Press Action Hero of the Week: RANIA MASRI
Press Action
Sunday, February 29, 2004
http://www.pressaction.com/news/weblog/full_article/hero02292004/
During the 1980s, the divestment movement succeeded in forcing many foreign companies that generated profits in South Africa to end their investments in an economic system governed by the apartheid regime. A similar movement is growing today against companies that profit off U.S. foreign policy.
The activists spearheading the growing anti-war-profiteer movement would rejoice if their work were to achieve as much success as the South African apartheid divestment movement. If the current campaign does in fact reach such a level of success, U.S. aims for total political and economic control of Iraq and other regions of the world could be thwarted.
South Africa’s apartheid was a pernicious system whose architects and sponsors got off too easy during the nation’s truth and reconciliation period. But aside from some destabilization efforts in neighboring countries, South Africa’s racist white government did not seek to export its vile apartheid system to other nations through the use of force.
Through invasion and subversion, the U.S. government and its fellow imperialist bloc nations want to impose their political and economic will on the rest of the world. And U.S. and foreign companies are aggressively lobbying the crusading governments to allow them to compete for the profits available in the conquered nations.
The companies are engaging in work that fuels the U.S. government’s drive for political and economic supremacy. Targeting the corporate war profiteers through campaigns of boycott and direct action is an important step in derailing the U.S. government’s foreign policy efforts.
One of the leading voices of the anti-war-profiteer movement is Rania Masri, director of the Southern Peace Research and Education Center at the Institute for Southern Studies and co-director of the Campaign to Stop the War Profiteers.
Last week, the group organized demonstrations across the United States against corporate war profiteering in Iraq and called on the U.S. Congress to take immediate action to hold military contractors accountable and for legislation penalizing companies that engage in war profiteering. The group also demanded full respect for democracy and human rights in Iraq.
“A handful of well-connected corporations are making a killing off the devastation in Iraq,” Masri said in a statement.
U.S. banks and financial services companies, for example, are positioning to take over Iraq’s banking system. The Coalition Provisional Authority has enacted an order that opens up all of Iraq’s resources to foreign ownership except for oil.
The U.S.-appointed Iraqi Finance Minister Kamel Al-Gailani has initiated an overhaul of Iraq’s banking system by allowing foreign financial companies to own 100% of the banks in Iraq. The move marks the first time since the 1950s that foreign banks will have access to Iraq’s financial system, whose main asset is the second largest oil reserves in the world, Mitch Jeserich wrote in a Feb. 4, 2004 article for CorpWatch.
For the article, Jeserich interviewed Masri, who asked: “Are these the kind of laws that help Iraq rebuild for Iraqis or are these the kind of laws that open Iraq up for corporations to come in and profit off of Iraq’s resources? It reeks of colonialism. It does not represent a rebuilding.”
In Swans’ special issue on Iraq published in early February, Masri contributed an article in which she explained how the U.S. occupying forces have imposed on Iraq an economic program that no sovereign country would ever accept. “[I]t virtually guarantees that the Iraqi economy will be taken over by Western (mostly U.S.) multinational corporations and banks,” she wrote. “It is a policy that limits democracy, narrowing the public arena so that resources like health, education are controlled by the private sector, by unaccountable, tyrannical corporations.”
According to U.S. policymakers, “liberation” means conquest and “freedom” means imposing a neo-colonial economic arrangement that is military enforced, Masri explained. “‘Freedom for Iraq’ means freedom for the colonizer to dominate, to exploit, to control.”
Born in Beirut, Masri moved to the United States in 1986 and holds dual citizenship from the United States and Lebanon. She has a doctorate in forestry from North Carolina State University and a master’s degree in environmental management from Duke University. Masri, a widely published author on issues of human rights and peace, serves on the steering committee of the United for Peace and Justice coalition and is a national board member of Peace Action. She is also the coordinator and founder of the Iraq Action Coalition.
The Institute for Southern Studies launched its anti-war-profiteering campaign last August. In its statement of purpose, the group explains the situation: “Today, in the wake of the military destruction and occupation of Iraq, a second invasion has begun: the invasion of powerful corporations who seek to reap billions in profits off the devastation of war, and who aim to seize the wealth and resources that belong to the Iraqi people. Through multi-billion-dollar ‘reconstruction’ contracts, a handful of well-connected, mostly U.S. corporations -many with scandal-ridden business records -are making hundreds of millions in war profits. Bechtel, Halliburton, MCI and other companies have landed lucrative contracts -which include hundreds of millions in taxpayer-funded profits -despite sordid histories of financial fraud, cost overruns, and devastation in local communities across the globe.”
Masri argues that no real change can occur to end corporate power here in the United States and abroad, without demands from the people and without organizing.
“The only liberation in Iraq is the ‘liberation’ of Iraq’s resources to U.S companies. The same companies that are stealing Iraq’s resources, are stealing U.S. taxpayers’ money, and moving for privatization of everything abroad and at home, from water to prisons,” she wrote in a July 2003 article for Electronic Iraq. “And many of us remain, however much we may hate it, the guardians of this very military-industrial-congressional-prison complex that is robbing and killing in Iraq, and elsewhere. As the guardians, let’s revolt against this system.” -Mark Hand