Ex-shuttle engineer gets prison term for spying

A former space shuttle engineer has been sentenced to 15 years in prison for espionage

Latrine shortage could worsen public health in Haiti, UN agency says

Sanitation has become a pressing need in Haiti and the lack of it could pose health problems for the nearly 1 million people living in temporary settlements ahead of the rainy season, United Nations officials warned today.

Ex-space shuttle engineer gets prison term for spying

A former space shuttle engineer has been sentenced to 15 years in prison for espionage

Joint UN-African Union envoy to Darfur talks peace with armed rebel movements

The newly appointed head of the joint African Union-United Nations peacekeeping mission in Darfur, known as UNAMID, today met with members from key rebel militia as part of a series of talks on the prospects for a durable peace in the war-scarred region in western Sudan.

UN health agency stresses good hygiene to prevent cholera spread in Benin

Officials from the United Nations health agency and the Beninese Government are urging the West African nation’s citizens to be extra vigilant in observing good hygiene amid a recent cholera outbreak that has already claimed several lives.

UN crime watchdog helps Iran set up unit to combat money-laundering from drugs trade

Iran has teamed with the United Nations anti-crime agency to set up a financial intelligence unit tasked with tackling the spread of money-laundering in the country, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) announced today.

Released Video Captures Extrajudicial Executions of Nigerians

Tuesday, February 09, 2010
18:37 Mecca time, 15:37 GMT

Released Video Captures Extrajudicial Executions of Nigerians

http://english.aljazeera.net/news/africa/2010/02/2010298114949112.html

Nigerian police and military units carried out extrajudicial killings last year in the aftermath of clashes with members of a Muslim group in the north of the country, footage obtained by Al Jazeera appears to confirm.

An estimated 1,000 people were killed as Nigerian government forces fought Boko Haram in Borno, Yobe, Kano and Bauchi states in July and August 2009.

But the footage obtained by Al Jazeera shows that many of the deaths occurred once the fighting was over.

Elements of the police and army staged a follow-up operation in which house-to-house searches were conducted and individuals were apparently selected at random and taken to a police station.

‘Shoot him in the chest’

In the video, a number of unarmed men are seen being made to lie down in the road outside a building before they are shot.

As one man is brought out to face death, one of the officers can be heard urging his colleague to “shoot him in the chest not the head - I want his hat”.

As the executions continue another man is told: “Sit properly we want to take your picture.”

The shootings continue as a crowd gathers further up the street in front of the police station.

Voices can be heard saying: “No mercy, no mercy.”

After the executions, the army officer who appears to have been in charge of the operation is seen to be handing over command to a senior police officer. Both men are clearly identified by the name tags on their chests.

The family of Baba Fugu Mohammed, a respected community leader, told Al Jazeera that he was among those put to death outside the police station.

“He was killed, he was killed, that’s what we believe. He was shot by the police,” one relative said.

Fugu Mohammed was the father-in-law of Mohammed Yusuf, the Boko Haram leader whose group had battled the police, but the two had become estranged.

His family said that he had come to help police restore order, but was shot.

‘Killings of the innocent’

In the days following the clashes between the police and Boko Haram, the government, police and military repeatedly denied that civilians had been killed by their personnel.

But Nigerian officials have since acknowledged that extrajudicial killings took place and an inquiry was set up to investigate the incident.

“It was obvious [from] what we have seen and from the eye witnesses that the government police were doing the killings of the innocent,” Abubakar Umar Garda, a senator and a member of Nigeria’s ruling People’s Democratic Party party, told Al Jazeera.

“The government is investigating the incident and as we go along the perpetrators will be put in front of the law and the law will take its course … the government acknowledged that this was a crime against humanity … you cannot shoot an unarmed civilian.”

Fugu Mohammed’s family have given their story to the government commission set up to investigate the events that took place, but they are still waiting to receive an official explanation for the deaths.

Senator Umar Garda could not confirm to Al Jazeera whether there had been any arrests relating to the killings and there have been few tangible signs of the inquiry bringing anyone to account.

Boko Haram leader killed

Aster Van Kregten, a Nigeria expert with rights group Amnesty International, told Al Jazeera that the group’s research suggested extrajudicial killings were widespread in Nigeria.

“Our research shows that the Nigerian police are getting away with murder, they killed hundreds of people a year without any investigation - any investigation on whether the use of force was lawful or not,” she said.

“What we saw on the footage happened seven month ago and we haven’t heard anything from the government whether they have arrested anyone and how far the investigation is going.”

Among those killed in the aftermath of the clashes between Boko Haram and the police, was Boko Haram leader Mohammed Yusuf.

