Disaster that won't be forgotten. Struggle that still goes on.

PIPER ALPHA at night. 167 killed as North Sea rig blazed.
 
TWENTY FIVE years after the worst ever oil rig disaster, the blaze on Piper Alpha, in the North Sea, in which 167 workers were killed, there has been a conference to consider the lessons. The BBC is to screen a film about it. But trade unionists fear lives could be lost again, because the government is reducing provision for health and safety inspections in offshore oiland gas, as in other industries, and because workers are frightened to open their mouth about health and safety in case it leads to them losing their jobs and being blacklisted, in the same way as has happened to building workers.   

Trouble on the Piper Alpha rig, operated by Occidental oil in the sea north-east of Aberdeen, started with maintenance issues. On July 6, 1988, one of two pumps sending oil and gas to the mainland had its safety valve removed for routine maintenance, and replaced with a temporary cover.  The on-duty engineer filled out a permit which stated that Pump A was not ready and must not be switched on under any circumstances.

When the night shift began at 6pm, the engineer found the on duty custodian busy, so placed the permit in the control room, and left. This permit disappeared. There was another for general overhaul of the pump , and so did another for genral overhaul of the pump

At 9:45 p.m. problems with a methanol system had led to an accumulation of hydrate ice formed by gas and water combining, and causing a blockage in Pump B. So pump A was restarted, apparently without realising it had no safety valve.  The temporary plate cover was obscured from view by machinery. At 9.55pm escaping gas ignited and caused the first of two explosions, also damging the firefighting system. While the firefighting system was not on automatic control and could not be remotely started from the control room, two outlying platforms joined by pipe to Piper Alpha continued pumping oil and gas into the damaged rig, where it escaped and fuelled the flames.

10:04 p.m. The control room was abandoned. Piper Alpha's design made no allowances for the destruction of the control room, and the platform's organisation disintegrated. No attempt was made to use loudspeakers or to order an evacuation. Emergency procedures instructed personnel to make their way to lifeboat stations, but the fire prevented them from doing so. Instead the men moved to the fireproofed accommodation block beneath the helicopter deck to await further instructions. Wind, fire and smoke prevented helicopter landings and no further instructions were given, with smoke beginning to penetrate the personnel block.

As the crisis mounted, two men donned protective gear in an attempt to reach the diesel pumping machinery below decks and activate the firefighting system. They were never seen again.

By the time rescue helicopters reached the scene, flames over one hundred metres in height and visible a huindred kilometres away prevented safe approach. Tharos, a specialist firefighting vessel, was able to approach the platform, but could not prevent the rupture of the Tartan pipeline, about two hours after the start of the disaster, and it was forced to retreat due to the intensity of the fire. Two crewmen from the standby vessel MV Sandhaven were killed when an explosion on the platform destroyed their Fast Rescue Craft; the survivor Ian Letham later received the George Medal.

The blazing remains of the platform were eventually extinguished three weeks later by a team led by famed firefighter Red Adair, despite reported conditions of 80 mph (130 km/h) winds and 70-foot (20 m) waves. The part of the platform which contained the galley where about 100 victims had taken refuge was recovered in late 1988 from the sea bed, and the bodies of 87 men were found inside.

Various recommendations were made by an inquiry into the disaster, and accepted by the industry. It was also recommended that the government transfer responsibility for safety in the North Sea from the Department of Energy to the Health and Safety Executive, to avoid a conflict of interest between productivity and safety considerations. Survivors and relatives formed an association to campaign for better safety.

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piper_Alpha

The disaster also boosted a determination by offshore oil industry workers to organise themselves. The Offshore Industries Liaison Committee, formed to link workers regardless of trade or original union eventually became a union in its own right, though not officially recognised by management or within the TUC. In 2008 it became part of the Rail, Maritime and Transport union (RMT), a merger which made sense as the RMT already had diver members.

It is Jake Molloy,  formerly OILC general secretary, and now Aberdeen-based regional organiser for the RMT, who is warning that the dismantling of a specialist offshore safety division set up by the government after the Piper Alpha accident will make things worse and should be reversed.

Oil and Gas UK, a lobby group for the major oil companies,  issued its latest annual health and safety report before the Piper 25 conference in Scotland, outlining a 48% reduction in the number of reportable oil and gas releases over the last three years, plus an all-time low in 2012 in the incidence of "over-three-day injuries".

Jake Molloy says these statistics were irrelevant if those employed offshore were still too frightened to report safety breaches because they believed they could lose their job. "Overall safety in the North Sea has improved since Piper Alpha but I have got two safety representatives in my office now saying they cannot do what they are meant to," he said. "You can have all the statistics and the technology in place but it does not make a blind bit of difference if people are under pressure, being bullied, or just disengaged."

Molloy is worried that companies driving to cut costs cut endanger jobs and safety, with workers frightened to risk their employment if they raise safety isues.     

Molloy says oil companies subcontract almost all North Sea work to third-party contractors, meaning those employers are more scared of losing their multimillion-pound deals through lost work time than interested in listening to difficult issues raised by their employees. Some managers rule in a climate of fear where employees dread an "NRB" (not required back) on the grounds of a one-off complaint about their behaviour.

He said even safety representatives feared their employers and did not have the authority to halt operations as they do in Norway, where the overall industry safety record is much better.

The decision by the government to dismantle the offshore safety division inside the Health & Safety Executive (HSE) and subsume its functions inside a newly created energy division covering onshore and other installations is also troubling the RMT. "HSE says this restructuring will make no difference but I remain to be convinced, as does the rest of the trade union movement in Scotland. We are also worried that the role of the HSE is being diluted,"
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2013/jun/16/oil-gas-workers-safety-fear-sack

See also: http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/scottish-news/jake-molloy-1876900


There are obvious parallels here with the building trade where workers who raised safety issues found themselves blacklisted. In fact, among the names which stood out among the files of the employers' blacklist Consulting Assocation was that of Glasgow academic Charles Woolfson, apparently becoming of interest after he criticised safety standards in the wake of the Piper Alpha disaster. There were suggestions big companies could put pressure on the institution employing him.

