Elsewhere Today (396)
Aljazeera:
Al-Qaeda issues 9/11 anniversary warning
Monday 11 September 2006, 12:37 Makka Time, 9:37 GMT
Al-Qaeda's number two leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, has called on Muslims to increase their resistance to the US on the fifth anniversary of the September 11 attacks.
Al-Zawahiri addressed the US and its citizens in a video, seen by Aljazeera on Monday, which appeared to be new.
He said, "You gave us every legitimacy and every opportunity to continue fighting you ... You should worry about your presence in the [Persian] Gulf, and the second place you should worry about is Israel.
"Your leaders are hiding from you the true extent of the disaster, and the days are pregnant and giving birth to new events with Allah's permission and guidance."
He also said al-Qaeda was justified in continuing its fight against America as the US administration had "ignored our offer of a truce", adding US troops fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan "were doomed".
New footage
Al-Zawahiri refers to Israel's bombardment of Lebanon this summer, the capture of Israeli soldiers by Hezbollah and fighters in Gaza in the video, entitled Hot Issues, leading experts to believe it is probably new.
He says that Israel was attacking Lebanon and Gaza only because Egypt had left the "field of conflict with Israel".
As-Sahab website, al-Qaeda's media arm, posted on Sunday the full video of a smiling Osama bin Laden and other commanders in a mountain camp, apparently planning the September 11 attacks, excerpts of which were first aired by Aljazeera last Thursday.
The documentary-like retrospective of the five years since the attacks was unusually long - 91 minutes, split into two segments and sophisticated in its production quality compared to previous al-Qaeda videos.
It included the last testament of two of the September 11 hijackers, Wail al-Shihri and Hamza al-Ghamdi, and showed bin Laden strolling in the camp, greeting followers.
"Among the devout group which responded to the order of Allah and the order of his messenger were the heroes of September 11, who wrote with their blood the greatest pages of modern history," the narrator said, referring to the hijackers who flew planes into the Pentagon and the World Trade Centre.
Al-Shihri and al-Ghamdi were each shown speaking to the camera, their image superimposed over background pictures of the crumbling World Trade Centre towers and the burning Pentagon, as well as a model of a passenger jet.
© 2003 - 2006 Aljazeera.Net
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/6EAB860A-6E29-478E-9EDF-8030C6427A16.htm
Aljazeera:
Rwandan singer on mass murder charge
Monday 11 September 2006, 11:10 Makka Time, 8:10 GMT
A Rwandan singer is set to go on trial on charges of genocide in one of the first cases of a musician being charged with mass murder for his work.
Simon Bikindi is to appear before the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), accused of inciting fellow Hutus to kill minority Tutsis during the 1994 genocide.
The 52-year-old Hutu, a renowned traditional musician who became popular during the 1980's, faces six counts of genocide and related charges.
Bikindi vehemently denies the charges, and his legal team says the prosecution is a denial of his human rights and artistic liberty.
"Between 1990 and 1994, Simon Bikindi composed, sang, recorded or distributed musical works extolling Hutu solidarity and accusing Tutsis of enslaving Hutus," the ICTR indictment says.
"These songs were then used to incite Hutus to identify and kill Tutsis," the indictment says.
'I Hate Hutus'
The ICTR has tried and convicted journalists and media personalities in the past, but Bikindi's trial will be the first of a creative artist.
At the time, Bikindi enjoyed almost legendary status in Rwanda and his songs could be heard in buses, bars, restaurants and offices, while wealthy families often hired his band to entertain at weddings and other occasions.
Prosecutors say he used his music to incite killings and point to one song in particular - Njyewe nanga Abahutu, Kinyarwanda for "I hate the Hutus" - that they say singled out Hutus who joined the Tutsi rebellion.
"I hate these Hutus, who can be led to kill and who, I swear to you, kill Hutus," the lyrics say. "Dear comrades, if I hate them it is for the better."
Wilfred Nderitu, Bikindi's lawyer, says his client's songs are innocent.
"To accuse him is to deny him his right of expression."
The ICTR sits to try those allegedly involved in the 1994 genocide, when 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were massacred by Hutu extremists.
AFP
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/7D303764-2230-450A-ACDC-418BFA17A8F2.htm
Arab News:
Editorial: The Bush War
Monday, 11, September, 2006 (18, Sha`ban, 1427)
GEORGE Bush and his supporters will no doubt mark the fifth anniversary of 9/11 by stressing to the American people that, since that horrible day, there has not been a single terrorist attack on US soil. Though that is undeniably true, it is, however, only half the picture. Americans will also wake up today to be told that the threat of terrorism against them remains, as one of countless reports on the anniversary put it, “chillingly lethal,” and despite a government overhaul and more than $250 billion spent to bolster security on airlines, at borders and in seaports, officials predict another massive attack; there are no “ifs” — only when.
Five years have passed since 9/11. But there is still a need to look into the real reason Bush launched an “all-out war on terror” without defining “terror” or determining the method and duration of the war. Nor was much done about what is perhaps the most important aspect of the entire issue: eradicating the root causes of terror. The events of 9/11 coincided with an American leadership inspired and shaped by neoconservatives who still form the current administration. Their invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003 and Israel’s recent war on Lebanon were mere episodes in the endless “global war on terror.” But there is precious little in common between the wars fought so far and the actual eradication of terror.
And as anybody with only limited knowledge of the situation can tell you, conventional military means will not succeed against youths who are prepared to sacrifice their lives as long as their death acquires meaning by causing harm to New York, Madrid, Bali, London and just about anywhere else. Aircraft carriers, missile bombardment, landing forces, and occupying troops don’t stand a chance against this phenomenon. There is no place to take this youth on, no battle theater where standing armies can clash, nor even in the more vague arena of guerrilla warfare. But Americans are bent on engaging the enemy in combat, and have ended up fighting countries that have no relationship with terrorism and may have themselves been victims of it. Iraq is the finest example and Americans have found themselves succeeding in only weakening national governments and causing the very phenomenon which they had allegedly set out to destroy to proliferate and take root in areas where it had never previously existed.
Following the 9/11 attacks, Bush told the world that everything had changed. But had it really? At the outset of his global campaign, Bush talked of “Crusades,” then retracted the word, claiming it was a mere slip of the tongue. But then more recently, he used another emotive expression — “Islamic fascism.” Five years of war haven’t changed his mind. His “global war on terror” is simply an imperial war to subjugate whatever part of the world is in the “against-America camp” — and a sizeable portion of this anti-US population is in the Middle East. Today, exactly five years on, there is still international turmoil, but this turbulence must not be blamed solely on the murderous perpetrators of 9/11.
Copyright: Arab News © 2003 All rights reserved.
http://www.arabnews.com/?page=7§ion=0&article=86383&d=11&m=9&y=2006
Clarín: Nueva amenaza de Al Qaeda,
a cinco años de los atentados en EE.UU.
El número dos de la red terrorista, Ayman al-Zawahiri, dijo que los próximos objetivos a atacar serán los países del Golfo e Israel. En un video difundido por CNN, advierte también a los occidentales que "sus líderes les están ocultando la verdadera magnitud del desastre. Estos días, con el permiso y consejo de Alá, darán a luz nuevos acontecimientos".
Clarín.com, 11.09.2006
El presunto número dos de Al Qaeda, Ayman al Zawahiri, instó hoy a los musulmanes del mundo a enfrentarse con Occidente y anuncia "nuevos sucesos", en un video aparentemente preparado para el quinto aniversario del 11-S.
En el video en árabe, de una hora y 16 minutos de duración y que lleva subtítulos en inglés, Zawahiri advierte a los occidentales que "sus líderes les están ocultando la verdadera magnitud del desastre. Estos días, con el permiso y consejo de Alá, darán a luz nuevos acontecimientos".
La cinta entera, extractos de la cual emite hoy la televisión estadounidense CNN, que los ofrece también en su página web, fue "subida" anoche en varios sitios de internet islámicos.
Zawahiri, quien en un momento afirma que Osama bin Laden le había autorizado a transmitir este mensaje, avisa a Occidente de que "no hay que preocuparse por sus tropas en Afganistán e Irak, porque ya están perdidas", sino por "su presencia en el Golfo (Pérsico), primero, y en segundo lugar, en Israel".
En alusión a los conflictos en los últimos meses entre Israel, por una parte, y Hamás y Hezbollah, por otra, Zawahiri critica a Occidente por aportar armas a Israel y llama a la nación musulmana a "aprestarse en acudir, con todos los medios a su alcance, en ayuda de sus hermanos musulmanes de Gaza y el Líbano".
También insta a los kurdos de Irak a que, en vez de colaborar con las fuerzas internacionales encabezadas por EEUU, luchen contra éstas "y escriban así una página honorable en la historia contemporánea del Islam".
El dirigente de Al Qaeda es muy crítico con las monarquías árabes, debido a lo que califica de colaboración con Occidente y corrupción.
Invita a los musulmanes de Somalia a luchar contra las fuerzas locales apoyadas por Estados Unidos y a "tomar represalias" contra EEUU por haber encarcelado al clérigo egipcio ciego Omar Abdel Rahman.
Copyright 1996-2006 Clarín.com - All rights reserved
http://www.clarin.com/diario/2006/09/11/um/m-01269462.htm
Guardian:
The hunt
Armies have been mobilised, phones tapped, huge rewards offered - yet Osama bin Laden is still at liberty. Does anyone even have the faintest idea where he is? Declan Walsh investigates
Declan Walsh
Monday September 11, 2006
To find Osama bin Laden, try Peshawar's smugglers' bazaar on the road to the Khyber Pass. Walk past the small mountains of almonds and lemongrass and green tea. Turn at the stacks of duty-free TVs and cheap cosmetics. Stop at the stalls with the topless women. Down a cramped alley, bearded shopkeepers squeezed behind tiny counters offer a fine selection of fanciful sex products. "Delay sprays" carry the promise of lingering pleasure. For the discerning lover there is Lovely Curves, a product that claims to be a "bust-developing cream". If all else fails, there is plenty of knock-off Viagra at knock-down prices. Worry not about the quality: "Made is Germany" (sic) reads the label.
The merchandise hidden under the glass counters, however, caters to a different kind of thrill. For a discreet inquiry and 75p, the smiling traders offer a wide selection of jihadi DVDs. Slickly edited footage shows beheadings of alleged collaborators, bombs that flip American Humvees into the air, and the last words of suicide bombers. And then there are the images of the lanky Saudi tycoon's son with a bad back, a scraggly beard and a placid, dead-fish glare. "I've sold about 100 since Friday," says Abdul at one of the stalls, sifting through a stack of discs. "Some ask for [Afghan militant] Gulbuddin. Some ask for Taliban. Some ask for Osama."
The sheikh, the director, the emir, even "the Samaritan" - Bin Laden violently changed the course of our world in 2001, and then began his own audacious flight from justice. Six days after the twin towers folded into Manhattan, while dazed Americans fumbled for meaning, President George Bush promised to lasso in the al-Qaida leader, Texan style. "There's an old poster out west, as I recall, that said, 'Wanted: dead or alive'," he told a press conference at the Pentagon. The order went down the line. Cofer Black, the CIA's counterterrorism chief, later told a subordinate, "I want Bin Laden's head shipped back in a box filled with dry ice." Yet five years on, a pokey video stand on the Pakistani frontier is about as close as anyone has got.
Rarely has so much brought so little. The US has spent billions on the search. It has mobilised armies, bribed informers, bullied allies, emptied bank accounts, tapped phones, abducted suspects and assassinated his henchmen. It has, without a doubt, seriously damaged al-Qaida's ability to carry out terrorist attacks. Yet still the scarlet pimpernel of jihad roams free.
The foolhardy words of the American general who promised a scalp by the end of 2004 have been quietly forgotten. Embarrassment has crumbled into recrimination. The Americans blame the Pakistanis. The Pakistanis blame the Afghans. The Afghans shrug their shoulders. President Bush wanted to invade their country and catch Bin Laden, they say. So why hasn't he?
