Sex Slave Victim Wins Abuse Claim

Taken from The Age, Australia, May 29, 2007
Natalie Craig

A FORMER child sex slave has become the first person in Australia to be compensated as a victim of sex trafficking.

Thai woman Jetsadophorn Chaladone, known as "Ning", yesterday told The Age of the success of her compensation claim for the sexual abuse she suffered at a Sydney brothel in 1995, aged 13. Ning, now 25, said she hoped her story would raise awareness about sex slavery.

She was trafficked to Australia with the consent of her father, expecting to work as a nanny. She was instead put to work in a brothel. She said she was told she owed a "debt" to her traffickers of about $35,000, which she would pay off by having sex with 650 men.

She was not allowed to leave the "safe house" where she and other prostitutes slept, and had no money and no contacts in Australia.

Ning said she had sex with as many as 100 men in 10 days, before immigration officials found her during a routine compliance raid.

She also made mention in her compensation claim of a "beating room" where unco-operative workers were taken.

The owners of this Surry Hills brothel and their trafficking accomplices were never investigated for their crimes against Ning. This was despite pressure on NSW police by Sydney immigration officials, as shown through records of correspondence in 1995, obtained through freedom of information.

"It still hurts to talk about it," Ning said through a translator of her experience. "I have been depressed … sometimes I feel like I don't have any reason to go on."

The compensation was awarded last month but Ning is only making her case public now as she previously felt too uncomfortable to discuss the details.

Her psychological scars have been heavy and enduring. The NSW Victims Compensation Tribunal stated in its reason for award that Ning "suffered from chronic post-traumatic stress disorder and moderate to severe depressive disorder" as a consequence of the abuse in Sydney.

Melbourne filmmaker Luigi Acquisto helped Ning lodge her claim by arranging a psychiatric examination in Thailand, engaging the help of Melbourne human rights lawyer Fiona McLeod, SC, and arranging for her to travel to Australia.

He said he first heard about Ning's case back in 1995 when he was researching a documentary about sex trafficking, and was appalled that nothing had been done.

"If the brothel had been prosecuted, the Attorney-General of NSW could now claim the money paid to Ning back from them," Mr Acquisto said.

"But this compensation is vitally important. Relevant compensation can pull victims out the cycle of poverty … give them some status within their community so they can lead a normal life."

Ning has not disclosed the sum she was awarded, although it is modest in Australian terms. She said she would use the money to educate herself and her five-year-old son, to renovate her two-bedroom house and set up a business in her home in Kalasin province in north-east Thailand.

Ms McLeod, who helped Ning to lodge a claim, said she was heartened by the precedent the case had set. "I am hopeful that the success of the compensation claim will at least educate other trafficking victims about the possibility of making claims," she said.

There has been no statistical research on the number of sex slaves in Australia. Federal Government figures suggest that the number of women trafficked to Australia each year is well below 100, while Project Respect, a sex industry lobby, has conducted surveys to suggest the number is at least 300.

There have been only two successful prosecutions for sex slavery since the introduction of anti-slavery laws in 1999.

Brunswick brothel owner Wei Tang was sentenced to a minimum of six years' jail last June for keeping five Thai women as sex slaves.

Last July, Sydney brothel owners Somsri Yotchomchin and Johan Sieders were each found
guilty of engaging in sexual servitude.

Ms McLeod said the failure of several other prosecutions related to the Australian visa system for sex slaves and a lack of education about the nuances of the crime.

She said it was important to emphasise that the issue was one of slavery, in which women, men and children suffer.

"The fact that Ning was a child when this happened makes it more devastating, but there are many adults who don't have a like choice because of poverty … whether you're a child or an adult you don't have a voice," she said.

"And it's up to the rest of us to protect them."

Ms McLeod met Ning for the first time last week, when Ning visited her city chambers to thank her for her work.

"I'd like to thank you for everything you have done for me," Ning said.

Ms McLeod responded tearfully: "This case has already given me tremendous satisfaction … I would not want my daughter to go through what you went through."

Useful Links
http://antislavery.org.au
http://projectrespect.org.au
http://goodshepherd.com.au/justice

Desperate Iraqi Refugees Turn To Sex Trade In Syria

Taken from The New York Times, May 29, 2007
By KATHERINE ZOEPF

MARABA, Syria — Back home in Iraq, Umm Hiba’s daughter was a devout schoolgirl, modest in her dress and serious about her studies. Hiba, who is now 16, wore the hijab, or Islamic head scarf, and rose early each day to say the dawn prayer before classes.

But that was before militias began threatening their Baghdad neighborhood and Umm Hiba and her daughter fled to Syria last spring. There were no jobs, and Umm Hiba’s elderly father developed complications related to his diabetes.

Desperate, Umm Hiba followed the advice of an Iraqi acquaintance and took her daughter to work at a nightclub along a highway known for prostitution. “We Iraqis used to be a proud people,” she said over the frantic blare of the club’s speakers. She pointed out her daughter, dancing among about two dozen other girls on the stage, wearing a pink silk dress with spaghetti straps, her frail shoulders bathed in colored light.

As Umm Hiba watched, a middle-aged man climbed onto the platform and began to dance jerkily, arms flailing, among the girls.

“During the war we lost everything,” she said. “We even lost our honor.” She insisted on being identified by only part of her name — Umm Hiba means mother of Hiba.

For anyone living in Damascus these days, the fact that some Iraqi refugees are selling sex or working in sex clubs is difficult to ignore.

Even in central Damascus, men freely talk of being approached by pimps trawling for customers outside juice shops and shawarma sandwich stalls, and of women walking up to passing men, an act unthinkable in Arab culture, and asking in Iraqi-accented Arabic if the men would like to “have a cup of tea.”

By day the road that leads from Damascus to the historic convent at Saidnaya is often choked with Christian and Muslim pilgrims hoping for one of the miracles attributed to a portrait of the Virgin Mary at the convent. But as any Damascene taxi driver can tell you, the Maraba section of this fabled pilgrim road is fast becoming better known for its brisk trade in Iraqi prostitutes.

Many of these women and girls, including some barely in their teens, are recent refugees. Some are tricked or forced into prostitution, but most say they have no other means of supporting their families. As a group they represent one of the most visible symptoms of an Iraqi refugee crisis that has exploded in Syria in recent months.

According to the United Nations high commissioner for refugees, about 1.2 million Iraqi refugees now live in Syria; the Syrian government puts the figure even higher.

Given the deteriorating economic situation of those refugees, a United Nations report found last year, many girls and women in “severe need” turn to prostitution, in secret or even with the knowledge or involvement of family members. In many cases, the report added, “the head of the family brings clients to the house.”

Aid workers say thousands of Iraqi women work as prostitutes in Syria, and point out that as violence in Iraq has increased, the refugee population has come to include more female-headed households and unaccompanied women.

“So many of the Iraqi women arriving now are living on their own with their children because the men in their families were killed or kidnapped,” said Sister Marie-Claude Naddaf, a Syrian nun at the Good Shepherd convent in Damascus, which helps Iraqi refugees.

She said the convent had surveyed Iraqi refugees living in Masaken Barzeh, on the outskirts of Damascus, and found 119 female-headed households in one small neighborhood. Some of the women, seeking work outside the home for the first time and living in a country with high unemployment, find that their only marketable asset is their bodies.

“I met three sisters-in-law recently who were living together and all prostituting themselves,” Sister Marie-Claude said. “They would go out on alternate nights — each woman took her turn — and then divide the money to feed all the children.”

For more than three years after the American-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, Iraqi prostitution in Syria, like any prostitution, was a forbidden topic for Syria’s government. Like drug abuse, the sex trade tends to be referred to in the local news media as acts against public decency. But Dietrun Günther, an official at the United Nations refugee agency’s Damascus office, said the government was finally breaking its silence.

“We’re especially concerned that there are young girls involved, and that they’re being forced, even smuggled into Syria in some cases,” Ms. Günther said. “We’ve had special talks with the Syrian government about prostitution.” She called the officials’ new openness “a great step.”

Mouna Asaad, a Syrian women’s rights lawyer, said the government had been blindsided by the scale of the arriving Iraqi refugee population. Syria does not require visas for citizens of Arab countries, and its government had pledged to assist needy Iraqis. But this country of 19 million was ill equipped to cope with the sudden arrival of hundreds of thousands of them, Ms. Asaad said.

“Sometimes you see whole families living this way, the girls pimped by the mother or aunt,” she said. “But prostitution isn’t the only problem. Our schools are overcrowded, and the prices of services, food and transportation have all risen. We don’t have the proper infrastructure to deal with this. We don’t have shelters or health centers that these women can go to. And because of the situation in Iraq, Syria is careful not to deport these women.”

Most of the semi-organized prostitution takes place on the outskirts of the capital, in nightclubs known as casinos — a local euphemism, because no gambling occurs.

At Al Rawabi, an expensive nightclub in Al Hami, there is even a floor show with an Iraqi theme.

One recent evening, waiters brought out trays of snacks: French fries and grilled chicken hearts wrapped in foil folded into diamond shapes. A 10-piece band warmed up, and an M.C. gave the traditionally overwrought introduction in Arabic: “I give you the honey of all stages, the stealer of all hearts, the most golden throat, the glamorous artist: Maria!”

Maria, a buxom young woman, climbed onto the stage and began an anguished-sounding ballad.

“After Iraq I have no homeland,” she sang. “I’m ready to go crawling on my knees back to Iraq.” Four other women, all wearing variations on leopard print, gyrated on stage, swinging their hair in wild circles. The stage lights had been fitted with colored gel filters that lent the women’s skin a greenish cast.

Al Rawabi’s customers watched Maria calmly, leaning back in their chairs and drinking Johnnie Walker Black. The large room smelled strongly of sweat mingled with the apple tobacco from scores of water pipes. When Maria finished singing, no one clapped.

She picked up the microphone again and began what she called a salute to Iraq, naming many of the Iraqi women in the club and, indicating one of the women in leopard print who had danced with her, “most especially my best friend, Sahar.”

After the dancers filed offstage and scattered around the room to talk to customers, Sahar told a visitor she was from the Dora district of Baghdad but had left “because of the troubles.” Now, she said she would leave the club with him for $200.

Aid workers say $50 to $70 is considered a good night’s wage for an Iraqi prostitute working in Damascus. And some of the Iraqi dancers in the crowded casinos of Damascus suburbs earn much less.

In Maraba, Umm Hiba would not say how much money her daughter took home at the end of a night. Noticing her reluctance, the club’s manager, who introduced himself as Hassan, broke in proudly.

“We make sure that each girl has a minimum of 500 lira at the end of each night, no matter how bad business is,” he said, mentioning a sum of about $10. “We are sympathetic to the situation of the Iraqi people. And we try to give some extra help to the girls whose families are in special difficulties.”

Umm Hiba shook her head. “It’s true that the managers here are good, that they’re helping us and not stealing the girls’ money,” she said. “But I’m so angry.

“Do you think we’re happy that these men from the gulf are seeing our daughters’ naked bodies?”