 How an academic got on the blacklist

OILC to RMT, and Enemies

Eight different unions were trying to organise in the offshore oil industry before the OILC got started. In their hard struggle for recognition, safety representation, and wages commensurate with the industry's profits as well as the risks and harsh conditions they faced on the North Sea, workers not only had to contend with hardfaced employers but with two-faced union officialdom.

In March 1991, union officials signed a new 'hook up' agreement with the bosses, over the heads of the workers. Rank and file resentment and anger led to the OILC declaring itself an independent trade union, which gained official certification.They also gained support from the Norwegian offshore union OFT.

Efforts continued to win united action with other unions, for instance to gain better pay and conditions for the worse off workers, like those in catering services, often migrant workers, whom RMT and the TGWU represented.

But even when the OILC decided to rejoin the family, as it were, by merging with the RMT in 2008, its troubles were not over. Two larger unions, the Transport and General (TGWU) and Amicus, had merged and held their first joint executive meeting, and as the bureaucrats looked for ways to chuck their weight about some of them discussed  a move to chuck the RMT out of the Trades Union Congress (TUC).

I thought at first this was a heavy handed follow up to the RMT being expelled from the Labour Party. This had been because it permitted its Glasgow branch to support the Scottish Socialist Party. But I was told in my union branch  that the RMT's "crime" in the eyes of some people was that it had accepted the OILC, a union outside the TUC, to enter the fold.

At that I pointed out the hypocrisy, to say the least, when our new partners in Amicus had brought back in the EEPTU electrical union, and some of its leaders and methods. The EETPU had been outside because it was expelled from the TUC, after Wapping. The OILC was only outside because of its efforts to organise workers, not for scabbing as the EEPTU had done performing Murdoch's bidding.

The irony was obvious enough, as my branch had originated from the breakaway Electrical and Plumbing Industries Union, formed by workers opposed to the right-wing EEPTU leadership and determined to stay with the mainstream trade union movement. But we too had been denounced as a "split" by some of the same people condemning the OILC, before we eventually voted to join the TGWU.     

 Anyway, others more important and influential than me must have thought the same thing, because I never heard more of the plot to oust the RMT, and I don't know whether it ever amounted to more than talk or if anything was done, or even recorded of it. It is possible the change of leadership in Unite put the matter to rest. Still, I am recording it now as a reminder of what not just the RMT/OILC but the decent majority of Unite members are up against.  



Piper Alpha oil rig disaster

http://www.oilc.org/

The OILC Saga

Struggle in North Sea Oil industry

Concern as companies drive to cuts costs

The Whistleblower, the Warnings of Disaster, ...and a Disaster

AS once again there's excited talk of what to do to stop Iran's alleged project to acquire nuclear weapons, and whether America should bomb first or let Israel start the bombing, the man who has arguably done most to stop the Middle East becoming a nuclear tinder-box, and certainly made the biggest sacrifice, is due to be awarded an international peace medal.

But as things stand, he is going to be unable to travel to receive it.

Mordechai Vanunu spent eighteen years in prison, twelve of them in solitary, for blowing the whistle on Israel's development of nuclear weapons. Since his release he has called for the Middle East to be made a nuclear weapons-free zone, to prevent the area's endemic conflicts becoming a major world disaster, and start the ball rolling instead towards world nuclear disarmament.

Rather than let him become an influence for peace and the rights of Palestinian and Israeli peoples to achieve genuine freedom, the Israeli government insists on holding Vanunu captive in Jerusalem, and treats it as a breach of parole when he talks to any foreign journalists.

This year he received a three months sentence and was back in jail for that offence. But he had managed to visit the Petach Tikva court where Nobel Laureate Mairead Corrigan-Maguire was opposing deportation. "Why can't they deport me instead?" quipped Vanunu.

On December 12, Vanunu is expected to receive the Carl Von Ossietzky Medal, to be awarded in Berlin by the International League of Human Rights. The League announced his nomination in October, and urged the Israeli government to let Vanunu free to attend the ceremony.

Carl Von Ossietzky was a German peace campaigner and anti-Nazi who should have been allowed to leave Germany in 1935 when he was named a Nobel peace laureate. The Nazis refused to let him leave, and instead he was incarcerated in a concentration camp, and later murdered.

Mairead Corrigan-Maguire is one of the signatories to an open letter sent to the Israeli government urging them to allow Vanunu to come and partticipate in the medal ceremony. Other signatories include Nobel laureates like German writer Günter Grass, chemist Harold W. Kroto, physicist Jack Steinberger, as well as singer Nina Hagen, author and lawyer Felicia Langer, and former Vice President of the European Union Luisa Morgantini.

Following the letter, Vanunu's attorney Michael Sfard sent a letter to Interior Minister Eli Yishai and Deputy State Prosecutor Shai Nitzan, saying the atomic whistleblower was willing to commit himself to returning to Israel following the ceremony in Berlin. In his letter Sfard asked whether "Israel was interested in joining the unlovely ranks of nations who prevented their citizens from receiving international prizes by preventing their arrival at ceremonies?"

The comment by Vanunu's lawyer cited Poland when it revented Lech Wałęsa from receiving the Nobel Peace Prize as well as the Soviet Union, which barred author Boris Pasternak from claiming the Nobel Prize in Literature. China is preventing 2010 Nobel Peace Prize laureate dissident Liu Xiaobo from leaving the country.

But Israel is different, and its government and supporters affect shock whenever unpleasant comparisons are made. Israel is, as we are frequently told, "the Only Democracy in the Middle East".


The fire this time

WHILE Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu has been focussing on one threat of disaster, holding out for bigger bombs and bigger bombers in return for the slightest pretence at concessions in the interests of peace, a smaller but realer disaster had caught his government ll-prepared, and ordinary Israeli citizens are paying a dear price for it.

Writing in Ha;aretz, former Knesset member and Environment Minister Yossi Sarid says the fire raging around Mount Carmel bears out his warnings about the gap between the government's pretensions and its incompetence, " reflected yesterday in the rescue services' inadequate hoses and ladders. Even their fire-extinguishing planes are improvised, and there are too few of them to make a difference. The meager materials at the firefighters' disposal will run out by this morning.

Sarid says reports forecasting doom were ignored, and the present Interior Minister " is in no hurry when everything goes up in flames. He relies on God, whose salvation is instantaneous, like the blink of an eye. The minister is ready to set Jerusalem on fire at any moment as well".