Guessing the location of Bin Laden's lair is the favoured parlour game of south Asia, played out along the 1,500-mile Pakistan-Afghanistan border where the participants - spies, soldiers and journalists - believe he is hiding. It is a massive and daunting arena. Scraps of intelligence and educated guesswork slim the odds, but not much. Theories shift with the seasons. Three years ago, some put Bin Laden in Pakistan's Waziristan, nested behind serried ranks of flinty pro-Taliban fighters. Last year it was Bajaur, a tribal agency further north, where a group of harried Arabs were spotted lugging supplies up a mountainside. This year's hot bet is closer to the Chinese border, in Chitral.
Peaceful, mountainous and sprawled across the lower Himalayas, until recently Chitral's main attractions were hiking, rare falcons and a rather rough version of horse polo. Then, one day last winter, three Americans arrived, and all that changed. The strangers checked into the Hindu Kush Heights, a luxury hotel with sweeping views over Chitral's main valley. The owner, Siraj ul Mulk, a genial former air force officer and a prince of the local royalty, offered his help. "They said they wanted to develop the area," he recalls. "They said American development money was coming." Ul Mulk whipped out his maps, which the Americans eyeballed enthusiastically. But when the conversation turned to talk of tourism, their faces glazed over. "You could tell it was going in one ear and out the other," he says.
As it turned out, the Americans were only interested in one tourist. By last May, word spread that the CIA or the FBI - nobody was ever sure which - had come to Chitral on the trail of Bin Laden. Locals grew angry. A cleric organised protests and a politician kicked up a fuss in parliament. Reporters snooped around a house that the now-absent Americans had rented, noting a fitness machine and a satellite dish on the porch. The Americans never came back, leaving locals scratching their heads and wondering if the bizarre episode was a blessing or a curse. "I'm thinking of spreading new Osama rumours," says Ul Mulk sardonically. "It seems a good way to bring in visitors."
For America, it was another dead end in a long manhunt. The "development experts" had come from the US consulate in Peshawar, a colonial-style house ringed with enough razor wire to protect a small prison. It is the sort of place where visa inquiries are politely referred elsewhere. Behind its fortified walls is a major nerve centre in the Bin Laden hunt - some of the world's most sophisticated decryption and eavesdropping equipment. And yet western intelligence has not had a bead on Bin Laden in years, says Michael Scheuer, the CIA analyst who set up the Osama bin Laden cell in 1996 and resigned two years ago. "As far as I know there's been no serious credible information about his location since Tora Bora," he says.
That high-octane cave chase in December 2001 was probably Bin Laden's luckiest break. After Kabul fell, he fled south to the saw-toothed White mountains, on the border with Pakistan, and burrowed into Tora Bora, an underground warren that the CIA once helped fortify. Surrounded by an estimated 1,000 al-Qaida diehards and pounded by a blitz of American bombs, it was a harrowing time. According to one account, American officers listening on a captured radio set heard Bin Laden apologise to his fighters for leading them there. But then, many believe, the American generals made a mistake. Instead of sending in the elite rangers to finish the job, they turned to unreliable Afghan militias. As daisy-cutter and bunker-buster bombs exploded around him, Bin Laden slipped through the dragnet and into North Waziristan, a remote Pakistani tribal agency of fortress-like compounds and stern tribesmen. An American general, Tommy Franks, disputes this account, saying it was never clear if Bin Laden was in Tora Bora. Nevertheless, in 2004, under intense American pressure, Pakistan dispatched tens of thousands of soldiers to Waziristan, by then a major haven for al-Qaida fugitives. But it was too late. The sheikh had fled.
Since then, the trail is mostly conjecture. In interviews with Pakistani army officers, western officials and local reporters, a common theory emerges. Bin Laden is surrounded by two or three concentric circles of security with a small corps of battle-hardened men at its centre. He has not used his satphone - the old number was 00873 682505331 - in years and communicates only through handwritten notes carried by trusted couriers. He travels only at night, possibly in disguise. At an early stage, Pakistani police were instructed to check all burkas in case he was hiding underneath, John Simpson-style. "He's morphing all the time," says one western official.
The armour has two possible chinks. Since 2001, al-Qaida has released at least 37 video or audio recordings. The latest, produced last week, shows Bin Laden meeting with the 9/11 bombers. Earlier this year, he released five audio tapes. Could the tape trail unravel his cover? The early cassettes were delivered to the office of al-Jazeera in an Islamabad suburb. America was watching, but to no avail. "They did it at night using cut-offs," says one official, using the term for someone who does not know his employer. "It's one of the most reliable measures in spycraft." Now Bin Laden's messages are distributed via an even more elusive channel - the internet.
His other weakness is his health. Rumours of sickness have swirled around Bin Laden for years. The French newspaper Le Figaro reported in 2001 that he had visited Dubai for kidney treatment. Rahimullah Yusufzai, a Peshawar journalist who interviewed Bin Laden in 1998, noticed his copious consumption of water and green tea, which may indicate kidney disease. At the time, Bin Laden walked with a cane, he says, and complained of back problems. "He said he used to love playing soccer and horse riding, but had to stop," says Yusufzai. But when he photographed a stooped Bin Laden shuffling into a tent, his followers erased the digital images. "They said they didn't want him to look weak or disabled," he says.
Even if Bin Laden is ailing, he enjoys an ideal sanctuary. The Pashtun tribal belt is a broad swathe of high-walled villages, sprawling orchards and fiercely conservative tribesmen that straddles the Pakistani-Afghan border. Pashtunwali, the strict Pashtun code of honour, dictates that all guests must be treated to warm hospitality, no matter who they are. But the tribal belt can also be a tough place to keep a secret, which leads many to believe that Bin Laden has a powerful protector. "It seems that someone very important has given him refuge," said Yusufzai. "Someone we don't suspect and someone the Americans don't suspect. Someone with so much commitment that he would risk losing everything."
That may help explain why America's $25m bounty - advertised on Pakistani television and hawked on cheap State Department matchboxes bearing his picture - remains untouched. Assumptions that a sweaty-palmed Pashtun tribesman would trade his loyalty against a fistful of dollars have proved fantastically misplaced. "Everyone thought they were feckless, that they would sell him for the money. It hasn't happened," laments a US official in Pakistan. "These people are direct and forthright. They can't be bought."
And they call Bin Laden their Robin Hood. According to a poll released last year, 51 per cent of Pakistanis, 60 per cent of Jordanians and 35 per cent of Indonesians support Bin Laden. They share his worldview not, as Bush claims, due to some irrational hatred of American elections and women who work, but because the Saudi has flamboyantly defied a superpower they see as a threat to their religion and way of life. "We underestimate Bin Laden's popularity," says Scheuer, arguably the intelligence agent who has followed Bin Laden most closely. "For better or worse, he stood with the Afghans for 25 years. And whether we like it or not, he's a hero. We're going to be awfully lucky to find a source willing to turn him over."
In the tribal belt that popularity has been nourished by a current of radicalism that swelled after 9/11. The provincial assembly is controlled by the MMA, a pro-Taliban coalition that has steadily attacked women's rights. Last week, the Pakistani government signed a peace deal with fundamentalist militants in Waziristan who publicly execute accused thieves and shut down music shops. Broiling hostility against America and the military president, General Pervez Musharraf, has never been higher.
The Bin Laden we know was forged in the hot fire of frontier radicalism. He arrived in Peshawar in the early 1980s, one of thousands of Arab idealists drawn by the jihad against the godless Soviets who had invaded Afghanistan in 1979. Armed with nothing but his tycoon father's bank account, he set up an office in the well-heeled University Town neighbourhood under the mentorship of Abdullah Azzam, a Palestinian academic who had once lectured him in Jeddah. Azzam later died in a bomb blast that some blame on an ambitious Bin Laden. However, other allies from that period have proven more enduring. Intelligence officials believe that Bin Laden is supported by the forces of Younis Khalis and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, two of the seven mujahideen leaders whom the CIA and Saudi intelligence used to arm during the 1980s jihad.
Kunar, where Hekmatyar's men roam large, had the strongest Arab presence during the 1980s jihad. Not coincidentally, it is currently the province with the greatest concentration of American troops in Afghanistan, and some of the highest casualty rates. Some believe that Bin Laden is hiding there.
The other wild card in the Bin Laden puzzle is Pakistan. Cynics accuse the country's powerful ISI intelligence agency of, at best, not looking very hard for him and, at worst, helping him out, a notion that Pakistan angrily rejects. Officials point to the 600 al-Qaida suspects they have killed or detained, including the 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, now being transferred to Guantánamo Bay for trial. "They are on the run," Musharraf told me during an interview at his office last April. "Wherever we locate them, we hit them." Intelligence cooperation with America is close. When an American Predator drone fired missiles at a mud-walled house in Bajaur last year - thinking, mistakenly, that Ayman al-Zawahiri, Bin Laden's deputy, was inside - Musharraf protested loudly. In fact, he had approved of the strike in advance. "For domestic reasons, we had to say we knew nothing," admitted a senior aide.
But after five years of searching, with the trail still cold, the recriminations have started. The US, frustrated at the limitations of its electronic surveillance, wants to develop more "human intelligence" - essentially, local tribesmen it can pay for information. "The outer shells [of his security] are more attenuated. They are the ones that can be turned," says one US official in Islamabad. But Pakistan's ISI refuses permission to roam the tribal areas, saying that it is too dangerous for any white man, much less an American. Tensions are rising. "We give Musharraf $300m a year in military aid alone," says the official. "People will start saying, 'What the hell are we getting for this? What are the results?'"
Americans also admit that they have themselves to blame. Infighting is one problem. The CIA recently shut down the specialised Bin Laden unit due to bureaucratic wrangling, Scheuer recently disclosed. The US official blames President Bush for employing the shoot-'em-up tactics that have alienated Muslim opinion in places where the US needed help the most. "It should have been presented as a search for justice using intelligence and law enforcement. If we kept it in that ideological space, simply asking Muslims for help in tracking down a criminal, we would have made headway," he says. "Instead, we regarded it as a war we could fight through the military with heavy and blunt instruments that were telegraphed for hundreds of miles."
The other pressure is Iraq. As with the army, many intelligence assets have been transferred from Afghanistan to the Middle East, Scheuer says. "What is left is now engaged almost fully in trying to prevent the fall of Hamid Karzai's government, not looking for Osama bin Laden," he says.
It may already be too late. Bin Laden has evolved into more of a symbol than an operator, some argue. Maulana Muhammad Alam, a radical preacher in the Dir valley, 80 miles above Peshawar, says: "Osama is not the name of an individual; it's a movement ... Osama is the right of every individual to fight and defend Islam." And anyway, his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri, is the true brains of the outfit. Scheuer disagrees. "This business that he's the puppet and Zawahiri is the string-puller is completely wrong. Bin Laden is dangerous because he is talented. He is a genuinely historic personality."
But capture, even if possible, would also bring problems. If it happened in Pakistan, Musharraf would face colossal public protest. In the US, they would face the prospect of the world's most potent media manipulator in a New York courtroom, on CNN, for possibly three years. "You only have to look at the trial of Saddam to see how that can go wrong," says one diplomat. In that case, the only solution is assassination, even at the risk of creating a martyr - perhaps the only thing that Bin Laden himself agrees with. In speeches, he repeatedly stresses that his own survival - a "slave of Allah" - is unimportant. One rumour has it that his bed is surrounded by landmines hooked up to a trigger.
In the meantime, we await the next tape or the next attack. A video message last weekend by Adam Yehiye Gadahn, a 28-year-old American al-Qaida convert urging US soldiers to embrace Islam, passed off largely unnoticed. But it could have an ominous significance. After 9/11, Islamic scholars criticised Bin Laden for failing to follow a Qur'an teaching that enemies should be offered a chance to convert before an attack. Now that obligation has been fulfilled, says Scheuer.
"The tape was directed at Muslims to show that [al-Qaida] has gone the extra mile to get us off the hook," he says. "It's a mug's game to guess when, but I wouldn't be surprised to see another attack in the United States before the end of this year"
Then again, who really knows? One man does. He is sitting in a concealed room, ringed by cagey men ready to die, sipping from a flask of green tea, thinking and plotting. He knows. But he's not saying - at least for now.
