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	Rights Activists condemn Constitutional Changes by IRIN News Zimbabwe   JOHANNESBURG, 30 Aug. 2005 (IRIN)   Zimbabwean human rights activists condemned sweeping constitutional amendments approved by parliament on Tuesday, arguing the government has undermined basic freedoms.   Describing the proposed changes to the constitution as the "worst piece of legislation yet", Joseph James, president of the Law Society of Zimbabwe, said lawyers "across political and ideological lines" had, for the first time, taken a stance against the new legislation.   "It is worse than the Public Order and Security Act (POSA) and the Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act (AIPPA), as the current legislation attacks the very basis of our constitution," he commented, in reference to two controversial laws that limit freedoms of association and expression.   The law society is considering taking its protest to either the African Commission on Human Rights or the Supreme Court in Zimbabwe, which also functions as the Constitutional Court.   James pointed out that the 22-clause Constitutional Amendment Bill abolishes freehold property titles; removes the landowner's right to appeal expropriation; usurps the authority of the courts, and will restrict the movement of Zimbabweans.   The bill also seeks to reconstitute parliament as a bicameral legislature, consisting of a 60-seat senate and a House of Assembly. The new senate will not have the authority to initiate legislation, but can review legislation proposed by the assembly.   Forty-five of the 60 members will be elected to the house in elections to be held in October. Each province will elect two senators - the remaining 15 will be nominated with the final approval of the president, which critics have alleged will be used to reward loyalists.   Soon after a controversial landslide election victory in March, Zimbabwe's ruling ZANU-PF party announced its plans to use its two-thirds parliamentary majority to change the constitution.   National political commissar Elliot Manyika told IRIN that the House of Senate was necessary for strengthening constitutional democracy and widening the process of parliamentary decision-making, based on national consensus. The senate was abolished in 1987.   James insisted the amendments were an "undisguised frontal assault" on the rights of Zimbabweans, which "fully merit censure".   The amendments "seek to demolish and attack the fundamental principle of constitutionalism, ensured by the separation of powers, checks and balances, independent constitutional review by an independent judiciary, and protection of individual rights".   "As officers of the Court, with a duty to the law and the pursuit of these principles, we cannot sit back and fail to act whilst fundamental rights accruing to people by virtue of their existence and dignity as human beings are being attacked," he observed.   Earlier on Tuesday while introducing the bill in parliament, news agencies reported that Justice Minister Patrick Chinamasa said the amendments would bring to full circle Zimbabwe's war against British colonial rule which culminated in independence in 1980.   "This amendment will conclude the third chimurenga (war of liberation in the Shona language) and the process of decolonisation," he said.   The government's fast-track land reform programme, launched in 2000, targeted the colonial legacy of land ownership, in which a small group of largely white commercial farmers owned vast tracts of the country's most fertile land. But it was accompanied by violence and intimidation.   Several farmers had successfully challenged the expropriation of their farms in administrative courts, where over 5,000 land acquisition cases dating back to 2000 were reportedly still waiting to be heard.   The changes to the property clause now allows government to seize land without being challenged in court; moreover any court decision taken against expropriation during the implementation of the land reforms will be overturned in favour of the state.   Zimbabwe Human Rights Association (ZimRights) director Munyaradzi Bidi described the amendments as an "evil piece of legislation, which completes the cycle of repression", and said the changes to the property clause would have "far-reaching consequences in a country dependent on agriculture".   Amendments to the constitution's freedom of movement clauses now allows the authorities to confiscate passports of those deemed a threat to national security. Chinamasa told IRIN earlier this month that there was no need for law-abiding citizens to worry about the proposed changes.   Zimbabwe's constitution has reportedly been amended 16 times since independence in 1980. The last attempt at constitutional reform was in 2000, when the government's recommendations were rejected in a referendum.
