Towards the Unconditional Return of All Tribal Lands

After over 500 years of European rule in the Americas and about 100 years after the last of the "wild" Indians were massacred at Wounded Knee, 150 in all including women and children, the tide may finally be turning for the Indigenous people of these lands.

Evo Morales, an Aymara Indian, was recently elected to the presidency of Bolivia and has proposed a new constitution which would recognize the rights of the country's indigenous population to their tribal lands including natural resources (this is what really frightens the avaricious oligarchs in the wealthier provinces of the country -- not the lifting of term limits so often publicized by the U.S. news media which is actually not uncommon in many of Europe's democracies).

At the same time, further north, representatives of the Lakota Sioux Indians (including three veteran A.I.M. activists who were at Wounded Knee during the 1973 takeover) have declared independence from the U.S. citing years of treaty violations and other grievances. The delegation has already met with representatives of the Bolivian government which has expressed interest in the Lakota Sioux cause.

Hopefully this is just the beginning.

Stop the Genocide in Iraq!

According to a study published in September 2007 by the U.K.-based Opinion Research Business (ORB), the number of civilian deaths in Iraq since the U.S. invaded in March 2003 has now exceeded one million. This number is nearly double the figure that came out of the Johns Hopkins study published in The Lancet in 2006. The authors of the Johns Hopkins study were not surprised, however, at the new estimate considering that it covers a broader time period. Moreover, having read the new report, the authors of the study published in The Lancet supported the new figure since the methodologies of both studies were essentially identical. Killing over a million civilians in a country of roughly 30 million is nothing less than genocide.