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006
http://www.guardian.co.uk/september11/story/0,,1869516,00.html
Guardian: Global warming to wash away beaches,
warns Spanish study
Giles Tremlett in Madrid
Monday September 11, 2006
The fight for space on Spain's beaches looks set to grow fiercer over the next four decades as the sand starts to disappear under a rising sea that also threatens to flood beach-side homes, according to a Spanish environment ministry report.
Spain's beaches are expected to shrink by an average of 15 metres (50ft) by 2050 as global warming causes sea levels to creep up while stronger waves and currents eat away at the coastline.
In some of the worst hit resorts, unprotected beaches could vanish altogether while salt water washes into holiday homes, the authors warn.
"I wouldn't buy a house in La Manga," said the report's coordinator, Professor Raúl Medina, referring to an area in the south-eastern region of Murcia popular with British holiday-home buyers.
"It is a bad investment because I doubt that my children would be able to use it," he told the newspaper El País.
Global warming is melting the icecaps and raising sea levels around Spain by 2.5mm a year. By 2050 that will mean a 12cm-15cm rise, with northern Spain's Atlantic coast suffering most.
The Mediterranean coast, where many resorts already have to truck in sand each spring, will lose an average of around 10 metres of beach by 2050.
Hotel owners in the southern Costa del Sol have already asked for permission to bring in their own sand as beaches begin to shrink. The report also recommends that sea walls be raised in some Spanish ports and that planning permits for beach-side buildings take into account the changing shape of the coastline.
It also warns that some of Europe's most important wetland sites will be hit.
The Albufera of Valencia and the delta of the River Ebro as well as the Dóana national park in south-west Spain - one of Europe's biggest nature reserves - will all suffer the consequences of rising water levels and higher salinity.
"It will be even worse by the end of the century, when a lot of today's children will still be alive," warned the ministry's top climate change official, Arturo Gonzalo.
As climate change quickened, he said, so too would the rate at which sea levels rose. "The sea level will have risen between half a metre and a metre by the end of the century, and up to 50 metres of beach will disappear in some areas."
The warnings came as Spain's sweltering summer showed little sign of abating this month. Twenty cities have posted record monthly temperatures in the first week of the month, with the north-western city of Ourense recording a temperature of 41.4C (107F).
Farmers in Murcia, meanwhile, gathered to pray for autumn rains to prevent a third consecutive year of drought. Some 2,000 farmers asked the Virgin of Fuensanta, Murcia's patron saint, for rain.
Rainfall over the year up to September was 15% down on the average. The previous year had been 21% down, Spain's meteorology institute reported.
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006
http://www.guardian.co.uk/climatechange/story/0,,1869430,00.html
Página/12:
Nueva York conmemora su día más oscuro
BUSH VISITO LA ZONA CERO, DONDE HASTA 2001 ESTUVIERON LAS TORRES GEMELAS
Hace cinco años, dos aviones se estrellaban contra el World Trade Center, otro contra el Pentágono y un cuarto, contra un campo en Pensilvania. Morían 2973 personas. Y comenzaba la guerra antiterrorista de la administración republicana.
Lunes, 11 de Septiembre de 2006
A cinco años de los atentados contra las Torres Gemelas, el presidente George Bush quiere volver a utilizar el tema de la inseguridad para mejorar su popularidad. Sin embargo, la falta de resultados en Irak y en la búsqueda de Osama bin Laden le están jugando en contra esta vez. El mandatario viajó ayer a Nueva York, junto con su esposa, Laura, para colocar una ofrenda floral en la Zona Cero, el lugar en donde hasta 2001 estaban las famosas torres. Pero este acto oficial fue muy diferente del de cinco años atrás. Esta vez, a Bush lo esperaban decenas de manifestantes que lo abuchearon y le demandaron que se retire de Irak.
De impecable luto, Bush y su esposa depositaron flores rojas y blancas en el lugar donde se levantaban las imponentes Torres Gemelas. Este fue el primer acto oficial de los dos días de homenaje que la Casa Blanca planeó para recordar el mayor atentado que hayan sufrido los estadounidenses en su territorio. Hace exactamente cinco años, dos aviones se estrellaban contra las torres del World Trade Center, otro contra el Pentágono y un cuarto contra un campo de Shankville, Pensilvania, en el noreste de la mayor potencia del mundo. Entre los cuatro atentados, 2973 personas murieron.
Nueva York amaneció ayer con grandes banderas colgadas en los edificios públicos y en los puentes que unen los distintos sectores de la gran ciudad. Toda la ciudad se preparaba para conmemorar el día más oscuro de toda su historia. La Casa Blanca ya anunció que Bush participará hoy de un acto en la Zona Cero, en el que se leerán los nombres de todas las víctimas. Los familiares y amigos de los que fallecieron serán los encargados esta vez de pronunciar los discursos. El mandatario luego se reunirá para almorzar con parte del equipo de bomberos que ayudó en las tareas de rescate en 2001. Los actos se completarán con la visita de Bush a Pensilvania y al Pentágono, los escenarios de los otros dos atentados. Ya a la noche, el presidente se dirigirá al país desde la Casa Blanca.
Pero Bush ya ha comenzado a hablar. El sábado pasado, en un discurso con un claro tinte electoral con miras a las legislativas de noviembre, el presidente destacó el “valor inestimable” que tuvo su guerra contra el terrorismo para la seguridad de Estados Unidos y de sus aliados –-seguramente se olvidó de los atentados en Londres y Madrid–. Incluso, Bush se animó a conjeturar que de no haber comenzado una campaña contra el terrorismo, Al Qaida hubiese podido atacar de nuevo al país.
Utilizando el miedo que instalaron los atentados en la sociedad estadounidense, Bush busca volver a ganar apoyo electoral a sólo semanas de las legislativas. Por primera vez en muchos años, los demócratas podrían recuperar el control de al menos una Cámara. Por eso, este quinto aniversario del 11-S está más politizado que nunca. El presidente del Partido Demócrata, Howard Dean, polemizó ayer con la secretaria de Estado, Condoleezza Rice. Dean criticó al gobierno por no avocarse lo suficiente a la guerra contra el terrorismo por estar demasiado ocupado con Irak. “Lo que teníamos que haber hecho es ir tras Bin Laden a gran escala. Debemos capturarlo, debemos matarlo”, afirmó el dirigente opositor.
Por su parte, Rice intentó defender la decisión de atacar a Irak, recordando el supuesto vínculo entre Saddam Hussein y Al Qaida –aunque el propio vicepresidente Dick Cheney reconoció que nunca pudieron confirmarlo–. La funcionaria no sólo le estaba contestando al líder demócrata, sino también al propio Senado. La semana pasada, el Comité de Inteligencia de la Cámara alta difundió un informe en el que descarta que el ex mandatario iraquí haya tenido vínculos con la red terrorista dirigida por Bin Laden. “Saddam Hussein no tenía confianza en Al Qaida y consideraba a los extremistas islámicos como una amenaza a su régimen, y negó todos los pedidos de ayuda material y operativa que le realizó Al Qaida”, afirma el documento.
La prensa estadounidense tampoco quiere que Bush sume puntos en las encuestas con este nuevo aniversario del 11-S. En su edición de ayer, el diario The Washington Post afirmó que la Casa Blanca hace dos años que no tiene un dato fuerte sobre el paradero de Bin Laden, según reconocieron funcionarios de primera línea de Washington y de Kabul. No obstante, Bush continúa promocionando sus “victorIas” sobre el terrorismo y atacando la frontera entre Afganistán y Pakistán, la misma zona que bombardea desde la invasión a ese país en 2001.
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Aniversario del otro 11 de septiembre
MAS DE DIEZ MIL CHILENOS MARCHARON; HUBO DISTURBIOS AISLADOS
Lunes, 11 de Septiembre de 2006
En su primer aniversario del golpe militar como presidenta, Michelle Bachelet intentó imprimirles un clima de reflexión a las conmemoraciones. Mientras el gobierno realizará un acto hoy, más de diez mil personas marcharon por las calles de Santiago ayer para recordar a los 3200 muertos y 1200 desaparecidos que dejó la larga dictadura de Augusto Pinochet. La manifestación hizo una de sus paradas en el Palacio de La Moneda, en donde padres y abuelos pudieron explicarles a sus hijos y nietos lo que sucedió hace 33 años, el 11 de septiembre de 1973. “Mira, hijo, ése es (Salvador) Allende, que luchó por lo que era justo”, le dijo un padre a su pequeño de cinco años que miraba atentamente el monumento del primer dirigente marxista que llegó a la presidencia por la vía electoral, en Chile y en el mundo.
La manifestación masiva fue convocada, como todos los años, por organizaciones de derechos humanos, agrupaciones sociales y partidos de izquierda. A pesar del mensaje pacífico de sus organizadores y de la fuerte seguridad policial que había desplegado el gobierno, la jornada quedó teñida por la violencia de no más de cien encapuchados que en dos oportunidades chocaron con los carabineros. Los enfrentamientos duraron casi dos horas en total y dejaron, según la policía, tres oficiales heridos y cerca de 30 personas detenidas. Primero, un grupo de encapuchados, presuntamente de un grupo anarquista, lanzó una bomba incendiaria y varias botellas con pintura contra el Palacio de La Moneda. Los ataques se extendieron a un banco, un local de comida y varias paradas de colectivos aledañas a la sede presidencial. Tras esos incidentes, la marcha continuó hasta el Cementerio General. Cerca de allí, un grupo de encapuchados volvió a enfrentarse con los carabineros, que los dispersaron con chorros de agua y gases lacrimógenos.
Exceptuando estos choques, la marcha fue ordenada y pacífica. Miles de personas caminaron con banderas rojas y pancartas en las que recordaban al ex presidencia Allende y a las víctimas de la dictadura pinochetista. La gruesa columna de manifestantes, compuesta por personas de todas las edades, comenzó en la céntrica Plaza de Los Héroes, paró en La Moneda, para luego partir hacia el Cementerio General. Allí realizó un acto final frente al monumento que recuerda a los detenidos desaparecidos y a los ejecutados políticos por el régimen de facto.
Tras el paso de la columna por el costado de la sede presidencial, cientos de claveles rojos adornaban la puerta del número 80 de la calle Morandé, por donde los militares sacaron el cadáver del presidente ese martes 11 de septiembre. También colocaron un lienzo con fotografías de algunos de los desaparecidos junto a la puerta del palacio presidencial. “Yo vengo hace años a la marcha. Es un rito necesario”, explicó una de las mujeres mientras miraba el edificio, en el que Allende resistió sus últimas horas, junto con un grupo de escoltas y de compañeros.
La marcha de ayer en Santiago tuvo como objetivo no sólo recordar los horrores de la dictadura dirigida por Pinochet, sino también honrar a Allende. “Sigan ustedes sabiendo que, mucho más temprano que tarde, abrirán las grandes alamedas por donde pase el hombre libre para construir una sociedad mejor.” Esta fue la última frase que pronunció el mandatario esa mañana, antes de que la radio que lo transmitía fuera bombardeada. Ayer, miles de chilenos intentaron hacer realidad ese sueño.
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Una historia de éxito
GERRY MCDERMOTT, CIENTISTA POLITICO, ESPECIALISTA EN ECONOMIA INTERNACIONAL
Su centro de interés es la competitividad: cómo hacen algunos sectores, regiones o países para crecer y sostener el crecimiento en el tiempo. Aunque parece una historia reservada a países como Corea, McDermott encontró un ejemplo complejo y matizado aquí mismo, en la industria del vino.
Por Sergio Kiernan
Lunes, 11 de Septiembre de 2006
–¿Por qué investigar Argentina si está buscando entender los mecanismos del éxito económico? El nuestro no es un país particularmente exitoso...
–Argentina es muy interesante por la gran variedad de soluciones e iniciativas que se tomaron a niveles por debajo del nacional. Yo quería encontrar historias de éxito pero que convivieran con historias de fracaso, para entender mejor qué hace que estas cosas funcionen. Hay muchas historias de fracasos en el continente, lo que buscaba era la variación, el éxito, el fracaso y la mediocridad. Necesitaba una economía lo suficientemente grande como para ver dentro de una misma industria las variaciones regionales, algo que anduviera bien en una provincia o región, que anduviera más o menos en otra, que fracasara en una tercera. Así empecé, tomando varios sectores y también viendo qué pasaba en Brasil y Chile. Terminé concentrado en autopartes y en la industria del vino.