Most so-called casinos do not appear to directly broker arrangements between prostitutes and their customers. Zafer, a waiter at the club where Hiba works, said that the club earned money through sales of food and alcohol and that the dancers were encouraged to sit with male customers and order drinks to increase revenues.

Zafer, who spoke on condition that only his first name be used, refused to discuss specific women and girls at the club, but said that most of them did sell sexual favors. “They have an hourly rate,” he said. “And they have regular customers.”

Inexpensive Iraqi prostitutes have helped to make Syria a popular destination for sex tourists from wealthier countries in the Middle East. In the club’s parking lot, nearly half of the cars had Saudi license plates.

From Damascus it is only about six hours by car, passing through Jordan, to the Saudi border.

Syria, where it is relatively easy to buy alcohol and dance with women, is popular as a low-cost weekend destination for groups of Saudi men.

And though some women of other nationalities, including Russians and Moroccans, still work as prostitutes in Damascus, Abeer, a 23-year-old from Baghdad working at the same club as Hiba, explained that the arriving Iraqis had pushed many of them out of business.

“From what I’ve seen, 70 percent to 80 percent of the girls working this business in Damascus today are Iraqis,” she said. “The rents here in Syria are too expensive for their families. If they go back to Iraq they’ll be slaughtered, and this is the only work available.”

UK Human Rights In Iraq: A Case To Answer

Revealed: How Lord Goldsmith advised Army chiefs to deny detainees 'full' legal protection

Taken from The Independent, 29 May 2007
By Robert Verkaik

The Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, is facing accusations that he told the Army its soldiers were not bound by the Human Rights Act when arresting, detaining and interrogating Iraqi prisoners.

Previously confidential emails, seen by The Independent, between London and British military head-quarters in Iraq soon after the start of the war suggest Lord Goldsmith's advice was to adopt a "pragmatic" approach when handling prisoners and it was not necessary to follow the " higher standards" of the protection of the Human Rights Act.

That, according to human rights lawyers, was tantamount to the Attorney General advising the military to ignore the Human Rights Act and to simply observe the Geneva Conventions. It was also contrary to advice given by the Army's senior lawyer in Iraq, who urged higher standards to be met.

Today, rights groups and experts in international law will call on the Government to disclose Lord Goldsmith's legal opinion, which they say could have helped create a culture of abuse of Iraqis by British soldiers.

Last month, the first British soldier convicted of a war crime was jailed for a year and dismissed from the Army after being convicted of mistreating Iraqi civilians, including the hotel worker Baha Mousa, who died of his injuries at the hands of British soldiers. In 2005, three British soldiers were jailed by a court martial in Germany after "trophy" photographs emerged, showing Iraqi detainees being abused at an aid centre called Camp Bread Basket. There are about 60 more allegations of abuse being prepared for legal claims by rights groups.

Last week, Parliament's Joint Committee on Human Rights wrote to the Government to ask for an "explanation" about the evidence of torture in the Baha Mousa court martial.
Andrew Dismore MP, chair of the committee, said: "We have asked the Ministry of Defence to explain what appear to be stark inconsistencies in the evidence presented to our committee about the use of inhuman and degrading interrogation techniques prohibited as long ago as 1972."

But emails sent just after the invasion indicate Lord Goldsmith's belief that British soldiers in Iraq were not bound by the Human Rights Act. The documents also show a wide differing of opinion between him and Lieutenant-Colonel Nicholas Mercer, the Army's most senior legal adviser on the ground, who wrote to say he felt "the ECHR would apply" to troops in Iraq.

On one occasion, Rachel Quick, the legal adviser to Permanent Joint Headquarters who had regularly sought and been given guidance from Lord Goldsmith on the treatment of Iraqi prisoners, wrote to Colonel Mercer giving her interpretation of the Attorney General's advice.

His view, she said, "was that the HRA was only intended to protect rights conferred by the Convention and must look to international law to determine the scope of those rights".

Ms Quick went on say that the advice of the Attorney General, supported by Professor Christopher Greenwood [the barrister who advised Lord Goldsmith on the legality of the war], was that, in the circumstances, the HRA did not apply. "For your purposes," she wrote, "I would suggest this means no requirement for you to provide guidance on the application of the HRA. I hope this is clear."

Ms Quick, who in November 2003, was appointed OBE, added: "With regard to the detention of civilians - I will look at your documents in more detail and discuss with FCO, MoD legal advisers.

Although my initial thoughts are you are trying to introduce UK procedures to a Geneva Convention IV context. Whilst this may be the perfect solution it may not be the pragmatic solution. Again we raised this issue with the AG and got a helpful steer on the procedures. I'll aim to try to produce guidance, taking into account their advice on the detention of civilians."

Such were the concerns of legal advisers on the ground over the Attorney General's views that the MoD arranged for the senior legal adviser at the Foreign Office, Gavin Hood, to visit Permanent Joint Headquarters to settle any worries. Crucially, the emails make clear Lord Goldsmith's legal opinion was not shared by Colonel Mercer, who contacted his superiors in London to ask for guidance after he had witnessed the hooding of 40 Iraqis at a British PoW camp in March. The men were all forced to kneel in the sun and had their hands cuffed behind their backs. Worried this could leave the soldiers vulnerable to prosecutions, he told the MoD that in his view soldiers should behave in accordance with the "higher standard" of the Human Rights Act.

But the response from the military's Permanent Joint Headquarters in Qatar was that Lord Goldsmith had told the MoD the human rights law did not apply and soldiers should simply observe the Geneva Conventions.

When Colonel Mercer said he disagreed with the Government's most senior law officer he was told that "perhaps you should put yourself up as the next Attorney General". Colonel Mercer also asked for a British judge to be flown out to oversee the procedures for the detention of Iraqi prisoners, but this also was blocked at a high level.

Colonel Mercer's interpretation of the law has since proved correct. Thirty months after he first raised his concerns during the Iraq conflict, the Court of Appeal ruled that British soldiers were bound by the Human Rights Act, which bans torture or degrading of prisoners.

The emails, part of court documents being prepared to support a judicial review in the High Court this year, reveal considerable disquiet among the military about the Attorney General's advice.

The documents show that as early as March 2003, the International Committee of the Red Cross had begun investigating complaints of possible war crimes by British soldiers at the same PoW camp in south-east Iraq that had prompted Colonel Mercer's original intervention. The Government was so worried about this that it flew out a political adviser from London to address the Red Cross's concerns about hooding and other practices.

International law
* Torture is defined by international law as any threat or use of severe pain, physical or mental, against an individual with the intention of obtaining a confession or other information. Under the UN Convention Against Torture, 40 states - including Britain - have agreed not to engage in such practices.

During military conflict the third and fourth Geneva Conventions protect prisoners of war and civilians who are held by soldiers. Torture is also defined as a war crime by the International Criminal Court, which describes it as the unlawful infliction of severe pain.

Many of the incidents of abuse committed by British soldiers on Iraqi civilians may fall outside the strict definition of torture under international law.

But under the European Convention of Human Rights, incorporated in the Human Rights Act 1998, there is no requirement that the threat or use of pain should be severe for an act to fall foul of the law.

Lord Goldsmith argued that because UK forces did not have full control of Iraq, the country was not part of its jurisdiction and therefore the Human Rights Act did not apply. He lost this argument when the Court of Appeal ruled that Iraqi civilians held in custody and the soldiers detaining them were subject to the Human Rights Act. The case is to be settled later this year by the House of Lords. If the Government loses then it is expected that full and independent inquiries will be held into the deaths, disappearances and torture of Iraqis by British soldiers.

'Dead' Klansman On Trial Over 1964 Deaths

Taken from The Guardian, UK, May 29, 2007
Ewen MacAskill in Jackson, Mississippi

Thomas Moore is looking forward to finally confronting face-to-face James Ford Seale, a Ku Klux Klansman who came back from the dead.

"I want to look at him," he said. "I want to tell him about the pain he caused me and my family."

Moore, 63, a retired sergeant major, today recalled the day he found out that Seale was still alive. "I was so happy. We thought the guy was dead and so did everyone else."


A US marshal escorts James Ford Seale, 71, from the federal courthouse in Jackson, Mississippi. Photograph: Rogelio V Solis/AP

The trial opens tomorrow in the Mississippi state capital, Jackson, of Seale, 71, a former worker in a paper plant, crop duster and police officer, accused of kidnapping and conspiracy in relation to the murder of two black teenagers in 1964, one of them Moore's brother.

According to the indictment, the two 19-year-olds, Moore and Henry Dee, were kidnapped by the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, tortured and dumped in the Mississippi river, Moore tied to a Jeep engine block, and, according to an FBI informant at the time, still breathing.

The killings marked the beginning of a summer of madness, as the KKK responded to the civil rights movement with the fiery crosses, church bombings and murders depicted in Alan Parker's 1988 film, Mississippi Burning.

The Seale prosecution could be among the last of the KKK trials. Although the justice department has promised to reopen cases, witnesses are dying off and files have been lost.
Now living in Colorado, Moore had been brought up in Franklin County, one of the strongholds of the White Knights. He returned in 2005 with a Canadian filmmaker, David Ridgen, to investigate the murders.

Pulling up at a petrol station for an egg and sausage sandwich, he met by chance a distant cousin, Kenny Byrd. Moore explained why they were in Franklin County and said it was a pity that Seale, who had been one of the main suspects, was dead. His family had been saying so since 2000. The local Clarion-Ledger had reported it as fact: so too had the Los Angeles Times. Byrd replied: "Hell no, he lives over there."

Moore, tracing lost files, speaking to potential witnesses, harrassing former Klansmen and mobilising the African-American community, successfully campaigned to have the FBI reopen the case.

Seale is expected to plead not guilty, in a trial expected to last about a fortnight. If found guilty, he faces life in prison.

The discovery of the bodies was depicted in Mississippi Burning. The FBI had been hunting for three missing civil rights activists - two white, one black - and when a fisherman found Moore's body, the agents, the government and media were initially excited. That passed quickly when it was realised, as a CBC report at the time put it, they had the "wrong body".

It was this that caught the interest of Ridgen, who works for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. "How can it be a wrong body?," he said, adding that the contrast between the interest in the two cases was simply down to the fact that whites were involved in one and only blacks in the other.

"The difference was stark. When whites were involved, the world went crazy."

Mississippi is different these days, at least on the surface. It is evident to anyone arriving at the airport at Jackson, now called Jackson-Evers International in recognition of the civil rights leader, Medgar Evers, who was assassinated in 1963. It is evident too in the fact that the judge who will try the case, Henry Wingate, is African-American.

But Heidi Beirich, the deputy director of intelligence at a Jackson-based civil rights group, the Southern Poverty Law Centre, which investigates hate crimes, cautioned that though the Ku Klux Klan and institutionalised racism is mainly a thing of the past, Mississippi still has problems.

She noted that when the state voted in 2002 to retain the Confederate flag, a symbol of hate for African-Americans, the divide was on racial grounds. In addition, African-Americans in the state continue to live in the poorest areas, with the worst schools.

