Tomorrow, Thursday June 24, Irish activist Caoimhe Butterly will complete a two-week, water-only hunger strike outside of Cement Roadstone Holdings in Fitzwilliams Square.

The hunger strike was initiated in an attempt to focus attention on direct Irish complicity in the construction of Israel’s Apartheid Wall, which violates International Law and contributes to grave human rights violations of the Palestinian people. C.R.H. owns a 25% stake in the Mashav Group, an Israeli holding company for Nesher Cement, which is the sole provider of cement in Israel.

Amnesty International recently stated that C.R.H, through its subsidiaries Mashav and Nesher, is likely to be providing the raw material of the fence/wall so, it would contravene the U.N. norms on the responsibilities of Transnational Corporations and other Business Enterprises with regard to Human Rights (2003).

By Anna Bachmann
Voices in the Wilderness

I had a good meeting today and a bad one.

I’ve been seeing posters around town that have been put up the a group called the Iraqi Free Observers … the one that caught my attention was a poster about the concrete blast walls that are everywhere around town. Each section of these walls costs between $800 and $1200 … The group estimated that there are over 230 of these sections set up around a typical building in Iraq. That’s a lot of dough being spent on something like concrete and rebar. The poster started by saying “Concrete Shield … Until When? … An Actual Obstacle in the Face of Reconstructing Iraq”… I saw the poster right after speaking to an advisor to the Ministry of Agriculture who had told me pretty much the same thing, but I wasn’t sure if I should believe him or not. When I saw the groups poster, I knew I had to talk to them.

I sat down with three members of the group today and was not disappointed … they are a group of young professionals from a wide variety of fields. They’ve formed a kind of watchdog group and have put out three posters so far, using only their own resources. One concerned the blast walls I just mentioned. Another, featuring colorful graphics, focused on the take over by the American Military of an island on the Tigris that was an amusement park. It stated “Where are Iraqi’s Children Playing in Holiday!?” The third poster featured bomb-carrying, cartoon terrorists entering Iraq and pointed to the lack of secure borders which had led to an increase in the drug trade and smuggling, the spread of Aids, the importation of expired foods, and the deaths of innocent people because of terrorism.