–¿Por qué esos dos?
–Por un lado, porque hay datos, por otro porque quería estudiar sectores con tecnologías diferentes, estrategias y estructuras empresarias distintas. Y por supuesto, una es industria tradicional y la otra es transformación de materias primas. Pero lo que comparten es que son actividades tradicionales, muy influidas por empresas internacionales y por los mercados exteriores, y son sectores con amplias variantes internas, que producen bienes de muy baja y también de muy alta calidad. También que acusan y mucho las diferentes políticas a nivel nacional, provincial y hasta municipal.
–¿Cómo se investigan estas actividades?
–Con muchas entrevistas en el lugar, con muchas visitas. Debo haber hecho por lo menos cien entrevistas en ambas industrias, a funcionarios, directivos de cámaras, gerentes y líderes técnicos como ingenieros o enólogos. Por otro lado, con el IAE hicimos algo que creo que nunca se hizo en América latina, que es desarrollar un método para medir la competitividad de una empresa. Esto trasciende la ganancia o facturación, porque hay una tremenda volatilidad en esos factores, al menos aquí, con un mercado con tantos problemas. Esos números no te dicen mucho. Entonces, hablando con colegas de Wharton, buscamos medir algo que ya sabíamos: que las compañías compiten no sólo ganando dinero sino desarrollando en el tiempo una serie de capacidades que les permiten innovar sus productos y sus procesos, cambiar. Son capacidades dinámicas, un fenómeno muy bien estudiado hoy en día que se considera clave para el desarrollo.
–¿Y eso cómo se mide?
–Adaptamos algunos métodos usados en países desarrollados. Ya sabíamos que la capacidad de upgrading, de hacer mejoras de un modo continuado, es esencial para industrias como la biotecnología, la electrónica, la automotriz y también la del vino. Para medirlo, desarrollamos dos cuestionarios. Uno usa la Escala Likert, que es algo técnico que básicamente permite graduar de uno a cinco las respuestas. Por ejemplo, pedimos a gerentes que graduaran su capacidad de control de calidad, de introducir novedades y tomar riesgos, de alentar que los empleados sugieran ideas. Y, algo muy importante, cómo y con quién se comunican cuando necesitan resolver un problema, tanto dentro como fuera de la empresa. Cuando se introducen, por ejemplo, nuevas variedades de uva o nuevos varietales, hay un nivel de riesgo y experimentación que buscamos medir porque es central a la cuestión. Es un proceso de aprendizaje que incluye coordinar el experimento con otras firmas, con los proveedores y hasta con la competencia.
–¿Es común este tipo de actitud?
–Las empresas que logran competir globalmente suelen ser bastante planas, tienen una pirámide chata, con pocos jefes, y las ideas circulan rápido, se hacen experimentos y se fracasa sin problemas. Son firmas con equipos que trabajan juntos y se comunican.
–¿Y cuál es el segundo tipo de preguntas que hizo?
–Información sobre qué produce la empresa, qué hicieron, qué hacen, cómo cambiaron sus productos, cuánto invierten en tecnología, cuánto en capacitación. Con esta información se pinta un retrato de la empresa, de su capacidad de generar y manejar la innovación, de generar nuevos roles internos. Esto nunca se había hecho y al llegar la información logramos comenzar un retrato del sector. Al mismo tiempo, con mi equipo invertimos mucho tiempo preguntando a las empresas cómo es su relación con otras empresas, con instituciones y organizaciones. Esto es porque las redes empresariales son muy importantes para la creación y difusión del conocimiento, para acelerar el aprendizaje y difundir nuevas prácticas y standards. Esto es algo que en Wharton investigamos en otras regiones del mundo y sabemos que también es importante otro tipo de institución, pero no queda en claro cuál: algunos lo llaman capital social, que es algo muy difícil de medir. Nosotros tratamos de medirlo también, preguntando cuánto una empresa interactúa con ONG o asociaciones locales, con universidades o entes oficiales. Y muy importante, cuánto se relaciona con las nuevas entidades público/privadas, esas que son formadas por un sector pero con participación del Estado. Fue muy interesante hacer este survey, sobre todo comparando Mendoza y San Juan, donde nos ayudó mucho el Instituto de Desarrollo Rural, que es justamente una de estas instituciones públicas y privadas a la vez.
–¿Por qué es tan importante la competitividad?
–Porque hay que ser competitivo en este mundo para obtener divisas y financiar el crecimiento. Países medianos, como Argentina, no pueden crecer sólo con lo que generan internamente, tienen que exportar para pagar su deuda porque en el ínterin se endeudan para pagar todo tipo de cosas, de hospitales a bonos. Argentina quebró después de la convertibilidad porque si bien el sistema era defendible para controlar la hiper, lo era sólo a corto plazo. En los noventa, el mercado internacional compraba aquí acciones de empresas a privatizar y bonos argentinos, deuda. No hay país que no tenga deuda, pero para pagarla hay que exportar y Argentina sólo exportaba el 10 por ciento del PBI. Para comparar, Chile exporta el 35 por ciento, México el 30, Polonia casi el 40. O sea, si no se exporta, se quiebra, y para exportar hay que competir. Hay que tener una cotización de la moneda normal, pero devaluar no es todo: siempre hay un país más barato que Argentina, siempre está Botswana o Bangladesh.
–Y siempre está Inglaterra, carísima pero exportadora.
–¡Claro! Lo que hay que pensar es qué hacen ellos que no haga Argentina. Por ejemplo, Italia, país donde el Estado funciona mal, que tiene costos laborales muy, pero muy caros. Italia no es un ejemplo, pero se gana la vida con zapatos y ropa de alto nivel y precio. Italia compite no por sus costos sino por lo que agrega, por su capacidad de innovar, y eso lo cobran más. Para cobrar más hay que innovar constantemente, hay que tener una enorme capacidad de cambio. Y esto no es apenas algo de las empresas, es algo de la sociedad. Argentina no estaba creando nada de esto, las empresas no invertían, se perdía la capacidad de innovar. Para bajar costos se despedían ingenieros, se cerraban las oficinas de investigación, diseño y desarrollo. En los noventa, el sesenta por ciento de la producción industrial era de pequeñas o medianas empresas, que no tenían ninguna red de apoyo ni podían crear solas, no tenían escala. Lo que es crucial para Argentina ahora es aprovechar la buena coyuntura de hoy para invertir en la capacidad de innovar en toda la sociedad. Si todo se basa en los costos, en el dólar caro, la ventaja competitiva se va a perder en poco tiempo.
–¿Cómo se mantiene la competitividad?
–Agregando valor. Es la única manera de competir en el mundo. En ciertas industrias, hay que estar al filo, siempre moviéndose hacia arriba. El 87 por ciento de las exportaciones de Chile son cobre, maderas, pescado, vino y fruta fresca. ¿Cómo se sostiene una cosa así? Desarrollando procesos de calidad propios, lo que hace que la fruta chilena sea de excelente calidad y se venda muy cara en Estados Unidos. Desarrollando una industria pesquera de excelente calidad. Cada fruta, cada pescado es individualmente excelente, no es un commodity cualquiera. Los compradores internacionales se fijan en el precio, por supuesto, pero también quieren el producto presentado de una manera específica en un momento específico, y si uno no puede cumplir se queda afuera. La capacidad de cumplir así es bastante compleja y una empresa solita no puede hacerlo, es una economía entera, un país. Y luego la cosa se complica, como en Chile, donde está naciendo un sector de biotecnología que proviene de trabajar con pescado. Es una industria del conocimiento que se paga muy bien.
–Usted encontró un sector así aquí en Argentina, el del vino.
–En Mendoza, que no es un paraíso pero hizo muchas cosas bien. Acá entra lo de comparar dentro de un mismo sector. Por más de un siglo, Mendoza y San Juan tuvieron grandes industrias del vino que hasta los ochenta produjeron enormes cantidades de vino de baja calidad, más que nada para exportar. Hoy, el vino argentino es competitivo, más que nada gracias a Mendoza, que es responsable de la mayoría de las innovaciones. Entonces: ¿qué empezó a hacer Mendoza que no hacía antes? ¿Qué hizo Mendoza que San Juan no hizo o no pudo hacer? La historia es interesante y se puede aplicar a otras regiones e industrias. Lo que hicieron en la provincia fue crear una base amplia para que el desarrollo sea sustentable en el tiempo. Durante diez años crearon o renovaron instituciones público/privadas que no se ven en otras provincias. Estas instituciones proveen a las empresas un repertorio de servicios como bases de datos, laboratorios, entrenamiento, servicios de extensión, programas de exportación, cosas que la mayoría de las empresas no pueden hacer y que el gobierno es incapaz de hacer. Estos son bienes intelectuales que se crearon y se pusieron a disposición del sector, de un modo que les permitió a las empresas aprender más y más rápido, les dio acceso a nuevos conocimientos.
–O sea, un pool de recursos, un ámbito donde circula el conocimiento.
–Y una cosa más, de inmensa importancia: esas instituciones son lugares donde las empresas se encuentran y aprenden a compartir información. Las compañías aprenden muy rápido cuando encuentran cómo compartir la información. La tecnología y el conocimiento agropecuarios no se aprenden de un libro, porque son muy dependientes del contexto en que se aplican, del lugar concreto. No hay un molde que sirva para todos los casos, hay que adaptar todo y experimentar. Si uno tiene varios coordinando experimentos y compartiendo los resultados, se aprende mucho más rápido. Mendoza acertó en esto y por eso más y más de sus empresas tienen conocimientos y procesos más sofisticados, tienen capacidades de innovación en crecimiento.
–¿Por qué ocurrió ahora? ¿Por qué no antes?
–En parte porque en el sector privado ya circulaban estas ideas hace tiempo, pero la diferencia ocurrió en el Gobierno, porque el Estado tiene un rol crítico en esto. Si el Estado es centralista, si aísla el poder de la legislatura y de los actores privados, no hay desarrollo sustentado en el tiempo, se fracasa en lo económico como en lo político. Para fines de los ochenta, Mendoza tenía una seria crisis en el sector agropecuario y en el vitivinícola, con una piedra alrededor del cuello que era la gigantesca bodega estatal Giol. En los noventa, cuando todo el mundo privatizaba, Mendoza hizo algo distinto, transformó a Giol en una federación de cooperativas vitivinícolas, llamada Fecovita. Esto no sólo salvó económicamente a la empresa sino que fue un aprendizaje para el Estado mendocino sobre cómo crear políticas hablando con otros actores, sociales y económicos. Para crear Fecovita, el gobierno hizo 500 encuentros con pequeños productores, porque Giol tenía como proveedores a 4000 pequeños productores. Les propuso ayudarlos a formar cooperativas para que tuvieron poder de manejar la nueva empresa, lo que también fue una movida política importante y astuta. Al mismo tiempo, se buscó involucrar al sector, al gobierno, a los municipios, en solucionar problemas reales. El gobierno aprendió a incorporar actores no oficiales en la elaboración de políticas. Con el tiempo y en especial en el sector del vino, esto se fue institucionalizando, aparecieron instancias y grupos que antes no existían, o las que existían cambiaron mucho. Como por ejemplo, el Inta en Mendoza, que se fortaleció y sofisticó mucho tejiendo redes con el sector privado y con los gobiernos locales, y dándoles más poder a sus consejos asesores locales. Este tipo de gobiernos colectivos tienen una mayor capacidad de resolver problemas y por lo tanto tienen mayor capacidad de innovar. Esto es lo que pasó en Mendoza.
–¿Y qué resultados concretos tuvo este proceso?
–Que hasta antes de la devaluación Argentina estaba progresando en la exportación de vinos, y ya tiene casi el 3 por ciento del mercado total de vinos del mundo. Más importante, cada año se exporta más, se está creciendo al 23 por ciento anual, cada vez se vende vino más caro y fino, y las ventas son en los mercados más sofisticados, Europa, EE.UU. y Japón.
–¿Y San Juan?