"As far as the Klan is concerned, its heyday is definitely in the past. It hit its peak in the 1920s at 4 million. The number of Klansmen is way down: we estimate 5,000 - 6,000. It is not a cohesive organisation any longer: it is fragmented. They are no longer capable of the kind of terror they rained down on the south in the 1950s and 1960s," Ms Beirich said.

But the sense of dread inspired by he KKK has not gone completely. Ridgen, who put together a documentary, Mississippi Cold Case, said: "The psychological threat was always there. There was fear every time in Franklin County. We never took the same route. We never told anyone in advance about coming."

At the trial, the key witness is likely to be a former Klansman, Charles Edwards, a suspect at the time, who is expected to give evidence against Seale in return for immunity.

Former FBI agents who carried out a fairly thorough investigation at the time are also scheduled to testify. After their investigation in 1964, they handed over the case to the local justice department that, as was not unusual at the time, quickly dropped it.

No real explanation has been given for the killings. Klansmen at the time told the FBI that Dee had been peeping at one of their wives while others alleged gun smuggling into a black church.
The indictment suggests otherwise: "The White Knights... targeted for violence African-Americans they believed were involved in civil rights activity in order to intimidate and retaliate against such individuals."

Dee's sister, Thelma Collins, who now lives in Louisiana, said today she could not remember him being involved in any civil rights activity. "He was quiet, never said much," she recalled.

She is saddened that the case took 43 years to come to court: "It is pitiful that those boys were killed and no one did anything about it. If it had been me, they would have brought me to trial."
She will be given an opportunity at the trial to make a victim's statement and will speak about her brother. She is dreading seeing Seale, but promised: "I am not going to say anything harsh." Moore will also get a chance to make a victim's statement. He intends to tell Seale about his younger brother, a student at a technical college.

Moore was in the army at the time: "We never had a chance to talk about what he wanted to be. He would have gone further than me. He had more ambition than me."

He will look directly at Seale. "I want to tell how it is to go without a brother, my son without an uncle, how Charles never had the opportunity to make mistakes, to live his life."

Background
# The reopening of racist killing cases from the 1960s in the south began in 1990 when a white supremicist, Byron La Beckwith, was indicted and eventually jailed for the assassination in 1963 of Medgar Evers, who was chairman of the Mississippi of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People.
# This encouraged the FBI and local justice departments to look again at unsolved cases. Since then, there has been six prosecutions in Mississippi, including Seale's tomorrow.
Authorities in seven states have re-examined a total of 29 killings and made 29 arrests, leading to 22 convictions.
# One of the most prominent was the trial and jailing in 2001 of Thomas Blanton and Bobby Frank Cherry for the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist church in Birmingham, Alabama, which killed four young girls.
# The revulsion created by the bombing helped turn public opinion behind the civil rights movement.
# In 2005, Edgar Ray Killen, 80, was jailed for the murder of the three civil rights activists depicted in Mississippi Burning. But the reality is there may not be many more: witnesses are dying off and records have been lost.

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If you havn't seen Mississippi Burning then I would highly recommend you do. It is a very powerful film and is probably my favourite film of all time.

Why The US Is Losing Its War On Cocaine

America has spent billions battling the drug industry in Bolivia, Colombia and Peru. And the result? Production as high as ever, street prices at a low, and the governments of the region in open revolt. Hugh O'Shaughnessy reports from La Paz, Bolivia

Taken from The Independent, 27 May 2007

The immensely costly "war on drugs" in Latin America is slowly collapsing like a Zeppelin with a puncture. The long-forecast failure for strategies which involve police and military in forcibly suppressing narcotics - first decreed by President Richard Nixon decades ago - is now pitifully evident in Bolivia, one of the poorest countries of the Western hemisphere.

The estimated $25bn (£13bn) that Washington has spent trying to control narcotics over the past 15 years in Latin America seems to have been wasted.

In 2005, according to UN guesses - and, amid merciless political spinning of what few facts there are- Colombia, Peru and Bolivia, the main producers of cocaine, had the capacity to produce 910 metric tons a year. As more productive strains of coca bushes appear, production has been increasing. Unsurprisingly, the price of cocaine on US streets has tumbled, according to the White House drug tzar John Walters, to $135 (£70) a gram, a fraction of the $600 a gram it was fetching in 1981. The purity of cocaine has gone from 60 per cent in mid-2003 to more than 70 per cent last October. Like the conflict in Iraq, the US's other great war is now being visibly lost.

Here, indigent Bolivian President Evo Morales, once a poverty-stricken llama herder and itinerant trumpet player, is resisting pressure from the Bush government to eradicate coca bushes by fire and sword.

The Bolivian leader is no lover of cocaine and his policies are summed up in the slogan "no to drugs, no to cocaine". More than 5,000 hectares of coca bushes were destroyed last year by growers voluntarily. "We did it without violating human rights", says Morales.

But he refuses to ban the consumption of coca leaves, which country people regard as gifts from heaven: the indigenous peoples have been chewing them for thousands of years as an aid to survival at 14,000 feet in the perishingly bleak highlands of the Andes which surround this city.

Their teeth are sometimes discoloured but otherwise they have come to little harm. Morales has no hesitation in saying that his refusal to allow foreigners to dictate Bolivia's policy on what Bolivians call Mama Coca has been one of the secrets of his political success. "The sacred coca leaf meant that we poor people are in government today," he proclaims.

Morales' stand was backed up here earlier this month when Jean Ziegler, the influential former Swiss parliamentarian, now the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, announced that promoting the cultivation and consumption of coca "doesn't go against international treaties to fight drug trafficking and organised crime."

But the determination of Morales, the leader of a poor country of nine million people, is only a tiny part of Latin America's rejection of the "war on drugs". In a Venezuela enriched by high prices for its oil exports, President Hugo Chavez, himself a political and financial supporter of Morales and ally of Fidel Castro, is placing strict controls on his country's co-operation with the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). The democratically elected Chavez sees the DEA as an arm of a government which was involved with the right-wing coup d'état in 2002, which toppled him briefly.

He sees it as devoted as much to Washington's political and military strategies in Latin America as to the battle against narcotics. The plain-speaking Chavez, who has called President Bush "a devil", has accused the DEA of spying.

Pedro Carreno, Chavez's justice minister, has said that Venezuela would not allow the DEA to mount anti-drug operations on its territory. Chavez has also forbidden overflights by US government aircraft. Carreno suggested that instead of Plan Colombia, the US "should apply a Plan Washington, New York, or Miami, so that they fly over their own air space, and take care of their coast and border because 85 per cent of the drugs that are produced in Latin America go to the United States."

Now a third Latin American leader, the newly elected President Rafael Correa of Ecuador, has announced that his country will ignore US instructions in the "war on drugs". He has announced that he will no longer allow US forces to occupy a large base at the Pacific port of Manta, which was leased to them by a previous government and which the Pentagon says is used for aircraft monitoring cocaine shipments between Peru and Colombia. Many small farmers in Ecuador along the border with Colombia have seen their crops and livestock ruined and their own health affected by the spraying of poisons, such as glyphosate, by Colombian and US pilots in a so far vain attempt to destroy coca bushes in Colombia. The pesticides have drifted over the international border spraying Ecuadorean farms.

Last week, Professor Paul Hunt of Essex University, the UN Special Rapporteur on Health, speaking in Ecuador said: "There is credible, reliable evidence that the aerial spraying of glyphosate along the Colombia-Ecuador border damages the health of people living in Ecuador.

There is also reliable evidence that the aerial spraying damages their mental health. Military helicopters sometimes accompany the aerial spraying and the entire experience can be terrifying, especially for children. "

If this continues the Ecuadoreans have threatened to shoot the offending aircraft down.

But it is in the Colombian capital city, Bogota, that the "war on drugs" is seriously falling apart.

Colombia's president, Alvaro Uribe, is in deep political trouble as his opponents dig up unsavoury evidence of his past. He was for years seen as the strongest ally of the US and Britain in South America - he has been received several times at the White House and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office paid him a substantial bursary in 1998 for two years' study at St Antony's College, Oxford before he was elected president in 2002. As a model recruit into the "war on drugs" his country has received $5.4bn under the so-called Plan Colombia from Washington for drug control, more US foreign aid than any other country except Israel and Egypt.

Yet Colombia is estimated to be producing nearly 800 tons of cocaine every year and it has been an open secret for years that senior politicians and the armed forces are deeply mixed up in drug dealing and the right-wing death squads - coyly referred to as "paramilitaries" are also involved in the trade.

In February, Uribe had to sack his foreign minister Maria Consuelo Araujo because of her family connections with the death squads and the drug trade. Uribe is becoming something of a pariah and his support is falling away, even in Washington. Senator Al Gore withdrew from a conference on climate change in Latin America to avoid being photographed with him because of allegations linking Uribe and government members to death squads and drug dealing. Gore called the claims deeply troubling. In 2001, some senior politicians signed the so-called Pact of Ralito, which bound them to well-known drug smugglers with names such as Jorge 40, Don Berna, Salvatore Mancuso and Diego Vecino. Other accusations against Uribe include one by an opposition senator that death squads used farms belonging to Uribe's family to carry out meetings and killings in the 1990s.

Earlier this month, the Vice President, Francisco Santos announced that "more than 40 members of congress" could go to prison because of their links to drugs and death squads. More than a dozen senators, congressmen and political insiders have been arrested. This month, two police generals were sacked.

The truth is also emerging about the Colombian army, beloved of the US government but widely hated by many Colombians for its closeness to the death squads. Senator Patrick Leahy ordered a temporary freeze on tens of millions of dollars of US military aid after the Colombian army commander, General Mario Montoya, was found to be deeply involved with the death squads.

Leahy condemned the waste of US money in Colombia: "When Plan Colombia began, we were told it would cut by half the amount of cocaine in five years. Six years and $5bn later, it has not had any measurable effect on the amount of cocaine entering our country."

Big business is also caught up in drug dealing. In March, Chiquita Brands International, a US banana multinational, was fined $25m by the US Justice Department for having funded the AUC, the principal Colombian death squad which is closely linked to international drug-smuggling. The collapse of the "war on drugs" in Latin America is of a piece with Tony Blair's failure to control drugs in the UK by police action and imprisonment. Britain's drug use rates are among the highest in Europe and there are 327,000 problem drug users. The failure to stem the supply of heroin is illustrated by the fall in price of a gram, from £70 in 2000 to £54 in 2005.

The annual number of drug offenders jailed more than doubled between 1994 and 2005 and the average length of their sentences went up. The courts handed out nearly three times as much prison time in 2004 as they did 10 years earlier.

Last month, an inquiry for the UK Drug Policy Commission said: "The research suggests that the greatest reductions in drug-related harm have come from investment in treatment and harm reduction. However, the bulk of expenditure on drug policy in the UK is still devoted to the enforcement of drug laws".

In Britain, as in Latin America, drugs clearly can't be controlled by armies and police forces.
Hugh O'Shaughnessy is the author with Sue Branford of 'Chemical Warfare in Colombia: the Costs of Coca Fumigation'

Cocaine Wars Make Port Colombia’s Deadliest City

Taken from The New York Times, May 22, 2007
By SIMON ROMERO

Visitors to this city can be forgiven for thinking no place is safe here. Gunfire often echoes through the slums surrounding its port, the country’s most important on the Pacific coast. As larger cities have calmed, Buenaventura has emerged as the deadliest urban center in Colombia’s long internal war.