In the Al Jazeera footage, he is seen wearing handcuffs and surrounded by heavily armed police officers.

Nigerian police have said that Yusuf was killed while attempting to escape, but he died still wearing the handcuffs.

In another video, which was made available shortly after last year’s fighting, Yusuf is shown inside the police station, his body covered with marks and bruises, as he is questioned about the organisation that he led.

It is not known whether the injuries were caused during the fighting, arrest, or detention.

‘Extrajudicial killing’

The New York-based Human Rights Watch described Yusuf’s death as “an extrajudicial killing”.

“The extrajudicial killing of Mr Yusuf in police custody is a shocking example of the brazen contempt by the Nigerian police for the rule of law,” Eric Guttschuss, the organisation’s Nigeria researcher, said.

Boko Haram, which means “Western education is prohibited” in the local Hausa dialect, has called for the nationwide enforcement of a strict interpretation of Islamic law, or sharia, even among non-Muslims.

Last year’s clashes took place after suspected Boko Haram members, armed with machetes, knives, bows and arrows, and home-made explosives, attacked police buildings and officers.

Nigeria’s 140 million people are nearly evenly divided between Christians, who dominate the south, and the primarily northern-based Muslims.

Islamic law was implemented in 12 northern states after Nigeria returned to civilian rule in 1999 following years of military rule.

UN seeks to restore Haiti’s weather services to prevent further disasters

With the rainy season and its flood risks due in April and hurricanes shortly after, Haiti urgently needs operational meteorological services to forestall further disasters after last month’s devastating earthquake, the United Nations weather agency reported today.

African-American History & The Struggle For Socialism: A Public Forumin Detroit, Feb. 20, 5:00-8:00pm

For Immediate Release

Event: African-American History Month Program
Date: Saturday, Feb. 20, 2010, 5:00-8:00pm
Location: 5920 Second Avenue at Antoinette (WSU area)
Sponsor: Workers World Party and the Harriet Tubman School
Contact: 313.671.3715 or 887.4344
E-mail: panw@africamail.com
Dinner: African-American Cuisine Served

African American History & The Struggle for Socialism

Even though it is hidden in the official accounts of U.S. history, African-Americans have played a pivotal role in the struggles against national oppression, capitalism and imperialism. During slavery Africans revolted and fled from bondage. Many fought in the civil war and afterwards for freedom and self-determination.

African-American workers and youth have been on the ground level in the formation of trade unions and student organizations. Thousands joined left movements between World War I
and the Great Depression. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Black Panther Party and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers advanced socialism as a political goal.

Today African-Americans and women are on the frontlines of the struggle against the economic crisis for jobs, housing, health care and quality education. Join us on Feb. 20 for this groundbreaking discussion.

Speakers Include:

Debbie Johnson, Meeting Chair: Member of Workers World Detroit Branch

Sandra Hines, Moratorium NOW! Coalition Organizer: Presents “A Tribute to Langston Hughes”

Andrea Egypt, MECAWI/Moratorium NOW! Coalition Organizer: “Report on the Legacy of Claudia Jones and the Role of African-American Women in the Fight for Socialism”

Kevin Carey, People’s Task Force: Report on “The Cold War, COINTELPRO & The Black Left”

Abayomi Azikiwe, Editor, Pan-African News Wire: Report on “Socialism and the Right of Oppressed Nations to Self-Determination”

Imari Obadele, Who Fought For Reparations and Independence, Dies at 79

Imari Obadele, Who Fought for Reparations, Dies at 79

By DOUGLAS MARTIN

Imari Obadele, a teacher and writer whose commitment to black empowerment fired a militant, sometimes violent effort to win reparations for descendants of slaves and to carve out, however quixotically, an African-American republic in the Deep South, died on Jan. 18 in Atlanta. He was 79.

The cause was a stroke, said Johnita Scott, his former wife.

Mr. Obadele (pronounced oh-ba-DEL-ee) was president of what he called the Republic of New Afrika, a country that existed as an idea. His provocative proposal was to have Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi and South Carolina — the heart of the old Confederacy — removed from the union and given over to black Americans.

The demand drew the national news media’s attention. The New York Times called it “bizarre.”

The proposal emerged in 1968, the year the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. Black separatism was on the rise, with some advocates resurrecting 19th-century proposals for blacks to return to Africa.

Mr. Obadele, who had despaired of integration into white society, demanded American land as payback for the centuries of abuse blacks had suffered. He also asked for billions of dollars and became a leader of the reparations movement.

His organization saw itself as fighting a war of national liberation. It had a uniformed militia and engaged in gun battles with the police in Detroit and Jackson, Miss.; a police officer died in each.