–San Juan era muy dependiente de la promoción industrial y los fondos federales. Lo interesante es que ahora están recibiendo muchas inversiones en el sector vitivinícola, gracias a que trabajan con Mendoza y a que están tratando de imitar el modelo que funcionó. Es un cambio muy promisorio, tratando de reparar errores como haber privatizado su bodega estatal, Cavic, de la manera tradicional. La bodega privatizada acabó quebrando. Ahora, hasta la sociedad que agrupa a los grandes productores se dividió, los que quieren un cambio se fueron. Nada de lo que pasó en Mendoza estaba escrito, ni siquiera era esperable viendo la provincia a fines de los ochenta.
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Los dientes del tiempo
Por Juan Sasturain
Lunes, 11 de Septiembre de 2006
“Si el tiempo no ataca a la obra,
muerde al obrero.”
Estelas, Victor Segalen
Hace unos meses, la noticia era que se desmoronaban tramos de la mítica muralla china: las lluvias, cataclismos puntuales; el tiempo y sus avatares, en suma. Ahora, según cables fechados en Pekín la semana pasada, la pagoda de madera de Yingxian, la más alta del mundo en su tipo, ha comenzado a emular a la torre de Pisa y se inclina, se viene pausadamente abajo sin que los expertos sepan cómo evitarlo. Erigida hace 950 años durante la dinastía Liao (916-1125), la osada estructura octogonal tiene la excepcional particularidad de estar construida íntegramente de madera sin utilizar un solo clavo. Ubicada en el templo budista de Fogong, en la provincia norteña de Shanxi, la pagoda es apenas más alta que la emblemática torre italiana: 67,31 metros de altura y nueve pisos (cinco visibles desde el exterior y cuatro ocultos). La construcción lleva el nombre de Sakyamuni, fundador del budismo, y sus muros interiores están decorados con estatuas y pinturas de Buda que son fundamentales –dicen los que saben– para estudiar la religión y las técnicas de grabado de la dinastía Liao.
Aunque en los últimos siglos ha soportado y superado terremotos, tormentas, relámpagos y guerras, en la actualidad la supervivencia –unida a su condición vertical– de la estilizada torre de madera está amenazada a plazo más o menos fijo. Mientras, a la espera de que el ángulo de inclinación no difiera muy aceleradamente de los noventa grados clásicos del equilibrio, una brigada de bomberos sigue vigilando la pagoda las 24 horas del día para defenderla de otra de sus mayores amenazas: el fuego.
Los expertos encargados de neutralizar la falsa escuadra y evitar que la pagoda se venga cada vez más en banda –según puntualizan los mismos cables– se debaten entre tres opciones: desmantelarla y reconstruirla usando la madera y la técnica original, elevar los tres primeros pisos para fijar los dos inferiores (que son los que más se han inclinado), y reforzar las partes dañadas con estructuras de acero. La opción escogida será probablemente una combinación de las tres alternativas. Ninguna de ellas, estamos seguros, responderá al espíritu con que la pagoda fue construida: no provocar al tiempo ni desafiarlo sino ofrecerse dócilmente a él. Como ya lo explicó alguna vez y para siempre el malogrado Victor Segalen en palabras perfectas –ellas sí inaccesibles a los estragos del tiempo–.
Quien me reveló las maravillas del médico naval y arqueólogo francés que descubrió China y se dejó conquistar por ella hace casi un siglo fue el pintor Daniel Santoro. Primero descubrí, en un catálogo o en un libro suyo dedicado a la estética y a la gráfica peronista, la memorable cita del acápite: “Si el tiempo no ataca a la obra, muerde al obrero”. Después, la única vez que fui a su taller, conversamos, con Santoro, entre otras cosas y entre otros signos e ideogramas, de esa cita luminosa, de los chinos y del maravilloso Segalen. Fue una verdadera revelación poética y filosófica que ahora, con la historia de la pagoda de madera encastrada que parece que se viene cayendo y que se cae, vuelve con la belleza de sus sordos ruidos.
Victor Segalen (Brest, 1878) publicó los poemas en prosa de Estelas (Estèles) en 1912 en Pekín, donde estaba en misión oficial primero como médico militar, luego como arqueólogo y expedicionario. De regreso a París, realizó una edición aumentada de 64 textos, la definitiva, que dedicó a Paul Claudel, y retornó a Oriente. Volvería a Europa sólo para morir.
Es que China, toda la cultura china, lo conmovió. Segalen comprendió enseguida –como le sucedió por entonces a Pound en el campo de la expresión poética– que ahí había otra cosa, otra manera de ver y concebir el mundo que no era la del trágico Occidente. Siguió su trabajo de iluminación con Pinturas (Peintures), que apareció en 1916, y el extenso poema Tibet que se publicará, como el resto de su escasa obra, tras su muerte en la oscura Huelgoat, en 1919.
Segalen no tuvo contacto con el pobre Apollinaire o con el manco Cendrars (para nos salir de la lengua francesa ni de los obuses de la época), pero junto a ellos y desde otro lado dejó una obra extraordinariamente original previa a que estallaran primero Dadá y después la revolución surrealista en la inmediata posguerra.
Las luminosas 64 “estelas”, forma de composición “inspirada en esos monumentos limitados a una tabla de piedra erigida verticalmente que lleva una inscripción y cuya frente plana se incrusta en el cielo de China”, están distribuidas en el libro en seis series irregulares, según estén dispuestas “de cara” al Norte, al Sur, a Oriente, a Occidente, al Mediodía o colocadas “al borde del camino”...
La novena estela de las que dan cara al Mediodía se titula A los diez mil años y en tono admonitorio aconseja a “los hijos de Han” cuya sabiduría alcanza “diez mil años y diez mil veces diez mil años” no hacer lo que hacen “estos bárbaros (los occidentales) que descartando la madera, el ladrillo y la tierra, edifican en la roca a fin de edificar para la eternidad”, “veneran tumbas, cuya única gloria consiste en existir todavía, puentes célebres por ser viejos y templos de piedra demasiado dura... Se enorgullecen de que su cemento se endurece con los soles; las lunas mueren pulimentando sus losas...” No saben que “ninguna cosa inmóvil escapa a los dientes hambrientos de las edades” y que “la permanencia no es nunca el destino de lo sólido”. Para terminar: “Lo inmutable no habita en vuestros muros sino en vosotros, hombres lentos, hombres continuos...” Y ahí, en seguida, el verso hermoso, terrible: “Si el tiempo no ataca a la obra, muerde al obrero”.
Por eso, hay que alimentar al tiempo –dice Segalen por boca china o China a través de Segalen–. Hay que saciarlo con maderas pintadas, edificar en arena que ceda, arcilla húmeda, erigir bellos techos que han de derrumbarse, “acribillarán el suelo con sus escamas”.
La pagoda de madera de Yingxian, cansada de siglos, se inclina en callado, dócil asentimiento. No se cae; sólo vuelve a casa.
© 2000-2006 www.pagina12.com.ar|República Argentina|Todos los Derechos Reservados
http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/contratapa/13-72827-2006-09-11.html
Pambazuka: The hopes and illusions
of world trade liberalisation for women in Africa
Cheikh Tidiane Dièye (2006-09-07)
Africa has faced ten years of unfettered liberalisation that, argues Cheikh Tidiane Dièye, has left the continent on its knees. Women, more than any other group, suffer the weight of the constraints of poverty largely brought about by the world trade system. It is women that must play a crucial role in winning the struggle for a better trading system.
Even though over the last twenty years many African nations have adopted sometimes draconian economic reforms, the benefits of trade liberalisation that were promised have not materialised. On the other hand, developed nations have enjoyed 70% of the wealth generated by trade liberalisation. In some respects, world trade regulations, defined for the most part by industrialised countries during the Uruguay Round agreements between 1986 and 1994, have only increased Africa’s economic problems.
Before an “ambiguous consensus” [1] was reached at Doha, which was at the heart of the launch of the round of multilateral negotiations that tool place at the World Trade Organisation (WTO), the “battle of Seattle” or “Seattle showdown” [2] revealed to the world the growing dissatisfaction of developing countries with regard to the WTO, whose way of working did not appear to respond to their profound desire for economic progress and development.
With the support of powerful groups of NGOs, they then put into practice their power to block negotiations by refusing to submit to a potential consensus. With this action that was previously unheard of, developing countries, and particularly those in Africa, managed to draw the attention of the international community and the representatives of multilateral institutions to the stark inequalities brought about by inequitable globalisation, whose consequences have been hundreds of millions of human beings being reduced to near total destitution and the almost irreversible destruction of the environment.
This is why in Seattle, while the United Nations and Europe were seeking to enter into a “Millennium Round” of large-scale negotiations concerning new and complex issues, particularly in relation to investment policy, competition, electronic commerce and standards in the areas of labour rights and the environment, a large number of African countries advocated a “Development Round” which would allow interlocutors to discuss the implementation of regulations from the Uruguay Round directly concerning developing countries and to urge industrialised countries to honour their commitments. In this way, these nations hoped finally to succeed in opening developed countries’ markets to their exports, eliminating other structural imbalances that were unfavourable to developing nations, removing tariff, non-tariff and technical barriers imposed on the exports of less developed countries, and developing and making official WTO technical aid and capacity building programmes.
From this perspective, the group of African countries proposed to renew and apply the “special and preferential” measures from the Uruguay agreements, which aimed to facilitate the integration of developing countries into the world trading system.
After Seattle failed, the fourth WTO ministerial conference was held in November 2001 at Doha, Qatar, and the members had a common desire to correct the malfunctioning of the multilateral trading system. The developed countries made promises, among which were to reduce or remove subsidies causing imbalances in global markets, to remove obstacles blocking developing countries’ products entering their markets, to recognise and make effective special and differential treatment, to facilitate poor countries’ access to essential drugs and to create the conditions necessary for the greater participation of these nations in trade negotiations through technical aid and capacity building.
On the other hand, the dogged will of the developed countries to defend the interests of some of their privileged citizens and their multinationals straight away took priority over ethical considerations and concerns for the survival of African populations: access to essential drugs for millions of sick Africans is still being blocked due to market interests; millions of farmers sink into poverty each day as a result of the North’s illegal subsidies [3]; and the pressure to increase the liberalisation of basic social services such as water, education, energy and healthcare is about to destroy what remains of African economies.
One of the most tangible characteristics of African poverty is its “femininity”. Statistics show that African women, more so than any other category, suffer the damaging effects of poverty and all the constraints brought about by the current structure of global economic and trade relations. In healthcare as well as education, access to land and economic resources, etc., African women have remained well below world averages.
In such a context, it is not difficult to establish a link between the situation of women in Africa and the world trade system, which, even if it is not the only explaining factor, is at the very least an important factor. The financial collapse of agriculture and African industries, caused by the combined effect of liberal policies imposed by international financial institutions and WTO rules, affects both rural and urban women, as it subjects them to chronic food insecurity, begging and the dangers of the informal economy in African towns and cities.
Greater liberalisation does not give rise to human development
Many studies have tried to establish a correlation between the level of openness to trade and increased economic growth and human development. In effect, there is no proof that the liberalisation of exchanges leads automatically to economic growth and human development. In a study [4] looking at the relationship between trade and sustainable human development, the UNDP drew an interesting comparison between two countries, in relation to their level of openness to world trade, to demonstrate such an assertion. These countries are Vietnam and Haiti.
Since the beginning of the 1980s, Vietnam has undertaken a progressive approach to reform. It is not a member country of the WTO. It has organised world trade at the level of the state, has maintained a monopoly over imports, and has preserved quantitative restrictions and high customs duties (30 to 50%) on imports of agricultural and industrial products. However, despite these measures being contrary to the “formulas” often advocated by those who hold neo-liberal doctrines, Vietnam has had spectacular success by achieving a growth rate higher than 8% per annum since the mid-1980s, which has earned the country a 12% increase in trade, a considerably reduced level of poverty, including in rural areas and in vulnerable groups (women and young people), and has attracted high levels of foreign direct investment.
Haiti, on the other hand, has become involved in an ambitious road to liberalisation and total openness since 1994/1995. The country has brought its customs tariffs down to a maximum of 15% and has removed all quantitative restrictions. For all this, Haiti’s economy has not evolved. Social indicators have even deteriorated and poverty has, in places, reached worrying levels. Although a member of the WTO, Haiti is one of the most marginal countries in terms of integration into world trade.