Soldiers search almost every car at checkpoints on the winding road from Cali. Guerrillas recently fired mortar shells at the police headquarters. The stately Hotel Estación, a neo-Classical gem built in 1928, where executives come to hammer out deals to import cars or export coffee, is guarded by dozens of soldiers in combat fatigues.

“It’s as if we have a little Haiti within Colombia,” said Lt. Nikolai Viviescas, 25, a police officer who was transferred from Bogotá six months ago. “It feels like another country.”

Although Bogotá, the capital, and other cities have become secure and prosperous enough that it is possible there to forget about this country’s four-decade-old civil conflict for a while, Buenaventura is a different story.

Killings in this city of about 300,000 climbed 30 percent last year, to 408, giving Buenaventura the nation’s highest homicide rate at 144 per 100,000, more than seven times the rate in Bogotá and four times that of Medellín. And this year, the police say, 222 people have been killed here.

A vast majority of the killings are the product of a narrow territorial conflict over control of the edge of the city’s slums, acres of wooden shacks built on stilts over the sea. From these makeshift wharves, police and naval officials say, fast boats depart with cocaine for points north. Buenaventura’s geography, crucial in connecting Colombia to the global flow of trade, also holds strategic cachet for drug traffickers.

Despite receiving more than $5 billion in antinarcotics and counterinsurgency aid from the United States this decade, making the country the largest recipient of American aid in the hemisphere, Colombia remains the world’s largest cocaine producer and the supplier of 90 percent of the cocaine consumed in the United States.

Drug lords, rebels and resurgent paramilitary gangs all draw on Buenaventura’s slum dwellers as their foot soldiers.

The police say that many of the combatants on the rebels’ side belong to the Manuel Cepeda Vargas Urban Front, a cell of the main rebel group FARC that is based in Cali and opposes the Autodefensas Campesinas del Pacífico, composed mostly of former paramilitary fighters.

“Nothing in this fight is about ideology,” said Antero Viveros, the head of a community group in Lleras, a large slum controlled by the guerrillas. “It is about drugs, with members of one ethnicity killing each other.”

Despite its emergence as Colombia’s most dangerous city, people displaced by fighting in the countryside still see Buenaventura as a refuge. About 42,000 refugees have arrived here since 1998, mostly Afro-Colombians from rural areas, according to the federal government. They swell the ranks of what may be Colombia’s poorest slums.

“If you’re hungry, you’ll do whatever imaginable to survive,” said Fernando Nuñez, 29, a Lleras resident who ekes out a living repairing old cellphones.

President Álvaro Uribe has forcefully criticized the violence here and sent new police and navy commanders to the city at the start of the year. About 2,000 soldiers and police officers, who also wear combat uniforms and carry semiautomatic weapons, patrol Buenaventura.

Still, critics say authorities have long neglected Buenaventura’s problems in part because Afro-Colombians receive scant federal attention. Nongovernmental groups say Afro-Colombians account for up to a quarter of the country’s population of 44 million, by some measures giving Colombia the largest black population in the Spanish-speaking world. And more than 80 percent of Buenaventura’s residents are black.

This month, when the president chose Paula Marcela Moreno Zapata as culture minister, was the first time an Afro-Colombian ascended to a cabinet position in the country’s history. Yet political analysts and black advocacy groups said the appointment was largely to appease Democrats in Washington who complain of racial exclusion in Colombia as they weigh a trade agreement.

“The war in Buenaventura is not going to be ended by symbolic actions from Bogotá,” said Rosaliano Riascos, a Buenaventura native who fled the city after a wave of paramilitary-led killings several years ago. Mr. Riascos, who heads an independent black advocacy group in Bogotá, said it had been a year since he returned to Buenaventura to visit family.

“Buenaventura is a no-man’s land,” he said.

The entrance to Lleras looks like that of any shantytown elsewhere in Colombia, with cinder-block shacks and a few paved streets. But deeper into the slum, the structures are made from discarded wood, with newcomers squeezing into lean-tos alongside older houses. Rusted barrels collect rain from zinc roofs, the only source of fresh water.

Sewage bubbles down trash-strewn dirt roads before flowing into the sea. Stereos blare vallenato and reggaetón music. And precariously built homes are hoisted above the water on spindly pieces of wood.

Many of the residents of these hovels hesitate to offer their names out of fear of retaliation over what they might say. One middle-aged man, offering a visitor a cup of rum from the steps of his house, said he had worked as a stevedore at the port years ago before losing that job. “Now,” he said, “I do nothing.”

Some economists hold up Buenaventura as an example of the risks of exposing certain areas of developing economies to market forces. María del Pilar Castillo, an economist at Valle University in Cali, said many residents lost economic security when the city’s port was privatized more than a decade ago, cutting its work force and reducing benefits.

With taxes on the imports flowing through Buenaventura’s port largely going directly to the central government, the city reaps few benefits from international trade, even as Colombia’s economy grows more than 6 percent a year. So the poor in Buenaventura, with an unemployment rate of about 28 percent, resort to the drug trade.

“There is no other viable industry here, so there are no other viable jobs,” said Ana María Mercedes Cano, director of Buenaventura’s Chamber of Commerce. “So we live in a situation with violence all around us.”

Civilians are increasingly caught in the cross-fire. Guerrillas were blamed for an attack earlier this year in which five people, including one police officer, were killed when a homemade mortar shell was fired at a police truck. Security officials here say laws that are lax on minors, who carry out many of the attacks, make it difficult to reduce the killings.

“We have a justice system designed for Switzerland, yet we have no Swiss here,” said Col. Yamil Moreno, the chief of police in Buenaventura. In the same breath, Colonel Moreno, who was transferred here from the north, callously described Buenaventura’s dying combatants.

“These vagabonds,” he said, “are good only for drinking, dancing and killing.”

Exile And Extinction Face A Tribe That Lost Everything To Cocaine

Taken from The Times, UK, May 19, 2007
By Catherine Philp in Chocó, Colombia

The Wounaan Indians are used to newcomers. Over the past 500 years the Spanish conquistadors, freed African slaves and Marxist guerrillas have all tried to encroach on their ancestral land. But the Wounaan, one of the oldest indigenous peoples in the region, have held firm. And then came the coca leaf.

Living in small villages of wooden houses on stilts in riverside clearings in the jungles of Chocó, the Wounaan had largely succeeded in keeping out of Colombia’s bloody conflicts. They hunted, fished and farmed along the banks of the San Juan River, left alone by the battling rebels, paramilitaries and government troops.

Then, three years ago, the guerrillas came with an order at gunpoint. “They said we had to grow coca or else leave,” Fernando, a Wounaan leader, said. “And so we began planting it on our lands.”

The arrival of coca cultivation set in motion a chain of events that has left the Wounaan divided, displaced and at risk of extinction.

With cocaine increasingly the drug of choice in Europe – 1.2 million Britons are regular users – the plight of the Wounaan, and of Colombia’s three million other displaced, are prompting a major rethink in how to police the world’s most important drugs war.

It is more than four decades since the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or Farc, began their armed struggle to install a Marxist regime. In the 1990s, with added pressure from right-wing paramilitaries, the guerrillas became increasingly dependent on cocaine to finance their campaign, to the point where it has superseded the Utopian vision.

Since 2000 the US – where more than 75 per cent of Colombia’s cocaine exports end up – has spent $700 million (£350 million) a year to help to root out drug traffickers and eliminate coca crops. Plan Colombia, which began as a mixture of social programmes, crop eradication and military action, quickly lost sight of its social elements.

Chocó, an extravagantly fertile eco-region along Colombia’s Pacific Coast, was never traditionally an area for coca cultivation. Although coca has grown wild in Colombia since time immemorial, and was chewed by indigenous people as a mild stimulant, like coffee, it did not naturally take root in Chocó.

As spraying began in provinces such as Caquetá and Putu-mayo to the east and south, the rebels who supervised the growing of the coca crops started moving into areas farther afield, like the rainforests of Chocó.

Under threat of death or expulsion, the Wounaan began planting coca, which the guerrillas then bought from them. The crop was lucrative: a three inch cube of pressed coca would fetch them 1.8 million pesos ($900). The rice they had grown before fetched only 4,000 pesos a small sack.

Not everyone liked what else the coca brought. “At the beginning there was money,” Fernando said. “But then it started to destroy the culture. Drinking and prostitution, all these things begin when the money comes.”

In March last year leaders in Union-Wounaan, the largest settlement, sent word to the guerrillas that their coca-grow-ing days were over. A day later guerrillas seized a teacher from his classroom. His mutilated body was found hours later. The next day a tribal leader was seized and beaten to death.

The killings caused panic in the community. More than 1,000 of the area’s 3,500 Wounaan fled upriver to the town of Istmina, with hundreds more fleeing elsewhere into the jungle. Hundreds more wanted to leave but those arriving in Istmina said that there were no boats to bring them and they remained trapped upriver.

The displaced tribespeople took shelter in a house by the river, crammed 30 to a room. Exile proved too hard for many and some climbed into boats and travelled back. Those who had opposed the guerrillas had no choice but to stay – 47 of them were given asylum in Panama and more than 70 remain in Istmina.

In recent weeks right-wing paramilitaries who have refused to disarm under a government programme have started to move onto Wounaan land, seeking control of the coca crops themselves.

José Llanos, a tribal leader who has been speaking out against coca cultivation, arrived in Istmina with his family last month after receiving death threats from the paramilitaries. He told of a community caught between two illegal armies.

“We cannot be neutral,” he said. “Wherever we live, the other group thinks we are with that group. And both groups want the coca.”

The Wounaan join a human tide of migration across Colombia. More than three million people have been forcibly displaced across the country, second only to Sudan. Every day, 850 more people are driven from their homes. Alvaro Uribe, Colombia’s President, has received plaudits for improving security, though many blame his policies for the new crises in far-flung corners of the country previously little touched by the war.

“It is true that the violence is no longer affecting the governing classes as much,” Marie-Helene Verney, spokesman for the United Nations refugee agency in Colombia, said. “But the situation is very different in the countryside where voiceless minorities are coming under threat.”

In Condoto, a riverside cathedral town, hundreds of the displaced inhabit rundown slums that they built after fleeing their villages. Afro-Colombi-ans, the marginalised descendants of former slaves, have been here as long as five years. “I don’t believe we will ever go back,” Maria Cesario, a heavily pregnant mother of six, says. She is probably right. The vast majority of displaced Colombians never return home.

For the Government, there is little political capital to be won from helping the displaced. An average displaced family receives just one quarter of the subsidy given to the family of an illegal militiaman who turns in his guns. But for the Wounaan, there is more at stake than for most.

“The conflict has put their way of life at risk,” Ms Verney said. “They have been forced to leave their ancestral lands and now they find themselves at risk of extinction.”

