Sunday, May 3, 2009
News From Indymedia
May 1, 2007-On April 27th, without prior warning, the indigenous land owners of the villages surrounding Barrick Gold’s Porgera open pit mine were violently evicted by a police and military operation with 200 troops. “Operation Ipili” was launched during the middle of the day to allegedly make way for the expansion of a Barrick gold mine. This effective State of Emergency in Porgera was motivated by situation reports presented by Barrick (PNG) Limited, according to Laigap Porgera Member of Parliament Phillip Kikala.
Households of third generation landowners were purposefully razed to the ground, causing residents to flee for fear of their lives. According to eyewitnesses, eighty houses in Ungima, two houses in Yokolama and four houses in Kulapi had been torched within the first 2 days of the operation. By April 30, community reports put that number at close to 600.
According to the Akali Tange Association, a human rights organization in Porgera, none of the residents were given time to gather any of their possessions. Anyone who spoke up was reportedly physically attacked by the security forces and some were arrested.
Increasing numbers of people are reporting injuries, as are those who are being detained. Although the landowners received no formal warning that they were to see their houses destroyed – according to the ATA – Barrick Gold had demanded that the land be cleared of local villagers, some of whom are small scale artisanal miners eking out a living beside the mine.
Barrick Gold’s personnel claim the land owners are ‘illegal’ and last week, issued a memorandum calling on them to stop their subsistence activities and leave their homelands. The chief landowner, Nixon Mangape, recently alerted their local Member of Parliament as well as media outlets about the impending threats from the mining company. To date, there has been no acknowledgement that villagers have been demanding compensation from Barrick if the confiscation of their land was to move forward, given their resulting loss of livelihood, possessions and ancestral territory. Now, these communities are suffering from brutal attacks by security agents and faced with the situation that their homes – with all their possessions – have been burned to the ground, in clear violation of national and international legal precedents.
Jethro Tulin, Executive Officer of ATA traveled to Canada this week – along with other international affected communities – to tell shareholders at Barrick Gold's annual general meeting about the on-going human rights crisis in Porgera. As Mr. Tulin traveled to Canada to attend Barrick's AGM, the Papua New Guinea government sent 200 heavily armed troops to the Porgera area. He has since been receiving regular updates about landowner's houses being searched for incriminating materials and burnt to the ground.
"Barrick Gold and the Government of Papua New Guinea must immediately start to address the catastrophic problem in Porgera pro-actively rather than over reacting with high level security installations and branding it as a law and order problem. Calling a State of Emergency is not the right method to fix these extensive and irreversible damages, the ordinary people are already victims of what as gone wrong."
Last year the Norwegian Pension Fund divested $230 million CAD from Barrick Gold for ethical concerns related to the Porgera Mine.
Households of third generation landowners were purposefully razed to the ground, causing residents to flee for fear of their lives. According to eyewitnesses, eighty houses in Ungima, two houses in Yokolama and four houses in Kulapi had been torched within the first 2 days of the operation. By April 30, community reports put that number at close to 600.
According to the Akali Tange Association, a human rights organization in Porgera, none of the residents were given time to gather any of their possessions. Anyone who spoke up was reportedly physically attacked by the security forces and some were arrested.
Increasing numbers of people are reporting injuries, as are those who are being detained. Although the landowners received no formal warning that they were to see their houses destroyed – according to the ATA – Barrick Gold had demanded that the land be cleared of local villagers, some of whom are small scale artisanal miners eking out a living beside the mine.
Barrick Gold’s personnel claim the land owners are ‘illegal’ and last week, issued a memorandum calling on them to stop their subsistence activities and leave their homelands. The chief landowner, Nixon Mangape, recently alerted their local Member of Parliament as well as media outlets about the impending threats from the mining company. To date, there has been no acknowledgement that villagers have been demanding compensation from Barrick if the confiscation of their land was to move forward, given their resulting loss of livelihood, possessions and ancestral territory. Now, these communities are suffering from brutal attacks by security agents and faced with the situation that their homes – with all their possessions – have been burned to the ground, in clear violation of national and international legal precedents.
Jethro Tulin, Executive Officer of ATA traveled to Canada this week – along with other international affected communities – to tell shareholders at Barrick Gold's annual general meeting about the on-going human rights crisis in Porgera. As Mr. Tulin traveled to Canada to attend Barrick's AGM, the Papua New Guinea government sent 200 heavily armed troops to the Porgera area. He has since been receiving regular updates about landowner's houses being searched for incriminating materials and burnt to the ground.
"Barrick Gold and the Government of Papua New Guinea must immediately start to address the catastrophic problem in Porgera pro-actively rather than over reacting with high level security installations and branding it as a law and order problem. Calling a State of Emergency is not the right method to fix these extensive and irreversible damages, the ordinary people are already victims of what as gone wrong."
