Indonesia warns US on antiterror interference

http://www.boston.com/news/world/asia/articles/2006/06/07/indonesia_warns_us_on_antiterror_interference/?rss_id=Boston+Globe+--+World+News

JAKARTA, Indonesia -- Indonesia's defense minister yesterday warned Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld that Asia's Muslims increasingly believe the United States is trying to use its economic and military power to dictate terms for carrying out the war on terror, a perception that risks alienating the countries the Bush administration needs as allies.

In unusually blunt language following an hourlong meeting here with Rumsfeld, Juwono Sudarsono said some Muslim nations see the US as a threat to global stability, and suggested the Bush administration should allow national governments to come up with their own strategies to deal with Islamist extremism.

``The sun never sets on the back of an American GI," Sudarsono said, noting the $12 trillion US economy allows it to be ubiquitous around the globe.

``It's best that you leave the main responsibility of anti terrorist measures to the local government in question and not be overly insistent about immediate results arising from your perception about terrorists."

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http://www.labornotes.org/archives/2001/0901/0901b.html


The bus was stopped by 15 gunmen, some in military uniforms. They began checking the workers' identification, and when they found the two union leaders, pulled them off the bus.

One of the gunmen shot Locarno in the face, as his fellow workers watched in horror. Orcasita was taken off into the woods at the side of the road. There he was tortured. When his body was later found, his fingernails had been torn off.

Locarno and Orcasita had made repeated pleas to their employer, Drummond Co. of Birmingham, Alabama, for protection. Just a week before the assassinations, the union demanded that Drummond provide security for its workers and abide by a previous agreement allowing them to sleep overnight at the mine. The company refused to allow the men to stay.

Protesting the deaths, 1,200 miners at Loma stopped work. In Colombia, labor activism is often punished with death. By mid-May, 44 union leaders had been violently murdered this year alone. Last year assassinations cost the lives of 129 others. The National Labor School reports that 1,500 have been killed in the past decade. Out of every five unionists killed in the world, three are Colombian, according to a recent U.S. union report.