Many more of Colombia’s one million indigenous people are also under such a threat. A year ago, 80 members of the hunter-gatherer Nukak tribe walked out of the jungle after months on the run from armed groups who ordered them off their land to grow coca. Only 500 remain in the jungle and fears are growing for their survival. For the Wounaan, the future looks bleak. In Istmina, they live in their own small community by the river, surrounded by an alien Afro-Colombian culture of hard drinking and casual sex. An air of tragedy hangs over them. All have taken Spanish names, the ones used here, to hide the Wounaan names that appeared on the guerrillas’ hit lists.

With their teachers dead, they struggle to teach their children to read and write their own language. At school they are taught in Spanish, which few Wounaan can speak.

At night, they try to perform traditional dances to preserve their culture but they find little to celebrate. They live as close to the river as they can. “The river is like our blood. Just like somebody without blood cannot live, we cannot live without the river,” said Fernando.

But their ancestral lands are far away and they have no prospect of return. “The land is like our mother. To lose it is very hard.”

Plan Colombia, the programme that drove the coca crops deep into their forests, is nearly over.

While the acreage of coca has shrunk, the yield has increased, so the amount of cocaine produced has not changed.

That fact, and revelations about links between the Government and illegal paramilitaries, have led to a suspension in the US aid money that funds it.

A new scheme, Plan Colombia II, has been hatched with less emphasis on military action and more on social programmes. But sceptics say they have seen this scheme before, and give warning that it may go the way of the original plan.

For the Wounaan, such geo-political manoeuvring is mean-ingless. But one thing they do know.

If no one wanted the little green leaf, no one would plant it. As Colombia gears up for the next chapter in the war on drugs, a dying tribe has this plea for the outside world.

“If nobody bought the drug, it wouldn’t be produced,” José Llanos says. “To those who buy it, it’s just merchandise. For us, it is disaster. They have our blood on their hands.”

Trading in misery
# 80% of the world’s cocaine is produced in Colombia
# $400bn - value of the global trade in the drug
# 500 hectares of rainforest cleared each year for new coca cultivation in Chocó province alone
# 3,000 people killed each year in Colombia’s cocaine-fuelled conflict
# 3m people displaced in what the UN describes as the worst humanitarian crisis outside Africa
# 60% of the world’s cocaine is consumed in the US
# 6.8% of Britons have tried the drug
# 5% of British banknotes have significant traces of cocaine indicating that they have been used to snort the drug

Coca-Cola Vs Coca Sek In Colombia

Taken from ABC News, May 10, 2007
By SERGIO DE LEON, Associated Press

President Alvaro Uribe is taking the war on drugs to the supermarket, prohibiting the sale of products made from the coca plant.

With the help of more than $600 million a year in U.S. aid, Uribe has strengthened Colombia's anti-narcotics police, seized record tons of cocaine and extradited 520 drug trafficking suspects to U.S. jails.

But until recently, his hardline government had not gone after natural coca products made by Indians, acknowledging that millions of peasants have chewed calcium-rich coca for thousands of years to stave off hunger and as a remedy for ailments from altitude sickness to stomach aches.

Uribe's presidential Web site even promoted natural coca products as a rare commercial enterprise for poor Indian communities, and the federal food-safety agency provided quality-control advice to the manufacturers of coca tea, cookies, shampoo and other consumer goods.

That suddenly changed in February, when Uribe's administration started banning the sale of coca products outside the reservations where Indians have a constitutional right to grow the hearty plant. Though it's still possible to find coca products at boutique markets and health food stores, inspectors have begun to forcibly remove them from supermarket shelves.

What prompted the switch?

For one, the success of Coca Sek, an energy drink made by the Nasa Indian tribe.

The carbonated drink made with coca, which looks like apple cider and tastes vaguely like ginger ale, was becoming a trendy alternative to Coca-Cola among Colombia's urban youth. The logo on the can even mimicked the popular U.S. soft drink's curvy script.

Newspapers around the world ran David-and-Goliath stories about the challenge by an unknown Indian tribe to the U.S. soda behemoth.

Atlanta-based Coca-Cola Co. responded with a trademark-infringement suit that Colombian authorities quickly dismissed.

Word also reached Austria, where the International Narcotics Control Board enforces a 1961 treaty that requires the "uprooting of all coca bushes which grow wild" and bans the distribution of products with even trace amounts of coca, the main ingredient in cocaine.

The board sent Colombia's foreign minister a letter asking how the "refreshing drink made from coca and produced by an Indian community" didn't violate the treaty and months later, the food safety agency quietly imposed the ban.

The Nasas cried foul, suspecting behind-the-scenes pressure from Coca-Cola.

Colombia's food safety agency, the narcotics control board and Coca-Cola Co. all denied that.

Agency lawyer Carolina Contreras says it was the control board's letter that prompted the ban, and the control board says it had no communication from Coca-Cola before sending it.

But the Indians remain suspicious. While they've appealed the ban, their $15,000-a-month income from the sale of Coca Sek and other coca products is suffering, says David Curtidor, a Nasa in charge of the company that produces the drink.

"Why don't they also ban Coca-Cola?" he said, claiming: "It's also made of coca leaves."

Dana Bolden, a spokesman at Coca-Cola's Atlanta headquarters, would neither confirm nor deny that a coca extract is part of the secret recipe. He repeated the company's longstanding refusal to reveal any elements of the Coca-Cola formula.

A loophole in the 1961 treaty allows coca leaves to be sold internationally if they are later distilled of their cocaine alkaloid to produce a "flavoring agent." That's what Northfield, Ill.-based Stepan Co. does under a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration license.

The Stepan Co., according to its Web site, is a "a global manufacturer of specialty and intermediate chemicals used in consumer products and industrial application." The company didn't respond to repeated requests to confirm that Coca-Cola is a client.

Stepan is the only U.S. firm currently importing coca, a DEA spokeswoman told The Associated Press. It buys about 55 tons of Peruvian coca leaves each year, said Jimmy Salcedo, commercial manager for Peru's state-owned National Coca Company, Enaco.

Many Indians in the Andes where coca is revered as a sacred plant and a matter of national pride in several countries are angry that the United States is importing coca leaves legally while their own coca products are banned.

"The coca leaf is legal for Coca-Cola and illegal for medicinal purposes in our country and in the whole world," Bolivian President Evo Morales told the U.N. General Assembly last year.

The Six-Day War: Forty Years On

Forty years ago, Israel launched what is known as the Six-Day war. The fighting was short, sharp and bloody. But its poisonous legacy has lasted far longer. For this special report, Donald Macintyre visits the heart of the conflict

Taken from the Independent, 26 May 2007

Less than a kilometre past the hillside olive groves of the sprawling Palestinian village of Sinjil, Dror Etkes turns left off route 60 as it dips and winds north through the terraced West Bank hills halfway between Ramallah and Nablus. He drives his white Mazda pick-up at alarming speed up a bumpy dirt road to the panoramic summit of what has been known for centuries in Arabic as Jebel Betin Halaweh but which is designated by the Israeli military the clinical name of Hill 804. A slight figure in his blue shirt, dark grey jeans, sunglasses and sandals, he parks the vehicle by the Army antenna, breathes in and announces with all the emphasis of the tour guide he once was: "We are now really in the heart of the ideological, religious, settlement movement."

It's easy to see what he means. We are in occupied Palestinian territory 21 kilometres east of the green line, which until the Six-Day War exactly 40 years ago denoted Israel's eastern border and in international law still does. On the windswept hilltops along a wide three-quarter circle to the west, north and east, the ridges are dominated by four Jewish settlements, the houses easily distinguishable from those in Palestinian villages by their red roofs, and eight of the satellite outposts, mainly consisting of up to 20 grey and functional container/caravans. Due west is Ma'ale Levona; to the north is Eli; to the east, just across Route 60, Shilo; and beyond it Shevut Rahel, founded in 1991 and named after a woman shot by Palestinian militants. And just south in the Shilo Valley is the open "industrial zone" with not a single factory on it, which along with the large municipal "jurisdictions" under their control mean that settlement-controlled land (including land previously cultivated by Palestinians) now accounts for 40 per cent of the West Bank.

A few minutes later, Etkes will pull off route 60 again and take a narrow paved road up to the 20-caravan settlement outpost of Nofei Nehemia, one of many identified as wholly illegal in the devastating Ariel Sharon- commissioned – but still to be implemented – 2005 report by the eminent lawyer Talia Sasson, showing how varying arms of the Israeli state – in this case the Housing and Construction Ministry – had secretly connived to establish such communities. Etkes keeps up a non-stop running commentary as we approach an outpost that has doubled in size in the past two years even though no one, including the Israeli government, pretends it has any legal right to be here. "Oh, someone's got a sense of humour," he says, translating a painted sign in Hebrew declaring: "Nofei Nehemia Security Road". "Look, here's an automatic barrier. Been here about half a year, I'd say. You can see the soldier manning it. This settlement is illegal in every way – supposed to be dismantled under the Road Map, Sasson report, everything." Legal or not, the settlers enjoy full military protection as Israeli citizens in a hostile environment. "It's in the DNA, it's in the system," says Etkes. "This is the military, supposed to be part of the law-enforcement agencies but in fact participating in massive law violation." As we drive back down the approach road, Etkes is so exasperated by the road sign that he jumps from the car and starts to wrench it from the ground. Changing his mind he says with a grin: "I'll come back when there aren't any journalists around."

If the Jewish settlers living in the West Bank have a one-man nemesis, the fast-talking Etkes, who has joined us for the Jerusalem-Nablus leg of our journey along route 60, is the likeliest candidate. It is doubtful that any Israeli knows more about the evolving political geography of the West Bank than he does. Much of his time since 2001, when he became director of Peace Now's settlement-watch programme, is spent photographing and documenting in minute detail the growth of the Israeli civilian presence in the West Bank. At the peak of the intifada, when it was blatantly unsafe for cars with Israeli plates to drive through the West Bank without armed escort, Etkes would put on his flak jacket – ironically to avoid being shot by Palestinian snipers on the repeated journeys he took, alone, to monitor and expose the settlers' relentless encroachment on Palestinian land.

Increasingly Etkes concentrates on legal actions designed to secure eviction from outposts which are both known to be illegal under Israeli law and erected on privately owned Palestinian land. When nine houses were finally demolished in the Amona outpost last year amid serious violence between settlers and police, it was the result of an incontrovertible case devised by Etkes. When the "unauthorised" Migron outpost of 60 caravans, east of Ramallah – on which the Sasson report established the Housing Ministry had spent nearly $900,000 on infrastructure and two fixed buildings – is finally demolished, it will be because of a case brought by Etkes and the Palestinian landowners. "That will be the biggest settlement outpost [to be evacuated] ever outside Gaza and the settlers are terrified of this because we are now grabbing them in the balls in certain places," says Etkes cheerfully. "We can go from place to place wherever there is private Palestinian land which was seized without any permission or any licences without any papers and we can screw them big-time."