"Saying ''I told you so' is annoying, I know, but those who refuse to listen are more annoying.

"The minister is not the only one to blame here. The entire government is responsible. Every government has a leader - And where's his head at, these days? Now there's a problem - who will appoint the inquiry committee into the fire. But what happens when the investigators are the same ones who caused the disaster in the first place?"

While racists were rushing to blame imaginary Arab fire-raisers, solely to stir violence, the Israeli authorities have arrested two Druse schoolboys, accusing them of failing to extinguish a picnic fire. The boys' own village is at the centre of the fire storm. Their mother says they were in school when it started.

Yossi Sarid has another explanation, and quotes Haifa's mayor who rushed to the scene and said, "We knew it was only a matter of time before disaster struck."

"He was referring to the neighboring landfill, where the fire most likely started. And if it wasn't the source of yesterday's brushfire, it will be the source of tomorrow's. The country is full of such garbage dumps where nobody bothers to enforce the law. The whole country is at risk, but especially Haifa, whose surrounding mountains were recently described by the industry, trade and labor minister as 'an atom bomb'"

Gush Shalom (Peace Bloc) campaigner and blogger Adam Keller has commented (Crazy Country) on the irony of Netanyahu's lack of preparation.

"Once upon a time there was a Prime Minister and Bibi Netanyahu was his name, but he wanted to be called Winston Churchill. A single thing preoccupied him, day and night, the nuclear bomb which a diabolical villain named Ahmadinejad was plotting to produce. All other problems and issues were minor and insignificant to Bibi, and he devoted most of his energy to preparing his people for the coming war. So determined was he that, for the sake of stealth bombers which could fly quickly in stealth and arrive to bomb Ahmadinejad 's country, Bibi was even willing to confront the settlers, his best friends.

"And yet Bibi did not remember that war with the evil Ahmadinejad would necessarily involve the massive shooting of rockets and missiles, and that missiles cause fires where they fall, and it is the nature of fires to spread in all directions burn everything in their way, and in Bibi's country the fire fighting apparatus was outdated and clumsy and split between thirty competing authorities. And the firefighters were crying out fot proper equipment, and again and again making dire warnings of an approaching disaster. But they went unheard, like a voice crying out in the wilderness.

"And it came to pass that while Ahmadinejad was sleeping peacefully in his bed and not a single missile was yet fired, stupid negligence caused a terrible great fire to burst out on the Carmel range, and it consumed woods and villages and kibbutzim, and the Prison Service cadets were caught in the flames and died a terrible death. And the firemen fought the flames heroically but hopelessly because they did not have the appropriate equipment, as if fighting with bows and arrows on a modern battlefield, and they urgently clamored for all the world to quickly and urgently send the vital equipment which nobody provided in their own country. And the TV commentators marveled at the sight of Prime Minister Bibi running quickly and efficiently the entire fire-fighting operation. In the absence of a singe country-wide head of the fire-fighting services Bibi had to take the role upon himself".
http://adam-keller2.blogspot.com/

As we heard at the weekend, Russia has sent aircraft to assist in fighting the Carmel fires. And, considering the way Netanyahu's ministers have called for mass deportation of Palestinians, if not now, under cover perhaps of supposed "security" in a war with Iran, here is the final bit of irony:

BETHLEHEM (Ma’an) -- More Palestinian firefighters on Sunday joined their colleagues battling a massive wildfire that killed several dozen Israelis and sparked an unprecedented global response.

Bethlehem's civil defense chief Ibrahim Ayish told Ma'an that 21 men from the West Bank and four fully equipped fire engines were assisting Israeli and international forces trying to control the blaze near Haifa.

The latest civil defense unit to depart the West Bank left at 4 a.m. and arrived at northern Israel five hours later, Ayish said.

"We're working alongside the Israeli team, which knows the area very well," he says. "We were received respectfully. After all, we're dealing with a humanitarian crisis which knows no borders.

"Neither walls nor checkpoints will stop us."

Centered in Carmel, south and east of Haifa, the fire is the biggest inferno in Israel's 62-year history. So far, it has taken 41 lives and forced more than 17,000 people to flee their homes.

Police have arrested two youths from the Druze Israeli village of Isfiya on suspicion of starting the fire "through negligence" by leaving behind burning embers after a family picnic.

The blaze has so far ravaged at least 5,000 hectares of land and five million trees in the pine-covered hills known locally as "little Switzerland."

The three Palestinian units work in a zone made up of local and international ground units as well as aircraft, which are playing the largest role. Field crews control the small fires.

How does commander Ayish feel about the unusual mission? "Proud to participate in the humanitarian work of firefighting," he said, defining it as "the work of protecting the environment and nature."

When people are dying or losing their homes in a terrible tragedy, it may seem inhuman to talk of irony and see a humorous side. Since writing his satirical remarks above, my friend Adam Keller had said the scale of the tragedy now overwhelms such comment. But perhaps a still bigger tragedy could be averted, if people see in the co-operation and respect shown between the firecrews from either side the Wall a vision of what could be in the Middle East. If you but will it, 'tis no dream, as someone once said.

"Bodies being eaten by dogs in the street'

A YOUNG internationally-known human rights campaigner and aid worker has made a brief but shocking appeal from Haiti in a letter to friends. Caoimhe Butterly, from Ireland, has worked in occupied Palestine -where she was shot by Israeli troops, and in Lebanon, as well as with homeless families in New York. Now she is in Haiti with the Turkish NGO IHH. Caoimhe writes:

" Should have written more but the situation here is actually horrific- and nothing is really moving..People hungry, wounded, grieving, homeless and desperate and the larger humanitarian organisations are completely failing in responding to what is going to become a full-blown crisis.

Bodies are still rotting or being eaten by dogs in the streets, and hundreds of thousands of people are sleeping in the streets and in make-shift camps of plastic sheeting. Many areas outside of the capital have not received any relief or medical teams since the earthquake and even the situation in the capital is desperate. And so many stories- entire families wiped out- and hurried burials in mass graves/ burning of bodies unclaimed in the streets means that many still wait for confirmation of their loved ones deaths..

