Elsewhere Today (403)
Aljazeera:
Somalia president escapes blasts
Monday 18 September 2006, 16:57 Makka Time, 13:57 GMT
Two explosions have killed at least 11 people near the parliament in Baidoa, the seat of Somalia's largely powerless interim government.
One of the blasts on Monday afternoon happened outside a hall where Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed, the president, had given a speech 10 minutes earlier, a local journalist said.
Many politicians were still in the buillding where they had been discussing a new parliament designed to shore up the government which has been challenged by the rise of the Islamic courts.
"Five people were killed from the presidential convoy and three wounded," Ismail Hurre, the foreign minister, said. "Six attackers were also killed and two captured."
The president's brother was among the dead, the associated Press news agency reported quoting government officials.
Witnesses said that many people had been injured in the blasts.
Hurre told Reuters news agency: "A car exploded when the president's convoy was passing on the way to his residence. He is fine."
"This was an attack aimed at assassinating the president to destabilise the government," he added.
The explosions from suspected car bombs sent huge balls of flame into the sky and destroyed eight cars, including three that were in the president's convoy, witnesses said.
Fighters loyal to the Islamic courts movement have gained control of Mogadishu, the capital, and much of the south of the country in recent months.
Agencies
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/DDD925B8-35B3-4891-8997-B758C916A151.htm
allAfrica:
Explosion At Parliament Building Kills Six
UN Integrated Regional Information Networks NEWS
September 18, 2006
Nairobi
At least six people were killed and up to 10 wounded in an explosion on Monday as the president of Somali's Transitional Federal Government (TFG) was leaving the building housing the interim parliament in the town of Baidoa, the temporary seat of government, an official said.
"Yes, there was an explosion outside the parliament when one of the president's escort vehicles exploded," Abdirahman Dinari, the government spokesman, said. "At least three of the president's security detail were killed in a targeted attempt on the president's life. The president has not been hurt."
The explosion occurred as the president, Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed, was leaving the building after giving a speech to legislators, who were debating the government's programme for the next six months, said an MP, who requested anonymity.
A local reporter said at least six vehicles belonging to MPs were destroyed in the explosion. The reporter said he could not immediately determine how many people had been wounded or killed but added, "It was a big explosion and the death toll could be much higher [than the original estimate]."
It was unclear what caused the explosion, the MP said, "but it has created an air of uncertainty". It was too early to say "whether or not the president was the target," he added.
The reporter added, "There is no way anyone can now say what caused it or who was behind it."
He said TFG security forces had cordoned off the area and were evacuating the wounded to hospital.
[ This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations ]
Copyright © 2006 UN Integrated Regional Information Networks. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com).
http://allafrica.com/stories/200609180259.html
Arab News:
Faith, Reason and Infallibility
Shaykh Riyad Nadwi, Ph.D., Arab News
Monday, 18, September, 2006 (25, Sha`ban, 1427)
A lecture by Pope Benedict XVI entitled “Faith, Reason and the University: Memories and Reflections” at the University of Regensburg last Tuesday has caused another uproar among Muslims worldwide and the tension seems set to increase.
Having read the official transcript of the lecture released by the Libreria Editrice Vaticana (2006) to the global media, I was not surprised, given the new global neocon principle of callous engagement with Muslims, to see a modern philosophical treatise predicated on medieval insensitivity. I believe that if the pope has been reading and believing the scaremongering publications rolling off the neocon printing press in North America (e.g. Bat Yo’er’s Eurobia) he would, indeed, think it appropriate to quote Manuell II Paleologus when he said “show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman...”.
The difficulty, however, is that there is an enormous chasm between the principle of callous engagement and that of reasoned philosophical discussion. Among the many arguments offered in the lecture, one in particular epitomizes this point. The main thrust of the lecture was a call to widen the scope of reason in Western academia so that it allows space for the Divine. The pope argued that:
“Only thus do we become capable of that genuine dialogue of cultures and religions so urgently needed today. In the Western world it is widely held that only positivistic reason and the forms of philosophy based on it are universally valid. Yet the world’s profoundly religious cultures see this exclusion of the divine from the universality of reason as an attack on their most profound convictions. A reason which is deaf to the divine and which relegates religion into the realm of subcultures is incapable of entering into the dialogue of cultures.”
It is impossible to reconcile this argument, which stresses the existence of the “world’s profoundly religious cultures” seeing Western philosophy “as an attack on their most profound convictions” and the need for “entering into the dialogue of cultures”, with the quote from Manuell II unless we place it in the context of the current global hysteria about Islam and Muslims. Let us not forget that the lecture was being delivered on Sept. 12, a day after the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 “anomaly”. The potency of the philosophical arguments in the lecture would not have been weakened had the pope omitted the Manuell II quote or relied on evidence much closer to his realm. For instance, there are the papal bulls (e.g. the Ad abolendam) ordering many inquisitions, which eventually led Cardinal Cisneros in 1499 to coerce 50,000 Muslims of Granada into mass baptisms. Those who refused were deported to Africa or were systematically eliminated. Those people were not foreigners or black (as the etymology of the word “Moor” suggests) but natives of Spain who had accepted Islam because of what they encountered of its beauty and justice. Had the followers of the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) brought “things only evil and inhuman”, more than ninety percent of the native inhabitants would not have adopted Islam voluntarily as history testifies they did.
There are lessons to be learned from this unfortunate error of the pope in developing and concluding his arguments with medieval insensitivity. The first lesson is that no one is immune from this new “virus” that demands callous engagement with Muslims. A prominent example is the No. 1 best selling author in the United States, Ann Coulter, who suggested that “We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity” (Guardian, Sept. 24, 04).
However in the case of the pope, it is even more unfortunate. The consequences are amplified by the fact that his utterances are officially recognized as infallible by million of Christians. The Dogmatic Constitution (ch.3, s.8) states that “he is the supreme judge of the faithful” and that “the sentence of the apostolic see (than which there is no higher authority) is not subject to revision by anyone, nor may anyone lawfully pass judgment thereupon”. It also defines, dogmatically, the doctrine of papal infallibility (ch.4, s.9), such that:
“When the Roman pontiff speaks ex cathedra, that is, when in the exercise of his office as shepherd and teacher of all Christians, in virtue of his supreme apostolic authority, he defines a doctrine concerning faith or morals to be held by the whole church, he possesses, by the divine assistance promised to him in blessed Peter, that infallibility which the divine redeemer willed His church to enjoy in defining doctrine concerning faith or morals. Therefore, such definitions of the Roman pontiff are of themselves, and not by the consent of the church, irreformable.”
The second lesson is that Muslims, in contrast to some of our interlocutors of the past, are not intellectually stagnated. In an attempt to quell the anxieties of Muslims, some representatives of the church have suggested that the pope did not condone the words of Manuell II. My response to this is that after reading the transcript, I agree that the pope did not actually say “I condone the sentiment of Manuell” but in fact he did much more than that to signal his approval. Not only did he use Manuell as a foundation upon which to build his entire lecture but also relied on a reference to him in the conclusion of his lecture. This cannot reasonably be interpreted as anything other than a resounding endorsement. For the pope to say now that he is “sorry” if any offense was caused, and to suggest that Muslims have misunderstood his complicated philosophical discussions, is condescending to say the least.
The only way to remedy the regrettable damage done to interfaith dialogue by this serious error of judgment at such a sensitive juncture of our history is for the pope to use his authority to openly challenge the trend of scaremongering and the numerous calls for callousness in dealing with Muslims. The pope also needs to revise and publish his understanding of the noble character of the Prophet Muhammad who is described in the Qur’an as “a Mercy unto the worlds”.
I beg the pope to reflect on the words of people who, unlike this author, cannot be accused for their lack of objectivity:
“I become more than ever convinced that it was not the sword that won a place for Islam in those days. It was the rigid simplicity, the utter self-effacement of the Prophet, the scrupulous regard for pledges, his intense devotion to his friends and followers and his intrepidity, his fearlessness, his absolute trust in God and in his own mission. These and not the sword carried everything before them and surmounted every obstacle.” (Mahatma Gandhi, Young India 1922)
“I believe that if a man like him were to assume the dictatorship of the modern world, he would succeed in solving the problems in a way that would bring the much needed peace and happiness. Europe is beginning to be enamored of the creed of Muhammad. In the next century it may go further in recognizing the utility of that creed in solving its problems.” (George Bernard Shaw, The Genuine Islam, Singapore, Vol. I, No 8, 1936).
— Shaykh Riyad Hanif Nadwi is director of Oxford Cross Cultural Research Institute. www.occri.org.uk
Copyright: Arab News © 2003 All rights reserved.
http://www.arabnews.com/?page=7§ion=0&article=86728&d=18&m=9&y=2006
Asia Times:
Jihad, the Lord's Supper, and eternal life
By Spengler
Sep 19, 2006
Jihad injures reason, for it honors a god who suffers no constraints on his caprice, unlike the Judeo-Christian god, who is limited by love. That is the nub of Pope Benedict XVI's September 12 address in Regensburg, Germany. It promises to be the Vatican's most controversial utterance in living memory.
When a German-language volume appeared in 2003 quoting the same analysis by a long-dead Jewish theologian, I wrote of "oil on the flames of civilizational war". [1] Now the same ban has been preached from St Peter's chair, and it is a defining moment comparable to Winston Churchill's "Iron Curtain" speech at Fulton, Missouri, in 1946. Earlier this year, Benedict's elliptical remarks to former students at a private seminar in 2005, mentioned in passing by an American Jesuit and reported in this space, created a scandal. [2] I wrote at the time that even the pope must whisper when it comes to Islam. We have entered a different stage of civilizational war.
The Islamic world now views the pontiff as an existential threat, and with reason. Jihad is not merely the whim of a despotic divinity, as the pope implied. It is much more: jihad is the fundamental sacrament of Islam, the Muslim cognate of the Lord's Supper in Christianity, that is, the unique form of sacrifice by which the individual believer communes with the Transcendent. To denounce jihad on theological grounds is a blow at the foundations of Islam, in effect a papal call for the conversion of the Muslims.
Just before then-cardinal Ratzinger's election as pope last year, I wrote, "Now that everyone is talking about Europe's demographic death, it is time to point out that there exists a way out: convert European Muslims to Christianity. The reported front-runner at the Vatican conclave ... Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, is one of the few Church leaders unafraid to raise the subject." [3] The Regensburg address oversteps the bounds of dialogue and verges upon the missionary. A great deal has changed since John Paul II kissed the Koran before news cameras in 1999. The boys and girls of the Catholic youth organization Communione e Liberazione that Ratzinger nurtured for a generation will have a great deal to talk to their Muslim school-fellows about.
No more can one assume now that Europe will slide meekly into dhimmitude.
In that respect [I wrote during the conclave] John Paul II recalled the sad position of Pius XII, afraid to denounce publicly the murder of Polish priests by Nazi occupiers - let alone the murder of Polish Jews - for fear that the Nazis would react by killing even more. It is hard to second-guess the actions of Pius XII given his terrible predicament, but at some point one must ask when the Gates of Hell can be said to have prevailed over St Peter.