In the Jackson face-off — a raid on the group’s headquarters in 1971 — murder charges against Mr. Obadele were eventually dropped, thought eight members of his group were convicted. A year later, Mr. Obadele was convicted of conspiring to assault an F.B.I. officer and served more than five years of a 12-year sentence.

Mr. Obadele and his supporters contended that they had become targets of the Federal Bureau of Investigation because of their political views, pointing to threats and raids by the police in the months before the Mississippi confrontation. Amnesty International in 1977 called Mr. Obadele a political prisoner, one of the first Americans so designated.

The F.B.I. was clearly watching the group, as internal agency documents showed when they later became public. A 1968 agency memorandum urged that Mr. Obadele “be kept off the streets”; another called him one of America’s “most violence-prone black extremists.”

In his critique of American race relations, Mr. Obadele, who had a doctorate in political science, argued that slaves should not have automatically been considered American citizens after their emancipation because they were offered no choice in the matter. If they had chosen not to become inferior members of a white society (the only possibility for them, as he saw it) or to move to another country, they should have been able to take land from the existing United States.

Mr. Obadele also started the advocacy group National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America. Maulana Karenga, the black nationalist leader best known as the creator of Kwanzaa, the African-American celebration in December, wrote in 2008 in The Sentinel, a black newspaper in Los Angeles, that Mr. Obadele’s work for reparations was “essential.”

Mr. Obadele’s views fueled a debate that had started during Reconstruction. In recent years, the issue has re-emerged among black intellectuals with the publication in 2000 of Randall Robinson’s book “The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks” and an effort by the Harvard law professor Charles J. Ogletree to assemble a top legal team to push for reparations.

Mr. Obadele was born Richard Bullock Henry in Philadelphia on May 2, 1930, one of 12 children. He was an avid Boy Scout and as a young man helped his brother Milton start a civil rights organization that had W. E. B. Du Bois as a speaker. When Milton moved to Detroit, Richard followed.

Richard worked there as a newspaper reporter and as a technical writer for the military. In 1963, he refused to let his son Freddy go to school and learn from textbooks he considered racist.

Richard’s brother was a close friend of Malcolm X, and after Malcolm’s murder in 1965, Richard and Milton Henry helped form the Malcolm X Society to promote his views. Malcolm, in the face of continuing bloodshed in the civil rights struggle, had become increasingly frustrated with the philosophy of nonviolent resistance espoused by Dr. King and others. The Henry brothers began to embrace black separatism.

In 1968, they and others formed the Republic of New Afrika and adopted African names; Milton became Gaidi Obadele. (Obadele is a Yoruba word meaning “the king arrives at home.”) At the group’s inaugural meeting in Detroit, about 200 delegates signed a declaration of independence and a “government in exile” was set up. Mr. Obadele was chosen information minister, and he published a handbook, “War in America.”

A paramilitary unit, the Black Legion, to be clad in black uniforms with leopard-skin epaulettes, was formed.

In March 1969, a gun battle erupted between police officers and the Black Legionnaires outside a Detroit church, leaving one officer dead. The militants were tried but not convicted in a trial that drew conflicting testimony about the confrontation.

The Republic of New Afrika splintered the next year, with Milton, or Gaidi Obadele, saying he now rejected violence. Imari, who had now been elected president, led about 100 followers to Mississippi to build a black nation. After a deal to buy 18 acres from a farmer collapsed, the group established a headquarters in a house in Jackson.

The local police and F.B.I. agents raided the house on Aug. 18, 1971. Some news reports said the purpose of the raid was to arrest a suspect in the Detroit killing. Others said the goal was to stop treasonous activities or to search for arms. Each side said the other fired first in a gun battle that left one officer dead.

Though indicted in the killing, Mr. Obadele was found to have been 10 blocks away during the raid and charges were dropped. But in a related proceeding, he was convicted of conspiracy to assault a federal agent and was sent to prison.

Mr. Obadele later earned a Ph.D. in political science from Temple University. He taught at several colleges, including Prairie View A&M University in Texas.

He is survived by his daughters Marilyn Obadele and Vivian Gafford; his sons Imari II and Freddy Sterling Young; and numerous grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

In 1983, Mr. Obadele was a defense witness in the trial of Cynthia Boston, a Republic of New Afrika member who was convicted in the holdup of a Brinks armored car in 1981. On the stand, he defended armed struggle.

“We cannot tell somebody who is underground what to do,” he said. “If people feel that they must attack people who have been attacking and destroying and harming our people, then that is a decision they have to make.”