If you guys know anyone coming here, please give them my number- we're working at St Clare's Church and Fathiyeh Mosque co-ordinating a more grassroots network of distribution and medical teams to the camps and there is need for medical personnel, medical equipment and supplies".

Caoimhe's concern as to whether aid is reaching people who desperately need it is shared by another witness. On 31 January 2010 22:59, Flavia Cherry, chair of the Caribbean Association for Feminist Research and Action (CAFRA), wrote the following description of her experience in Port-au-Prince:

"It is good to see that some efforts are being made to reach women in desperate need, but those of us on the ground are yet to see this happen in many of the areas where there is desperate need for food and relief. Aid agencies MUST find a more humane way to reach out to the women and children who are most vulnerable and desperate. I know that the need is great, (but) there is no excuse for what is the reality on the ground here in Haiti, as Caribbean citizens offered help and many have even been denied entry. It is obvious that the aid agencies (well intentioned as they may be) are unable to handle the scale of the problem here in Haiti. So why are they not being inclusive and involving more Haitian and Caribbean institutions in the relief and recovery efforts? Something is very wrong about the picture here in Haiti because while international agencies are dropping the ball in an attempt to monopolize aid efforts, Haitians are dying. Apart from lines for women, there is an urgent need for volunteers to go into the camps to reach women, children, disabled and elderly people who are unable to move.

It is a disgrace for so much money to be circling around to all kinds of aid groups, and every single day I see so many people hungry, desperate. This situation is simply not acceptable. There are women in camps who have not had anything to eat for days. There are many available Hatians who are willing to assist as volunteers to get the aid to those who need it, and CARICOM was willing to send help, but something seems to be really wrong. Why are Caribbean Governments not allowed to play a more pivotal role, especially as there are many CARICOM citizens and regional security officers who speak Creole and would be able to communicate better with the people of Haiti.

What I see on the ground is lots of big fancy air-conditioned vehicles moving up and down with foreigners, creating more dust and pollution on the roads. Thousands of millitary officers everywhere, heavily armed
like they are in some kind of battle zone. The girl guides and boy scouts of Haiti are also out in their uniforms, but unlike the army of troops, they are up and about, assisting in many ways. I saw of group of the boy scouts and girl guides directing traffic today, Sunday!

From the very beginning, I have been asking why aid agencies did not arrange separate lines for women, children and disabled people. It is obvious that if you leave people hungry for 5 to 8 days without food,
they will be desperate and when food finally arrives, it will be survival of the fittest. The international agencies allowed confusion to reign supreme for more than two weeks while sensational and racist
media people were merrily portraying images of hungry people fighting for food. At least now that they have suddenly realized the need for separate lines, I hope that this happens at every single distribution
point, because as I am writing this email, that certainly is NOT the case."

The United States military has taken control of Haiti's ports and airport, not the first time it has occupied the country, but 'military efficiency' does not seem to br0ught much benefit to the suffering people. The way in which powerful governments are more interested in gaining military, political and economic advantages out of Haiti's suffering, and the reported tardiness of big aid bureaucracy, contrast with ready human response of ordinary people and skilled professionals from around the world.

In the United States, Haitians and American supporters have a Haiti Emergency Relief Fund which is channelling aid to trade union and grass-roots organisations in Haiti, and sent a truckload of medical supplies to the Airistide Foundation in Port au Prince. Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez announced that he would write off the undisclosed sum Haiti owes Venezuela for oil. And in a reminder of the old saying that it's the poor that help the poor, we read of of money being raised for Haiti in Gaza, and funds being diverted by popular agreement that had been intended for Daheisha refugee camp in the West Bank.

http://www.haitisolidarity.net/index

In London, singer Billy Bragg will be joined tonight by Cuban salsa dancers Son Mas and Omar Puente, poet Jean 'Binta' Breeze and others in a Concert for Haiti being held at the TUC's Congress House. But if you haven't got your ticket too late - I hear it has been completely sold out. For once it's a TUC sell-out we won't complain about!
http://www.concertforhaiti.co.uk/news/

Trade unionists are endeavouring to get funds to sisters and brothers working in the Haitian trade union movement, rather than trust governments and government-run organisations.

The urgent need to get aid to the people of Haiti now is not blinding people to the history of plunder and exploitation which impoverished this state, nor preventing them discerning another application of the "shock doctrine", previously seen in New Orleans and Iraq among other places, by which powerful capitalist interests and 'neo-liberal' crusaders hope to use wars and natural disasters to impose their will on helpless peoples. At least the dogs on the street are only driven by their own hunger.

Brent Trades Union Council in North-West London is hoping to have a speaker on Haiti at its AGM on Wednesday evening, February 24. Watch out for more information on:
http://www.brenttuc.org.uk/


There is also a public meeting in central London next week:

NO SHOCK DOCTRINE FOR HAITI
7.30pm-9.30pm
Thursday 11 February 2010
Brockway Room, Conway Hall, 25 Red Lion Square
London WC1
[1]http://www.conwayhall.org.uk/


Speakers:
* Peter Hallward, author of Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide,
and the Politics of Containment

* Selma James, writer and solidarity activist, Global Women's
Strike

* Nick Dearden, director of Jubilee Debt Campaign

Haiti was the first independent nation in Latin America, freed as a result of an inspiring slave revolt. Yet it has been subject to domination ever since, from US occupations, to the crippling 135-year debt imposed by former colonial master France, to Western-backed dictatorships and IMF-imposed free market economic 'reforms'.

Now, as US troops patrol the country, free market economists are seeing new opportunities to privatise and 'restructure' Haiti's economy, while its external debts have still not been cancelled by rich donors.
The 'shock doctrine' looks to be striking again.

Join the discussion about what solidarity we can offer to those in Haiti seeking an alternative future.
Organised by the Radical Activist Network, [2]http://www.radicalactivist.net


(thanks to Mike Phipps for passing on message from Caiomhe and information from RAN)

Haiti needs help, against natural disaster and against rich neighbours out to help themselves

EMERGENCY aid supplies are reportedly reaching the people of Haiti at last. But it has been taking time. A doctor friend in the United States was desperately trying to get across there last thing I heard, while on TV we saw British firefighters frustratedly waiting for the go-ahead to start rescue work. A Cuban medical team is in Haiti, and Chinese aid workers have started arriving. The airport has been handed to Americans to run.