Looking at Africa, an analysis of the evolution of world trade over the last twenty years shows that the continent has unfortunately not profited from the benefits [5] that were granted and that, despite all the agreements and preferential schemes, Africa’s share of world trade has dropped significantly from 6% in 1980 to 2% in 2004. In effect, since 1980, African exports have increased at the average annual rate of 1.5%, whereas for the world as whole this increased by 5.8% per year.
The social consequences of such economic decline no longer need to be explained. In sub-Saharan Africa, women in certain areas produce up to 80% of basic food products and therefore play a decisive role in food security at the level of both the family and the nation. And in areas where cash crops predominate, reduced earnings resulting from reduced tariff protections and the large-scale entry of imported goods into national markets has exacerbated the vulnerability of women insofar as they have no other option other than to add to the swelling populations of shanty towns to work in order to survive in informal jobs and small trade.
In the industrial sector, WTO agreements concerning rules for market access for non-agricultural goods have imposed drastic cuts in customs duties, which was the only instrument there to protect African industries. This subjects a growing, and consequently vulnerable, African industry to direct confrontation with big corporations from the developed countries, which has quickly worked to the advantage of the latter. The most edifying example today is the African textile industry, in which countries with a definite relative advantage were obliged to cut hundreds of thousands of jobs even before the agreement on quotas was reached in December 2004. And since 2005, China’s powerful entry into the world textile market has heightened the pressure in this sector. Nigeria, Tunisia, Morocco, Ghana, Senegal and other countries are today experiencing the full force of the crisis in this industry, which has a high potential for employment, including a female workforce.
Even if the liberalisation of the textile industry has increased and diversified the supply of goods in African markets, where prices have also tended to drop, such an outcome cannot compensate for the long-term losses that the de-industrialisation of Africa will bring about. This de-industrialisation has only increased the informalisation of the economy by developing trade around goods produced elsewhere.
The WTO ten years on: economic opportunities or fresh risks?
The ten years of liberalisation under the aegis of the WTO needs to be assessed. Disregarding doctrine and squabbles between different schools of thought, it has been widely accepted that for African countries, trade liberalisation has not produced the results one hoped for.
Even if one has to admit that it is often difficult to measure the real impact of WTO rules on the situation of women in Africa, specific studies, of which there is a real shortage in this area, have concluded that this impact is most worrying when compared with the overall assessment of WTO rules on African populations.
Studies conducted into the liberalisation of the water sector in many African countries have shown that it is mainly women who carry the burden of the fresh constraints brought about by the privatisation of these strategic sectors. In the field of work, liberalisation has certainly increased the opportunities available to women in certain countries, but this usually takes place in very poor conditions and often pays much less.
It is remarkable that the mediocre results achieved for African nations after ten years of liberalisation under the aegis of the WTO has not led developed countries to reassess their positions and objectives. If the negotiations have today become bogged down in differences of opinion such that they have been indefinitely “suspended” by the Director of the WTO, this is not because the organisation is trying to take better account of the interests of developing nations, and Africans in particular. The present crisis is mainly down to the battle between the United States and the European Union on the one side, and the G20 [6] on the other. The battle is over the issue of parallelism [7] of forms. The developed countries are calling for the developing countries to impose drastic cuts in customs duties on industrial goods and to commit to the liberalisation of the trade in services, whereas the developing countries are calling for the other nations to reduce their agricultural subsidies.
Given the present crisis and the gloomy prospects at the WTO, the logical conclusion of an evaluation of its ten years of action should be “mission unaccomplished”.
And the question to ask now is what should be the alternative to the WTO? And what would the consequences of a long-term crisis at the WTO be for African people, and women in particular?
It is extremely tempting to respond in a simplistic way by saying that the failure of negotiations at the WTO could only be to the advantage of African countries due to the unfairness of the current rules. However, if one looks at the power relations at the WTO and in the system of world governance, it shows that such a stance does not stand up easily to clear analysis. The failure of trade negotiations would allow the status quo to gain acceptance once and for all, and would reinforce current trade relations, which are mostly to the detriment of African nations.
Therefore, on the contrary, we must relaunch multilateral negotiations and fight, so that the principle of special and differential treatment for African nations is put in place, made effective and made obligatory, in accordance with the Doha mandate in all areas of the negotiations.
Even if the negotiations have still not really advanced the cause of Africa, they at least allow African populations to hold an interest in them, place more popular pressure on governments and negotiators, provide a platform for African states and civil society organisations (NGOs, producer organisations, trade unions, women’s organisations, etc.) to denounce current trade rules and schemes, and reduce the pressure of governments in the North and multilateral institutions who advocate liberalisation in the interests of the rich.
Conclusion
The way in which trade is governed in today’s world leads to necessarily unfair results. But could it be otherwise in a game whose players are not equal?
Whilst the rules that have been set do not allow African nations to develop the means to compensate those who have been damaged by international trade, developed nations have implemented mechanisms to protect themselves from the dangers brought about by liberalisation.
In such a context, the Doha development agenda could only really achieve its goal of creating a framework for development if it allowed the creation of an international environment that guarantees African countries enough flexibility to implement national standards and policies. This would have the effect of helping these nations protect their populations, markets and institutions from the effects of the market.
Such an approach calls upon African leaders to act responsibly. If it is understood that the system governing world trade should take greater account of the opinions of vulnerable populations, one also needs to recognise that this task must first be carried out at the national level. Greater participation of various types of stakeholder, including politicians, NGOs, producer organisations, women, consumers, the private sector, etc., in the development of trade policy is without doubt a pre-requisite in order to make national interests known at WTO negotiations. From the perspective of gender [8], however, even though efforts have been made for years, there remains a serious shortfall that is holding back African negotiation strategies.
* Cheikh Tidiane Dieye is a socio-anthropologist who has been involved in trade and multilateral negotiations on behalf of Enda Tiers-monde, a member of the Africa Trade Network (ATN). He is co-editor of "Footbridges between trade and durable development", a news bulletin on the trade negotiations.
* This is a shortened version of the original French article, which was translated by Timothy Cleary.
Notes
[1] See Passerelles n° 2 vol 3, November 2001 – January 2002
[2] From a book by Maude Barlow and Tony Clarke (“Global Showdown: How the New Activists are Fighting global corporate rule”, 2002), recounting the demonstrations of global citizens’ movements which prevented the launch of the WTO’s “Millenium Round”.
[3] Interesting studies conducted by NGOs such as Enda Third World, Oxfam and the ICSTD have shown the disastrous impact of American subsidies on the African cotton trade. On this, read the “White Paper on Cotton”, Enda Diapol, 2005.
[4] “Making Global Trade Work for People”, UNDP, 2003
[5] Among these relative benefits, one can cite in particular the unreciprocal trade preferences between the EU and the ACP which characterised the Lomé Convention, the flexibility offered to LDCs at the WTO and, more generally, to the generalised system of preferences.
[6] The G20 is a large group of negotiators based around the big developing countries exporting agricultural goods, such as India, Brazil, Argentina, China and South Africa. The group emerged just before the Cancun Confernece in 2003 and is fighting against subsidies in the North.
[7] This is a concept defended by the EU in particular in its commitments. Each group stands firm and asks the other groups to make the first commitments.
[8] Few African delegations at the WTO ministerial conference in Hong Kong included women.
http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/features/36859
The Independent: The world in 2031:
How September 11 could shape our future
Last week, the Harvard academic Niall Ferguson offered an optimistic prediction of how our world could look, 30 years after the September 11 attacks. But is the future really so rosy? Will our society and way of life survive the traumas of war, terrorism and climate change? Here, three leading historians look ahead - to a time we can only imagine
Published: 11 September 2006
The new Thirty Years' War
by Paul Kennedy
It seems very hard and strange now, to look back more than 30 years to that shocking morning of September 11 2001, and to attempt to reflect on how the world has changed and not changed during those decades. In the catastrophe's immediate aftermath and, in fact, for many years afterwards, it was common to believe that the world's scene was totally different; that the landscape of national and international politics had been transformed by the sabotage and deliberate crashes of four aircraft on American soil.
That certainly was the drumbeat message of the Bush administration of the time and, if anyone can recall those days, for the subsequent wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran, the emergency military expeditions to defend the oilfields of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, and the welter of terrorist attacks upon Europe, North America and Japan in the critical years 2008-2012. They all seemed to justify an apocalyptic view.
How curious, in retrospect, appears that broad post-September 11 conviction that we were on the verge of Armageddon or, to use a softer but still powerful phrase, that we had entered a new Thirty Years War, this time between universalistic liberal values and the fanatic, destructive counter-attack of fundamental Islamicists.
Yet our later knowledge of how the world unfolded in ways very different from those ultra-gloomy assumptions is not just a display of being wise after the event. After all, what were regarded as the major tendencies in global affairs before al-Qa'ida struck the Pentagon and the Twin Towers? Surely they the following: the United States was unquestionably the global No 1, albeit facing serious financial imbalances and militarily overstretch abroad; Asia, led above all by China and India, was rising both economically and militarily; Russia, under Putin's coldly calculated mix of domestic and external stratagems, was steadily recovering its place in world affairs; Europe was getting older and slower but was still a nice place in which to live; Africa was grappling, with mixed results, with more disasters than any other broad region of the Earth; and the Middle East, with exceptions, could not manage the 21st century.
Thirty years later, those major tendencies seem to have held their course, and were to be far less disrupted by the impacts of the September 11 attacks than some of us assumed at the time. Just look at the world around us, in this pleasant early-autumnal week of 2031. The United States still possesses the greatest overall combination of military, economic and technological strengths, but it has been considerably checked and sobered by the fiscal crises and military setbacks of the decade that followed the Bush administration's decision to fight in both Afghanistan and Iraq, so that it now sensibly pursues policies of cooperation - with the other powers, and with international agencies - and much more restraint abroad.
China and India have indeed risen, not without enormous wrenches in their domestic social fabrics, and are now major, responsible actors on the world scene. Putin's clever Bismarckian policies of internal and external improvements paid off; here is the fourth big player on the world chessboard. Europe worries incessantly about itself but, actually, is just fine, a comfortable antidote to America's habit of self-improving and Asia's blinkered commitment to 15-year-plans. Africa endured hell for the first half of these past three decades - continued civil wars, genocides, failed states, environmental calamities - but resourceful peoples in Botswana, Kenya, Sierra Leone, Morocco, South Africa and elsewhere fought off those common foes and advanced, stronger than before, for the tests they endured.
The Middle East was different, but that was true before September 11, even if the subsequent events in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Egypt between that date and the second decade of our 21st century intensified its convulsions. The annual Arab Development Reports composed by the UN Development Programme early in the 21st century had pointed to the many hindrances that would prevent this region from smoothly entering the comity of nations. Regional experts and CIA analysts warned that the area was unstable, unhinged, in so many ways.
Still, the convulsions of 2009-2012 came so thick and fast that, for all their failures, the policy-makers of those years can hardly be dismissed as buffoons; to be fair, they were humanly incapable of dealing with the almost-simultaneous collapse of the regimes in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Syria, the worsening of the Iraqi civil war, the generational struggle for power in Iran, and, above all, the horrifying Iranian nuclear devastation of Tel Aviv as well as much of the city's surrounding suburbs.
The Israeli nuclear counter-strike killed 10 million Iranians, but the ancient Persian entity itself remained, eviscerated but not obliterated. The Great Powers were paralysed, for what exactly was one supposed to do following an Iranian-Israeli nuclear exchange? Frightened, they sought for compromises on all fronts, multiple UN-led peacekeeping missions, and then disentanglement and post-nuclear clean-up. Americans were aroused, but simultaneously scared at going back into that mire - and who exactly did you "nuke" just because Tel Aviv had disappeared?
Europeans were numbed. Putin kept his lips tightly closed. And why should the ever-more-prosperous Asia get involved in stupid religious and ideological wars far to the west? So Israel limped on, awfully damaged, still protected by the US, but facing an unclear future.
Thirty years after the September 11 attacks the Middle East remains unstable, even if moderate political groups are gaining ever more support from a newer generation of Arabs in the Gulf, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia. The most promising fact is that al-Qa'ida is a distant memory, like the anarchists of the 1870s and 1880s. They scared people for a long while, but ran themselves into the sand, especially with their foolish bombings in Shanghai and Beijing in the years 2010 to 2012 to protest at Chinese security measures against Muslims in the country's western provinces.