Specifically, Benedict stated that jihad, the propagation of Islam by force, is irrational, because it is against the Reason of God. Citing a 14th-century Byzantine emperor to the effect that Mohammed's "decree that the faith he preached should be spread with the sword" as "evil and inhumane" provoked headlines. But of greater weight is the pope's observation that Allah is a god whose "absolute transcendence" allows no constraint, to the point that Allah is free if he chooses to promote evil. The great German-Jewish theologian Franz Rosenzweig explained the matter more colorfully than did the pope, as I reported three years ago in the cited review:
The god of Mohammed is a creator who well might not have bothered to create. He displays his power like an Oriental potentate who rules by violence, not by acting according to necessity, not by authorizing the enactment of the law, but rather in his freedom to act arbitrarily ... Providence thus is shattered into infinitely many individual acts of creation, with no connection to each other, each of which has the importance of the entire creation. That has been the doctrine of the ruling orthodox philosophy in Islam. Every individual thing is created from scratch at every moment. Islam cannot be salvaged from this frightful providence of Allah ... despite its vehement, haughty insistence upon the idea of the god's unity, Islam slips back into a kind of monistic paganism, if you will permit the expression. God competes with God at every moment, as if it were the colorfully contending heavenful of gods of polytheism.
It is amusing to see liberal Jewish commentators in the United States, eg, the editorial page of the September 16 New York Times, deplore the pope's remarks, considering that Rosenzweig said it all the more sharply in 1920.
Benedict's comments regarding Islam served as a preamble to a longer discourse on the unity of faith and reason. "Is the conviction that acting unreasonably contradicts God's nature merely a Greek idea, or is it always and intrinsically true?" Benedict asked, and answered his own question: "I believe that here we can see the profound harmony between what is Greek in the best sense of the word and the biblical understanding of faith in God." It is not, however, the reasoned side of Benedict's remarks to which Muslims responded, but rather the existential.
Rather than rail at the pope's characterization of Islam, Muslims might have responded as follows: "Excuse me, Your Holiness, but did we hear you say that you represent a religion of reason, whereas Allah is a god of unreason? Do you not personally eat the body and blood of your god - at least things that you insist really are his flesh and blood - every day at Mass? And you accuse us of unreason!" That is a fair rebuttal, but it opens up Islam's can of worms.
True, we are not pottering about in this pilgrim existence to be rational. Today's Germans are irrational, and know that their time has past, and therefore desist from bearing children. What mankind - Christian, Muslim and Jew, and all - demand of God is irrational. We want eternal life! Christians do not want what the Greeks wanted - Socrates' transmigration of souls, nor the shadow existence of Homer's dead heroes in Hades. That is an unreasonable demand if ever there was one.
Before the Bible was written, the Babylonian hero Gilgamesh learned that his quest for immortality was futile. The demigods of Greece, mortals favored by Olympians, suffered a tedious sort of immortal life as stars, trees or rivers. The gods of the heathens are not in any case eternal, only immortal. They were born and they will die, like the Norse gods at the Ragnorak, and their vulnerability projects the people's presentiment of its own death. To whom, precisely, have the gods offered eternal life prior to the appearance of revealed religion? Eternal life and a deathless mortality are quite different things.
But what is it that God demands of us in response to our demand for eternal life? We know the answer ourselves. To partake of life in another world we first must detach ourselves from this world in order to desire the next. In plain language, we must sacrifice ourselves. There is no concept of immortality without some concept of sacrifice, not in any culture or in any religion. That is a demand shared by the Catholic bishops and the Kalahari Bushmen.
God's covenant with Abraham is unique and singular in world history. A single universal and eternal god makes an eternal pact with a mortal that can be fulfilled only if Abraham's tribe becomes an eternal people. But the price of this pact is self-sacrifice. That is an existential mortal act beyond all ethics, as Soren Kierkegaard tells us in Fear and Trembling. The sacraments of revealed religion are sublimated human sacrifice, for the revealed god in his love for humankind spares the victim, just as God provided a ram in place of the bound Isaac on Mount Moriah. Among Jews the covenant must be renewed in each male child through a substitute form of human sacrifice, namely circumcision. [4] Christians believe that a single human sacrifice spared the rest of humankind.
Jihad also is a form of human sacrifice. He who serves Allah so faithfully as to die in the violent propagation of Islam goes straight to paradise, there to enjoy virgins or raisins, depending on the translation. But Allah is not the revealed god of loving kindness, or agape, but - pace Benedict - a god of reason, that is, of cold calculation. Islam admits no expiatory sacrifice. Everyone must carry his own spear.
We are too comfortable, too clean, too squeamish, too modern to descend into the terrible space where birth, death and immortality are decided. We forget that we cannot have eternal life unless we are ready to give up this one - and this the Muslim knows only through what we should call the sacrament of jihad. Through jihad, the Muslim does almost precisely what the Christian does at the Lord's Supper. It is the sacrifice of Jesus that grants immortal life to all Christians, that is, those who become one with Jesus by eating his flesh and drinking his blood so that the sacrifice also is theirs, at least in Catholic terms. Protestants substitute empathy identification with the crucified Christ for the trans-substantiated blood and flesh of Jesus.
Christians believe that Jesus died on the cross to give all men eternal life, on condition that they take part in his sacrifice, either through the physical communion of the Catholic Church or the empathetic Communion of Protestantism. From a Muslim vantage point, the extreme of divine humility embodied in Jesus' sacrifice is beyond reason. Allah, by contrast, deals with those who submit to him after the calculation of an earthly despot. He demands that all Muslims sacrifice themselves by becoming warriors and, if necessary, laying their lives down in the perpetual war against the enemies of Islam.
These are parallel acts, in which different peoples do different things, in the service of different deities, but for the same reason: for eternal life.
Why is self-sacrifice always and everywhere the cost of eternal life? It is not because a vengeful and sanguineous God demands his due before issuing us a visa to heaven. Quite the contrary: we must sacrifice our earthly self, our attachment to the pleasures and petty victories of our short mortal life if we really are to gain the eternal life that we desire. The animal led to the altar, indeed Jesus on the cross, is ourselves: we die along with the sacrifice and yet live, by the grace of God. YHWH did not want Isaac to die, but without taking Abraham to Mount Moriah, Abraham himself could not have been transformed into the man desirous and deserving of immortal life. Jesus died and took upon him the sins of the world, in Christian terms, precisely so that a vicarious sacrifice would redeem those who come to him.
What distinguishes Allah from YHWH and (in Christian belief) his son Jesus is love. God gives Jews and Christians a path that their foot can tread, one that is not too hard for mortals, to secure the unobtainable, namely immortal life, as if by miracle. Out of love God gives the Torah to the Jews, not because God is a stickler for the execution of 613 commandments, but because it is a path upon which the Jew may sacrifice and yet live, and receive his portion of the World to Come. The most important sacrifice in Judaism is the Sabbath - "our offering of rest", says the congregation in the Sabbath prayers - a day of inactivity that acknowledges that the Earth is the Lord's. It is a sacrifice, as it were, of ego. In this framework, incidentally, it is pointless to distinguish Judaism as a "religion of works" as opposed to Christianity as a "religion of faith".
To Christians, God offers the vicarious participation in his sacrifice of himself through his only son.
That is Grace: a free gift by God to men such that they may obtain eternal life. By a miracle, the human soul responds to the offer of Grace with a leap, a leap away from the attachments that hold us to this world, and a foretaste of the World to Come.
There is no Grace in Islam, no miracle, no expiatory sacrifice, no expression of love for mankind such that each Muslim need not be a sacrifice. On the contrary, the concept of jihad, in which the congregation of Islam is also the army, states that every single Muslim must sacrifice himself personally. Jihad is the precise equivalent of the Lord's Supper in Christianity and the Jewish Sabbath, the defining expression of sacrifice that opens the prospect of eternity to the mortal believer. To ask Islam to become moderate, to reform, to become a peaceful religion of personal conscience is the precise equivalent of asking Catholics to abolish Mass.
Islam, I have argued for years, faces an existential crisis in the modern world, which has ripped its adherents out of their traditional existence and thrust them into deadly conflicts. What was always latent in Islam has now come to the surface: the practice of Islam now expresses itself uniquely in jihad. Benedict XVI has had the courage to call things by their true names. Everything else is hypocrisy and self-delusion.
Postscript
Regarding Benedict XVI's statement that the characterization of the Prophet Mohammed did not reflect his "personal opinion": In 1938, at the peak of Stalin's terror, a Muscovite called the KGB to report that his parrot had escaped. The KGB officer said, "Why are you calling us?" The Muscovite averred, "I want to state for the record that I do not share the parrot's political opinions."
Notes
1. See Oil on the flames of civilizational war, December 2, 2003.
2. See When even the pope has to whisper, January 10, 2006.
3. The crescent and the conclave, April 19, 2005.
4. See The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son: The Transformation of Child Sacrifice in Judaism and Christianity, by Jon D Levinson (Harvard; Cambridge 1993).
Copyright 2006 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/HI19Aa02.html
Asia Times:
Turkey has second thoughts
By Hilmi Toros
ISTANBUL - In another attempt to mollify the Islamic world after apologies from the Vatican earlier, Pope Benedict XVI personally intervened during his Angelus, the traditional Sunday noon blessing, to reject any anti-Islam sentiment and appeal for dialogue.
The damage control may appear to succeed, but questions remain whether the damage is more serious than conceded. And
while interventions were not too late (this was the first by the pope, but the third by the Vatican in less than a week), some may still consider them too little.
Reading from a prepared text at his heavily guarded palace in Castel Gandolfo outside Rome, the pontiff declared he had only been quoting from a medieval text during the lecture that caused the controversy, and that its contents seen as offensive by Muslims did not reflect his views.
In his lecture at the University of Regensburg in Germany last week, the pope quoted 14th-century Emperor Manuel II Paleologos of the Orthodox Christian Byzantine Empire as saying: "Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached."
The pope used the expression "I quote" twice before the phrases on Islam. He also described the phrases as "brusque", without explicitly condoning or condemning them.
Veteran Vatican analyst Giancarlo Zizola called it all "an accident" while commenting on the controversy on Italian television on Sunday. He attributed it to the pope's background more as a theologian than a statesman attuned to political sensitivities.
But in the Muslim world it caused an uproar marked by widespread denunciations, demonstrations, attacks on some churches and threats to attack the Vatican. The Italian Interior Ministry increased the nationwide security alert on Sunday.
The controversy has also soured - if not compromised - plans for the pontiff's trip to Muslim Turkey due in November.
Muslim leaders, including Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, are demanding that the pontiff issue a formal personal apology. Statements by the Vatican Press Office and later by the Holy See's new secretary of state (prime minister), Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, were seen as unsatisfactory.
The pope made no formal apology, but said: "I am deeply sorry for the reactions in some countries to a few passages of my address at the University of Regensburg, which were considered offensive to the sensibility of Muslims. I hope this serves to appease hearts and to clarify the true meaning of my address, which in its totality was and is an invitation to frank and sincere dialogue, with mutual respect."
How this personal plea may have placated public opinion in the Muslim world has yet to be seen, despite several public declarations calling for acceptance of the Vatican apology so as to calm the crisis before it causes further damage.
Erdogan had said earlier he was not sure whether the pope's visit would go ahead. He described Benedict's lecture as "ugly and unfortunate" and as against "inter-religious peace".