Important as Etkes believes, no doubt rightly, these actions to be in putting settlers on the defensive, they cannot of course remove the elephant in the room: the parent settlements themselves, all 121 of them, comprising 260,000 settlers in the West Bank in all. (If the settlements in Arab East Jerusalem, whose annexation by Israel has never been accepted by the international community, are included there are roughly 450,000 settlers in occupied territory.) The adults are eligible to vote in Israeli elections; almost all have a vested interest in remaining under Israeli jurisdiction. And these numbers have grown from exactly zero since the triumphant victory in the war whose 40th anniversary Israel will commemorate, with some hesitation and self-reflection, next month. The anniversary of the war is also a reminder that the occupation of the West Bank – of which the settlements and the huge security, road and infrastructure apparatus that surrounds them are the most visible symbols – has lasted exactly 40 years.

It all started here in Kibbutz Kfar Etzion, which in the late spring is a lush oasis of trees and flowers, with all the hillside space it needs to grow the orchids and cherries that help make it one of the most prosperous settlements in the West Bank. Kfar Etzion has a special place in Israeli hearts because of the heroic last stand in the 1948 war, in the Etzion Bloc of four kibbutzim, in which 155 Jewish defenders, men and women, were killed by the Arab Legion irregulars and local villagers. The worst carnage was at Kfar Etzion, an orthodox kibbutz, where almost all those who surrendered were massacred. The women and children had mostly been evacuated, including the mother of Gerry Katz, now 60, the man responsible for the outstanding gardens of the kibbutz today. His father was killed in the last battle.

Katz, tanned in his blue workshirt, chinos, sandals and kippa (skullcap), says that each year the children of Kfar Etzion would gaze longingly down from Jerusalem on what was now Jordanian territory – today the old Jordanian command post is the kibbutz's communications centre – and dream of coming back. Which about half the 58 children from the kibbutz – Katz was the last to be born there – eventually succeeded in doing, with the Labour government's hesitant blessing. "It was like the Jews coming back to the land of Abraham all over again," says Katz today, who came straight here from his wartime Army service. "It was the metaphysical becoming reality."

Of course, the special role in Israeli history of the kibbutz made it a prime site for all those agitating after 1967 for settlement in the West Bank. But while Kfar Etzion was special to Katz above all, he himself is in no doubt that it was at one with the dream of Jews living elsewhere in what had been a few months earlier the Jordanian- controlled West Bank. "Our land is in Judaea and Samaria," he says using the name for the territory favoured by many Israelis. "This is Jewish land." No he did not think, even now, that it should be formally annexed. "The eternal nation moves slowly," he adds enigmatically.

It is hard to overestimate the foreboding inside Israel that preceded the war. The causes were complex and, like most issues in the Middle East, still disputed. But the most immediate triggers were the clashes between Israeli and Syrian forces on Israel's border with the Golan Heights and (the Egyptian president) Nasser's decision, amid a build-up of Egyptian forces in the Sinai, to close the Tiran Straits outside the Gulf of Aqaba. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the preceding months, almost every historian has commented that this felt to most Israelis like a war for what suddenly seemed like the fragile existence of a 19-year-old state that no Arab country then recognised, invoking for many memories of the Holocaust itself. There was, of course, a corresponding sense of relief and euphoria at the subsequent decisive victory after just six days, from the morning of 5 June to the evening of 10 June – much of it shared in the West.

In London, the Daily Telegraph trumpeted the outcome as "The triumph of the civilised", while in Paris Le Monde went deeper into the reasons for Western relief at Israel's victory. While acknowledging that it had happened "alas on the back of the Arabs", the paper declared: "In the past few days Europe has in a sense rid itself of the guilt incurred in the drama of the Second World War and before that the persecutions which accompanied the birth of Zionism."

The war cost the lives of more than 16,000 Arab men, the large majority Egyptian, and 800 Israeli soldiers. It left Israel in control of a million Arabs and large new swathes of territory, including the West Bank and Gaza, seized from Jordan and Egypt respectively, and the Golan Heights, overrun and captured from Syria. The political debate in Israel over what to do about the new conquests was almost immediate. The Labour politician and former general Yigal Allon, for example, produced a plan which provided for annexation of – and creation of civilian settlements along – the border with Jordan. Moshe Dayan, the triumphant Defence Minister, announced that he wanted an "invisible occupation", adding: "I want a policy whereby an Arab can be born, live and die in the West Bank without ever seeing an Israeli official."

At the same time, other forces were also at work, attracted by the possibilities of creating a "Greater Israel" from the River Jordan to the Mediterranean. These included – but were by no means confined to – the political right, which would 10 years later propel Menachem Begin to power, and religious Zionists like the Rabbi Moshe Levinger, who would go on to found Gush Emumim, the movement behind so many of today's settlements. Levinger quickly offered his support to attempts to re-settle Kfar Etzion in the face of initial ambivalence by the Prime Minister Levi Eshkol. And even for some of those who did not share the "Greater Israel" dream, there was another imperative, one which still survives, and which the Israeli writer Gershom Gorenberg (whose authoritative book on the first 10 years of settlement policy will shortly be published in Britain) describes as: "to create facts that would determine the final status of the land, to sculpt the political reality before negotiations ever got under way."

By September, Eshkol was seriously considering settlements in the Golan and Kfar Etzion. He was no doubt influenced by the Khartoum Arab summit which had responded to the Israeli Cabinet's secret offer, agreed within a fortnight of the war, of a negotiated withdrawal from most of the territories, with a resounding "no" to talks. In hindsight, it is possible to see the Khartoum declaration as a heavily coded concession to some form of indirect negotiation on recognition, in return for withdrawal from the territories occupied in the war. But Israel, whose position was anyway hardening, wanted direct negotiations and explicit recognition if it was going to pull back.

In all the debate – within the public and, it appears, in Cabinet – one highly significant aspect of settlement policy was barely, if at all, discussed: whether it was legal. Since then Israel has never accepted the argument, ratified by successive UN resolutions, that civilian settlements violated international law. Which makes it all the more interesting that Theodor Meron, the then-36-year-old legal adviser at the Foreign Ministry, was asked to deliver an opinion on just that issue. Meron, a Holocaust survivor, had been a member of Israel's delegation to the UN during the June war. "It was a very traumatic period because in New York things looked terribly ominous," he recalls today.

But the secret memorandum he wrote three months later – initially only for the eyes of his boss, the Foreign Minister Abba Eban, but then sent to Eshkol's office – was clearsighted and unequivocal. The document, written after the Khartoum summit when he knew settlement in the Golan and the West Bank was very much in the air, was unknown until it was unearthed from the Israel State Archives and brought to light by Gorenberg last year. In it, Meron wrote that "my conclusion is that civilian settlement of the administered territories contravenes the explicit provisions of the Fourth Geneva Convention." The Convention prohibits deportation or transfer by the occupying power of its own civilian population into the territories it occupies.

The official Red Cross commentary explains that this prohibition was "intended to prevent a practice adopted during the Second World War by certain Powers, which transferred portions of their own population to occupied territory for political and racial reasons or in order, as they claimed, to colonise those territories." Meron's crisp recommendation was that the prohibition was "categorical and aimed at preventing colonisation of conquered territory by citizens of the conquering state." That was not all. Even when establishing military posts, Israel, he was clear, had also to respect the 1907 Hague Convention on Laws and Customs of war on land, which stated that "Private Property cannot be confiscated". This has been little discussed in the Israeli-Palestinian context but its lasting pertinence was underlined last November when Peace Now, on the basis of leaked data from the military's Civil Administration in the West Bank, revealed that 15,000 acres, or 40 per cent of the West Bank settlements, were on privately owned Palestinian land, often by military order.

This could be dismissed as no more than an interesting historical footnote, except for one thing. Theodor Meron, now an American citizen, went on to become one of the world's most eminent international jurists, if not the most eminent. Until 2005 he was president of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. Moreover, as a law professor at New York University, he published much of the theoretical work which led to the establishment of the tribunal, on which he now sits as an appeals judge, and of the International Criminal Court. The Government was not choosing to ignore the opinion of some obscure legal maverick.

Meron, who has never talked publicly about his opinion before, knew, of course, that what he had been asked to write, after Khartoum, and at a time when he knew well that settlement in the West Bank and the Golan was being considered, was of fundamental importance. Weighing his words with all of a judge's care, in the forbidding grey tribunal building in the wooded outskirts of The Hague, he asked me: "Did I realise that this was a momentous decision? Yes. But I took it very much in my stride. I mean I don't want to say to you that I felt that I was doing something particularly brave or heroic. I was, of course, doing my job. It was a much more important opinion than any other that I wrote during those few months we are talking about. But I felt that legal advisors have professional and ethical obligations and I believe that governments should listen more to professional legal opinions. And when they disregard those opinions, sooner or later, things boomerang."

Meron was born in Poland, spent four years of childhood and early teens in the Nazi labour camp at Czestochawa and lost his mother, brother and all four of his grandparents in the Holocaust. For him, the Geneva Convention is not some dry abstraction from a law book. "It is a convention which deals with tangible human concerns and with the rights of inhabitants and populations. It is a people-friendly convention It is a convention that puts constraints on what occupying armies, even the most benevolent occupying armies, may do and what they may not do. I very much felt that the Geneva Conventions – and this is, of course, my view today – are a very special kind of a law. We are not talking about commercial law or contract. We are talking about norms that were established soon after the Second World War in order to learn from the experience of that war and try to prevent, for the future, some of the events which I experienced as a child I wish I had not had those experiences because they were very painful. But I never dwell on the past. I believe that basically it is not terribly productive. We should just create the best environment in terms of human rights that we can for now and for the future."

At the time, however, his arguments were anything but emotional. In particular he dealt, with great foresight, with several of the arguments still used by the Israeli government today to justify its contention that the settlements are not unlawful – including that Jordan had unilaterally annexed the West Bank and therefore this was not "normal" occupied territory.

First, he correctly predicted the international community would not see it that way. "I drew attention to the fact that the United Kingdom, for example, in [Ambassador Lord Caradon's] statement to the UN, made it quite clear that it views Israeli presence in the West Bank as one of classic occupation." And secondly, he pointed out that Israeli actions – like the military decree on the third day of the war providing that military courts must apply the Geneva Conventions – were "inconsistent" with the claim that the West Bank is not occupied territory. Finally, as he explained in The Hague this month, even these arguments could not be applied to the Golan Heights, which had been undisputed as "classically Syrian territory" before the war.

Meron acknowledges that "the fact that there was no proclaimed desire by the Arab states for negotiations created the environment in which this policy of establishing settlements could prosper." But he points out that, as he advised at the time, there was a perfectly plausible and legal alternative. "In terms of international law, it would have been entirely appropriate for Israeli military bases and a strong military presence in the territories to be maintained until there [was] a political resolution. So there was an alternative to the civilian settlements approach."

Forty years later, does Meron still stand by his memorandum? While he might have used "less bureaucratic jargon" here and there, he said: "I reread that opinion recently and I believe that I would have given the same opinion today ... It was quite legitimate on your part to ask me whether this is still my view. It is. I don't believe I made a gross legal error."

Nor it appears did his own boss – which is itself a disclosure of historical importance. "I do remember that the Foreign Minister Abba Eban was quite sympathetic. I cannot recollect after so many years when exactly I discussed it with him. [But] I did. And the fact that the opinion
went to the Prime Minister suggests there was no objection by the Foreign Minister. I was constantly in touch with [Eban] and my clear recollection is that he was sympathetic."