With an aroused China joining an already belligerent USA in the war against terror, with Putin agreeing and Europe and the rest of the world scuttling to destroy any home-grown terrorists, and with all possible al-Qa'ida financial supporters arrested by cooperative measures among banks (instigated by President Bush), they are now a busted flush. Indeed, the terror organisation is becoming a distant memory.
So, where are we, 30 years after the twin towers came down? Older, certainly; perhaps a bit wiser. It has not been a happy planet, especially in much of Africa and the Middle East. But, in truth, we are in 2031 a lot better off than most of the pundits of 2001 thought we might be. That itself is cause for some rejoicing. But not much.
Paul Kennedy is professor of history at Yale University. His latest book is 'The Parliament of Man: The United Nations and the Quest for World Government', Allen Lane, £25
An age of technological medievalism
by Michael Clarke
The future is another country, we do things differently here; and we never cease to be intrigued by our own schizophrenia of 30 years ago. How did we not see it all more clearly then? Why did we make so light of the West's stunning consumer victory over Communism? We had lived with the possibility of nuclear annihilation as a matter of course, and then in the very decade of victory, made a war out of terrorism, convinced ourselves it was the principal problem we faced, then fought it as if we really wanted to lose.
The fact that we did not was even more curious, and probably astonishes our terrorist adversaries more than us. To be sure, we made it hard for ourselves; getting pulled into three battlefields of the jihadis' own choosing - in Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia. Osama bin Laden's final tape before he succumbed to his kidney disease was full of triumphalism: he had begun the war that others would win; he had used al-Qa'ida to mobilise radical Islam into fighting for itself; and Western leaders had huffed and puffed their way down blind allies. Many of us gloomily agreed with him when we saw that last grainy broadcast. We had failed to win a battle of ideas with the Islamo-fascists, our confidence in ourselves, and our liberties, were on the wane.
Yet it was ideas that finally buried the terrorist challenge: not those of Western governments, but the individual ideas, the technological drive and the creative instincts that fashioned what we now label as the new "technological medievalism". The international system changed so dramatically in that second decade of our century it overtook the war on terror, made it look trivial in the West and unfashionable across the Islamic world.
It was the big crises of the second decade that provoked those systemic changes we now recognise but still struggle to understand. The Middle East went into political meltdown in a chaos that went beyond the capacity of the major powers to contain, and cruelly exposed the long-term lack of any political leadership within the region itself. The United States declared victory and left. The Russians and Chinese dabbled in the fire and got burned. After that, the powers effectively isolated the region and let it spiral into the abyss in which it still is.
In the midst of the energy crisis they could ill afford to do this, but they lacked the capacity to do anything else. The energy crisis reached a political peak in the middle of that decade, resulting in some of the tense stand-offs between the United States and China, while Russia tried to throw its energy weight around Asia and Europe, only to find it lost more than it gained from the resulting tensions. It was a nasty and dangerous time. We got through the period without a formal exchange of nuclear weapons among the 12 nuclear powers, but not without nuclear use by those who had some access to the technology.
While the major powers of the world looked increasingly hamstrung, the effects of climate change, environmental stress and human insecurity arising from crime, poverty and resource-scarcity remained unaddressed, except in endless rhetoric. In 2015 we passed a critical milestone when more than 50 per cent of the world's population was "urbanised" - almost 80 per cent in the developed world. We got used to the concept of mega-cities that would either cope, and be prosperous; or fail, and be sinks of misery and instability. If we spoke about the new American empire in 2001, it had come to feel more like the third-century Roman empire by 2021.
But it was clear by then that people, cities and organisations were making their own decisions. They had accepted that the old 20th-century state was only good for certain things. The technologies of communication, computing and transport that had put more power into the hands of the individual than of the state were given another twist by the impact of biotechnology, nanotechnology and materials science once they really hit the market. National economies became almost completely fractured into regional hot-spots and cool peripheries in the 2020s.
If China had held together for a little longer then its leadership might have harnessed the power of some very hot-spots in Asia the way that India did. But the Chinese government simply could not keep up with the dynamism of key parts of the society. China "regionalised" irrevocably, leaving the Beijing government fading away.
Washington managed to put an ad-man's spin on its own declining relevance. "We're just re-asserting our traditional 19th-century role," it announced. "The economy is dynamic, society can look after itself; we've been arguing against big government for years, now we're practising it."
Europe had long since got used to the idea but still had to give up any notions of a European super-state, or even a unified super-economy.
Our world is one of very postmodern individual values. We've stopped looking for political "isms" to unite us. That's part of history. We've learned to live with a global "non-system" that is far from mere chaos but which perhaps inures us too much to its fierce inequalities, its peripheral miseries side by side with metropolitan power and prosperity; driven relentlessly by the networks of corporate dynasties.
But there is a lot of individual freedom in this world and a local creativity that 20th-century man would not have understood. We are no better than before at dealing with the root causes of climate change, poverty and deprivation, but we have figured out some astonishing ways of dealing with the symptoms.
That is why the jihadi threat faded with an older generation. It was always based on a very 20th-century, fascistic interpretation of collective willpower. Outside the Middle East, Islamic societies adapted to the new medievalism as well and as badly as the rest of us. Not that on our 2031 Earth religion is unimportant, but it was not the meek, but the adaptive, who turned out to inherit it.
Michael Clarke is professor of defence studies at King's College London
The world map redrawn
by Lisa Jardine
There are events in history that sear the shared consciousness of what, at the start of the 21st century, used to be known as the First World. We all remember where we were, on the morning of 11 September 2001, when we got our first sight on a television screen of the twin towers shortly after the first and then the second plane had struck. Thirty years on, we can begin to see that the lasting impact of those traumatic events and their aftermath were not as they appeared at the time.
At the time, it felt like war. The aide who whispered in President Bush's ear that a second plane had struck the south tower told him: "America is under attack." In his first phone call, made as he was driven to safety, the President told the Vice-President: "We're at war - and somebody's going to pay."
If this was war, there had to be an enemy - a nation state against whom war could be declared. Targeting first Afghanistan and then Iraq, on the grounds (more spurious in the second case than the first) that nations that harboured terrorists were legitimate military objectives, perpetuated the idea that some territory - some state or nation - had to be held accountable, and retribution exacted.
On the fifth anniversary of the attack in 2006, commentators were still identifying 9/11 as the epochal moment at the start of a global war. By now, however, it was a "war on terror" against an invisible, fanatical, suicidal enemy bent on global destruction. In August, Bush told the American Legion in Salt Lake City: "This war will be long... but it's a war we must wage, and a war we will win... The war we fight today is more than a military conflict; it is the decisive ideological struggle of the 21st century."
But, since the first decade of the 21st century, our way of seeing the world has irretrievably altered. Who, we now ask, was at war with whom? Was Bush's rhetoric simply that old ruse of defining "the nation" by positing great danger beyond its borders?
We ought to have recognised that the seeds of change were part of the conditions for the cataclysmic event itself. By the beginning of the century, the internet had already made the concept of containment of ideas (and the activities to which they give rise) within conventional national boundaries in effect obsolete. Ideas and contacts, plans and blueprints for action, could be formulated by individuals on opposite sides of the world. They empowered individuals for good or ill, dismantling the structures which had sustained power-from-the-top for centuries.
As the final report of the 9/11 Commission made clear in 2004, in the decade before the attack, border security had been given comparatively low priority. A terrorist attack on US soil was considered extremely unlikely. In fact, controlling those "inside" national borders in 2001, while keeping others "outside", was already an artificial aspiration.
At the same time, easy access to air travel was eroding the distinctions between "immigrant", "migrant" and "visitor". Today, we can see that global mass movement, facilitated by cheap travel, enables contingents of new residents in any country to retain multiple identities, allowing them to participate in many scattered communities, sharing their hopes and fears. Gone are the days when the new arrival had no option but to try to "fit in".
Today, the consequences for global government are well established and have literally redrawn the world map. Nation states are a thing of the past. Territories continue to be administered locally, for convenience, and those residing within the boundaries of "England" or "Denmark" are required to comply with the laws of those lands. But residents also consider themselves fully paid-up members of other groups and gatherings, at multiple, distant locations, communication with which shapes many aspects of their lives - they may buy goods, including everyday items like food and clothing, from outside their country of residence. They certainly spend periods of time elsewhere. They are likely to retain a facility in several languages, sustained by their internet correspondence with friends and relatives abroad.
Secular and sacred are conveniently separated - the former defined by a person's geographical location, the latter by the networks they belong to and with which they regularly communicate. The internet enables connections between individuals without regard for geography, ethnicity, creed or statehood. The territory formerly known as "Israel", for example, is now a jointly and peaceably administered land, most of whose inhabitants are of Arab extraction.
Global mingling means that when we look back to the early decades of the 21st century, we are bound to be puzzled by the conviction with which a group like al-Qa'ida identified "America" as the "imperialist enemy", and was prepared to commit atrocities against ordinary Americans of all races and creeds. The population of the United States has diversified beyond recognition. The last two American Presidents have been of Hispanic origin and Spanish-speaking. Census data predict that by 2050 the Hispanic population of the US will be 102.6 million, 24 per cent of the total population. So what identifies an "American", and what might their interest be in long-running territorial disputes in the Middle East?
Today, "America" is a large land-mass administered by an efficient bureaucracy that provides general administration, healthcare, social services and judicial oversight of commerce. Its President is elected for his ability to respond effectively to the external pressures of a fast-changing political world, much as leaders of major corporations do. The quality of information reaching him has improved hugely since the confused pictures reaching George Bush, and the tools of his trade have become more subtle as he now struggles to influence his sophisticated and globally linked electorates.
Did 9/11 itself impact on these changes? I think the answer is yes. The "war on terror" took Western nations into military conflicts of increasing irrelevance to their own inhabitants. The cost in lives lost became intolerably high, yet the justifications for conflict seemed more and more implausible. The elaborate arrangements for surveillance, border policing and control of possibly dissident elements inside individual countries took up increasing amounts of government time and energy. No wonder we eventually returned to Thomas Hobbes's 17th-century view that the state exists to protect the solitary individual from harm, and that war serves the interests only of those in power, and is never in our interests.
Professor Lisa Jardine is the director of the AHRC Centre for Editing Lives and Letters at Queen Mary, University of London
© 2006 Independent News and Media Limited
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article1444566.ece
The Independent:
The bitter legacy of 9/11
Published: 11 September 2006
2,973 Total number of people killed (excluding the 19 hijackers) in the September 11, 2001 attacks
72,000 Estimated number of civilians killed worldwide since September 11, 2001 as a result of the war on terror
2 Number of years since US intelligence had any credible lead to Osama bin Laden's whereabouts
2,932 Total number of US servicemen and women killed in Afghanistan and Iraq since September 2001
1,248 Number of published books relating to the September 11 attacks
$119m Ticket sales for anti-Bush documentary Fahrenheit 9/11
$40bn Airline industry losses since September 2001
2009 Date when the official memorial will open at the World Trade Centre site
0 Hours of intelligence training provided to new FBI agents before 9/11. Now they get 24.
91 per cent Terror cases from FBI and others that US Justice Dept declined to prosecute in first eight months of 2006
11 Weeks the 9/11 commission's final report was top of New York Times' non-fiction best-seller list
117 Number of UK service personnel killed in Iraq since invasion
40 Number of UK personnel killed in Afghanistan since invasion
7 per cent People in UK who think US-led war on terror is being won, according to YouGov
1 Those charged in US with a crime in connection with 9/11
455 Number of detainees at Guantanamo Bay
77 per cent Percentage of people in the UK who believe Tony Blair's Middle East policy has made Britain a terrorist target (YouGov)
4,000 Number of UK troops left in Iraq after British-controlled provinceshanded back to Baghdad
18 The number of times that undercover investigators with fake IDs have breezed through US border checkpoints in a test by the Government Accountability Office
$8bn The amount the US will spend this year on hunting Bin Laden and other terrorists
© 2006 Independent News and Media Limited
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/politics/article1466758.ece
Tomgram:
Chernus, Cornered Empire, the Legacy of 9/11
TomDispatch.com
a project of the Nation Institute
compiled and edited by Tom Engelhardt
With the collapse of the Berlin Wall, American leaders declared "victory" in the Cold War no less firmly or repeatedly than our President has promised "victory" in his Global War on Terror -- no less than 12 times, in fact, in an August speech to the American Legion National Convention. However, as Andrew Bacevich, author of The New American Militarism, recently wrote, victory in our times turns out to be a remarkably quicksilver concept, especially since "the East has solved the riddle of the Western Way of War… [T]he Arabs now possess -- and know that they possess -- the capacity to deny us victory, especially in any altercation that occurs on their own turf and among their own people."