Accepting that the earthquake wrecked roads and port facilities as well as damaging the airport, one can still regret that states seem able to move troops and munitions round the globe more quickly than they can bring relief to people one hour's flight from Florida. That said, let's salute those going to help, and hope that common humanity and international co-operation continue to guide their missions, and inspire us to what could be achieved if nations continued working together.

Unfortunately the will to help fellow-human beings is not all that is at work. America seems to be giving priority to getting its troops into Haiti. A French hospital plane was refused permission to land.

It takes a special kind of psycho to rejoice at a disaster such as has befallen the people of Haiti, and declare it "a blessing in disguise". But one does not have to look far to find one in America, where "evil bastard" is often spelt "evangelist", or especially, TV evangelist. Pastor John Hagee was one of several who told people that Hurricane Katrina was God's judgement on "sinful" New Oreleans, and he also says Hitler was sent by the Almighty to hunt out the Jews (as he adds that this was to make them go to Israel, and backs that up with big donations, the Israeli government thinks he's swell).

Now it is TV evangelist Pat Robertson who says Haitians were "cursed" by a "pact to the devil."

"Something happened a long time ago in Haiti, and people might not want to talk about it," he said on Christian Broadcasting Network's "The 700 Club." "They were under the heel of the French. You know, Napoleon III, or whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, we will serve you if you'll get us free from the French. True story. And so, the devil said, okay it's a deal. .. ever since, they have been cursed by one thing after the other" "

Haitians fought for their freedom during France's revolutionary wars, and obtained independence in 1803, five years before Napolean III (Louis Bonaparte) was born. The nearest Toussaint L'Ouverture came to a pact with the devil was a secret agreement with the British, followed later by commercial agreements with Britain and the United States. I guess they don't teach a lot of history at Reverend Pat Robertson's Sunday school, but I'm wondering what kind of Bible they use to teach his brand of religion. That right, Reverend, the Plagues were sent to punish Moses and the Israelites. for asking Pharaoh to let them go?

Poor people in New Orleans, like those in Haiti, may have wondered how come the Almighty's wrath fell most heavily on them, considering someone said "blessed are the poor", and how His blessing in disguise mostly benefited those with big contracts, and the developers of real estate. Because while we may only wonder at the ways of "the Lord" we have a right to ask questions of governments.

As Peter Hallward says, writing in the Guardian, " Any large city in the world would have suffered extensive damage from an earthquake on the scale of the one that ravaged Haiti's capital city on Tuesday afternoon, but it's no accident that so much of Port-au-Prince now looks like a war zone. Much of the devastation wreaked by this latest and most calamitous disaster to befall Haiti is best understood as another thoroughly manmade outcome of a long and ugly historical sequence". (If we are serious about assisting this devastated land we must stop trying to control and exploit it. Guardian Comment is Free, January 13)

"The country has faced more than its fair share of catastrophes. Hundreds died in Port-au-Prince in an earthquake back in June 1770, and the huge earthquake of 7 May 1842 may have killed 10,000 in the northern city of Cap ­Haitien alone. Hurricanes batter the island on a regular basis, mostly recently in 2004 and again in 2008; the storms of September 2008 flooded the town of Gonaïves and swept away much of its flimsy infrastructure, killing more than a thousand people and destroying many thousands of homes. The full scale of the destruction resulting from this earthquake may not become clear for several weeks. Even minimal repairs will take years to complete, and the long-term impact is incalculable".

But it is not natural disasters alone that have made Haiti the poorest country in the Western hemisphere. Rather, the country's poverty and political history have made it so vulnerable and incapable of coping with the calamities.


As Ted Rall puts it:

"How did Haiti get so poor? Despite a century of American colonialism, occupation, and propping up corrupt dictators? Even though the CIA staged coups d'état against every democratically elected president they ever had? It's an important question. An earthquake isn't just an earthquake. The same 7.0 tremor hitting San Francisco wouldn't kill nearly as many people as in Port-au-Prince.

"Looking at the pictures, essentially it looks as if (the buildings are of) breezeblock or cinderblock construction, and what you need in an earthquake zone is metal bars that connect the blocks so that they stay together when they get shaken," he quotes Sandy Steacey, director of the Environmental Science Research Institute at the University of Ulster in Northern Ireland. "In a wealthy country with good seismic building codes that are enforced, you would have some damage, but not very much."

We've seen Haitians struggling to dig people out by hand, and the Haitian Red Cross tring to cope, but there were neither the equipment, the ambulances, or the medical staff to treat people. That's not due to tectonic plates. "Ninety-nine percent of the death toll is attributable to poverty", says Rall.

How did Haiti become so poor?

"The story begins in 1910, when a U.S. State Department-National City Bank of New York (now called Citibank) consortium bought the Banque National d'Haïti--Haiti's only commercial bank and its national treasury--in effect transferring Haiti's debts to the Americans. Five years later, President Woodrow Wilson ordered troops to occupy the country in order to keep tabs on 'our' investment.

"From 1915 to 1934, the U.S. Marines imposed harsh military occupation, murdered Haitians patriots and diverted 40 percent of Haiti's gross domestic product to U.S. bankers. Haitians were banned from government jobs. Ambitious Haitians were shunted into the puppet military, setting the stage for a half-century of U.S.-backed military dictatorship.

"The U.S. kept control of Haiti's finances until 1947. Still--why should Haitians complain? Sure, we stole 40 percent of Haiti's national wealth for 32 years. But we let them keep 60 percent.

"Despite having been bled dry by American bankers and generals, civil disorder prevailed until 1957, when the CIA installed President-for-Life François 'Papa Doc' Duvalier. Duvalier's brutal Tonton Macoutes paramilitary goon squads murdered at least 30,000 Haitians and drove educated people to flee into exile.

"Upon Papa Doc's death in 1971, the torch passed to his even more dissolute 19-year-old son, Jean-Claude 'Baby Doc' Duvalier. The U.S., cool to Papa Doc in his later years, quickly warmed back up to his kleptomaniacal playboy heir. As the U.S. poured in arms and trained his army as a supposed anti-communist bulwark against Castro's Cuba, Baby Doc stole an estimated $300 to $800 million from the national treasury, according to Transparency International. The money was placed in personal accounts in Switzerland and elsewhere.