Last year the Norwegian Pension Fund divested $230 million CAD from Barrick Gold for ethical concerns related to the Porgera Mine.
Schlock Cinema's Last Hurrah: Hobgoblins
I have come to think of the 1980s as the last hurrah of exploitation cinema. Those of us born in the early 1960s had no idea that when we trundled off to the local movie house we were seeing the last round of cheaply-produced cinematic garbage. Nowadays, because we are firmly ensconced in the era of the cinematic block-buster, we can only see crap movies on home DVD, or god-forbid, the Internet. We no longer have the communal experience of chucking candy and popcorn at the screen while hooting out loud at the big screen.
One of the hallmarks of exploitation cinema is the cheap knock-off designed to cash in on a big trend or popular movie. As a young science fiction and fantasy fan, I cannot tell you how many on-location-in-the-Hollywood-Hills-quickies I dutifully attended in movie houses, just because somebody was feeding my jones. I am talking about movies that make Beastmaster into high cinema. Of course, horror, and the re-vamped monster movie were big draws in the 1980s and had their share of low-budget imitators.
I draw your attention to the 1988 schlock-fest: Hobgoblins. Gremlins was a big cinematic hit earlier in the decade and spawned a couple of sequels. So, what is a schlock cinema producer to do except rip it off? The titular critters in this masterpiece of rip-off cinema look so much like the Gremlins of the parent feature that the makers of this film are so lucky their feature flew so far under the radar that it avoided a lawsuit. Also, like the Gremlins of the previous hit, the creatures are not to be put into direct light, or maybe they are not to be put in darkness. This movie has a wonderfully-muddled script that no one can really keep straight, much less the characters.
Speaking of the characters, the casts largely consists of a bunch of younguns probably trying to get their SAG cards. The plot, which largely revolves around a house in Rancho Cucamunga that was not being used for the weekend it took to shoot this mess, wherein, it is discovered, that the titular creatures, have the ability to grant fantasies, which somewhat explains the bizarre behavior we see for a lot of the film. During a severe crisis, one of the characters, for some reason, calls a fantasy-phone line, so that in the next scene, we can see the director's girlfriend standing outside the house ready to sate the fantasy of the young man. Next, the female lead, or what passes for same in this flick, gets into her head to go to a punk /strip club to perform the least erotic striptease in cinematic history. Eventually, the movie ambles to a close, but not until we see one of the least talented of the New Wave Bands of the Sunset Strip, The Fontanelles, perform for us.
The real value to this film, is that I can remember getting all liquored up, stumbling into a feature, like this, and then stumbling on over to an all-night eatery to commiserate about how bad a film like this is. It is an empty experience watching it over the intertubes, and I lament that the kids of today do not have bad cinema of their own to kill a couple of hours on weekend night.
One of the hallmarks of exploitation cinema is the cheap knock-off designed to cash in on a big trend or popular movie. As a young science fiction and fantasy fan, I cannot tell you how many on-location-in-the-Hollywood-Hills-quickies I dutifully attended in movie houses, just because somebody was feeding my jones. I am talking about movies that make Beastmaster into high cinema. Of course, horror, and the re-vamped monster movie were big draws in the 1980s and had their share of low-budget imitators.
I draw your attention to the 1988 schlock-fest: Hobgoblins. Gremlins was a big cinematic hit earlier in the decade and spawned a couple of sequels. So, what is a schlock cinema producer to do except rip it off? The titular critters in this masterpiece of rip-off cinema look so much like the Gremlins of the parent feature that the makers of this film are so lucky their feature flew so far under the radar that it avoided a lawsuit. Also, like the Gremlins of the previous hit, the creatures are not to be put into direct light, or maybe they are not to be put in darkness. This movie has a wonderfully-muddled script that no one can really keep straight, much less the characters.
Speaking of the characters, the casts largely consists of a bunch of younguns probably trying to get their SAG cards. The plot, which largely revolves around a house in Rancho Cucamunga that was not being used for the weekend it took to shoot this mess, wherein, it is discovered, that the titular creatures, have the ability to grant fantasies, which somewhat explains the bizarre behavior we see for a lot of the film. During a severe crisis, one of the characters, for some reason, calls a fantasy-phone line, so that in the next scene, we can see the director's girlfriend standing outside the house ready to sate the fantasy of the young man. Next, the female lead, or what passes for same in this flick, gets into her head to go to a punk /strip club to perform the least erotic striptease in cinematic history. Eventually, the movie ambles to a close, but not until we see one of the least talented of the New Wave Bands of the Sunset Strip, The Fontanelles, perform for us.
The real value to this film, is that I can remember getting all liquored up, stumbling into a feature, like this, and then stumbling on over to an all-night eatery to commiserate about how bad a film like this is. It is an empty experience watching it over the intertubes, and I lament that the kids of today do not have bad cinema of their own to kill a couple of hours on weekend night.
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