London's terrorism support apparatus: environmentalism, indigenism, and NGOs

This article appeared in the November 10, 1995 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.

London's terrorism support apparatus:
environmentalism, indigenism, and NGOs

by Joseph Brewda
British targeting of the Americas today uses an international network of environmentalist and ethnic indigenist terrorist gangs operating under its ideological control. The support apparatus for this network is made up of well-financed non-governmental organizations (NGOs), especially those operating under human rights cover. The goal is to wreck the nation-state, and to redefine the Americas along "Indian peoples" lines. Britain's insane intent is shown by the proposed division of the western hemisphere into 31 "nations," as per maps prepared by Joel Garreau, the Royal Dutch Shell-funded author of The Nine Nations of North America, and Yale University's Encyclopedia of World Cultures. (Map 2(PDF, 136K)). The instruments and ideological justification to achieve this goal are reflected in Maps 3 (PDF, 560K), 4 (PDF, 428K), and 5(PDF, 656K), and Table 1 (GIF, 20K). Map 3 shows the "indigenous" population regions allegedly threatened by development. Map 4 shows the national parks created to preserve "endangered species." Map 5 shows the "ecoregions" purportedly threatened by economic development.
These maps point to the purpose of terrorism in the Americas today: to block economic development, tear societies apart along ethnic lines, and destroy the nation-state.

Mother Earth vs. the nation

The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have operated against economic development and the nation-state, since their inception after World War II. But now, in a further evolution of this policy, the World Bank has gone unabashedly green to justify its genocide, as has the related Inter-American Development Bank. In October 1995, the World Bank and the British royal family's World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) released a joint study, A Conservation Assessment of the Terrestrial Ecoregions of Latin America and the Caribbean, whose stated purpose is to "identify ecoregions that, due to their conservation status, cannot absorb further intensive development projects." According to this report, 137 of the 178 supposed "ecoregions" of Ibero-America are in a "critical," "endangered," or "vulnerable" condition, requiring the cancellation of "intensive development projects," the "immediate implementation of recovery plans," and efforts to "ward off complete degradation." Map 5 shows that almost all of Ibero-America, except for the Amazon jungle, falls under these combined bogus classifications.
The report makes no bones about what constitutes the threat: "agricultural expansion, intensive grazing, road building that opens areas for exploitation, logging, mining, dam construction, water projects, increased urbanization." The recovery of these ecoregions and efforts to ward off complete degradation, demands that international managers of "investment portfolios" cut off credit for development projects, and also apply diplomatic and other pressure.
Other pressure certainly includes terrorism.
In 1994, the Ecologist, the magazine of WWF founder and funder Teddy Goldsmith, endorsed the Zapatista uprising in Mexico as "a dignified reaction to too much development," which arose "because people opted for a more dignified form of dying." Under the claim that the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) defends the environment, Greenpeace, a WWF sub-group run by Imperial Chemical Industry heir Lord Melchett, has organized support demonstrations for the uprising throughout the world.
The WWF's efforts to build a terrorist movement opposed to "too much development," are closely tied to its creation of national parks and ecological reserves throughout Ibero-America, in which all economic activity is banned. Map 4 shows the vast area of the continent now locked up in parks and reserves, some 13% of the South American continent. These parks are usually planned, sited, and administered by the WWF, and imposed on the nations concerned through international diplomatic and financial pressure.
These parks and reserves virtually constitute extraterritorial enclaves, used for the training and safe haven of ecological-terrorist organizations. For example, in Chiapas, Mexico, the EZLN's primary staging areas and safe-haven are found in the Lagunas de Montebello and Agua Azul Cascades National Parks, and the Montes Azules and El Ocote Ecological Reserves, the latter of which is also a safe-haven for Rigoberta Menchú's National Revolutionary Union of Guatemala (URNG). Similarly, Shining Path has carried out much of its activity and found safe haven in Peru's national park system, which had been planned and established by WWF's Col. Ian Grimwood, under a British government grant in the 1960s. Shining Path's bases of operation have included the Biabo-Cordillera Azul, Alexander von Humboldt, and Pampa Galeras national parks, all located in Peru's coca-growing regions.