"Under U.S. influence, Baby Doc virtually eliminated import tariffs for U.S. goods. Soon Haiti was awash predatory agricultural imports dumped by American firms. Domestic rice farmers went bankrupt. A nation that had been agriculturally self-sustaining collapsed. Farms were abandoned. Hundreds of thousands of farmers migrated to the teeming slums of Port-au-Prince.

"The Duvalier era, 29 years in all, came to an end in 1986 when President Ronald Reagan ordered U.S. forces to whisk Baby Doc to exile in France, saving him from a popular uprising. Once again, Haitians should thank Americans. Duvalierism was 'tough love.' Forcing Haitians to make do without their national treasury was our nice way or encouraging them to work harder, to lift themselves up by their bootstraps. Or, in this case, flipflops.

"The U.S. has been all about tough love ever since. We twice deposed the populist and popular democratically-elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide. The second time, in 2004, we even gave him a free flight to the Central African Republic! (He says the CIA kidnapped him, but whatever.) Hey, he needed a rest. And it was kind of us to support a new government formed by former Tonton Macoutes.

"Yet, despite everything we've done for Haiti, they're still a fourth-world failed state on a fault line. And still, we haven't given up. American companies like Disney generously pay wages to their sweatshop workers of 28 cents an hour. What more do these ingrates want?"
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24391.htm


Peter Hallward again:

The noble "international community" which is currently scrambling to send its "humanitarian aid" to Haiti is largely responsible for the extent of the suffering it now aims to reduce. Ever since the US invaded and occupied the country in 1915, every serious political attempt to allow Haiti's people to move (in former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide's phrase) "from absolute misery to a dignified poverty" has been violently and deliberately blocked by the US government and some of its allies. Aristide's own government (elected by some 75% of the electorate) was the latest victim of such interference, when it was overthrown by an internationally sponsored coup in 2004 that killed several thousand people and left much of the population smouldering in resentment. The UN has subsequently maintained a large and enormously expensive stabilisation and pacification force in the country. Haiti is now a country where, according to the best available study, around 75% of the population "lives on less than $2 per day, and 56% – four and a half million people – live on less than $1 per day". Decades of neoliberal "adjustment" and neo-imperial intervention have robbed its government of any significant capacity to invest in its people or to regulate its economy. Punitive international trade and financial arrangements ensure that such destitution and impotence will remain a structural fact of Haitian life for the foreseeable future. It is this poverty and powerlessness that account for the full scale of the horror in Port-au-Prince today. Since the late 1970s, relentless neoliberal assault on Haiti's agrarian economy has forced tens of thousands of small farmers into overcrowded urban slums. Although there are no reliable statistics, hundreds of thousands of Port-au-Prince residents now live in desperately sub-standard informal housing, often perched precariously on the side of deforested ravines. The selection of the people living in such places and conditions is itself no more "natural" or accidental than the extent of the injuries they have suffered. As Brian Concannon, the director of the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti, points out: "Those people got there because they or their parents were intentionally pushed out of the countryside by aid and trade policies specifically designed to create a large captive and therefore exploitable labour force in the cities; by definition they are people who would not be able to afford to build earthquake resistant houses." Meanwhile the city's basic infrastructure – running water, electricity, roads, etc – remains woefully inadequate, often non-existent. The government's ability to mobilise any sort of disaster relief is next to nil. The international community has been effectively ruling Haiti since the 2004 coup. The same countries scrambling to send emergency help to Haiti now, however, have during the last five years consistently voted against any extension of the UN mission's mandate beyond its immediate military purpose. Proposals to divert some of this "investment" towards poverty reduction or agrarian development have been blocked, in keeping with the long-term patterns that continue to shape the ­distribution of international "aid". The same storms that killed so many in 2008 hit Cuba just as hard but killed only four people. Cuba has escaped the worst effects of neoliberal "reform", and its government retains a capacity to defend its people from disaster. If we are serious about helping Haiti through this latest crisis then we should take this comparative point on board. Along with sending emergency relief, we should ask what we can do to facilitate the self-empowerment of Haiti's people and public institutions. If we are serious about helping we need to stop ­trying to control Haiti's government, to pacify its citizens, and to exploit its economy. And then we need to start paying for at least some of the damage we've already done.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jan/13/our-role-in-haitis-plight

Many people are raising concern that like New Orleans and Iraq, Haiti will be a victim of what Naomi Klein calls "Shock Doctrine" - that wars and natural disasters can be used to smash a people's will to resist, opening the way for big capitalist corporations and right-wing governments to go in and do as they please.

A Facebook group, "NO SHOCK DOCTRINE FOR HAITI" says:
'The people of Haiti need help. We must dig them out of the rubble. We must feed and clothe them, and then we must work with them to re-build their country.

Yet some see this as an excuse to strip their economy of what assets it has left. Some see the shock of the earthquake as an opportunity to impose unpopular policies on a grieving people.

America's radical right have long seen disasters as a chance to push devastating policies on the distracted poor. They know it is the only way people will accept their economies being plundered.

This "Shock Doctrine" which brought us General Pinochet and Russian oligarchs is now moving swiftly on Haiti. These are the people who forced through the privatisation of social housing after Katrina - pushing the poor out of their homes without their consent. They used the Asian Tsunami as an excuse to take coasts out of the possession of poor fisherman, and hand them to western hotel conglomerates.

And now, one of the most influential American think tanks - the Heritage Foundation - is already suggesting they do the same to Haiti. The IMF are alleged to have demanded pay freezes and energy price hikes in exchange for a help.

We must help the people of Haiti build a country they want, not one which is forced on them by the people who brought us the credit crunch, South Americas generation of dictators, and George W Bush.

See here, for example:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shock_Doctrine


http://i3.democracynow.org/2010/1/14/naomi_klein_issues_haiti_disaster_capitalism

http://www.naomiklein.org/articles/2010/01/haiti-disaster-capitalism-alert-stop-them-they-shock-again


On Thursday, a number of progressive organisations in the United States, including the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti(IJDH), called for the different aid missions arriving in Haiti to make sure their work was co-ordinated and that it respected the dignity of Haitians, involving them in decision-making, and ensuring accoutability. Otherwise they would cause more suffering, warned IJDH director Brian Concannon.
http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/index.php/news/content/view/full/85634

At present the signs are not too hopeful.