This was not enough, of course, to halt the Cabinet's eventual endorsement of settlement in the West Bank. Meron is careful to a fault about avoiding political statements, let alone comment on current Israeli political issues. But he says: "It's obvious to me that the fact that settlements were established – and the pace of the establishment of the settlements – made peacemaking much more difficult. This is something the Arabs greatly resented. Would peace have been achieved? I can't answer that. I am not a prophet. Would the chances have been much better? I think so – and most people agree that the prospects of peace would have been much better."

To see why, it's necessary to return to Route 60, the almost surreal highway that cuts through the middle of the West Bank. For much of its length it is used only by Israelis – and for much of the route that means settlers – because Palestinians are either prohibited from driving on it by military order, or prevented from reaching it by the earthworks or gates that block the feeder roads from their villages. To start the journey it's worth first travelling south to the paradoxical and – to Jews and Muslims – holy city of Hebron, where Rabbi Leibovich arrived in 1968 to found Kyriat Arba, the adjacent settlement that paved the way for the growth that is visible today throughout the West Bank. Outside its historic heart, Hebron is the most normal of Palestinian cities. Partly this is because it is more open to the surrounding countryside and to Jerusalem than Nablus and Jenin. Partly it is because its strong and traditional clan nexus militates against the lawlessness that has started to spread to those cities, as well as in Gaza, since Hamas won the January 2006 elections and the international community mounted its boycott in response.

But the old city is notoriously a ghost town, thanks almost entirely to the four small and notably hard-line Jewish settlements that have been allowed to establish themselves – uniquely in any part of the West Bank – in the heart of the city. For the protection of no more than 400 Israeli settlers, the area surrounding the settlements is under direct control of the Israeli military; the only cars allowed are those of the settlers and the Army; most of the shops have long been boarded up; and stretches of the main artery Shuhada Street are closed even to Palestinian pedestrians. Earlier this month, the two most respected Israeli civil-rights organisations, Btselem and the Association of Civil Rights, produced stark new figures to underline what it called the "quiet transfer" of Palestinian population from the once-teeming city centre: 41 per cent of the housing and 65 per cent of business premises lie vacant, many of them by direct military order. Among the reasons for the flight cited in the report is the "failure of law-enforcement authorities to enforce the law on settlers who assault Palestinians and damage their property."

Now, however, an ominous new problem has emerged: the takeover by settlers of a large empty Palestinian building – a mini apartment block really– in a strategic position on the road linking Kyriat Arba, outside the city, and the Tomb of the Patriarchs, deep inside it. It's an outpost that could just turn into a fifth inner-city settlement. As the Palestinian families in the street warily watched their new Jewish neighbours installing water tanks, hauling up generators and hammering in window frames at their new four-storey home, next door to a mosque, they claimed the settlers had sought to provoke them by tactics ranging from repeated stone-throwing to leering provocatively at the girls and women – knowing it to be deeply offensive in traditional Muslim societies.

The single word "Revenge" had been scrawled in Hebrew by someone on the door of Fathi al Razem's yard. Like many others, the al Razem family lost nine acres of vines a generation earlier to the new settlement of Kyriat Arba. "All the people are silent," said Mr al Razem, who is 60, "because they are hoping the [Israeli government] will evacuate them. But we won't accept harassment if they don't." Whether they will have any choice depends on a current appeals process by the settlers against an order to move. As Talia Sasson among others has pointed out, the best way to have stopped the hardline Hebron Jewish residents forming what could yet become a fifth settlement within the city, was for the Army to have forcibly prevented them entering in the first place.

Hebron and the conflict with the settlers throws up a telling vignette of everyday life under the modern occupation. In 2002, Nidal Jamjoum, then 23, watched in horror as his 14-year-old sister Nasseem was shot and fatally wounded on the roof of their old city home by settlers who were on the rampage after the shooting by a Palestinian militant in the south Hebron hills of a settler who was also a soldier. Maybe it's because he has, despite everything, kept the sense of humour he definitely needs that the story of Nidal's struggle to rise above the tragedy has a tragic-comic flavour worthy of Paradise Now, the Golden Globe award-winning film set in the West Bank.

According to the Israeli legal NGO Yesh Din, no one is indicted in 90 per cent of cases of settler violence. And so it was when Nidal's sister was shot by a settler who has never been brought to court. At the time, Nidal was studying at the Al Quds Open University – and as recompense for the tragedy, he was promised by Mohammed Hourani, an expansive Fatah Hebron member of the Palestinian parliament, a "Yasser Arafat scholarship" to study abroad. So he abandoned his course at Al Quds. "He promised me I would go to Algeria, Russia or Romania," Nidal recalls, "but it was a false promise." Smiling ruefully at what he evidently now sees as his naivety, he adds: "I didn't know he was a liar. I thought he was a responsible officer in the Palestinian authority and cannot tell a lie. Then I discovered."

Nevertheless, Nidal retained a keen desire to study abroad. "Everywhere here in Hebron I am reminded of what happened," he explained. Finally, using the internet, he says, he managed to secure a promise of admission to a university in Alberta, Canada. Which left him needing a visa, which in turn meant meeting two requirements. One was raising (or at least being able convincingly to pretend that he had raised) enough money to persuade the Canadians that he could initially support himself. And the second was a trip to the Canadian embassy in Tel Aviv, some 50 miles away, to apply for his visa. The first requirement proved rather more trouble-free than the second.

Without much difficulty he was able to secure a note from a businessman acquaintance guaranteeing a donation of $12,000. By Nidal's account, the man probably did not intend to pay up, but Nidal thought – perhaps also naively – that it would be enough to get him the visa. Next he went to try and get a permit from the Israeli military to travel to Israel to do so. "But they told me I couldn't have the permit because my sister had been killed and that made me a security risk because I might try and commit some terrorist act in revenge."

So on 6 January 2003 – Nidal can remember the date more than four years later – he found a taxi driver from East Jerusalem prepared to take him, along with two Palestinians working illegally in Israel. They left Hebron through the back roads, avoiding the checkpoints, and on to Tel Aviv. He did his business at the embassy – he was later to hear he did not get the visa – and rang the taxi driver on his mobile. But the driver was still some way away. "I was walking up and down in front of the embassy. The driver was late. The people in the restaurant next door were staring at me. They could tell I was a Palestinian and I was scared."

Then the police arrived. "They asked me where I was from and I told them I was from Hebron. They put me in handcuffs and searched my body for explosives. Then they checked my story with the Canadian embassy. They kept me in the police station for four or five hours. I had to sign something saying I would not come back again. I told them I didn't come to Tel Aviv for fun; if the Canadian embassy had been in Hebron I would have stayed there. And I had to sign something saying they hadn't beaten me up." (They hadn't.)

He was then dropped somewhere at 4.30pm. He is not sure of the place – except that it was two hours' tramp to the Arab village of Kafr Qasem. There he found some Hebronites to stay with, and indeed to return home with – part walking across the hills, part hitchhiking on the Palestinian backways. He left at 6am and finally got home at 4pm. The walking was the worst part because of a fierce and icy hailstorm which drenched all of Nidal's precious papers, the Palestinian passport, the high school certificates, the Al Quds University credits, the (probably worthless) $12,000 "guarantee".

Though he still dreams of getting away from Hebron, Nidal is today searching for a job – so far in vain because of an economic blight roundly blamed this month by the World Bank on Israeli restrictions on Palestinian movement. He is back at Al Quds Open University, supported by his two brothers, who are in the business of producing wire mesh – a commodity much in demand in a city which, thanks to the presence of the settlers, is the undisputed capital of the throwing of stones and trash between Jews and Arabs.

And going back to the reason for the Army's refusal to grant him a permit, has he been tempted to join the militants? On this, Nidal is emphatic. "If I join either: 1) they arrest me and put me in gaol, or 2) I will be killed and my family may get arrested." Indeed, he says, the first is just what happened to a distant cousin of his who joined Islamic Jihad. So what did he think of the second intifada, in retrospect? "It was a big failure. What are the gains? Tell me what it achieved? A few good songs and that's it."

Turning north back to Jerusalem, you pass through two long tunnels carved into the mountain – one of them directly under the Palestinian town of Beit Jala. They were built at a cost of tens of millions of dollars so that the settlers would no longer have to risk driving through Bethlehem. Next you pass through the new and dauntingly permanent-looking Beit Jala "terminal"– and indeed it is more like a border crossing than a checkpoint, except that in international law, if not in the view of Israel, both sides of it are actually in occupied territory.

Jerusalem, of course, is a story all of its own. The city is far from immune from just the kind of encroachments on the Arab eastern sector that threaten the prospects of a final, two-state deal between Israel and the Palestinians. When the senior European diplomats and their American counterpart in the city refused to join in this year's Jerusalem Day celebrations of the 40th anniversary of the "reunification", they reflected the official Western view that the annexation that followed the Six-Day War had no basis in international law.

It's a view endorsed in a report produced by the International Red Cross committee, which acts as the official guardian of the Geneva Conventions that Theodor Meron presciently predicted would be the core of Israel's international problem. In other words, East Jerusalem is still occupied and the ring of huge Jewish "neighbourhoods" which Israel has built there since the war are settlements. Israel refuses to accept this, standing by the annexation and pointing out that after it Palestinians were offered Israeli citizenship and in the main refused. This is hardly surprising since Palestinians have always insisted on Jerusalem (these days in practice East Jerusalem) as the capital of a Palestinian State – and no international statesmen seriously believes a final peace is negotiable with anything less.

Although it was never officially published as intended by their foreign ministers – for fear of angering Israel – the European consulates produced a devastating report in November 2005 report. Leaked to The Independent, it charged that use of the separation barrier – cutting some Arab quarters off from East Jerusalem and dividing others – along with what the report called without embellishment "illegal" settlements in and outside East Jerusalem and the highly restrictive system of building and other permits for Palestinians were all "reducing the possibility of reaching a final-status agreement on Jerusalem, and demonstrate a clear Israeli intention to turn the annexation of East Jerusalem into a concrete fact". That report was largely written in the British Consulate – which by a serendipitous irony, now finds it could itself have a Jewish settlement as its neighbour in the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood of East Jerusalem. But if the plan to demolish the old Shepherd's Hotel and build a clutch of multi-storey apartments for Jewish families on a site acquired by the right- wing businessman Irwin Moskowitz is upsetting the diplomats, it is upsetting the poorer residents of Sheikh Jarrah even more.

A few doors down, 70-year-old Bahia Siam remembers 1967 with barely expressible sadness. Her sadness is not for the war itself – when she walked on the last day all the way to Ramallah to find her husband who had been cut off from home while working at the old Jerusalem airport in Atarot – but for the following month when her three young sons were killed as they played in the yard behind the house, possibly by an accidental explosion detonated by Israeli troops operating in the area. "All our relations with our neighbours are good," says her daughter Ibahe, age 35. "What will it be like if our neighbours are extreme Jews?"