'Protecting' the indigenous peoples

According to the World Bank's 1990 definition, "indigenous peoples" are "social groups ... vulnerable to being disadvantaged by the development process." In the bizarre world of the World Bank, roads, canals, farms, factories, and the like, not only constitute a threat to "ecoregions," but to impoverished indigenous peoples as well. Map 3, drawn principally from anthropologist Manuel Lizarralde and published in Yale University's Encyclopedia of World Cultures, shows the areas purportedly occupied by the indigenous peoples of South America, who allegedly comprise some 25-30 million people, out of the continent's 460 million, divided into 170 major tribes.
The United Nations' International Year of the Indigenous People (1993) goes even further than the World Bank to claim that the hideous underdevelopment of these peoples constitutes a model for all mankind. "Where most of humankind seek dominion over the natural world," it gushes, "indigenous peoples generally favor a holistic approach that is the very essence of sustainable development."
The latest draft of the U.N. Universal Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples asserts that "all indigenous nations and peoples ... have the right to whatever degree of autonomy or self-government they may choose," and "may engage in self-defense against State actions in conflict with their right to self-determination." And, with an eye to justifying imperial intervention into former colonies, the draft adds that "disputes regarding the jurisdiction, territories, and institutions of an indigenous nation or people are a proper concern of international law." In other words, Britain and its allies claim the right to intervene in the internal affairs of States, to protect indigenous people "threatened by the development process."
The British are very busy doing just this. "The indigenous nations of South America have resisted genocide and ethnocide throughout their history," and "this tradition of resistance is far from dead," Minority Rights Group reports in its 1987 study The Amerindians of South America. "Throughout South American, indigenous peoples are currently forming local, national, and international organizations to fight for their rights to life, land, culture, and self-determination." The chairman of the group, Sir John Thomson, is a former British ambassador to the U.N., and reportedly is currently the deputy director of the British intelligence agency MI-5. The group's U.S. arm, the Harvard University-based Cultural Survival, played a central role in forming one such terrorist "indigenous organization," the EZLN.
Norway's Nobel Committee, heavily influenced by British intelligence, is also involved in promoting indigenist terrorism. Their granting of the 1992 Nobel Peace Prize to the Guatemalan terrorist leader Rigoberta Menchú glorified such terrorism internationally. And in 1995 they reportedly came within a hair's breadth of granting the peace prize to Bishop Samuel Ruiz of Chiapas, Mexico, the actual commander of the EZLN guerrillas.

'Human rights' NGOs and 'aid'

The deployment of ecological and indigenous terrorist insurgencies requires an international support apparatus. Table 1 shows the connection between many of Ibero-America's terrorist organizations and several top NGOs. Much of the support apparatus is environmentalist and indigenous, but a critical role is also played by human rights NGOs, which openly defend narco-terrorism. Two key ones are Amnesty International, a covert arm of the British Foreign Office; and Human Rights Watch, a New York-based organization financed by the multibillionaire speculator George Soros, a proponent of narcotics legalization who went from rags to riches in the 1970s.
Amnesty International's 1995 International Report, which reviews alleged violations of human rights throughout the world, is typical of the pro-terrorist propaganda.

"Scores of prisoners of conscience, mostly indigenous peasants, were detained," reads the lead sentence of the report's chapter on Mexico, which focuses on condemning the Army suppression of the EZLN. "During the uprising in Chiapas," it adds, Indians "were tortured and illtreated before being released." Similarly, Bolivia is singled out for "torture and ill-treatment of coca-growers detained during an operation to counter drug-trafficking."