Naomi Klein on Disaster Capitalism

THE wrecking balls are swinging, demolishing public housing that had withstood the disaster. The authorities say those who used to live there have dispersed. Meanwhile thousands of people are homeless, sleeping under bridges

Commercial interests are being handed contracts for health provision and schools.
Some parts of the city are booming, as low-cost housing is replaced by expensive condoms. . But the local people are not benefiting. The largely Afro-American workforce has been replaced by migrant workers, who are cheaper and have no rights. If these workers from Mexico or further afield ask for more money or even wages they are owed the employer can threaten that the INS (Immigration and Naturalization Service) are on their way, and they can be deported.

Some of this sounds like what's happening elsewhere, but in New Orleans, as described by author Naomi Klein, it is happening big time. Klein says it was a mistake to accuse the US authorities of incompetence in the way they dealt with the disaster. On the contrary, they had proved highly competent in turning the disaster to advantage, for the interests they represent.

It was the same with natural disasters as with war. "Blackwaters (private security firm operating in Iraq) are there, Halliburtons(engineers involved in the oil industry and in building prison camps like Guantanamo) are there as well," Klein told a packed and attentive audience at London's Friends Meeting House on Monday.

In London to launch the paperback edition of her book "The Shock Doctrine", * the Canadian writer recalled that in the early period of settlement in north America the Puritans saw it as a gift from God that diseases like smallpox had ravaged the native American population. Now capitalism was using both natural and man made disasters. She talked about the huge rise in privatisation at home and abroad, with the number of private contractors working in Iraq growing until they now outnumbered the US soldiers.

In Burma, under 'crony capitalism' the military junta was busy privatising everything from rice mills to the national library, while making sure which generals got what. A week after the cyclone soldiers were mobilised not for disaster relief but to run polling stations for a referendum on the constitution. The fertile land of the Irawaddy delta was up for grabs, the floods having helped clear small peasant farmers.

In the United States itself something which had not been seen since olden times was back - private firefighters. Rich people who could pay extra premiums to the insurance companies were entitled to this service, so that while forest fires might destroy nearby homes,their homes they would be sprayed with fireproof liquid by fire engines bearing the company logo.

Private health companies were now profitably treating soldiers returning from the war, with both physical and mental problems. Homeland Security is another profitable industry, with private prisons and ID cards etc. and the 'war on terror' would really be against immigrants.

I just managed to get in to hear Naomi Klein speak having come from a meeting of trades unionists discussing problems not unrelated to the developments she was talking about.
I was the only one going on to her meeting and though the Friends Meeting House was packed for the occasion, the organised labour movement was not much in evidence.

Although Naomi Klein spoke about workers' struggles in the US and Iraq, and in support of the Iraqi oilworkers fighting privatisation and foreign oil companies, somehow, as I was discussing with friends afterwards, the working class as a force for change, the "gravedigger of capitalism", was absent from her conclusions. That said, we have to be impressed at the way a mass of mainly young people can fill a hall to hear about serious issues, and talk about what they can do. Many are taking part in lively campaigns and actions against the capitalists.

Rather than carp at what was not there, it is up to us socialists of the 'old school' in the movement to find ways of bringing the energy and ideas of the young and the older labour movement together.
.
* http://www.naomiklein.org/shock-doctrine

http://www.handsoffiraqioil.org/

"Buried alive by the NCB"

Forty years after disaster at Aberfan

At 9.15 am on Friday, October 21, 1966 a waste tip slid down a mountainside into the mining village of Aberfan, near Merthyr Tydfil in South Wales. Down below it was foggy in the valley, and people heard the rumble before they could see what was happening. The black avalanche destroyed a farm cottage in its path, killing all the occupants. It continued down to Pantglas Junior School, where the children had just returned to their classes after singing All Things Bright and Beautiful at their assembly.

Gaynor Minett, an eight-year-old at the school, remembered four years later:
"It was a tremendous rumbling sound and all the school went dead. You could hear a pin drop. Everyone just froze in their seats. I just managed to get up and I reached the end of my desk when the sound got louder and nearer, until I could see the black out of the window. I can't remember any more but I woke up to find that a horrible nightmare had just begun in front of my eyes."

Men working above the tip had tried to run and give warning. They had no phone, apparently because the cables had previously been stolen. In any case even a 'phone warning would not have ennabled anyone to move in time, it all happened so quickly. The slide engulfed the school and about 20 houses in the village before coming to rest. Altogether 144 people died in the Aberfan disaster: 116 of them were school children. About half of the children at Pantglas Junior School, and five of their teachers, were killed.

"Buried alive by the NCB!" was one father's bitter verdict, shouted aloud at the inquest. Though volunteers had rushed to help local people and rescue teams at the disaster scene, Lord Robens of Walsingham, the former Labour MP Alf Robens, chairman of the National Coal Board (NCB) had carried on with his scheduled business, going to accept an appointment as chancellor of the University of Surrey. He would try and hide the causes of the slide and claim that nothing could have been done to prevent it. He never apologised.

A Tribunal of Inquiry found that the National Coal Board had been responsible for the disaster, "due to ignorance, ineptitude and a failure of communication".
The Aberfan disaster was not some unpredictable freak of nature. It could have been foreseen. Aberfan lies below Merthyr Mountain, on the bank of the River Taff, near the Merthyr Vale colliery. Like other mountain areas in Britain it has a high rainfall. Where mining subsidence has accentuated cracks in the sandstone of the mountain, the water penetrates down until it reaches layers of coal or clay, when it bubbles back to the surface as springs and streams down the slopes. One such stream was buried under Tip 7.

As far back as 1927 a Professor Knox delivered a paper to the South Wales Institute of Engineers in Cardiff, warning that if water accumulated in tips it would cause landslides. Collieries which failed to pay for drainage to remove the water would end up paying compensation for the results. Among those who studied this paper was a man who would later be Production Director of the NCB's South Western Division, covering Merthyr Vale, near Aberfan.