Danny Seidemann, an Israeli lawyer specialising in fighting the settlement projects in East Jerusalem, warns that the "Hebronisation" of Jerusalem is the stark alternative to Israelis and Palestinians dividing and sharing the city in partnership. The Sheikh Jarrah plan may only be a small example but it would be one more step towards the settlers' objective of interrupting the "contiguity" of Arab East Jerusalem by helping to cut off the Old City from the northern neighbourhoods of Shuafat and Beit Hanina. As Ibahe Siam says, "If they manage to build a settlement here, the whole of Sheikh Jarrah will go."

It's on Route 60 leaving Jerusalem that Etkes joins us. Here, on the heavily restricted sections on which Palestinians are allowed to drive, Israeli cars simply pass the long queues at the checkpoints and are waved through by the soldiers painstakingly inspecting the queues of cars with Palestinian registrations plates. Starting in the 1990s, the highway has been re-routed to bypass the main Palestinian cities so that settlers don't have to drive through them. Arab villages along the way are virtually never mentioned on the signposts and the road has imposed an alternative reality on the West Bank. Here, on the outskirts of Jerusalem, one of the many long stretches where no Palestinian cars are allowed at all, we pause for a few moments just past another new "terminal", above the Palestinian village of Hizma, which also has occupied territory on both sides. Most West Bank Palestinians will be denied entry through it to Jerusalem, of course. Etkes points out that much of the huge settlement – or Jerusalem "neighbourhood" – on the other side of the barrier was built on Hizma land. He adds that Israel has unilaterally defined its border "and then basically denies the right of Palestinians who live here, half a kilometre from what used to be their land, to get inside. It's really crazy when you think about it. Most of us don't even think about it. Most of us don't even know it. But it is a hard story."

Further north, we come to the Jewish West Bank settlement of Beit El, where Etkes has identified a section – including a water tower among other buildings – which is outside the zone commandeered by official military order. He will now search the registries of Palestinian landowners in the hope of bringing a case. "The state basically assisted this to happen," he says. "Look at the antennae. Look at the pavements. Look at the electricity. Everything here belongs to the state. It's part of the state system. This is what happens in 40 years, if you just close your eyes and act according to the assumption that there are no red lines [limits] to what Israel can do in order to achieve its political goals."

Next stop is Ariel, the large settlement block (population 18,000) which cuts deeply eastwards across the West Bank and is already partly surrounded by the separation barrier which may or may not one day be completed around it. Ariel has a 7,000-student college and advertises itself as being in "The Middle of Israel", even though it is entirely east of the 1967 green line. When Ariel Sharon secured (in 2004) a promise from President Bush that existing "population centres" would remain in Israel under any final deal with the Palestinians, Israel assumed that Ariel would be among them. But the unofficial Geneva Accord between Israeli and Palestinian politicians Yossi Beilin and Yasser Abed Rabbo, reached in the dark days of the intifada's peak, assumed that it would be Palestinian. Etkes points to the metal fencing clad in barbed wire, the two trenches and the electric wire which make up the 20m-wide barrier here. Then he gestures towards some unkempt olive trees inside the barrier – and explains how once they were carefully tended by Palestinians: "This is an attempt unilaterally to annex Ariel to Israel. That's what it is." New houses here cost some 30 per cent less than in Israel proper, and there is a string of other financial incentives to make it more attractive to the often non-ideological settlers who choose to live here.

As we drive north – bypassing the Palestinian city of Nablus, of course – Etkes muses on the part played by the settlements in the conflict. He is emphatic in saying that he doesn't "legitimise terrorism". Of the second intifada, with its trail of suicide bombings, he says that the Palestinians had "a wide spectrum of choices [to act against the occupation] and they failed to select the good one or the right one." But he says that the rapid acceleration of settlement growth under four prime ministers, starting with Yitzhak Rabin, after the Oslo Accords, was a crucial factor in precipitating it. "I think that the second intifada was a direct result of settlement policy. If in 1994 Israel had seriously taken responsibility and said, 'Hey, this is a real opportunity to think about what we have done in the last 26, 27 years,' I don't think the intifada would have erupted."

Etkes spent six years of that period abroad, after doing his military service in a combat unit during the first intifada. He first became truly interested in the settlements when he got back to Israel and started taking taxis to places where he had served as a soldier. He was dumbfounded by how much had changed. He says now, by way of explanation of his earlier – undoubtedly controversial – remark: "There is a very important difference between how Israelis consider reality and how Palestinians consider reality. Israel concentrates on what Israel says, while Palestinians are very much aware of what Israel does. If you look at what Israel does rather than what it says the conclusion is that Israel is not willing to accept a Palestinian state.

"The conclusion of the Palestinians is that there is no point in discussing with Israelis a political [deal] because they're building settlements all the time – and Israel is not willing eventually to give up the majority of the West Bank. That is very much the collective experience of Palestinians in the West Bank. When I was there and I looked at what Israel was doing I reached the same conclusions. I refuse to live and dream in their world of fantasies. I refuse to be enchanted by the beautiful declarations of Israeli politicians. Because I go into the field and check what they actually do."

As Hebron is the southernmost city in the West Bank, so Jenin – where the Israeli military has recently been carrying out operations against militants, and into which, of course, Etkes, as an Israeli civilian, cannot accompany us – is the northernmost. Al Haq, the Palestinian civil-rights organisation, has been investigating what it believes is the "widespread practice" of harassment of local ambulance drivers, which it says contravenes international legal provisions prohibiting states from "denying or actively limiting access to health". Sitting on the floor, over a simple lunch of omelette, sausage and salad, driver Feda Subh describes how, with six members of a mobile clinical team, he was on his way to the village of Seer. Along the way, he passed, as ambulances routinely do, to the front of a queue of around 25 cars halted at a typical flying checkpoint consisting of three Hummers and seven Israeli soldiers. "It all depends on the mood of the soldiers," he said. "Sometimes they let you go and sometimes they make you go to the back of the queue." But this time, he says, "three of them dragged me out of the car and threw me on the ground. It was raining and they started kicking me and threatening to kill me." After the whole incident, which lasted about five minutes in all, Subh says he was told to go – and that he drove through the checkpoint without the ambulance even being searched. "My face was bleeding," he said. "When we started the clinic, I was the first patient." The military said this month that it was opening an investigation into Mr Subh's case.

Meanwhile, on the cypress-lined main road from Jenin south to Qabatiya, there has been a recent death in the forenoon. Taxi driver Ashraf Haneishe, age 25, was ordered out of his Toyota by Israeli special forces and shot dead after being ordered to lie spreadeagled on the road with his two passengers. According to local witnesses, two of the Israelis who emerged from the van were dressed in plain clothes like Arabs, and had been spotted earlier getting into the yellow and white VW van with Palestinian registration plates from which they and the rest of the soldiers, dressed in normal uniforms, emerged. Mohammed Nazzal, 42, a cousin of the dead man, who runs a car wash 25 metres from where it happened and who drove him to hospital, heard the shots and came out in time to see the body being dragged "by the legs" by two of the soldiers from the middle of the road.

According to the Israeli military, Haneishe had been active in helping the "Islamic Jihad infrastructure" in Jenin by handling funds for it – though it was the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade that claimed him as a member in the "martyr poster" they swiftly produced, as the factions regularly do whether the casualty was a militant or not. Mr Nazzal says he doesn't believe it. Only the previous day, he said he had asked Haneishe to take him and his young son to hospital.

"Do you think if I had known he was wanted I would have let my son go into his car?" Certainly, it would have been a dangerous thing to do in Jenin.

But in any case that still leaves the question of why he was killed rather than arrested. The Army's answer is that he pulled a handgun on the troops even though the sworn affidavits mention no gun, and one, from a farmer who saw the incident and is also a member of the Nazzal family, says specifically that Haneishe got out of the car slowly with his hands up and was shot as soon as he had laid down. Haneishe's 35-year-old brother Maher says: "It was an execution; they should have considered him a prisoner of war." Citing the testimony of one of the passengers, he claims that as the soldiers drove off "they laughed".

Whether the anniversary reflections in Israel will prompt any hope of finally settling this seemingly endless conflict remains to be seen. Etkes thinks it possible that one factor – the ferocious political power of the settlers – may have reached its "high-water mark". Last year's Israeli elections were the first in which a majority of voters opted for withdrawals from the West Bank. "I have no doubt that the massive terror attack on Israeli society during 2001 to 2003 was one of the main contributions to the killing of the peace camp in Israel." During that period, he says, settlers enjoyed "wide manoeuvrability because there was no energy left to deal with them". Now that might be changing.

On the other hand he still believes that this is more likely to revive the idea of "unilateralism", on which Ehud Olmert fought the election and is now too hobbled by the Lebanon war and other factors to deliver. In other words partial withdrawals on Israel's terms and not on negotiated ones. This is most favoured by those who want withdrawals for what Etkes calls the "wrong reasons" – "demography" or the fear that if Israel controls a state populated by more Arabs than Jews then it will have to choose between being Jewish or democratic. It is an argument that appeals not a jot to most settlers, of course. David Wilder, the Hebron settlers' spokesman, told me last year that democracy had been elevated to a "deity" and added: "If I have to choose between the survival of the state of Israel over democracy then I choose the survival of the state of Israel." By that Wilder means a state which includes the West Bank.

The 1967 war was of course the moment at which Israel had showed its strength – something warmly welcomed at the time in most of the West. For the international community, reinforced by Meron's remarks and the International Red Cross's now-public concerns over Jerusalem, the 40th anniversary may be time for the West to reflect on how long it will tolerate what it sees as 40 years of the breach of international law. Meron says: "I don't see a conflict between strength and compassion. Of course, it would have been and it is entirely appropriate for Israel to defend itself. It was then, it is now. At the same time, Israel or any country must be, and its people must be, compassionate and respectful of others. If you do not respect the rights of others you simply exacerbate the problems that will one day haunt you."

Moreover, logic – if that ever counted for anything in the Middle East – would suggest that now is just the time for a negotiating effort. The Arab League Mecca summit has, however belatedly and with however little international impact so far, turned the history of the last 40 years full circle by promising pan-Arab recognition in return for an end to the occupation. Writing earlier this month in Haaretz, the eminent Hebrew University scholar Eli Podeh declared: "It is already possible to say today – and not 40 years from now – that there has been a turnaround, and that the voices coming from the Arab and Islamic world calling for a dialogue are sufficiently serious and important. We should not ignore them."

If so, that moment may need to be soon, before the new generation, the children of the second intifada grow up.

Jenin – impoverished, increasingly lawless and isolated from Nablus, let alone Jerusalem – seems a world away from Kfar Etzion. As Mohammed Nazzal and his neighbours drink coffee, they discuss the "situation" in the late afternoon sun. Abu Ezzat, age 63, reflects back to the mid-point between the Six-Day War and now: the first intifada, which unlike the second had a concrete result – the Oslo process. "In 1987 we felt it had been a long time and we wanted to liberate ourselves. At one moment we thought we could have peace and co-existence, open relations between Israel and Palestinians. Now it doesn't seem possible. And if you take the kids to a toy shop to buy them something at the end of Ramadan, all they want is a gun."