If the Turkish visit proceeds, the pope is likely to find a reserved reception confined to officialdom. There may be objections from the public to any plans to visit a mosque. His predecessor, John Paul II, was welcomed as the first pope to enter a mosque in Syria in 2001.
Officially, Pope Benedict XVI will be going to Turkey as "president" of the Vatican City State, rather than the supreme head of more than a billion Roman Catholics. The main religious significance of his trip to Turkey would be a meeting with the head of the Greek Orthodox Church in Istanbul.
There, too, there are pitfalls: it could be controversial if he kneels and prays during a possible visit to Santa Sophia, once the main church of the Eastern Christian Empire, later a mosque, and now an imposing museum.
The pope would face criticism if he calls the head of the Istanbul-based Greek Orthodox Church "ecumenical", meaning the head of all 200 million Greek Orthodox Christians worldwide. Turkey considers him head of the Greek Church in Turkey.
Besides, Turks have a particular dislike for the current pope. As a conservative cardinal before succeeding John Paul II, he spoke against Muslim Turkey's entry into the European Union, citing cultural differences.
His perceived views on Islam, both in Turkey and the Islamic world at large, are subject to harsh attacks. Turkey's religious-affairs director, Ali Bayrakoglu, told national television that the pope had a Crusader mentality and that his remarks "reflect the hatred in his heart".
The perceived views of the pontiff are seen in sharp contrast to a more conciliatory approach begun by pope John XXIII in the 1960s, carried on by popes Paul VI and John Paul II, and culminating in John Paul II asking for "pardon" for excessive militancy by the church, including the Crusades.
Hilmi Toros is a former Vatican correspondent.
(Inter Press Service)
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/HI19Aa01.html
Guardian:
UK accused of Guantánamo collusion
David Batty and agencies
Monday September 18, 2006
More than 100 senior doctors today accused the government of colluding in war crimes by refusing to give medical aid to British residents detained at Guantánamo Bay.
The doctors called for an urgent independent investigation into the medical needs of the detainees at the camp.
In a letter published in The Times newspaper today, the doctors condemn the Foreign Office for its "shameful" refusal to respond to a request from the British Medical Association (BMA) to send a team of doctors to the detention camp in Cuba.
The medics also criticise the failure of the Foreign Office's medical and legal panels to discuss the plight of the detainees for the reason that they are not British passport holders.
Nine British citizens have been released from the camp since 2004, but at least eight men who have British residency rights are believed to still be there.
"Our government's excuse is that it does not wish to set a precedent to act for British residents, rather than British citizens. We find this morally repugnant," said the letter, which was signed by 120 medical professionals.
They add: "It is clear that an independent scrutiny is urgently required by physicians outside the US military. The silence of the Foreign Office is shameful and reflects the collusion of this country in a war crime."
Dr David Nicholl, a consultant neurologist at the City Hospital in Birmingham, who coordinated the letter, said: "Many doctors I speak to every day are outraged by the government's heartless attitude to these eight Guantánamo prisoners.
"They simply can't accept that men trapped at Guantánamo should be denied independent medical assistance because the government is hair-splitting about nationality versus residency status. The case is straightforward: these men are vulnerable and they need to be examined by a team of independent physicians."
None of the eight British residents held at Guantánamo has been independently examined, according to Amnesty International. The human rights group says that one of the detained, Omar Deghayes, is believed to have been blinded in one eye by guards at the camp.
Kate Allen, the director of Amnesty International UK, said: "It's shameful that in four and half years the government has not insisted on independent medical examinations for long-term residents of the UK held in the black hole of Guantánamo.
"These men - some of whom are refugees that the UK has acknowledged to be vulnerable people - have essentially been left to rot in Guantánamo's cells. They're Guantánamo's forgotten prisoners."
There are also concerns for the mental health of some of the detainees - concerns that were heightened after three died - apparently from self-inflicted injuries - last June.
Last year the New England Journal of Medicine reported that psychiatrists and psychologists had been involved in coercive interrogation tactics being used on detainees at the camp since 2002.
The Pentagon said there was no "credible evidence" physicians had taken part in the "inhumane treatment of detainees". But it admitted that "behavioural science consultants" were helping interrogators exploit prisoners' weaknesses. Around 460 people are detained at Guantánamo, according to Amnesty International. They include 14 alleged al-Qaida figures, recently transferred there from CIA custody.
A Foreign Office spokesman said its policy was not to provide consular assistance or diplomatic protection to non-British nationals.
However, it made an exception in the case of Bisher al-Rawi, an Iraqi detained in Guantánamo. Al-Rawi, a resident of Britain since 1985, was arrested in Gambia in 2002. In April the then foreign secretary, Jack Straw, wrote to his US counterpart Condoleezza Rice to demand al-Rawi's the release. A US lawyer, George Brent Mickum IV, said in March that the exception was made because al-Rawi had provided assistance to the British intelligence agency MI5 and had agreed to work for them in exchange for his release.
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006
http://www.guardian.co.uk/guantanamo/story/0,,1875351,00.html
Guardian:
Ghosts of Nazi past
A regional election in Germany saw a province dip back into the darkest parts of the country's past, reports Luke Harding
Monday September 18, 2006
In the end, the result was as bad as everyone had feared. Germany's neo-Nazis pulled off a widely anticipated electoral coup last night, with the far-right winning 7.3 % of the vote during elections in the north east state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern.
The NPD comfortably exceeded the 5 % hurdle necessary to win seats. It will now sit in the state's regional assembly in Schwerin for the first time. This is the second time that the NPD has got into a regional parliament in three years, confirming fears that the party is now an established part of the political landscape, especially in Germany's depressed former communist east.
Ahead of yesterday's poll, hundreds of neo-Nazis flooded the rustic state, turning the party's stronghold town of Anklam into a neo-Nazi HQ. The tactic worked. In some Baltic villages in the east of the state, the NPD got as much as 15 % of the vote. The NPD did best where unemployment was highest. In many areas here it is more than 25 %.
This morning's German papers, reporting on the poll and yesterday's election in Berlin, gave a gloomy reaction. Der Tagesspeigel said there was no point in pretending that the NPD's voters - most of them under the age of 30 - had somehow been tricked into voting for a bunch of unashamed racists. "Whoever voted for this party, knew what they were doing," the paper said.
The Berliner Zeitung conceded that the "real winner" of yesterday's election was the NPD's leader in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Udo Pastörs. The fact that other parties treat him as a 'pariah' merely helps his cause, the paper said, adding: "Nobody had so many cameras and microphones thrust at him".
It was not clear this morning, meanwhile, what coalition would govern in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, a lush Baltic region which includes Angela Merkel's seaside constituency. The Social Democrats (SPD) emerged as the biggest party with 30.2 % of the vote - but only after a night of heavy losses.
The state's SPD premier, Harald Ringstorff, now has to decide whether to continue his existing left-wing coalition with the post-communist Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS) - or enter into a new one with the conservative Christian Democrats (CDU).
The CDU won 28.8 %; the PDS 16.8 %; and the right-wing liberal FDP party made it back into the assembly with 9.6 %.
In Berlin, the picture is a bit clearer. Berlin's popular Social Democrat mayor Klaus Wowereit was the undisputed winner of yesterday's election - winning 30.8 % of the vote in Berlin and another term as mayor. This morning's papers show him putting an affectionate arm round his partner, Jörn Kubicki.
Wowi, as Berliners call him, now has to decide whether to govern in coalition with the Greens or the PDS. The Greens did better than expected with 13.1 %.
Die Linke - as the PDS is known - had a terrible night, and saw much of their support, especially in east Berlin, evaporate. The party polled 13.4 %, almost 10 % less than during the last election in 2001.
Two trends this morning appear clear. Firstly, the neo-Nazis in Germany appear to be here to stay. Secondly, the Christian Democrats do not appear to have benefited much from the fact that their leader Angela Merkel is Germany's chancellor, and the head of a 'grand coalition' government in Berlin with the Social Democrats. Her long term ability to win elections is still in doubt.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/elsewhere/journalist/story/0,,1875279,00.html
Harper’s Magazine:
Worker's Paradise
[Proposals]
Posted on Monday, September 18, 2006. From entries to Since Sliced Bread, a 2005 contest sponsored by the Service Employees International Union. Entrants were invited to submit policy ideas that would “improve the day-to-day lives of working men and women and their families.” Originally from Harper's Magazine, February 2006.
America's heartland is filled with dying towns, while America's prisons have more than 2,200 juveniles serving life without parole. Why not give these young men and women the chance to make positive contributions to our country, rather than rot in prison while costing taxpayers billions? Why not relocate these lifers to those dying towns in order to renovate them and bring new life to the communities? The towns would be self-contained. Townspeople would provide new-style guards, meals, services, etc.
Pay-Per-View executions. People see a bio, like in America's Most Wanted, and vote, like in American Idol, for the death they want to see. Fifty percent of the profits go to the victims' families. The money wasted on these animals is appalling, and, though extreme, this would “thin the herd.” This would also be a major deterrent to future criminals.
Establish a national organ-donor program that automatically enrolls all recipients of taxpayer-funded medical care, such as Medicaid and Medicare. Thousands fewer would die from lack of available organs. Taxpayers would feel better about their tax dollars going to welfare programs, particularly since many of these taxpayers cannot afford their own health insurance. Medicaid and Medicare recipients would feel like they were contributing and “giving back.”
Automatic Deposit Machines. All Americans should be given a Social Security card, similar to a debit card, the day they are born. All commercial locations should have an ADM machine. When people receive change, they simply insert their card and deposit the change. A receipt is printed, as well as the user's lifetime balance. Americans will retire millionaires!
Install power generators on exercise equipment such as bicycles and stairmasters at gyms. The energy could be used to power the individual building or be fed directly into the grid. The Department of Energy could be charged with monitoring generation and all Americans could receive a rebate/credit via their income taxes.
Perhaps we should make Mexico part of the United States—voluntarily, of course. Then we would eliminate the problem of illegal immigration, because they would all be citizens.
Move Martin Luther King Day so that it is the day after the Super Bowl. We would be able to party more after the Super Bowl because we wouldn't have to go to work the next day, and more private employers would make Martin Luther King Day a holiday.
Problem: People need more time. Solution: Give the people more time! The plan would be like ending daylight-savings time repeatedly, gaining fifty-two hours over the course of a year, by setting clocks back weekly, such as at midnight on Sundays, or by mandating that clock manufacturers make their clocks inherently slow. Instead of running on a money deficit as we do now, we would be deficiting our time. Since people die, it would not be possible to accumulate a “debt” of time, as happens with money.
Too much money is wasted on U.S. universities that don't benefit me or my family at all. No one I know ever got accepted or went to college, so why do me and my friends have to pay for it? Let's cut spending on wasteful U.S. universities and build more sports arenas. Sports arenas are something we can ALL enjoy, especially working families!
This is Worker's Paradise, a reading, originally from February 2006, published Monday, September 18, 2006. It is part of Economics, which is part of Readings, which is part of Harpers.org.
Permanent URL
http://harpers.org/WorkersParadise.html
Jeune Afrique: Les opérations de dépollution
ont commencé à Abidjan
CÔTE D'IVOIRE - 18 septembre 2006 – AFP
Les opérations de dépollution des sites d'Abidjan souillés par les déchets toxiques ont démarré dimanche et devraient durer deux mois selon l'Onu, alors que le président Laurent Gbagbo a estimé que le nombre de personnes intoxiquées ne dépassait pas les 14.000.
Le Premier ministre Charles Konan Banny a officiellement confié dimanche après-midi les opérations d'enlèvement des déchets industriels à la société Trédi, filiale du groupe français Séché, spécialiste du traitement des déchets, lors d'une visite à la décharge d'Akouédo, l'un des sites les plus pollués
Au total, entre l'enlèvement des déchets et la dépollution des sites, l'opération "devrait durer deux mois", a précisé dimanche dans un communiqué le Bureau du coordonnateur humanitaire des Nations unies en Côte d'Ivoire.
"Ce qui est important aujourd'hui, c'est que nous allons réussir à débarrasser la population de ces déchets toxiques", a déclaré M. Banny à la décharge publique d'Akouedo, où il a assisté au début des opérations. Vingt-cinq techniciens de Séché sont arrivés à Abidjan et ont commencé à travailler dimanche, a précisé Henri Petitgand, le porte-parole du groupe Séché, ajoutant qu'à terme, "ils seront entre 30 et 40".
Séché a remporté jeudi le contrat de dépollution d'Abidjan, dont le montant "dépendra du nombre de tonnes" de matière polluée enlevées, a-t-il ajouté. La quantité de déchets toxiques déversés dans les 10 à 15 sites pollués reste inconnue, a précisé M. Petitgand, tout en indiquant que la quantité de matières toxiques ou contaminées qui devra être enlevée, confinée et envoyée à l'étranger pour traitement "se comptera certainement en centaines de tonnes".
Séché, qui a acheminé 60 tonnes de matériel à Abidjan, se donne d'abord deux semaines pour extraire et isoler les matières toxiques dans des barils ou des containers, a précisé M. Petitgand. Les semaines suivantes seront consacrées à la dépollution du reste des sites, à l'analyse des traitements nécessaires pour neutraliser les déchets, et à leur transport vers des laboratoires européens spécialisés, a-t-il ajouté. "Les produits toxiques vont être acheminés hors de Côte d'Ivoire par bateau, dans des laboratoires spécialisés qui ont les traiter", a confirmé M. Banny.
Le Premier ministre ivoirien avait revêtu une combinaison blanche intégrale équipée d'un masque à gaz, comme la grosse vingtaine des techniciens qui s'affairaient sur le site, une grande décharge publique que le gouvernement veut voir dépolluée en priorité pour la rouvrir au plus tôt et arrêter l'amoncellement sauvage des déchets dans les rues et quartiers environnants. Les déchets toxiques ont été déversés dans la capitale économique ivoirienne dans la nuit du 19 au 20 août par une mystérieuse société ivoirienne, Tommy, qui les avait déchargés du Probo Koala, un navire grec, au Port d'Abidjan.
Les émanations des déchets ont intoxiqués des milliers d'habitants d'Abidjan, dont sept sont morts et 24 ont du être hospitalisés, selon le dernier bilan fourni dimanche par l'Onu, qui recense par ailleurs 37.483 consultations liées à la pollution dans les centres de santé publics d'Abidjan Le président Laurent Gbagbo, en visite dimanche chez des familles de victimes de la pollution, a estimé que le nombre de personnes intoxiquées par les déchets ne dépassait pas les 14.000 et était au moins trois fois moins élevé que le nombre de consultations, car une partie des malades sont allés consulter des médecins plusieurs fois.
© Jeuneafrique.com 2006
http://www.jeuneafrique.com/jeune_afrique/article_depeche.asp?
art_cle=AFP43106lesopnajdib0
Página/12:
El Papa se mostró apenado
Benedicto XVI trató de aplacar la crisis que protagoniza señalando que fue malinterpretada la cita que dio para hablar del Islam, que lo describe como “maligno e inhumano”.
Por Peter Popham*
Lunes, 18 de Septiembre de 2006
El pontífice Benedicto XVI utilizó ayer su primera aparición desde que volvió de su gira de Italia y Alemania para intentar desactivar la crisis que lo acosa desde que citó a un emperador bizantino medieval describiendo al Islam como “maligno e inhumano”. Hablando con feligreses desde el balcón de su residencia de verano en Castelgandolfo, en el sur de Roma, al mediodía, dijo que “se sentía muy apenado por las reacciones que provocó un pequeño pasaje considerado ofensivo para los sentimientos de los musulmanes creyentes”. Continuó: “Este pasaje fue en realidad una cita de un texto medieval, que de ninguna manera expresa mi pensamiento personal. Espero que esto sea suficiente para aplacar los ánimos y para clarificar el verdadero significado de mi discurso, que en su conjunto fue una invitación a un franco y sincero diálogo, con mutuo respeto”.
Pero mientras el Papa estaba hablando, a cientos de kilómetros al sur de Roma, en Mogadishu, al menos dos hombres mataron a una monja italiana de 70 años por la espalda, en la escuela en donde trabaja. La monja, conocida como Hermana Leonella, murió en el hospital. Una importante fuente islámica en Somalía, citada por la agencia de noticias Reuters, dijo que “existía una alta posibilidad” de que el asesinato estuviera conectado con el discurso del Papa. Un sospechoso fue más tarde detenido. El vocero del Sumo Pontífice, el reverendo Federico Lombardi, describió al asesinato de la Hermana Leonella como “un horrible episodio. Esperemos que sea un hecho aislado”. Sin embargo, todavía no estaba claro si las palabras del Papa serían suficientes para desactivar una crisis, que se estaba empezando a parecer de forma inquietante a la que tensó la relación entre el Islam y Occidente a partir de la publicación de las caricaturas danesas.
En Turquía, el canciller Abdullah Gul aseguró que hasta lo que él sabía, la visita programada del Papa a ese país para noviembre todavía estaba en pie. “Desde nuestra parte, no hay ningún cambio”, afirmó. Pero otro ministro turco, Mehmet Aydin, destacó que en su discurso de disculpa el Papa pareció decir que estaba apenado por la reacción que habían provocado sus declaraciones, pero no por las declaraciones en sí. “Uno tiene que decir ‘Lo siento’ de una manera apropiada o no decir nada”, explicó. “¿Está apenado por haber dicho eso o por las consecuencias que tuvo?”, cuestionó.
El Papa parece haber estado ajeno a la posibilidad de que la cita del emperador bizantino de siglo XIV, Manuel II Paleologus, enterrada bien profunda dentro de una charla dada a los alumnos en la universidad alemana de Regensburg, hiciera enojar a los devotos musulmanes. No obstante, la frase “maligno e inhumano” y el no haberse distanciado de ella demuestran una increíble falta de sensibilidad de una persona cuyas palabras recorren el mundo en sólo minutos.
Y la violencia continuó ayer. Dos iglesias en Cisjordania fueron incendiadas, después de varios incidentes en Cisjordania y Gaza el sábado, en los que cinco iglesias fueron atacadas con bombas y disparos. En algunos lugares hubo señales de que las declaraciones del Papa en Castelgandolfo fueron suficientes para poner fin a este asunto. El segundo líder más importante de los Hermanos Musulmanes de Egipto aseguró que aceptaba la clarificación de Benedicto.
Sin embargo, en otras partes, predicadores islámicos continuaron exprimiendo esta crisis. En la ciudad sagrada de Qom, en Irán, el clérigo de línea dura, Ahmad Khatami, les dijo a cientos de manifestantes que el Papa y el presidente George Bush estaban “unidos para repetir las Cruzadas”. “Si el Papa no se disculpa, la ira de los musulmanes continuará hasta que tenga remordimiento”, advirtió. “Debería reunirse con clérigos, sentarse y aprender sobre el Islam”, recomendó el líder religioso iraní. Antes, las escuelas religiosas del país habían cerrado por un día, como un gesto de protesta. El gran ayatola Abdolkarim Mousavi Ardebili dijo: “Si el comentario no estuvo basado en una enemistad, eso demuestra un error de comprensión y malicia”. También se registraron protestas contra el Papa en India y Turquía.
Esta última crisis se activó por el descuido del Papa, mientras que la crisis por las caricaturas danesas fue el producto de un alborotador, que lo hizo deliberadamente. Pero, aunque tienen diferentes inicios, tienen algo en común: las dos empezaron con una descripción del Islam como violento. La caricatura que más ofensa causó era la que mostraba al profeta Mahoma con un turbante con la forma de un tanque. La cita utilizada por el Papa hace una referencia a las “órdenes del profeta para difundir con la espada la fe que proclama”. Son las referencias a la supuesta tendencia del Islam a la violencia lo que pone furiosos a algunos líderes islámicos y a sus seguidores –se enojan tanto por esta injuria que salen y les disparan a ancianas monjas por la espalda–. Esta es una paradoja con la que “el diálogo franco y sincero” de Benedicto deberá lidiar, si logra salir de esta crisis.
* De The Independent de Gran Bretaña. Especial para Página/12.
© 2000-2006 www.pagina12.com.ar|República Argentina|Todos los Derechos Reservados
http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/elmundo/4-73184-2006-09-18.html
Página/12:
Suecia se pasó a la derecha
TRAS DIEZ AÑOS DE GOBIERNO SOCIALDEMOCRATA
Por Stephen Castle*
Lunes, 18 de Septiembre de 2006
El partido conservador sueco ganó por una estrecha victoria las legislativas de ayer, terminando con la cuasi-hegemonía del partido socialdemócrata. Un sondeo, sobre cerca de diez mil votantes y realizado por el canal nacional público SVT, mostraba un 47,8 por ciento para el centroderecha, mientras que el Partido de Izquierda y el Verde sumaban un 45,6 por ciento. Estas cifras son el resultado de una campaña electoral que se convirtió en una prueba de popularidad de los diez años en el poder del primer ministro socialdemócrata, Goran Persson, quien anoche antes de conocerse los resultados finales ya había reconocido públicamente su derrota.
Su principal rival, Fredrik Reinfeldt, es padre de tres niños, de 41 años, que ha trasladado al partido conservador –conocido como el partido moderado– al centro, sacándolo de su salvajismo político. La votación de ayer también fue vista como un veredicto sobre el muy elogiado modelo social sueco. Este sistema utiliza el dinero proveniente de los altos impuestos y los canaliza en grandes inversiones en salud, educación, desarrollo infantil y para investigación y desarrollo.
A nivel macro, las cosas les están yendo bien a la mayoría de los suecos. El crecimiento económico es mayor al cinco por ciento y la inflación es baja. Pero, mientras el desempleo es oficialmente del seis por ciento, la tasa de jóvenes sin trabajo es varias veces mayor que esa cifra y, además, muchos desempleados están escondidos entre el gran número de personas beneficiadas por un seguro por enfermedad. Los moderados aseguran que la verdadera cifra de desempleo es mayor al 20 por ciento.
Reinfeldt, el líder de una alianza de cuatro partidos, se cree que introducirá reformas a este sistema, aunque ha sido cuidadoso en no cuestionar los fundamentos del Estado benefactor, que mantiene un apoyo mayoritario en Suecia. La baja de impuestos estaría dirigida a los que menos tienen, por ejemplo.
Aunque Reinfeldt está viviendo un impresionante momento político, los socialdemócratas mantienen un record formidable de dominación sobre la política sueca. Se mantuvo en el poder ininterrumpidamente, excepto por un período de nueve años, desde 1932. No han abandonado el gobierno desde 1994. Como en varias de las últimas elecciones en Europa, incluyendo la alemana y la italiana, los electores parecían estar divididos casi por la mitad en la víspera de la votación, lo que se reprodujo muy claramente ayer.
Después de diez años en el poder, Persson, de 57 años, es el segundo primer ministro de la Unión Europea con más años en el cargo, después de su par de Luxemburgo, Jean-Claude Juncker. Pero sus esfuerzos para mantener el poder se vieron obstaculizados por las demandas de los aliados de los socialdemócratas para obtener puestos en el gabinete de cualquier futuro gobierno. Persson se ha resistido a los llamados para crear una coalición formal, mientras que Reinfeldt accedió a formar una alianza con sus compañeros de la centroderecha. A ellos les otorgó el triunfo de ayer: “la victoria es un trabajo en equipo”.
* De The Independent de Gran Bretaña. Especial para Página/12.
Traducción: Laura Carpineta.
© 2000-2006 www.pagina12.com.ar|República Argentina|Todos los Derechos Reservados
http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/elmundo/4-73181-2006-09-18.html
Página/12:
“La mentira de la invasión silenciosa”
ELIZABETH JELIN, SERGIO CAGGIANO Y ALEJANDRO GRIMSON: MITOS SOBRE LOS INMIGRANTES DE PAISES LIMITROFES
Bolivianos, paraguayos, peruanos, chilenos y uruguayos han sido chivos expiatorios muchas veces de un discurso político que prefiere no asumir su propia responsabilidad. Los inmigrantes de países limítrofes han sido culpabilizados de la desocupación o el mal funcionamiento de los hospitales, entre otros mitos.
Por Mariana Carbajal
Lunes, 18 de Septiembre de 2006
–¿Hubo un aluvión migratorio de países limítrofes en la década del ’90?
Elizabeth Jelin: –La investigación histórica muestra que la proporción de población argentina originaria de países limítrofes ha sido constante por casi 150 años. Desde que se tienen datos –la primera mención es en el censo de 1869– hasta el último censo, entre 2 y 3 por ciento de la población del país es nacida en Paraguay, Bolivia, Uruguay, Chile, y Perú. De modo que en términos de peso en la población de Argentina no ha habido grandes variaciones. En general, cuando el tipo de cambio está alto la gente viene, y cuando baja, se va; cuando hay más crecimiento económico, viene, cuando hay más recesión, se va. Pero estas circunstancias, además, están cruzadas por exilios políticos y por otro fenómeno que ocurren en las migraciones, una especie de inercia por la cual cuando viene un miembro de la familia, empiezan a venir otros, independientemente de que el contexto económico mejore o empeore.
–¿Qué cantidad de inmigrantes de países limítrofes y de Perú llegaron en los noventa?
Sergio Caggiano: –No hay números absolutos. En la medida en que se presupone que hay una cantidad importante de indocumentados, es muy difícil tener una cifra real. De acuerdo con los distintos informantes, las cifras varían entre 2 millones y 700 mil inmigrantes.
–¿A qué nacionalidad corresponde el flujo mayor de inmigrantes?
E.J.: –La comunidad de residentes de países cercanos más importante es la de paraguayos. Pero en los últimos años hubo un crecimiento del número de bolivianos en relación con los paraguayos y tuvo un peso más significativo la inmigración de peruanos, que no tenía tradición histórica.
–¿Qué factores influyeron para que tuviera mayor visibilización la inmigración de los países limítrofes y del Perú en los ’90?
S.C.: –Hubo una concentración de la población proveniente de países limítrofes en la Capital Federal y áreas metropolitanas de Buenos Aires. Pero a ese fenómeno se sumó el papel que jugaron actores políticos, sociales y grandes medios de comunicación en la estigmatización y visibilización de esos inmigrantes, sobre todo asociándolos a problemas sociales como la desocupación, la crisis en el sistema de salud y al crecimiento de la inseguridad. Carlos Corach, que era el ministro del Interior, declaraba que había una “extranjerización de la delincuencia”. Uno podía comprobar que en las cárceles había un porcentaje mayor de personas de países limítrofes, pero eso no quería decir que fueran más delincuentes sino que eran más detenidos por la policía. Entre la detención y la comprobación del delito se iban depurando los porcentajes.
–Recuerdo unos carteles de un sindicato acusando a los inmigrantes de la desocupación...
E.J.: –La Uocra pegó carteles en todo el país diciendo que los migrantes eran los que nos quitaban el trabajo.
–¿Se determinó la representación real de extranjeros en el delito?
E.J.:–Investigaciones en profundidad demostraron que la representación de extranjeros en la criminalidad era menor que la de nativos.
–¿Existió una directiva del Ministerio del Interior para detener extranjeros de países limítrofes cometieran o no un delito?
S.C.: –No podríamos decir eso. Lo que sí se puede ver es que los fenómenos de estigmatización que eclosionaban en los discursos más discriminatorios que estaban en las cúpulas políticas, sindical, mediática, tenían consecuencias en las prácticas que llevaba a cabo quienes en las instituciones ejecutaban las políticas.
–¿Cuánto influyeron los inmigrantes en el aumento del desempleo?
S.C: –En uno de los trabajos más rigurosos que se han hecho sobre el tema se analizan los datos del ‘94, cuando el desempleo se duplicó y pasó de 6,5 por ciento al 13 por ciento. Ese estudio muestra que si se quitaran a los migrantes de la cifra de desempleo, la variación del índice sería menor al uno por ciento.
E.J.: –Una demógrafa, por otra parte, analizó cuánto menos subiría el desempleo si en ese momento se hubiesen mandado de vuelta a todos los migrantes, y la diferencia era mínima.
–¿Qué buscó el gobierno menemista con la estigmatización de los inmigrantes?
S.C.: –Básicamente convertirlos en el chivo expiatorio. Después del 2001 es bastante razonable para cualquiera de nosotros entender que ni la crisis del sistema de salud ni el aumento del desempleo fueron responsabilidad de los inmigrantes, pero en los ’90 ese discurso tuvo mucha pregnancia social.
–¿Qué papel jugó la prensa en la construcción de ese discurso?
S.C.: –Fue emblemática la tapa de la revista La Primera, de Daniel Hadad, que salió con el título de “La invasión silenciosa”. Esa nota es paradigmática. Tomarla como ejemplo es hacerle trampa al análisis porque es una grosería en términos periodísticos: juega con los números, sin mentir no dice la verdad. Sin embargo, todo lo que menciona ese artículo está presente, pero de manera más sutil, en casi toda la prensa gráfica de aquellos años.
–¿Cómo son tratados los bolivianos en la prensa?
S.C: –Analicé durante cuatro años los diarios El Día y Hoy, de La Plata, y vi cómo aparecían los inmigrantes bolivianos, cuando no se trataba de artículos sobre la comunidad boliviana o sobre inmigración y encontré que aparecían sólo en la sección policial, vinculados a la comisión de algún delito.
–¿Y eso ha cambiado en la actualidad?
E.J.: –Después de la crisis de 2001 hubo mucha inmigración argentina a Europa y Estados Unidos, y los medios empezaron a hablar de la discriminación hacia los argentinos en España. Junto con eso hubo un cambio de discurso sobre los inmigrantes que llegaban a la Argentina.
S.C.: –A partir del debate de la nueva Ley Migratoria, que se aprobó en 2003, hay una mirada diferente que surge de la política distinta que tiene este Gobierno con los inmigrantes, que se manifiesta con medidas como el plan Patria Grande.
Alejandro Grimson: –Hubo un cambio estructural y cultural muy grande. En los noventa muchos argentinos votaban a un presidente que decía que habíamos ingresado al Primer Mundo. O sea que muchos argentinos lo creían. En ese marco, mientras supuestamente habíamos ingresado al Primer Mundo teníamos más desocupación y delincuencia. Entonces, para el discurso oficial, las causas de la delincuencia y la desocupación era la invasión de los inmigrantes, porque los alemanes tenían a los turcos, los franceses a los argelinos, EE.UU. a los mexicanos. Hoy, la idea de entrar al Primer Mundo no es parte del discurso público.
–¿Qué moviliza a los peruanos a venir a la Argentina?
E.J.: –Hay comunidades de peruanos en todos lados del mundo, pero no cortan vínculos, se puede hablar de familias transnacionales, de multilocalización, de personas que están un tiempo acá y luego se van para allá. Se da en Italia, Estados Unidos, España, Brasil, hay muchísimos peruanos en Chile y también en Argentina. Se habla de la diáspora peruana y tiene que ver con las condiciones económicas y políticas, es un país de enormes desplazamientos de población por la violencia. Una característica de la migración que viene de Perú a la Argentina es que es educada, secundaria y terciaria también. En los sectores de clase media acomodada porteña trabajan empleadas domésticas peruanas que están cambiando los hábitos de comida en este momento.
–¿Y qué característica tiene la inmigración boliviana?
S.C: –Hay aspectos que son comunes a los inmigrantes de los países limítrofes y Perú: las ocupaciones en franjas de trabajos de baja calificación; los dos tiempos de la migración, primero en las zonas limítrofes y luego hacia los centros urbanos. Lo que tal vez diferencia a los migrantes bolivianos es la dispersión territorial: los dos grandes polos donde se asientan siguen siendo la frontera con Jujuy y la zona metropolitana, pero también están distribuidos por todo el territorio nacional, en distintas ciudades de la Patagonia, en Córdoba, en Mendoza.
E.J.: –La producción hortícola del Gran Buenos Aires está bastante armada en base a trabajo boliviano y también a empresarios bolivianos, que reclutan a los trabajadores en Bolivia.
–¿El trabajo de bolivianos en talleres de costura es un fenómeno reciente?
E.J.: –En los últimos treinta años se han ido dedicando a la costura. Lo que sucede es que ahora es más visible por la reactivación económica y el hecho de que en el sector textil no haya tanta importación. Es un negocio basado en la explotación de los trabajadores en talleres no registrados, cuya mercadería termina en las grandes marcas. Muchos de los talleres son de propiedad coreana. Esa simbiosis extraña entre coreanos y bolivianos que se ve en la zona del Bajo Flores viene de Bolivia.
–Caggiano, en su libro usted analiza por qué los inmigrantes bolivianos no entran en el mítico crisol de razas. ¿A qué conclusión llegó?
S.C.: –Hay cuestiones racistas, un racismo que está poco discutido en el país: como nosotros nos consideramos un país sin razas y sin problemas raciales, creemos que tampoco hay racismo. La metáfora del crisol condensa las imágenes de la Argentina que resulta de la inmigración que bajó de los barcos, de la fundición de razas blancas, pero niega una parte de la historia que no sólo tiene que ver con la inmigración limítrofe sino con parte de la historia argentina. Hay algunos datos numéricos que son muy relevantes también: la inmigración transatlántica, de fines del siglo XIX y principios del XX, en ese momento culminante que fue 1914, representó el 50 por ciento de la población de la ciudad de Buenos Aires. Pero la inmigración ultramarina representaba el 7 por ciento de la población de Jujuy. ¿Qué Argentina resulta de ese crisol de razas?
–Hay una creencia que indica que un alto porcentaje de las camas de los hospitales porteños están ocupadas por inmigrantes, que incluso vienen charters de Paraguay con pacientes. ¿Qué hay de cierto al respecto?
E.J.: –Hay mitos urbanos. Había uno que yo traté de seguir en una época, que decía que Perón les dio departamentos a gente que terminó haciendo asados con el parquet. En muchas investigaciones a lo largo de mi vida me encontré con gente que cuenta eso en barrios populares, no necesariamente gorilas de Barrio Norte. Les preguntaba entonces: “¿Usted lo vio? ¿Dónde pasó?” Me decían: “No, pero me contó un vecino”. Entonces, les decía: “Vamos a hablar con el vecino”. Traté de seguir la cadena y nunca llegué a nadie que dijera: “Yo lo vi”. Son mitos fuertes que permean. Y la gente actúa en consecuencia a los mitos. Quizás hubo una persona que quemó el parquet. Quizás hay charters. Nosotros no pudimos documentar ninguno. Tuvimos entrevistas con profesionales de la salud que dicen que existen, o que afirman que en la terminal de ómnibus de Ciudad del Este hay carteles que dicen “Al Hospital Alvarez” y otros que informan que para Gastroenterología hay que ver a tal doctor. Los profesionales de la salud cuentan que los micros llegan el domingo a la tarde.
S.C.: –Preguntamos: “¿A qué hora llegan este domingo?” Y no sabían. Volvíamos a preguntar: “¿Y usted vio alguno algún domingo que hizo guardia?” Y nos respondían: “Yo personalmente no, pero me dijeron”. Y el charter siempre está pero nunca se ve.
–¿Pudieron precisar qué porcentaje de las camas de los hospitales públicos está ocupado por inmigrantes?
E.J.: –Una de las investigadoras de nuestro equipo, Marcela Cerrutti, hizo un análisis cuantitativo, y mostró que los migrantes tienen una frecuencia de asistencia al hospital similar a la de la población nativa. No se enferman ni van más que los argentinos. Uno puede decir que usan más el hospital público que la población nativa porque son más pobres en promedio y no tienen prepaga. Pero si uno compara entre sector popular nativo y sector popular migrante, no hay diferencia en relación con la concurrencia al hospital.
S.C.: –En el trabajo que hice en Jujuy encontré que los propios profesionales de los centros de salud decían que el 51 por ciento de las camas estaban ocupadas con bolivianos. Pero los números oficiales de los propios centros indicaban que sólo ocupaban un 3,9 por ciento.
–¿Cómo reciben los médicos del sistema público de salud a los pacientes inmigrantes?
E.J.: –Encontramos muchas expresiones muy abiertas de lo que llamaríamos racismo en hospitales de la ciudad de Buenos Aires.
S.C.: –Hay una que me resultó muy impactante. Un médico se refiere a los problemas comunicacionales y dice que las bolivianas se quedan mirando con una expresión neutra. Lo que es interesante es que con esa observación el médico está denunciando, involuntariamente, un problema de códigos culturales, porque no hay expresiones faciales neutras, lo que hay es incapacidad de entender la expresión facial del otro.
–¿Qué maltratos hacia los inmigrantes detectaron en el sistema de salud?
A.G.: –A los migrantes, cuando llegan a un hospital, les exigen un DNI cuando no es necesario que lo presenten. Cuando acceden a la consulta tienen una probabilidad alta de encontrarse con un médico que por un montón de razones puede llegar a discriminarlo o a considerar que no debería estar atendiéndolo. Si el médico considera que esa persona tiene menos derecho que otras estamos en problemas. Vamos a suponer que no tuvo trabas administrativas, pero se encuentra con problemas gravísimos de comunicación intercultural: el médico no entiende y no tiene formación para entender. En distintos países las partes del cuerpo se nombran de manera distinta, entonces cuando alguien le dice que le duele algo, no siempre el médico entiende; cuando un médico está predispuesto para que el paciente le diga cuáles son los síntomas y el paciente no se los dice, estamos en una situación de comunicación distinta.
–¿Se ha estudiado si se casan los inmigrantes bolivianos con personas nativas?
A.G.: –Hay pocos estudios sociodemográficos sobre ese tema. Pero estoy convencido después de muchos años de trabajar y estar en relación con bolivianos, de que lo que se llama en sociología el mercado del matrimonio, es decir, las posibilidades que una persona cualquiera tiene de casarse con otras de distintas edad, género, clase, está profundamente cerrado para los bolivianos. ¿Cuántos matrimonios vemos por la calle entre bolivianas y argentinos o bolivianos y argentinas? En el imaginario social bolivianos no son sólo los que nacieron en Bolivia sino todos los que tiene un fenotipo aymara-quechua, con lo cual incluyen a miles y millones de argentinos que nacen acá pero son considerados bolivianos.
–¿Por qué les cuesta mezclarse con argentinos?
A.G.: –Las zonas donde viven más bolivianos son las villas miseria y los barrios populares. En el trabajo de campo que hice me impactó el grado de discriminación impresionante que hay en la vida cotidiana en los barrios populares hacia los bolivianos. Si vas a cualquier villa de Capital o Gran Buenos Aires, te dicen: “Los bolivianos son muy cerrados, bajan las persianas, se quedan en sus casas, sólo van a trabajar y vuelven pero no quieren relacionarse”. Pero lo que ves es que los peores estigmas en esos barrios están dirigidos a los bolivianos. Los vecinos que son más asaltados por los jóvenes de los barrios son los bolivianos: porque tienen plata, no se defienden de la misma manera, no se enfrentan a la situación colectivamente. Los jóvenes hijos de bolivianos (que son argentinos y que terminan siendo considerados socialmente bolivianos, y que muchas veces ellos mismos se consideran a sí mismos bolivianos, aunque son legalmente argentinos), cuando tratan de romper la barrera de la endogamia, la gran mayoría de las veces no lo consiguen. Hay casos de hijos de bolivianos, socialmente considerados bolivianos, que van a la universidad, que se socializan, que se hacen amigos de muchísimos argentinos y argentinas, pero no se casan con argentinos. Son situaciones muy fuertes porque estamos hablando de un espacio universitario, donde supuestamente hay menos discriminación, menos prejuicio.
–¿Hay una mirada más estigmatizante hacia los bolivianos con respecto a otras colectividades?
A.G.: –La discriminación hacia los paraguayos es bastante equivalente a la que sufren los ciudadanos provenientes de cualquier provincia argentina. En todos los barrios populares hay chistes sobre los santiagueños, los correntinos, los riojanos y también sobre paraguayos. Los peruanos sufren una discriminación de otro carácter que tiene que ver con dos factores: por un lado, con el miedo a la competencia porque tienen un nivel educativo muchas veces superior al de la población nativa; por el otro, porque se los asocia con la delincuencia, algo que nunca pasó con los bolivianos. A los bolivianos se los menosprecia, se los trata como indígenas. A mi juicio esto tiene su raíz en una profunda envidia. El de los bolivianos es un caso único donde hay ascenso económico sin ascenso social. Los bolivianos en muchos casos ahorraron, hicieron el piso arriba, se compraron la camioneta, instalaron un taller de costura en su casa, están arrendando tierras en el Gran Buenos Aires o en los cordones hortícolas de varias ciudades del país. Esto genera muchísima envidia.
© 2000-2006 www.pagina12.com.ar|República Argentina|Todos los Derechos Reservados
http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/dialogos/21-73179-2006-09-18.html
Página/12:
¿Hay más agua en el vino o vino en el agua?
Por Adrián Paenza
Lunes, 18 de Septiembre de 2006
Este problema enseña a pensar (por supuesto, en un caso particular), pero la idea es educar la intuición. Y poder decidir mejor o, en todo caso, tomar decisiones más “educadas”, en aquellas situaciones de la vida en las que uno tiene que optar. Estaba caminando por la Facultad de Ciencias Exactas de la UBA cuando me encontré con Teresita Krick, matemática, profesora también y, sobre todo, muy buena amiga.
“Adrián, tengo un problema interesante para vos –me dijo en un descanso de la escalera–; ¿tenés tiempo para que te lo cuente? Te va a servir para el final de cada programa de tele.”
“Sí –le digo–, bienvenida sea toda historia que sirva para pensar.” “Bueno, la historia es así: se tienen dos vasos iguales. Uno contiene vino (llamémoslo V) y el otro agua (llamado A). Los dos tienen la misma cantidad de líquido. Uno toma una cuchara, digamos de sopa para que sea lo suficientemente grande, aunque no es imprescindible, y la hunde en el vino. La llena (a la cuchara) y, sin que se caiga nada, vierte el vino que sacó en el vaso que contiene el agua. Y revuelve. Es decir, mezcla el agua y el vino. Claramente, el vaso llamado A tiene ahora un poco más de líquido que el vaso V. Más aún, lo que le falta de líquido a V, lo tiene de más el vaso A.
“Ahora bien –siguió Teresa–. Una vez que uno revolvió bien el contenido del vaso A, vuelve a meter la cuchara en el vaso A y vuelve a llenar la cuchara. Claramente, lo que uno está eligiendo ahora no es agua pura, sino una mezcla. Pero no importa. Llena la cuchara con ese líquido y lo pone ahora en el vaso V”.
Teresita me miraba fijo. Yo todavía no sabía hacia dónde iba, pero la dejé seguir:
“Si mezclamos otra vez el líquido en el vaso V, ¿qué te parece que pasa ahora? ¿Hay más agua en el vino o más vino en el agua?”
Fin del problema. Ahora, hay que pensar. El problema no tiene trucos, ni trampas. Se supone que el agua y el vino no se mezclan, en el sentido de que no cambian sus propiedades. Sé que esto no es cierto, pero a los efectos del problema vamos a suponerlo así.
Respuesta
La cantidad de agua en el vino es la misma que la cantidad de vino en el agua.
¿Cómo convencerse de que esto es cierto? Hay varias maneras de pensar este problema. Yo voy a sugerir dos, pero se puede resolver de múltiples formas (y estoy seguro de que la que eligió usted es mejor que cualquiera de las dos que figuran acá abajo, aunque más no sea porque es la “suya”, la que imaginó usted).
Primera solución
Las cantidades de líquido que había en cada vaso eran las mismas (antes de empezar el problema). Pero además, y esto es importante, las cantidades de líquido que hay al final, luego de haber mezclado en ambos vasos, también es igual.
Ahora bien: está claro que algo de vino quedó en el vaso A. Pero también es claro que algo de agua quedó en el vaso V.
Ese algo de agua que falta en el vaso A, está en V.
Y ese algo de vino que falta en el vaso V, está en A.
Si esas cantidades no fueran iguales, eso querría decir que en uno de los dos vasos hay más líquido. Y eso no puede ser. Como las cantidades finales son las mismas, entonces, eso implica que lo que falta de agua en el vaso A es igual a lo que falta de vino en el vaso V.
Y eso era lo que queríamos demostrar.
Segunda solución
Vamos a hacer un modelo distinto sobre el mismo problema. En lugar de líquido, vamos a suponer que hay bolitas de distintos colores en cada vaso.
Supongamos que en el vaso V hay mil bolitas verdes y en el vaso A hay mil bolitas azules. Suponga que en ambos vasos hay 1000 (mil) bolitas. Suponga que usted toma una cuchara y saca del vaso V 30 bolitas (verdes) y las pasa al vaso A (en donde están las azules).
