatorship in Jakarta was recipient of unfailing US support. Although Congress placed restrictions on US military assistance to the regime after a massacre of civilians in East Timor in 1991, Pentagon-led Administration efforts persisted in seeking to reinstate military-to-military assistance to the unreformed Indonesian military.
Book Review: On Venezuela
by Barbara Zepeda
for Pacific Vision
Pirates of the Caribean – Axis of Hope (Verso, 2006). This it the title of Tariq Ali’s book. It’s a good start to understand the Bolivarian revolution and the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela that challenges U.S. neoliberal foreign policy. Along with Chavez, also Evo Morales (Bolivia), Castro (Cuba) and Lula (Brasil) came to power campaigning against the IMF/CIA corporate war against the poor. Lula, sadly, is the least Bolivarian in his actions if not his words. Simón Bolivar, born rich in 1783, in Caracas, Venezuela, died poor in Colombia in 1830 in the company of few friends, after having led the liberation of Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Panama, Peru and Venezuela. His life had been a constant battle with that epoch’s elite. He said:
