El MAP condena presencia militar de EEUU en Panamá

por el Movimiento Alternativa Popular (MAP)

El Movimiento Alternativa Popular (MAP), condena los ejercicios militares norteamericanos sobre suelo panameño. Desde el 2 enero de 2018, están desembarcando tropas en Panamá, en diferentes provincias. Es un claro mensaje del imperio de Washington contra cualquier política panameña, que no se subordine a los intereses de ese país. Además, coloca al gobierno panameño en el centro de los planes imperiales de invadir militarmente al país hermano de Venezuela. Esta semana pasada, el Secretario de Estado norteamericano, Rex Tillerson, realizó una gira por cuatro países latinoamericanos, para preparar el ataque contra el pueblo hermano de Venezuela. La presencia militar de ese país en Panamá, es un mensaje de sus verdaderas intenciones.

El periodista Eliécer Navarro, del diario Crítica, de la capital panameña, informó que el “gobierno panameño permitirá que hasta 415 miembros de la Fuerza Aérea de EEUU ocupen territorio nacional durante la primera mitad de 2018 vistiendo uniforme militar y portando armas”. El acuerdo es parte de los ejercicios llamados “Nuevos Horizontes”.

Estas condiciones fueron solicitadas por la Embajada de EEUU, el 11 de diciembre de 2017. La nota respuesta aceptando la ocupación militar fue trasmitida el 4 de enero de 2018. Las tropas norteamericanas entraron a Panamá, el 2 de enero, dos días antes de la nota de la Cancillería. Aparentemente, EEUU tenía previsto ocupar el territorio panameño, con o sin la autorización del gobierno. Los ejercicios Nuevos Horizontes se realizarán en las provincias de Darién, Veraguas, Coclé y “cualquier otro lugar aprobado por el gobierno de Panamá y la Embajada”, según el acuerdo. No se mencionan las provincias de Panamá y Colón, donde se encuentra el Canal de Panamá.

Las tropas norteamericanas tendrán una “condición equivalente a la que se otorga al personal técnico y administrativo (diplomática) de una Embajada”. En otro punto, según el periodista Navarro, “el Gobierno panameño acepta asumir responsabilidad y eximir al Gobierno de EEUU de “cualquier demanda que se entable (contra) personal de EEUU con relación a su misión en Panamá”. En caso de demandas de terceros por muertes no relacionadas al combate del personal militar, EEUU pagará de conformidad a las leyes estadounidenses.

Hace pocos años un soldado asesinó a una joven panameña. El militar fue sacado del país por la embajada de EEUU y posteriormente juzgado en ese país. Los familiares aún piden justicia, sin que el gobierno panameño asuma sus responsabilidades en este caso.

En su gira, el ministro norteamericano le recordó a las cancillerías latinoamericanas que “América Latina no necesita de nuevos poderes imperiales que solo miran por su interés “. Mensaje que los panameños podemos traducir como una amenaza frente a los acuerdos del presidente Varela con la República Popular China.

El Movimiento Alternativa Popular, MAP, rechaza categóricamente ” Nuevos Horizontes”, porque los mismos violan la Constitución Política de Panamá, ya que los acuerdos que permiten la ejecución de esas maniobras, debieron ser aprobados por la Asamblea y no por simple acuerdo de ambos gobiernos, además recordemos que el art. 310, señala claramente que Panamá no tendrá ejército, por lo que no se justifica tropas extranjeras en nuestro territorio y menos, del país que nos invadió en 1989.

Dichas maniobras violan el Tratado de Neutralidad, ya que Panamá permite la presencia de fuerzas armadas de otro país, con lo cual se parcializa a favor de EEUU en detrimento del resto del mundo.

Pero lo más grave, es que coloca a Panamá, como objetivo militar de las fuerzas y grupos adversarios a EEUU, No olvidemos que Panamá, es el único país de América Latina, que forma parte de la Coalición Internacional contra el Estado Islámico.

El MAP, responsabiliza al gobierno panameño por los daños que se le causan y se le puedan causar al pueblo panameño y exige al gobierno del Señor Varela, una postura firme y patriótica, rechazando esas maniobras, que además de ilegales, ponen en peligro la seguridad de quienes vivimos en este territorio y mancillan la dignidad nacional.

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A new political trapeze act

by Mariela Sagel

Our country’s National Assembly never ceases to surprise us, just like the discredited courts, not to mention the presidency that believes itself to be a monarchy. This past week the tale is of the end of a tortuous road that the president’s two appointees of last December 15 had to run. Wasted — as have been public funds in all of his endeavors — were a valuable month and a half. The final result was that they were rejected in an unprecedented vote, with obvious political tinges that took into account neither the urgency of putting justice back on track nor speeding up government functions.

We went from event to festival, trapeze-style, which by definition undertakes pirouettes of increasing difficulty above the trapeze while it is swinging. They tried to throw dust in our eyes in December because the Christmas holidays were coming. The lazy deputies ended their deliberations, but about the designation of two attorneys as magistrates of the Supreme Court of Justice they put on a circus of opinions and statements about how politically incorrrect the choice of these two ladies was, with the purpose of prolonging the special session. As has been recounted on various occasions, the two may have had their merits but the form and the substance of their appointments was what was questionable. When they appeared before the plenum it was payback time, but this was surely the product of pressures to which the deputies had been subjected from the time that Varela had the ill-advised idea of imposing these women for the Supreme Court.

I am not going to get into that manipulative game that the vice president played by making this a gender issue, that there was such opposition mounted because they were women. There is the touchstone — they were being used and the dignified thing under the circumstances would have been to decline the president’s appointment, which I dare not say was honorable.

The entire country was witness to this manipulation. Instead of a debate about the nomination of two qualified people to try to rectify the Supreme Court that should have prevailed, the Varelistas, commanded by their boss, fell into politicking and dirty laundry. Those who had earlier been French kissing, who brought the current secretary general of the PRD to win that party’s internal elections in October of 2016, fought like muddy laundresses. It was a disgrace. They fell into depths of discredit, diatribe and recriminations like wounded and disgusted lovers.

There is no reason for euphoria or celebration of this sweeping rejection of the caprices of the president and his brother. It is no triumph, notwithstanding that, for the first time, the caucuses were able to unite around criteria and vote in a disciplined manner. We have to see that at the bottom of it we are in the year before an election and that what motivates them is re-election. Just to be aware that one of these individuals will not face justice for having killed a child in a hit-and-run, that another doesn’t know the words to the national anthem (these in the happy world of Colon) and a third, in an attack of sincerity says that he deceived the entire electorate to be elected, ought to lead us to cry out that nobody should be re-elected.

The political trapeze act is very fashionable in other countries and Panama is no exception. The Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman well said that “political parties are taxis in which certain characters are raised for convenience and later abandoned, sometimes being paid and sometimes not.” This thesis properly applies to the trapeze artist legislators — better known as the transfugas –- who consider the parties that clothed and supported them for a time as mere job opportunity franchises. But practical politics require congruity, without which there is no possible moral authority. This has not been learned by those who legislate from the Palacio Justo Arosemena, nor are they interested in learning it. What they see is how dilating processes that some at the moment criticize and collecting unwarranted pay for putting off votes in which they knew that the executive’s will would not be imposed, no matter how great the sums offered to vote in favor.

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“Not Enough!”

by Uri Avnery – Gush Shalom

Many years ago, right after the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, I was asked to write a book about the events. Rachel took the photos, I wrote the text. The book, which appeared only in Hebrew, was called “Lenin Does Not Live Here Anymore.

When we visited Warsaw, we were astonished by the many places in the city with metal plates announcing “(Name) was executed by the Germans at this spot. Until then we had no idea that the Polish resistance had opposed the Nazis so fiercely.

After coming home, Rachel happened to enter a clothes shop and hear the female owner talking with a customer in Polish. Still full of her discovery, Rachel asked the owner: “Did you know that the Nazis also killed a million and half non-Jewish Poles?”

The woman answered “Not enough!”

Rachel was amazed. So was I.

We knew, of course, that many Polish Jews did not like the Polish people, but we were not aware of the intensity of this hatred.

This hatred reappeared in full force this week.

The Polish parliament decreed that anyone who uses the words “Polish extermination camps” is committing a crime punishable by three years in prison. The right description, according to the Poles, is “Nazi extermination camps in Poland.

The rectification is quite correct. But in Israel, a storm broke out. What?! The Poles deny the Holocaust? Do they deny that many Poles helped the Nazis to catch and kill the Jews?

That is what many Israelis believe. Quite wrongly, of course. Poland never made peace with the Nazis, unlike several other European countries. The Polish government fled to France and then to Britain, from where they directed the Polish resistance. Actually, there were two Polish underground organizations, a national and a communist one. Both fought the Nazis and paid a heavy price.

If I am not mistaken, it was the Polish government in exile which transmitted to the Zionist leadership the first reliable information about the extermination camps.

Were there Polish collaborators with the Nazis? Of course there were, like in every occupied country. Without making any comparison, there are lots and lots of Palestinian collaborators in today’s occupied territories.

The main non-German helpers in the extermination camps were Ukrainians, whose hatred for Russia led them to sympathize with the Nazis. That and their own deep-seated anti-Semitism, stemming from the time when the Ukraine belonged to Poland and Jews administered the estates for the Polish owners.

The Nazis did not really make a serious effort to gain Polish or Ukrainian cooperation. Hitler’s secret plan was to exterminate or enslave all the Slavs too, right after the Jews, in order to create more Lebensraum for the German nation.

Yet it took less than 10 years from the end of the Holocaust for Israel to sign an agreement with the German state, while the hatred for Poland continues unabated.

Why?

Nobody ever asks the most obvious question: how come so many Jews, millions of them, came to live in Poland in the first place?

Centuries ago, when the Jews were driven out of Germany and other North-European countries, where did they go? Which European countries opened their gates for them?

Well, at the time Poland was the most open, even the most tolerant country in Europe. Fleeing Jews were welcomed and found a new home. The king had a Jewish mistress. An entire Jewish town grew up near Krakow, the center of Polish culture.

Honest disclosure: While my father’s forefathers had come to Germany from the west, my mother’s forebears had come from Krakow. My father, who had enjoyed a classical education, always insisted that our forefathers had come to the Rhineland with Julius Caesar (no evidence available), but my mother had to admit that her grandfather had come from Krakow, which before World War I was a part of Austria.

That Polish-Jewish Spring passed. What remained was the reality of a huge Jewish minority in Poland.

A minority that is radically different from the majority is always a problem. The Jews were different from the Poles in religion and culture, they spoke a different language (Yiddish). And there were lots and lots of them. Many millions.

So it was almost inevitable that between the two groups there sprang up a mutual distaste, which turned into mutual hatred. There were some pogroms. However, it seems that in modern Poland Jews lived in comparative comfort. They were organized politically and set up coalitions with non-Jewish minorities.

Masses of Polish Jews tried to emigrate to Germany. The German Jews, who despised them, put them on ships and sent them to the United States, where they prospered.

The classic German Jewish poet Heinrich Heine wrote a poem that goes like this (my own unauthorized translation): “Krapulinsky and Washlapsky, / Poles from the Polackei / Fought for freedom / Against Muscovite tyranny. // Fought with valor and with luck / finally managed to escape to Paris / Because to live, like to die, / For the Fatherland is sweet.”

And further on, drunk in a Paris bar, one comforts the other: “Not yet is Poland lost, / Our women give birth, / Our virgins do so, too. / They will give us heroes!”

After the advent of Hitler, when German Jews started to arrive in Palestine, they found Polish Jews who had arrived there before, like Dovid Grün (David Ben-Gurion) from Plonsk. The German Jews were received by them with contempt and ridicule.

Polish anti-Semites were seen by the Zionists as natural allies in their effort to push the Jews towards Palestine. One episode, known only to a few: in 1939, a number of leaders of the Irgun underground in Palestine (to which I then belonged) had a brilliant idea: start an armed insurrection against the British rulers and set up the Jewish State.

Looking for assistance, and especially arms, they turned towards the anti-Semitic officers of the Polish army. The Irgun offer was simple: we shall help you to get rid of your Jews. You train them and provide them with arms, we put them on ships to Palestine.

The Polish general staff liked the idea, and training of young Irgun members in Poland actually started. The outbreak of World War II put an end to this adventure.

IT IS this convoluted relationship of many centuries that is now finding its expression in the Polish-Israeli clash of the last few days.

Many Israelis have been taught to believe that the Holocaust was a joint German-Polish enterprise, and that the ovens of Auschwitz were operated by Poles. After all, wasn’t Auschwitz in Poland?

Was it an accident that practically all extermination camps were on Polish soil? (Actually it was an ideal location for the Nazis, especially after their invasion of the USSR. The Jews were there.)

I don’t believe that this exposition of facts will help. The sentiments are too deeply entrenched. But what the hell.

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