Ahora, en el vaso V, quedan 970 bolitas (todas verdes) y en el vaso A, quedan 1030 bolitas (1000 azules y 30 verdes que acabo de pasar con la cuchara).
Ahora mezclamos las bolitas del vaso A. En su mayoría, son bolitas azules, pero ahora hay también 30 bolitas verdes. Para replicar lo que hacíamos con el agua y el vino, ahora volvemos a usar la cuchara. La hundimos en el vaso A en donde están las 1030 bolitas, y a los efectos de poder avanzar con el pensamiento, vamos a suponer que nos llevamos 27 azules y 3 de las verdes que habían pasado originalmente (los números que elegí son arbitrarios, usted puede cambiarlos si quiere).
Estas treinta bolitas, las volvemos a depositar en el vaso V. Por favor, tome nota de que en el vaso A quedaron ahora 973 azules y 27 verdes. Pero ahora, al haber pasado las treinta bolitas del vaso A al vaso V, los dos tienen la misma cantidad de bolitas: mil.
En el vaso V quedaron 970 verdes que nunca fueron tocadas, más 27 azules que deposité la segunda vez que pasé la cuchara, más 3 verdes que volvieron también. O sea, hay 973 verdes y 27 azules.
Conclusiones:
a) En ambos vasos hay la misma cantidad de bolitas; b) en el vaso V hay 973 verdes y 27 azules; c) en el vaso A, hay 973 azules y 27 verdes.
Como se ve, hay la misma cantidad de verdes entre las azules que de azules entre las verdes. O si usted quiere, hay la misma cantidad de agua en el vino que de vino en el agua.
Final con moraleja incluida: para resolver este problema, es obvio que no hace falta saber resolver ecuaciones, ni hace falta saber modelar con bolitas. Hay gente que llega a la respuesta razonando como en la primera solución. Y otra, razonando como en la segunda. Más aún: como escribí más arriba, estoy seguro de que mucha gente lo resuelve de otras formas.
Por eso, no hay una única manera de resolver problemas. Lo que es interesante es ser capaces de pensar. No importa tanto qué caminos uno toma: todos iluminan.
© 2000-2006 www.pagina12.com.ar|República Argentina|Todos los Derechos Reservados
http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/contratapa/13-73178-2006-09-18.html
The Independent: Deadly harvest:
The Lebanese fields sown with cluster bombs
Lebanese villagers must risk death in fields 'flooded' with more than a million Israeli cluster bombs - or leave crops to rot
By Patrick Cockburn in Nabatiyeh
Published: 18 September 2006
The war in Lebanon has not ended. Every day, some of the million bomblets which were fired by Israeli artillery during the last three days of the conflict kill four people in southern Lebanon and wound many more.
The casualty figures will rise sharply in the next month as villagers begin the harvest, picking olives from trees whose leaves and branches hide bombs that explode at the smallest movement. Lebanon's farmers are caught in a deadly dilemma: to risk the harvest, or to leave the produce on which they depend to rot in the fields.
In a coma in a hospital bed in Nabatiyeh lies Hussein Ali Ahmad, a 70-year-old man from the village of Yohmor. He was pruning an orange tree outside his house last week when he dislodged a bomblet; it exploded, sending pieces of shrapnel into his brain, lungs and kidneys. "I know he can hear me because he squeezes my hand when I talk to him," said his daughter, Suwad, as she sat beside her father's bed in the hospital.
At least 83 people have been killed by cluster munitions since the ceasefire, according to independent monitors.
Some Israeli officers are protesting at the use of cluster bombs, each containing 644 small but lethal bomblets, against civilian targets in Lebanon. A commander in the MLRS (multiple launch rocket systems) unit told the Israeli daily Haaretz that the army had fired 1,800 cluster rockets, spraying 1.2 million bomblets over houses and fields. "In Lebanon, we covered entire villages with cluster bombs," he said. "What we did there was crazy and monstrous." What makes the cluster bombs so dangerous is that 30 per cent of the bomblets do not detonate on impact. They can lie for years - often difficult to see because of their small size, on roofs, in gardens, in trees, beside roads or in rubbish - waiting to explode when disturbed.
In Nabatiyeh, the modern 100-bed government hospital has received 19 victims of cluster bombs since the end of the war. As we arrived, a new patient, Ahmad Sabah, a laboratory technician at the hospital, was being rushed into the emergency room. A burly man of 45, he was unconscious on a stretcher. Earlier in the morning, he had gone up to the flat roof of his house to check the water tank. While there, he must have touched a pile of logs he was keeping for winter fires. Unknown to him, a bomblet had fallen into the woodpile a month earlier. The logs shielded him from the full force of the blast, but when we saw him, doctors were still trying to find out the extent of his injuries.
"For us, the war is still going on, though there was a cease-fire on 14 August," said Dr Hassan Wazni, the director of the hospital. "If the cluster bombs had all exploded at the time they landed, it would not be so bad, but they are still killing and maiming people."
The bomblets may be small, but they explode with devastating force. On the morning of the ceasefire, Hadi Hatab, an 11-year old boy, was brought dying to the hospital. "He must have been holding the bomb close to him," Dr Wazni said. "It took off his hands and legs and the lower part of his body."
We went to Yohmor to find where Hussein Ali Ahmad had received his terrible wounds while pruning his orange tree. The village is at the end of a broken road, six miles south of Nabatiyeh, and is overlooked by the ruins of Beaufort Castle, a crusader fortress on a ridge above the deep valley along which the Litani river runs.
Israeli bombs and shells have turned about a third of the houses in Yohmor into concrete sandwiches, one floor falling on top of another under the impact of explosions. Some families camp in the ruins. Villagers said that they were most worried by the cluster bombs still infesting their gardens, roofs and fruit trees. In the village street, were the white vehicles of the Manchester-based Mines Advisory Group (MAG), whose teams are trying to clear the bomblets.
It is not an easy job. Whenever members of one of the MAG teams finds and removes a bomblet, they put a stick, painted red on top and then yellow, in the ground. There are so many of these sticks that it looks as if some sinister plant had taken root and is flourishing in the village.
"The cluster bombs all landed in the last days of the war," said Nuhar Hejazi, a surprisingly cheerful 65-year-old woman. "There were 35 on the roof of our house and 200 in our garden so we can't visit our olive trees." People in Yohmor depend on their olive trees and the harvest should begin now before the rains, but the trees are still full of bomblets. "My husband and I make 20 cans of oil a year which we need to sell," Mrs Hejazi says. "Now we don't know what to do." The sheer number of the bomblets makes it almost impossible to remove them all.
Frederic Gras, a de-mining expert formerly in the French navy, who is leading the MAG teams in Yohmor, says: "In the area north of the Litani river, you have three or four people being killed every day by cluster bombs. The Israeli army knows that 30 per cent of them do not explode at the time they are fired so they become anti-personnel mines."
Why did the Israeli army do it? The number of cluster bombs fired must have been greater than 1.2 million because, in addition to those fired in rockets, many more were fired in 155mm artillery shells. One Israeli gunner said he had been told to "flood" the area at which they were firing but was given no specific targets. M. Gras, who personally defuses 160 to 180 bomblets a day, says this is the first time he seen cluster bombs used against heavily populated villages.
An editorial in Haaretz said that the mass use of this weapon by the Israeli Defence Forces was a desperate last-minute attempt to stop Hizbollah's rocket fire into northern Israel. Whatever the reason for the bombardment, the villagers in south Lebanon will suffer death and injury from cluster bombs as they pick their olives and oranges for years to come.
© 2006 Independent News and Media Limited
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article1616665.ece
ZNet | Europe
ORIANA FALLACI-THE ENJOYMENT OF HATE
Letter from Rome
by Judy Harris; DIRELAND; September 17, 2006
ROME - Italy's feisty queen of journalism, Oriana Fallaci, died of cancer in her native Florence at age 77 on Friday morning, September 15. Corriere della Sera's obituary, which runs Sunday morning, is not unusual in its oozing ecstatic phrases about her, with not a sobering doubt expressed. Seen from here, this is somewhat curious, for she was hardly without serious flaws. For example, a 2003 article in the center-left newspaper La Repubblica called her "ignorantissima," an "exhibitionist posing as the Joan of Arc of the West."
The author of thirteen widely translated books, in recent years she lived in Manhattan. "Florence and New York are my two countries," she said. But the world was almost too small for this aggressive interviewer. She was pretty and with enough potent sex appeal when younger to make her subjects-they included Henry Kissinger, U.S. astronauts, the Ayatollah Khomeini-relish the combat.
Born in Florence June 29, 1929, when she was ten years old her father, who liked to hunt, taught her to handle a gun. He was also an active anti-Fascist, later captured and tortured by Fascists, and encouraged his adolescent daughter to join the partisans' struggle in Tuscany against Nazi-Fascism during World War II. For this she received the gold medal of the Italian president in 2005. She something spoke in aphorisms, such as "Freedom is a duty before it is a right," and "Courage is made of fear." She occasionally deployed investigative talents - for example, after the 1975 murder of Pier Paolo Pasolini, she wrote an influential and widely-reprinted exposé (it appeared in the U..S. in The New Republic) of the killing as a political assassination committed by multiple persons, and showed how the supposed teenage "murderer" (who got a light sentence because he was underage) had complex family ties to a violent fascist group (last year, the "murderer" of Pasolini recanted his 30-year-old "confession" and said the assassination was, in reality, the work of a band of three other men.)
Fallaci also had a vivid imagination, which went beyond journalism to produce works like Oriana interviewing Oriana and a long letter to an unborn child. In 1979 she also wrote a novelistic tale, "A Man," of mega-devotion to her beloved Alexandros ("Alekos") Panagoulis.
The two met when she interviewed him as leader of the Greek resistance to the colonels. Panagoulis was already well known in European Socialist circles for his attempt to assassinate Greek dictator George Papadopoulos in 1968. As Panagoulis told Fallaci in her interview (reprinted in 1976 as Interview with History), "I am not capable of killing a man-I wanted to kill a tyrant." Amazon.com states, "from that interview was born a great love and an immense tragedy."
True only to a point, for it was neither a particularly great love, nor was the tragedy hers, except in the telling. Like many lovers, they did not always get on. One day in Oriana's apartment in Rome Panagulis was taking a shower when Oriana rushed in, with new clothing she had just purchased for him. She took the items into the bathroom to show him. Furious-he did not like the hint of being kept by her-he literally pelted her with the expensive new underwear. Fact was, back home in Greece Panagulis had a fiancée whom he was expecting to marry when he was killed in a suspicious auto accident in Greece. When he died, she wrote "A Man," and he was hers forever.
In recent years, Fallaci moved sharply to the right, and became an obsessive, xenophobic racist, producing three short, incendiary post-9/11 books - two of them, "The Rage and the Pride" and "The Force of Reason," which she translated into idiosyncratic English by herself (in the past she'd had extremely mercurial relations with her translators) and a third, "The Apocalypse," published in Europe, that also included a lengthy self-interview. The books have been best-sellers in Italy; and together sold four million copies (a reflection of the rise in fear and hatred of dark-skinned immigrants on the peninsula.) Her books were so rabidly racist that even Christopher Hitchens (who constantly harps on the dangers of "Islamofascism") wrote (in The Atlantic) that The Rage and the Pride was "a sort of primer in how not to write about Islam."