	Power to the victims of New Orleans by Rosa Brooks, Naomi Klein Los Angeles Times & agencues USA   Sept 2005   American Caesar, by Rosa Brooks. (Los Angeles Times)   Nero fiddled while Rome burned. President Bush, who"s not big on the classics, probably wasn"t thinking about this when he mugged for the cameras Tuesday, playing a guitar presented to him by country singer Mark Wills.   But with the photo now Exhibit A for many liberal bloggers, he may find the comparison hard to shake. True, while Bush enjoyed his vacation and strummed his new guitar, a great city was being devastated by water rather than fire.   And unlike the Emperor Nero, who was accused by the historian Suetonius of having deliberately started the fire that destroyed much of Rome in AD 64, no one is accusing President Bush of planning Hurricane Katrina.   But the Bush administration deserves substantial blame for the scale of the catastrophe in New Orleans.   An excellent article this week by Will Bunch in Editor & Publisher points out that it was the cost of the Iraq war that led the Bush administration to defund efforts to shore up the vulnerable city"s levees.   After flooding in 1995 killed six people in New Orleans, the Army Corps of Engineers started work on a massive civil engineering project designed to strengthen the region"s levees and improve the pumping system that regulates water levels.   The work got off to a good start, but in 2003 federal funding started to run dry, leaving many projects — including a planned effort to strengthen the banks of Lake Pontchartrain — on the drawing board.   As early as 2004, the New Orleans Times-Picayune began to report that local officials and Army Corps of Engineers representatives attributed the funding cuts to the rising cost of the war in Iraq.   Facing record deficits, the Bush administration cut costs — and cut corners — by including in its 2005 budget only about a sixth of the flood-prevention funds requested by the Louisiana congressional delegation.   The war in Iraq also has made recovery from Katrina slower and more challenging. The Army National Guard units normally available for domestic disaster relief found rapid emergency response unusually difficult since so many of their personnel are deployed in Iraq. Although more units were dispatched later in the week, the manpower shortage was painfully evident during the crucial first hours.   The Iraq war is not the only reason for insisting that the Bush administration deserves some blame for the magnitude of the still-unfolding catastrophe.   After 9/11, the president promised that the nation would never again be so unprepared in the face of disaster. The Department of Homeland Security was created with a view to ensuring that every American city had adequate emergency plans in place for the kind of large-scale crisis that could accompany either a terrorist attack or a natural disaster.   It was an empty promise.   Four years after 9/11, the fiasco in New Orleans underscores our nation"s ongoing inability to cope with serious threats.   Take public health, for example: Hurricane preparation plans — supposedly prepared with the involvement and approval of Homeland Security officials — were grossly inadequate for ensuring a continued supply of medication to the sick and for the evacuation of the ill and disabled, for cleaning up, ensuring safe drinking water or preventing the spread of disease.   With floodwaters, broken sewage pipes, damaged petrochemical pipelines and floating corpses all over the city, no one seemed to have a clear plan.   If a terrorist"s bomb, rather than a hurricane, had destroyed a levee around Lake Pontchartrain, no one would hesitate to condemn the administration for its lackluster emergency planning and response.   And federal officials had more than a week"s warning that a hurricane was on track for New Orleans — far more time than they"d likely have of a terrorist attack on critical infrastructure.   Not everything can be blamed on the Bush administration, of course, but for millions of Americans, the catastrophic aftermath of Hurricane Katrina is likely to stand as an indictment of Bush"s false economies, empty promises and foolish priorities.   Consider Louisiana"s wetlands, to take just one example. Policies associated with the administration exacerbated the geographical and ecological conditions for severe flooding. Over the decades, oil and gas company actions played a significant role in destroying the wetlands. Other factors also contributed, including residential development and, ironically, the overbuilding of some of the region"s levees. But the "man-made" aspects of the disaster highlight the folly of the policies of unlimited development and environmental despoliation that the administration has so consistently embraced.   Two thousand years after his death, Nero"s famous fiddling remains an allegory about feckless and self centered leadership in times of crisis. Bush"s guitar-playing antics in the face of the New Orleans devastation may doom him to a similar fate.   Sept 2005   With the poor gone, developers are planning to gentrify the city, by Naomi Klein.   On September 4, six days after Katrina hit, I saw the first glimmer of hope. "The people of New Orleans will not go quietly into the night, scattering across this country to become homeless in countless other cities while federal relief funds are funnelled into rebuilding casinos, hotels, chemical plants. We will not stand idly by while this disaster is used as an opportunity to replace our homes with newly built mansions and condos in a gentrified New Orleans."   The statement came from Community Labor United, a coalition of low-income groups in New Orleans. It went on to demand that a committee made up of evacuees "oversee Fema, the Red Cross and other organisations collecting resources on behalf of our people. We are calling for evacuees from our community to actively participate in the rebuilding of New Orleans."   