A.LOEWENSTEIN ONLINE NEWSLETTER

No nation on earth can wish Sri Lanka’s Tamil community more good fortune than Sri Lanka itself.

The truth is far uglier.

On Monday before the 36-year-old Fijian Josefa Rauluni fell to his death from a rooftop at Villawood detention centre, staff of the British company managing the centre, Serco, hauled mattresses to the footpath to break his fall. It was a busy day for Serco.
In Ireland its employees were managing the nation’s traffic lights. In the US they were running prisons, border security and defence systems. Public transport kept them busy in Dubai and South Australia. Welfare-to-work programs, schools, prisons and detention centres (or ”custodial accommodation” in company literature) were administered in Britain. Serco people were building military hospitals in Germany and helping to decommission US military bases in Iraq.
Some of Serco’s 70,000 staff were running both a new bicycle network in London and Britain’s five-satellite military communications network – evidently to inflame conspiracy theorists, it is called Skynet, the name of the evil computer system hell-bent on destroying mankind in the Terminator films.
Serco even manages Greenwich Mean Time.
There is a common factor in this apparently disparate $5 billion operation: Serco does the things governments no longer want to do.
”They are like a living organism that has found a very rich payload of nutrients and they are growing faster and faster,” says the NSW MP John Kaye, who has a keen interest in the growth of the private sector in the public sphere.

He’s from the town of Yehud, near Tel Aviv, was sentenced to 20 days of imprisonment. Zionist Druz enlisted in the Israeli military eight months ago. It was already as a soldier that he decided to refuse to continue his military service.

And from his letter of refusal:

I refuse to be part of the Israel Defence Forces, an army that occupies and oppresses a Palestinian population on a daily basis, which undermines the chances to achieve peace, and thus also Israel’s security, and which corrupts the moral and democratic character of the state.
For more than 40 years the IDF has been daily oppressing the Palestinians in the occupied territories and denying them their most basic rights to live normally. This includes hampering their freedom of movement, undermining their economy, hurting their bodies, illegally arresting them and committing many other severe crimes that usually fail to make it to the mainstream media. The very fact that any simple soldier serving beyond the Green Line has power over the lives of local residents and can force them to do as he pleases is illegal and undemocratic, and obtains the exact opposite of what it is supposed to – it produces more terrorists, increases hatred towards us and undermines any realistic chances for peace. So what purpose does this oppression really serve? Only one – perpetuating the Israeli settlements in the West Bank, which are illegal in their own right and which are the obstacle to reaching a compromise between the two peoples.
Even before enlisting I had my doubts about whether or not to join the army, whether to support the army that represents my country or to refuse. I eventually decided to enlist, because I felt that I could refuse from within, to do things otherwise, to effect change. Today I understand that the army’s actions in the occupied territories themselves, its very presence there, are what constitutes the occupation, and no action I could make, not even if I offer a more positive treatment to Palestinian civilians, could make any difference.
I believe that in a country that claims to be a democracy, it is good and even necessary for each of us to voice criticism and indignation when the country is wrong. The IDF is an organisation that fights for interests that I don’t believe in, performs anti-democratic and immoral actions and seriously undermines the chances to achieve piece. I am no longer willing to be part of it.