By Jo Wilding
May 27th

You can find Honey Buckets all over Washington State and beyond, not sweet-smelling receptacles of goodness but foul stinking pits of raw human waste with a note on the side specifying that they are designed for use by up to ten persons for a working week and if overused they are liable to overflow.

I say this, of course, with tongue in cheek, but if a Portaloo (or Porta-Potty, as Andy assured me they are known in North America) can be called a Honey Bucket without any apparent controversy then why should not an invasion and occupation which kills civilians and replaces the ruling Baathists with ruling ex-Baathists be called a liberation or the devastation of Falluja a ‘pacification’?

A young woman gave us directions to Fairhaven Campus and bowed. The administration at West Washington University in Bellingham tried to shut down the teachers’ union but found itself unable to do so because international as well as state laws protected the union, which was fighting, among other things, lack of funding and the drop in lecturers’ pay to less than it was a decade ago in real terms.

The Global Forums lecture series is organised outside of the normal lecture programme to allow students access to speakers from a variety of disciplines. The campus itself is multi-disciplinary, a display on the wall showing the final project of a young woman who spent a few weeks working in India with a farmers’ group, looking at the effects of the global agricultural and biotechnology industries’ efforts to control them.

By Anna Bachmann
Voices in the Wilderness

We left for Erbil on Friday, June 4th. David & James two journalists and A my translator had gone up on Wednesday. I traveled with another journalist named Dahr and his translator/driver Harb (Harb is Arabic word for war and given that this man can be argumentative, unwilling to listen and always sure that he is right while you are most assuredly wrong, I think is name is quite appropriate. Regardless, he is a very nice man and according to Dahr an amazing “fixer”).

First we visit with some friends of Harb in Kirkuk that lies a little over an hour south of Erbil. Harb is a retired Iraq army officer. His friend could only be described as something equivalent to the English batman. We spent time talking about the situation in Kirkuk, which is primarily characterized, according to Harb’s friend (a Turkmen) as a fight for control of the city between Arabs, Turkmen and Kurds. There is an American military presence here but unlike Baghdad, it is less visible.

By Jo Wilding
May 29th

“Welcome to Canada,” said the sign at the border. “Not quite as bad as the USA.”

OK, it didn’t but the Canadians who looked after us in Vancouver said it ought to, given how much of their country’s economy and foreign policy had become bound up with theirs next door. Though Canada has troops in Afghanistan, it declined to send any to Iraq but the Canadian Council of Chief Executives (CCCE) is pressing the federal government for closer economic integration with the US.

The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) came into effect in 1994 between Canada, Mexico and the US, forcing among other things large scale restructuring of Canada’s social programmes, not unlike the “structural adjustment policies” foisted on indebted countries by the IMF and World Bank. It gave corporations the right to sue governments for anything which interfered with their profits, even for legislation to protect citizens from harmful chemicals or for public opposition to the building of a factory in a given area.

Negotiations continue over the controversial Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) to tighten economic ties but there are also plans in process to co-operate with the US on the National Missile Defence system, to develop a North American identity document giving business people greater mobility, unite the two customs systems, increase US access to Canadian energy and water resources and align Canada more closely with the US on refugee and immigration rules, ‘homeland security’ and regulatory standards, for example on drugs and agricultural chemicals and hormones.

By Anna Bachmann
Voices in the Wilderness

Dr. Khammo Awshalim is going back to the UK. A former Agriculture professor with the Universities in Baghdad and Basra, he has been working for over a year for the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) as an advisor to the new Ministry of Agriculture. He helped develop numerous programs and projects to increase agriculture production, provide assistance to farmers, and restore the date palms, the national symbol of Iraq. Nearly all have come to naught and Dr. Awshalim is fed up and leaving the land of his birth to return to his adopted country where he lived for 14 years before returning to Iraq after the war to help with the reconstruction.

Dr. Awshalim rubbed his fingers together. “No money.” They seem to have plenty of money for security, he complained. Hundreds of thousands are being spent on concrete blast walls, armored vehicles, and security guards. “Tell me,” he said, “When the Americans finally leave, what will we do with all these concrete blast walls? Of what help will they be to the Iraqis?” For months now, Dr. Awshalim has been sending out email missives addressing these and many other issues that point to a lack of real reconstruction, huge wastes in spending and dubious environmental practices.

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.