Before nationalisation, in 1947, the mines in this area were owned by the Powell Duffryn company. It was at one of their collieries, the Albion, five miles from Aberfan, that on December 5, 1939, some 180,000 tons of wste from a tip slid down the hillside, into the road, the canal and the River Taff. Powell Duffryn commissioned a consultant engineer to investigate, and he produced a study called "The Sliding of Colliery Rubbish Tips".

In November 1944 a large part of the conical Tip No.4 at Merthyr Vale slipped down the hillside. The tip had partly lay on loose material left from an earlier slide. Earlier that year company officials had assured the local council that there was no immediate danger from the tip, and said they were starting to have drainage trenches dug. When the November slip happened the colliery agent blamed the rain, and told the council it could have been worse but for the drainage channels. In fact the No4 tip had buried 400 foot of a stream.

By the time of the Aberfan disaster the waste was being tipped on Tip.No7, and there was a new danger. Mechanised mining methods brought a new kind of waste, fine dust left when the smallest amounts of coal were extracted. These tailings could not be piled high as more solid material, and their inclusion considerably lowered the "angle of repose" at which a pile would settle significantly. In rain they could turn to a wet slurry, sliding down into watercourses, then drying to form a solid blockage behind which more water accumulated until it flooded.

Already in 1959 and 1960 the council, backed by the Merthyr Vale Labour Party, had raised concern over flooding and the dangers of tip slides. In 1963 part of the foot of Tip No.7 was washed away by a spring, leaving a steep face over 70ft. high. A consulative committee, attended by miners' representatives and others on November 26, 1963, heard fears of further slides. The colliery manager visited the tip, and decided tipping of tailings must stop. There had already been a decision in the South Western Division that such waste should be poured into disused shafts. But the tipping continued.

On March 29, 1965, at Tymawr, a tailings lagoon held behind rubbish at the base of a tip burst its banks and flowed over railway tracks and the main road for hundreds of yards, wrecking cars in the car park and threatening to flow into the mine shafts. It cost the NCB £20,000 but somehow the incident never made into records at the Board's headquarters. Nor had the 1963 slides of waste at Tip 7 over by Aberfan.

Yet local people did express fears about what could happen if waste contnued to be tipped on the hillside behind their school. The Merthyr Express reported on January 11 1964 that a local councillor warned a planning meeting "if the tip moved it could threaten the whole school".

Perhaps other voices were getting more attention. On 7 July 1965, the colliery manager and senior engineers from the area NCB visited the Aberfan tips with the managing director of a fuel company that was interested in reclaiming coal from the waste tips. Apparently they saw no evidence of anything wrong or any instability.

And so on Friday, 21 October 1966, at 9.15 am, after smaller movements, the big slide began. Down the hillside came 140,000 tons of waste. At the bottom part it appeared as liquid, like a cold black lava tide. Smashing through two mains water pipes its flow increased, crossing a railway embankment to engulf more homes.

The tribunal found that the disaster could and should have been prevented. The main cause was a build-up of water in the pile and, when a small slip occurred, the disturbance caused the saturated, fine material of the tip to liquefy and it flowed down the mountain. In 1958, the tip had been sited on a known stream (as shown on earlier Ordnance Survey maps, and it had previously suffered several minor slips. Its instability was known, both to colliery management and to tip workers but very little was done about it. The Merthyr Tydfil Borough Council and National Union of Mineworkers were cleared of any wrongdoing. No NCB employee was sacked, demoted, or even disciplined. The NCB was ordered to pay compensation, though much of this was made up by government, and compensation to local families was later reduced because they had received sums from an appeal fund.

Labour's nationalisation of industries like coal in 1947 did not remove them from capitalism. On the contrary, they were expected to show a profit after paying out interest on loans made to compensate the former coal owners, who had risked miners' safety and pocketed subsidies, and continued recieving payments even when their former mines were closed as "uneconomic". State owned industries were modernised at public expense to serve the private sector, while neither their workers nor the public gained any control over bureaucratic management.

Bosses and bureaucrats anywhere, management members, aim to increase profit, keep down costs, empty their in-trays, look the other way when necessary, endear themselves to their superiors, raise their status and earnings, and make sure anything that goes wrong will be blamed on someone else, preferably lower down in the workforce, or on unpredictable factors beyond their control. Anyone, manager or worker, who sees their responsibility to the wider comunity, the environment and humanity is asking for trouble with their careers, and woe betide the worker who speaks out of turn let alone expects a say in things.

Since Aberfan we have seen several major disasters, not least in the Thatcher era of "deregulation" - the Kings Cross fire(1987), the sinking of the aptly- named Herald of Free Enterprise off Zeebrugge(1987) and the Marchioness pleasure boat in the Thames, and major rail crashes, not to mention the continuing toll on workers' lives in the construction industry. Nor can we forget that this year was the twentieth anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster. State ownership with bureaucratic rule and control of information does not equal socialism. But we know that if global capital continues its way, under whatever political labels, the planet itself is threatened.

At the Labour Party conference in Manchester last month the party leadership was defeated on issues of public housing, privatisation in the Health Service, and the watering-down of the government's long awaited Corporate Manslaughter and Homicide Bill. Transport and General Workers' general secretary Tony Woodley said the bill only allowed companies to be fined, and would give guilty directors a "get out of jail free" card.

We will see whether this government takes more notice of union or Labour party members, or continues listening to the City and big employers. The tide of opinion in this country has swung against big business and privatisation, but on this as on the peace and war issues, the public mood still needs to find political expression. Socialists should be getting far more support, but whether in the Labour Party or out of, we have to ask how we realise this potential.

As we remember the victims of Aberfan, the children slaughtered when their lives had hardly begun, let us recognise the human cost of continuing to subordinate everything to profit, and the need to gain not just public ownership but democratic control by society over our industries and environment. It is a life and death question.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Much of the information about the history leading up to the disaster is from Victor Bignell's study on the Aberfan Disaster in Catastrophic Failures, published 1977 by the Open University.

I was spurred to write something on this by a TV news item on the village marking the anniversary, but also by fellow-blogger Mark Elf covering it in his blog Jews Without Frontiers. He also provides a reference to other resources at
http://www.nuff.ox.ac.uk/politics/aberfan/home2.htm