For its part, Human Rights Watch's 1995 World Report calls for the creation of an international criminal tribunal with the power to try individuals, including government officials, for committing human rights abuses within their own States. One reason for such a court, it claims, is that "eleven months after the Chiapas uprising, no one from the Mexican Army has been prosecuted for any of the documented acts of abuse committed in the course of suppressing the rebellion." The use of "faceless courts" (anonymous judges) in Peru and Colombia, where the identities of witnesses and judges are concealed in trying terrorists, is also condemned.
Both groups point to the Ibero-American military, and its war on narcotics traffickers, as central to the suppression of insurgencies. In an 1990 report, The 'Drug War' in Colombia, Human Rights Watch complains that "the 'drug war' has increased the killing and human suffering in Colombia," and charges that U.S. government support for this effort makes it "responsible for the serious violation of human rights that are being committed under the guise of a 'war on drugs.' " The Medellín Cartel's kingpins, known as the "Extraditables," immediately demanded that the HRW report be published in the Colombian press, as a condition for the release of several journalists they had kidnapped.
According to Lord Avebury, the head of the British All-Parliamentary Human Rights Committee, and a top figure in both Amnesty and HRW, the main human rights issue in Ibero-America is that "the military structures, which have caused the problem all along, have not been totally dismantled."
While Amnesty and HRW oversee the international human rights campaigns, other NGOs directly provide the terrorists funding and logistics.
In 1994, Misereor, the official aid organization of the Catholic Church in Germany, admitted that over the previous ten years it had covertly sent $7.5 million to Chiapas to fund indigenous human rights self-defense organizations, including a refugee camp used for recruiting EZLN terrorists, and overseen by its commander, Bishop Samuel Ruiz. Misereor's propaganda routinely supports the EZLN.
Pax Christi, a Catholic "Liberation Theology" outfit based in Belgium, is also active in Chiapas, working closely with Greenpeace, one of whose former officials now directs Pax Christi U.S.A. The group also plays a role in the Colombian kidnapping industry. According to the July 16 issue of La Prensa, Colombia's terrorist groups paid Pax Christi and other NGOs to negotiate the payment of ransoms for hostages they had seized. In early 1995, it secured $6 million in ransom for two Swedish engineers held by the FARC. In 1992, Pax Christi published a book, State Terrorism in Colombia, which provided the names, addresses, and photographs of the 500 top anti-guerrilla fighters in the military, claiming that they were "human rights violators."
Oxfam (Oxford Famine), a British Foreign Office covert arm, is also active in Ibero-America. Oxfam President Pierre Galan attended the São Paulo Forum's Fourth Plenary, in Havana, Cuba. The group finances the EZLN, according to Jorge Santiago Santiago, an imprisoned EZLN leader. Oxfam has been active in Chiapas and the Mexico/Guatemala border region since the mid-1980s. It was also caught red-handed funding the training camps of the terrorist Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka.
Norwegian People's Aid, which received funds from the U.S., Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, and Dutch governments, was in the forefront of efforts in Nicaragua to "support the Sandinista struggle for freedom," it reports, and to mobilize "Native Americans" under the slogan "500 years of resistance." "Native Americans have been oppressed and exploited for centuries," it insists, offering as evidence that, "as a result of hundreds of years of colonization, many native Americans have come to reject their ethnic origins, language, and culture." It has sponsored political asylum for Peruvian indigenous emigrés in Norway, according to its literature, many of whom are thought to have link's to Peru's Shining Path and other terrorist groups.
Similarly, the Switzerland-based International Committee of Red Cross routinely works with terrorist and insurgent organizations throughout the world, under the false claim that such organizations are "combatants" in war, and therefore must be accorded the same status as nation-states. According to its 1993 annual report, the ICRC "maintained high-level contacts with representatives of the Farabundo Martí Liberation Front (FMLN)" of El Salvador, as well as the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka. In Peru, it "continued dissemination activities designed to remind combatants and armed groups of the provisions of humanitarian law ... allegations concerning the armed opposition were communicated during contacts with the Shining Path and MRTA in the field." On March 29, 1995, the Mexican newspaper El Heraldopublished transcripts of a March 24 intercepted phone call between EZLN terrorists, where one terrorist told the other, "it is necessary to ask for more aid from the ICRC and the human rights groups, or our movement will die out."