It"s a radical concept: the $10.5bn released by Congress and the $500m raised by private charities doesn"t actually belong to the relief agencies or the government - it belongs to the victims. The agencies entrusted with the money should be accountable to them. Put another way, the people Barbara Bush tactfully described as "underprivileged anyway" just got very rich.   Except relief and reconstruction never seem to work like that. When I was in Sri Lanka six months after the tsunami, many survivors told me that the reconstruction was victimising them all over again. A council of the country"s most prominent businesspeople had been put in charge of the process, and they were handing the coast over to tourist developers at a frantic pace. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of poor fishing people were still stuck in sweltering inland camps, patrolled by soldiers with machine guns and entirely dependent on relief agencies for food and water. They called reconstruction "the second tsunami".   There are already signs that New Orleans evacuees could face a similarly brutal second storm. Jimmy Reiss, chairman of the New Orleans Business Council, told Newsweek that he has been brainstorming about how "to use this catastrophe as a once-in-an-eon opportunity to change the dynamic". The council"s wish list is well-known: low wages, low taxes, more luxury condos and hotels.   Before the flood, this highly profitable vision was already displacing thousands of poor African-Americans: while their music and culture was for sale in an increasingly corporatised French Quarter (where only 4.3% of residents are black), their housing developments were being torn down. "For white tourists and businesspeople, New Orleans"s reputation means a great place to have a vacation, but don"t leave the French Quarter or you"ll get shot," Jordan Flaherty, a New Orleans-based labour organiser told me the day after he left the city by boat. "Now the developers have their big chance to disperse the obstacle to gentrification - poor people."   Here"s a better idea: New Orleans could be reconstructed by and for the very people most victimised by the flood. Schools and hospitals that were falling apart before could finally have adequate resources; the rebuilding could create thousands of local jobs and provide massive skills training in decent paying industries. Rather than handing over the reconstruction to the same corrupt elite that failed the city so spectacularly, the effort could be led by groups like Douglass Community Coalition. Before the hurricane, this remarkable assembly of parents, teachers, students and artists was trying to reconstruct the city from the ravages of poverty by transforming Frederick Douglass senior high school into a model of community learning. They have already done the painstaking work of building consensus around education reform. Now that the funds are flowing, shouldn"t they have the tools to rebuild every ailing public school in the city?   For a people"s reconstruction process to become a reality (and to keep more contracts from going to Halliburton), the evacuees must be at the centre of all decision-making. According to Curtis Muhammad of Community Labor United, the disaster"s starkest lesson is that African-Americans cannot count on any level of government to protect them.   "We had no caretakers," he says. That means the community groups that do represent African-Americans in Louisiana and Mississippi - many of which lost staff, office space and equipment in the flood - need our support now. Only a massive injection of cash and volunteers will enable them to do the crucial work of organising evacuees - currently scattered through 41 states - into a powerful political constituency. The most pressing question is where evacuees will live over the next few months. A dangerous consensus is building that they should collect a little charity, apply for a job at the Houston Wal-Mart and move on. Muhammad and CLU, however, are calling for the right to return: they know that if evacuees are going to have houses and schools to come back to, many will need to return to their home states and fight for them.   These ideas are not without precedent. When Mexico City was struck by a devastating earthquake in 1985, the state also failed the people: poorly constructed public housing crumbled and the army was ready to bulldoze buildings with survivors still trapped inside. A month after the quake, 40,000 angry refugees marched on the government, refusing to be relocated out of their neighbourhoods and demanding a "democratic reconstruction". Not only were 50,000 new dwellings for the homeless built in a year; the neighbourhood groups that grew out of the rubble launched a movement that is challenging Mexico"s traditional power holders to this day.   And the people I met in Sri Lanka have grown tired of waiting for the promised relief. Some survivors are now calling for a people"s planning commission for post-tsunami recovery. They say the relief agencies should answer to them; it"s their money, after all.   The idea could take hold in the United States, and it must. Because there is only one thing that can compensate the victims of this most human of natural disasters, and that is what has been denied them throughout: power. It will be a long and difficult battle, but New Orleans"s evacuees should draw strength from the knowledge that they are no longer poor people; they are rich people who have been temporarily locked out of their bank accounts.   (A version of this column was first published in the Nation)
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