Triumphantly here today (as your generals sit grinning behind a marble table in one of Saddam's palaces), victory is gone tomorrow (as the IEDs start to explode and the suicide car bombs begin to mount). In the case of the Cold War, the question remains: Was that victory actually gone yesterday? Was it gone by the time officials danced their victory jigs in the corridors of the Pentagon and the White House?
In retrospect, it may be -- as perceptive scholars of imperial decline like Immanuel Wallerstein have long argued -- that we were already definitively on the way down; or, put another way, that there was no victor but there were two losers in the Cold War; that the Soviet Union, the weaker of the two great powers, simply imploded first; while the U.S., enwreathed in a rhetoric of triumph and self-congratulation, was slowly making its way to the door without waving goodbye.
In the fifteen years since the USSR evaporated, most indices of power, especially military power, have been challenged. To offer but a single sobering example, historian Gabriel Kolko, discussing how destructive power has been "democratized," points out that:
"U.S. power has been dependent to a large extent on the country's highly mobile navy. But ships are increasingly vulnerable to missiles, and while they are a long way from finished, they are more and more circumscribed tactically and, ultimately, strategically… [Iran, for example] possesses large quantities of [cruise] missiles, and US experts believe they may very well be capable of destroying aircraft-carrier battle groups. All attempts to devise defenses against these rockets, even the most primitive, have been expensive failures, and anti-missile technology everywhere has remained, after decades of effort and billions of dollars, unreliable."
When, back in the 1960s, Senator J. William Fulbright wrote of "the arrogance of power" as a defining trait of America's leaders, few in power took him seriously. So many years later, the question is: Do our present arrogant leaders have the faintest idea how limited their powers really are? As Ira Chernus, author of Monsters To Destroy: The Neoconservative War on Terror and Sin, suggests below, on this fifth anniversary of the September 11th attacks, the leadership of an increasingly cornered empire continues to put its emphasis not just on striking back, but on striking first… and wherever. This is the most dangerous, the most blinding and fearful legacy of the 9/11 attacks. In the long run, it threatens a world in rubble. Tom
The Day That Changed Everything Wasn't 9/11
By Ira Chernus
Yes, it changed everything -- not September 11, 2001, when the Twin Towers collapsed, but November 9, 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell and left the U.S. at sea, drifting without an enemy in a strange new world.
Through four decades of the Cold War, Americans had been able to feel reasonably united in their determination to fight evil. And everyone, even children, knew the name of the evildoers: "the commies." Within two years after the Wall fell, the Soviet Union had simply disappeared. In the U.S., nobody really knew how to fight evil now, or even who the evildoers were. The world's sole remaining superpower was "running out of demons," as Colin Powell complained.
Amid the great anguish of September 11, 2001, it was hard to sense the paradoxical but very real feeling of relief that flooded across the country. After a decade adrift with no foes to oppose, Americans could sink back into a comfortingly black-and-white world, neatly divided into the good guys and the bad guys, the innocent and the guilty. In the hands of the Bush administration, "terrorists," modest as their numbers might have been, turned out to be remarkably able stand-ins for a whole empire-plus of "commies." They became our all-purpose symbol for the evil that fills our waking nightmares.
Today the very word "terrorist" conjures up anxiety-ridden images worthy of the Cold War era -- images of an unpredictable world always threatening to spin out of control. As then, so now, sinister evil is said to lurk everywhere -- even right next door -- always ready to spring upon unsuspecting victims.
Historians, considering the last decades of our history, are well aware that millions of Americans didn't need the attacks of 9/11 to fear that their world was spinning out of control. As the Cold War waned, profound differences on "values" issues (previously largely kept under wraps) came out of the closet. Societal anxiety rose. Many wondered how long a nation could endure if it had no consensus on "moral matters" and no obvious authority figures to turn to. Many feared they would lose their moral anchor in an increasingly confusing and challenging world.
This was the real terror that the Bush administration played upon when the Twin Towers fell. It took no time at all for the President to be right on Manichaean message: "We've seen that evil is real." "It is enough to know that evil, like goodness, exists." He did not have to say the rest explicitly, because (with a sigh of relief and endless rites of ceremonial mourning) Americans understood it: Goodness exists here in the good old USA. How do we know? Because evil itself attacked us and we are so firmly committed to fighting it.
Such circular logic fed public discourse from the springs of a deeply buried unconscious longing for power, clarity, and innocence. Once again we could stand tall in the world, the dazzling hyperpower of hyperpowers. As long as we were fighting evil, we had to be the good guys. If we weren't so good, why would we be so determined to fight the supposedly new evil of global terrorism?
Of course, it worked the other way around, too: The only way to prove that we were good was by hunting out and fighting evil. If we were to keep on feeling certain that we were the good guys, a steady supply of bad guys was a necessity -- and the post-Cold War decade just hadn't done its job providing them. So it could easily seem more appealing to launch a generational Global War on Terror that would keep the "terrorists" around permanently. What better way to keep on proving our virtue than by combating and containing them forever?
The New Normalcy
The neoconservatives understand all this perfectly well -- and well before September 11, 2001. For years, they had dreamed of preserving American virtue (and American global dominance) by flaunting American military might. They just needed an ongoing series of excuses to do the flaunting. The attacks of 9/11 gave them their chance.
Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Condoleezza Rice (all products of the Cold War era) said it clearly in the weeks following the attack. Their new war would not be a straightforward World War II-style march to victory. It would be more like… well, the war they knew, the Cold War, with its endless string of conflicts, crises, containments, and battles in the frontier lands of what used to be called the Third World. And it would be forever.
As Cheney put it, "There's not going to be an end date when we're going to say, ‘There, it's all over with.'" And he classically summed things up this way: "Many of the steps we have now been forced to take will become permanent in American life. … I think of it as the new normalcy.'' The neocons were glad to see the war on terrorism revive memories of the days when -- they imagine -- we contained the commies, learned to stop worrying, and loved the bomb (despite all its terror).
It was a strange love that they remembered so fondly. Polls made it clear that we never really stopped worrying then -- and polls make it clear that we still haven't now. Now, as then, we just bury the terror ever deeper and console ourselves as best we can with the mercilessness of our enemies and the relative safety of our own neck of the woods.
A recent poll tells us that only 14% of Americans feel safer now than they did five years ago. Seventy-nine percent expect another attack on U.S. soil within the next year, and 60% think it's likely in the next few months. Four out of five say that "we will always have to live with the threat of terrorism," though only one in five admits to being "personally very concerned about an attack" in his or her own area. A Florida woman captured the prevailing mood when she told a reporter: "When I stop to think about it, I don't feel very safe. But then again, on a day-to-day basis, I feel fine." As Rep. Peter King, chair of the House Homeland Security Committee, put it: "It's like we live in two parallel existences."
Those words should sound awfully familiar to anyone who lived through the Cold War years. The war on terrorism has revived the Cold War mindset, in which we are all citizens of a national insecurity state. The terror of impending annihilation from a vast, conspiratorial, and evil enemy has again become the vague backdrop of everyday life. To assure ourselves of our absolute goodness, we must see the enemy as absolute evil; not a collection of human beings bent on harming us, but a network of monsters bent on -- and capable of -- destroying us utterly. In other words, Cheney's "new normalcy" is but a version of an older, deeper apocalyptic terror. Every loss -- of a diplomatic conflict or an economic tussle or a pair of skyscrapers -- is once again framed as a portent of looming doom for the nation. Any successful attack upon us, we are told, could bring down the curtain of Armageddon.
Here's the irony. Unlike the nuclear-armed Soviet Union in the Cold War years, terrorists cannot actually threaten to obliterate our country or destroy the planet. But each apocalyptic warning of war to the death by the Bush administration only hastens another kind of loss -- the loss of the American imperial power they so prize.
Cornered Empire?
Even if actual extinction doesn't threaten, when it seems to, a nation, like an animal, is tempted to fight back with no holds barred. That's the attitude Bush and the neocons have tried to inculcate since 9/11. It's the only attitude, they insist, that can save America's military might and moral fiber. Indeed, for hard-core neocons, the main point of their global-war-on-terror policies is to revive this very Cold War mentality.
Yet those policies have obviously backfired terribly. The war on terrorism was supposed to build a new American century -- a unipolar world in which the U.S. would reign supreme. But every day it looks more and more like the 21st century will be the multipolar century, with any number of powerful nations and regional groupings successfully challenging U.S. economic, diplomatic, and military preeminence.
Bush and his neocon advisors certainly don't bear all the blame for an American imperial decline. But their utter misreading of the nature of U.S. military power and their lack of interest in economic and diplomatic realities has certainly hastened along a process that, in some fashion, was bound to happen anyway.
The United States reached the peak of its power in the late 1940s. The meat-grinder of World War II had chewed up all the other great powers and their colonial empires, too. In the ensuing decades, as the others recovered and once-dominated nations like China and India broke free and gained traction, the world moved inevitably toward a multipolar future.
Cold war presidents from Truman to Reagan hastened the process by building up U.S. allies like Germany and Japan in order to stave off the evil empire. And they sometimes even heeded the call of those allies to refrain from using military force (or too much of it anyway), lest a global war be triggered. Empowering our allies, while keeping them militarily subservient, actually helped them grab a bigger slice of the global economic pie, encouraging the rise of multipolarism. Big mistake, the neocons declared as, after 9/11, they set the Bush administration on an aggressive course of unilateralism, aiming at their dream of a New-Rome-style unipolarism.
Looking back, it's easy to see what a big mistake they made -- even in their own terms. Their unilateralism and militarism accelerated to near warp speed the decline of U.S. power and influence around the world. Every military blow or threatened blow only multiplied American enemies; every shock-and-awe action only created more opposition, even from increasingly standoffish allies. In the years to come, for an economically weakened "last superpower," there will be more and more occasions, on more and more fronts, when the U.S. will meet its match and have to back down. None of these will spell doom for us. But in context of the national insecurity state, they're likely to be framed as apocalyptic defeats, harbingers of the end time itself, and, above all, good reason to fight back blindly with all our might.
This is the vicious circle from Hell. The Bush administration's aggressive policies weaken U.S. power. Then its officials try to frighten the public into supporting the very same aggressive policies. We were stuck in a similar cycle, only half-recognized, throughout the Cold War years, and there's no end in sight. So far, it looks like not much has changed at all since 9/11.
But we don't have to stay stuck. There's nothing inevitable about history. Some 160 years after the French Revolution, Chinese Prime Minister Zhou Enlai was asked how that event had changed the world. "It's too soon to tell," Zhou replied impishly. Five short years after 9/11, it's way too soon to tell if the attacks of that day actually "changed everything," or if they changed much of anything at all.
Already, there is a growing awareness that the Bush Global War on Terror is doing more harm than good. Even from the foreign policy elite we can hear (though still often faintly) voices saying it's time to call it off. For now, the talk is narrowly focused on our imperial well-being -- the weakening of U.S. power and interests around the world.
Perhaps, as losses mount, Americans will eventually see the more important truth: Simplistic moralism and a pervasive fear of apocalyptic disaster weaken our society here at home. They make every step toward positive change look like a looming danger and that plays right into the hands of conservatives who are dedicated to preventing the change we need so badly. If the failed war on terror eventually teaches us this lesson, 9/11 will turn out to be the day that did indeed change everything.
Ira Chernus is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder. His latest book is Monsters To Destroy: The Neoconservative War on Terror and Sin. He can be contacted at chernus@colorado.edu
Copyright 2006 Ira Chernus
posted September 10, 2006 at 2:54 pm
http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=119758
posted by attilav at 18:44
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