Elsewhere Today 421
Aljazeera:
South Asia flood waters receding
WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 08, 2007
11:40 MECCA TIME, 8:40 GMT
India and Bangladesh are struggling to reach food and water to millions of people as South Asia's floodwaters recede, leaving 1,900 dead, a trail of destruction and fear of epidemics.
Health workers disinfected wells and distributed chlorine tablets to villagers rushing back to their homes in northern India, officials said on Wednesday.
The UN and Oxfam, the charity, said millions of dollars in aid were needed to get relief supplies to some of the 28 million people displaced across India, Bangladesh and Nepal by the worst monsoon-triggered flooding in decades.
In Dhaka, the authorities were facing outbreaks of water-borne diseases as floodwaters fell and the local death toll climbed to 328 people, officials said on Wednesday.
Diarrhoea cases
At least 18,300 people suffering from diarrhoea have been admitted to hospitals across Bangladesh in the past eight days due to a shortage of drinking water, Aisha Akhter, a health spokesperson, said.
There have also been outbreaks of respiratory, skin and eye diseases over the past week, said Akhter, noting reports of more than 4,000 new cases of water-borne diseases in the past 24 hours.
"The situation is very acute and alarming," said Shahadat Hossain, a doctor at the country's largest diarrhoea hospital in the capital, Dhaka.
The government said it had mobilised thousands of medical workers and distributed millions of water purification tablets.
Bangladesh's flood monitoring agency said inundated areas were still suffering acute shortages of food even as officials said 8,000 tonnes of food had been distributed since late July.
The military-backed government has appealed to political parties, wealthy citizens and foreign countries to help rush food supplies to nine million flood victims.
India deaths
At least 251 have died in India since last week because of the monsoon floods. Another 164 people have died in Bangladesh, the information ministries said.
This included 25 bodies recovered in India's eastern Bihar state and 14 in northern Uttar Pradesh state since Tuesday, officials said.
Health experts also voiced fears of disease and the main hospital in Patna, the state capital, reported scores of patients turning up with symptoms of waterborne viruses such as hepatitis.
RK Singh, Bihar's chief relief co-ordinator, said distribution of safe drinking water to marooned populations was proving to be a herculean task.
"In 70 per cent of cases water pouches burst on impact after being air-dropped and so we will now consider putting plastic water bottles in the food packets that are dropped by helicopters," he said.
Bihar has asked the federal government for two million tonnes of wheat and rice to feed its flood-affected population, including two million people still living in the open.
Estimated losses
National authorities have put the estimated losses to the state at about $38m.
Huge swathes of Uttar Pradesh, Orissa and Assam states were also submerged during the rains, affecting another 6.5 million people.
Bhumidhar Barman, the Assam relief minister, said the situation had greatly improved in the northeastern state, where 870,000 hectares were submerged and 9,291 homes destroyed.
The World Food Programme and Unicef have been distributing emergency food supplies to thousands of people in Bangladesh and Nepal, said WFP spokesman Simon Pluess in Geneva.
India has not requested any aid, he said.
Source: Al Jazeera and agencies
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/2BA712B4-2A0C-44D0-A807-5D74FDAE4E4E.htm
AlJazeera:
Two Koreas to hold summit
WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 08, 2007
10:27 MECCA TIME, 7:27 GMT
North and South Korean leaders are set to hold only their second-ever summit this month.
According to the South Korean president's office, Roh Moo-hyun will meet Kim Jong-il, the North Korean leader, in Pyongyang at the end of August.
The announcement comes amid improved relations between the two countries that are still technically at war, and in the region.
The first inter-Korean meeting in June 2000 when Kim Dae-Jung, the then-South Korean president, met Kim led to decreased tension and unprecedented co-operation.
It spurred economic joint projects and reunions of families split by their shared border – the world's most heavily fortified.
It also earned Kim the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to engage the North through his so-called sunshine policy.