Part of her fantasy world was her vulgarly describing, post 9/11, the Islamic world as composed of men putting their butts into the air five times a day, and rabbity women tossing off babies endlessly ("Muslims breed like rats.". "I don't want to see a minaret every few yards in Giotto's Pisa.") Fallaci also had little use for Mexican immigrants: "If you put a pistol against my head and ask which I think is worse, Muslims or Mexicans, I'd have to think a moment, then I'd say the Muslims because they've broken my balls." She snarled that the presence of Islamic butcher shops in Cavour has transformed the "exquisite city" into a "filthy kasbah." Her paranoid world-view led her to ask whether all Islamic immigrants to the West had their transport paid by "some Osama bin Laden for the mere purpose of establishing the Reverse Crusade's settlements and better organizing Islamic terrorism."
Not long ago, Fallaci had a private audience with Pope Benedict XVI - and, considering Ratzinger's comments on Islam last week that created such world-wide furor, they obviously had much in common to talk about. Fallaci's conservatism also included opposition to abortion - unless she "were raped and made pregnant by a bin Laden or a Zarqawi."
A notorious homophobe who excoriated gay people as "devoured ... by the wrath of being half and half," she also opposed gay marriage by saying, "they'd like everybody to be like them." Sometimes she combined her homophobia and her Islamophobia ("In the same way that the Muslims would like us all to become Muslims, they [the 'gay lobby'] would like us all to become homosexuals"). In an interview with Robert Scheer for Playboy, she carried on about her distaste for gays: "I'm not crazy about them, the homosexuals. You see them here in New York, for instance, moving like this [makes a mincing gesture], exhibiting their homosexuality. It disturbs me. It's... I don't know... I just can't stand them." She then likens them to "the Mafia or the Communist Party."
Fallaci was paranoid about Jews - for example, she said, "I am angry at the Jews for many things... If you want to take the example of America, how they hold the power, the economical power in so many ways, and the press and the other kind of stuff... I never realized how it happened and they came to control the media to that point. Why?" That rant of Fallaci's reeks of classic anti-Semitism. Fallaci's racist disdain for anything in the Third World in her later years led her to characterize the United Nations as "a Mafia of cheaters and the underdeveloped."
Shortly after La Fallaci's outburst against the Muslim world following 9/11 (in a long newspaper essay for Corriere della Sera that would later be expanded into The Rage and the Pride), the late, remarkable Italian author/philosopher Tiziano Terzani (right) wrote her an open letter of reproach which included these words:
"And you, Oriana, putting yourself at the head of this crusade against all that are not like you or whom you don't like, do you believe you can offer us some salvation Salvation does not come from your hot rage, nor from you calculated military campaign, which, to make it more acceptable, you call 'enduring freedom.'..."To defend ourselves, Oriana, there is no need to offend (I'm thinking of your spitting and kicking). To protect ourselves there is no need to kill, even though in this there can be just exceptions."
She relished violence in her own language. And yet, as a former RAI TV network chief, Lucia Annunziata, said this morning, Oriana did not like being considered a rightist spokesperson, racist or xenophobic, which of course she was. Many Italians loved her, as per this paragraph posted on line today in Italy by a 20-year-old Florentine woman (see: http://OthankyouorianaO.giovani.it)
"This is placed on the web in memory of a Great Writer. This time I beg you only to respect our pain, and those of millions of readers who loved this woman. At least today do not wound us with bad, polemical and defamatory messages."
Sorry, but the Great Writer was also a Great Ego, whose enjoyment of hating everybody, or almost everybody, who was not her was immense.
This is the latest in a series of Letters from Rome on the politics of Italy from DIRELAND's correspondent in Italy, Judy Harris - a veteran expat journalist and former Italy staffer for the Wall Street Journal and TIME magazine. DIRELAND (where this article appeared on Sept. 16, 2006) is the blog of Doug Ireland, a longtime radical journalist and media critic.
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=74&ItemID=10983
ZNet | South Asia
Crony Capitalism and Its Implications
by Girish Mishra; September 17, 2006
In Western Uttar Pradesh, the State government has allotted agricultural land, acquired from peasants on very low rates, to industrialist Anil Ambani for building power plants and setting up a special economic zone. This has led to great discontent among local peasantry. Till recently, the State government never cared to pay any heed to peasants’ discontent and their demand for market rates to them for their landholdings. However, since peasants have launched a powerful and sustained agitation, led by, among others, by the former prime minister V. P. Singh and a film actor-turned-politician Raj Babbar, the government looks immensely worried because of immense media publicity and no sagging of the determination of the agitators in spite of police repression. It must not be forgotten that the Mumbai-based industrialist has been very close to the Samajwadi Party that rules the State and he was elected to the upper house of Parliament with its support.
Take a look at another news item. K. Natwar Singh and his son are under cloud because of their role in helping some of their friends secure contracts from the erstwhile Saddam Hussein regime of Iraq under the UN’s ‘Oil for Food Programme’ and make substantial amounts of money. K. Natwar Singh has lost his foreign minister ship while the Congress has suspended his son from the party.
On the surface, these two things do not seem to have anything in common, yet they symbolize the same phenomenon that goes by the name of ‘crony capitalism’. This term has gained prominence only in recent times, yet the phenomenon, it symbolizes has been present ever since the onset of modern industrial capitalism. A moment’s reflection will show that ‘crony capitalism’ is a contradiction in itself. To understand this, let us go a bit into history.
Raymond Williams in his Key Words dates the origin of the term ‘capitalism’ from the early 19th century while A Dictionary of Marxist Thought, edited by Tom Bottomore, et al, holds that the term ‘capitalism’ entered very late in Marxist parlance. “Marx, while he uses the adjective ‘capitalistic’ or talks of ‘capitalists’, does not use capitalism as a noun either in the Communist Manifesto or in Capital I. Only in 1877 in his correspondence with Russian followers did he use it in a discussion of the problem of Russia’s transition to capitalism.” As is now universally accepted, William Makepeace Thackeray first used the term ‘capitalism’ in his novel Newcomes: Memoirs of a most respectable family, published in 1877.
Very soon, ‘capitalism’ came to denote a specific mode of production, dominated by capital and its owners. The production for market in order to earn profit became the main motive. According to Adam Smith, the role of state would be the minimum possible and that of a facilitator. All decisions relating to production, that is, what to produce, how to produce and for whom to produce, would best be left to the ‘invisible hand’ of market forces. Any intervention by the state or any other organized entity, be it a labour union or association of merchants or producers would lead to harmful consequences. Wherever the economic role was indispensable like construction of roads, public buildings, etc. and it had to take the help of private parties, it must invite tenders and go in for those who offered the most favorable terms and conditions without showing any discrimination.
This stipulation itself was violated even during the 19th century, especially in the case of colonies. The British, for example, in the case of India favoured their own capitalists by permitting them to build railways on lucrative terms and conditions. They discriminated against Indian entrepreneurs in cotton textiles, steel, etc. This, however, was motivated by a general approach and no particular British capitalist was favoured against his compatriots.
The situation gradually changed and cronies came to be preferred and helped in the areas where the government had a say. Crony capitalism, as a phenomenon came to be noticed in America and, much later, in East Asian countries. Joseph E. Stiglitz, while discussing the case of Enron, has this to say: “Crony capitalism is not new; nor is it the province of a single party. Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin reportedly tried to influence the current government to intervene on behalf of Enron in its hotly contested dispute in India.” Further, “America’s willingness to provide multi-billion dollar bail-outs to airlines or to create cartels to protect its steel and aluminum industries suggests that free market ideology is but a thin guise for old-fashioned corporate welfare: give to those with the appropriate connections.” Stiglitz has underlined: “campaign contributions were not just a matter of public spirit, but an investment.”
Lending support to Stiglitz’s contention, Paul Krugman (“Crony Capitalism, USA, New York Times, January 15, 2002) says, “Cronyism is hardly novel in America, the Clinton administration took us to the edge of a trade war on behalf of Chiquita bananas, a major campaign contributor.”
A number of things follow from what has been said above. First, it is patently bogus to claim that free market has its sway in America. In fact, it is not allowed to function because cronyism has an upper hand. It is crony capitalism that is the ruling ideology. Under it those close to the politicians wielding power of making and enforcing policies receive favours of significant economic value. Thus politically connected people or corporate entities corner returns normally, not possible when market forces are allowed to dominate. Generally, capital and land are provided to the cronies at cheaper rates and on helpful terms and conditions. Land is acquired and given to the cronies at very cheap rates and credit is provided at low rates of interest and easy repayment terms from the government-controlled banks and other financial institutions. In addition, the cronies may be allowed to charge higher rates for their final products or accorded monopoly or quasi-monopoly position or protected from international competition in the domestic market. Thus the cronies earn an economic rent.
The cronies, in turn, help their political benefactors by funding their election campaigns under a democratic set up and also enriching them, their families and relations irrespective of the fact whether democracy or dictatorship prevails. Any number of examples from Suharto and Marcos to others can be easily cited. Obviously, a quid pro quo exists.
Crony capitalism distorts the pattern of production, the allocation of resources and the distribution of national income. It divides the society into two, the first consisting of those who benefit by crony capitalism and the second comprising those who are discriminated against or cheated of their resources. In our example of Western Uttar Pradesh Ambani and his political patrons are the real beneficiaries while potential competitors of Ambani and the peasants are the losers. This generates a tension in the society. Here one may ask: if crony capitalism is bad for the economy and the polity, why does it continue to flourish? And how can it be eradicated? Unfortunately, social scientists have not given adequate thought towards these questions.
In India, with a mushroom growth of political parties, the need for funds has increased enormously. People at large are generally indifferent and seldom contribute to their coffers. They depend largely on the corporate sector, traders, contractors and mafia besides looting the public exchequer. They do not approach people at large for contributions because this exercise is not rewarding. Fund seekers have to face many inconvenient questions and spend lots of time but the gain is not commensurate. It is better to help businessmen and criminals who, in turn, contribute sufficient funds for running the party concerned and its election campaign. Constituencies in India are relatively much bigger and very few parties have devoted full time workers in sufficient numbers to help carry on the campaign. There are, however, lots of unemployed young men and women available for work provided they are sufficiently rewarded and this can be possible only when crony capitalism flourishes.
Crony capitalism invariably gives rise to scandals. K. Natwar Singh is in trouble because he recommended the names of Andleeb Sehgal and some Khanna while, knowingly or unknowingly, ignoring the claims of other potential competitors. Some years ago, the Rastogi brothers of Lucknow were interested in setting up a technology park. They approached the then Prime Minister and the local M. P. A. B. Vajpayee to lay its foundation stone. Vajpayee obliged and this had a tremendous impact on the Unit Trust of India, a public financial institution that opened its coffers to the Rastogi brothers. The end result was the collapse of US-64 in which millions of middle class people had put in their hard earned money. Undoubtedly, they turned out to be losers.
Obviously, crony capitalism prospers at the expense of the people at large. Hence, it must be fought tooth and nail and eradicated at the earliest possible. This is also necessary for stemming the growth of, what actor-turned-politician Raj Babbar terms, “broker culture”.
Girish Mishra,
E-mail: gmishra@girishmishra.com
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=32&ItemID=10988
posted by attilav at 18:42
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