'Peace era'
South Korea's presidential office said in a statement the second inter-Korean summit "will contribute to substantially opening the era of peace and prosperity between the two Koreas".
Baek Jong-Chun, the South Korean national security adviser, said: "The position of our government was that we wanted to connect and develop the progress of the six-way talks and North-South relations in a positive way and this summit is a natural result which is part of that positive progress."
Pyongyang in a statement also confirmed that intelligence chiefs from both countries had signed an agreement on the summit on Sunday.
"The meeting between the top leaders of the North and the South will be of weighty significance in opening a new phase of peace on the Korean peninsula," North Korea's official Korean Central News Agency quoted from the statement.
Denuclearisation deal
Park Young-Ho, of the Korea Institute for National Unification, told Al Jazeera: "The North Korean authorities, I think, are taking into consideration the situation in South Korea."
Officials from both sides will be meeting at the North Korean border city of Kaesong before that to make arrangements for the August 28-30 summit.
Neighbouring Japan responded swiftly to the news.
Yasuhisa Shiozaki, chief cabinet secretary, said: "We hope the summit would especially give a boost to the denuclearisation of the peninsula and the peace and stability in Northeast Asia."
News of the summit follows this year's agreement by North Korea with the US and regional powers to move towards ending its nuclear weapons programme in return for massive aid.
Last month North Korea shut down its nuclear reactor at Yongbyon.
Source: Agencies
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/FAEE5AB1-3F2F-418B-977B-02986025BE40.htm
AllAfrica: UN Expert Reports Gross Violations
of Human Rights By All Sides in Darfur
UN News Service (New York) NEWS
7 August 2007
All parties to the Darfur conflict continue to carry out "gross violations" of human rights, including killings, disappearances, torture and sexual violence, an independent United Nations rights expert has reported after wrapping up her latest visit to Sudan.
Sima Samar, the Special Rapporteur on the human rights situation in Sudan, yesterday called for greater action to protect civilians in violence-wracked Darfur from breaches of international law.
"While the [Sudanese] Government has the primary responsibility in this regard, I welcome the recent approval of the [African Union] AU-UN peacekeeping force for the region," she said in a statement issued in Geneva after her visit to Sudan, which took place from 25 July to 2 August.
Ms. Samar said she had received allegations of serious violations in areas under the control of the wing of the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) controlled by Minni Minawi, a faction that was a signatory to the Darfur Peace Agreement (DPA) last year. Those allegations include torture, sexual violence, harassment and extortion.
In South Darfur, Ms. Samar said she had also been told of forced disappearances and killings in the town of Gerida. "These cases should be investigated and the perpetrators brought to justice."
The Special Rapporteur, who reports to the UN Human Rights Council, noted that both the Council and the Sudanese Government have undertaken or pledged to carry out steps and measures to ameliorate the conditions inside Darfur, where more than 200,000 people have been killed since 2003 and another 2 million people forced to flee their homes.
"I welcome the Government's acknowledgement of the seriousness of the situation," she said, urging Khartoum to quickly carry out the recommendations of a group of UN rapporteurs and other experts - which she presides over - on the situation in Darfur.
Fighting began in Darfur, an impoverished and arid region of western Sudan that is almost as large as France, when local rebels took up arms against the Government, which then responded with the support of notorious militia known as the Janjaweed.
In her statement Ms. Samar also said that civil and political rights are breached in other regions of Sudan, despite the Government's efforts to introduce legislative bills to ensure that its armed forces, police and national security apparatus comply with international legal obligations.
The situation is also tough in the "transitional areas" in the wake of the comprehensive peace agreement in January 2005 ending the north-south civil war, according to Ms. Samar. Those regions are officially administered by the north but its populations are linguistically and ethnically closer to the south, causing "particular problems," especially given that two parallel judicial systems are in place.
Copyright © 2007 UN News Service. All rights reserved.
http://allafrica.com/stories/200708071190.html
allAfrica: Hundreds of Thousands
Displaced By Mt Elgon Ethnic Clashes
East African (Nairobi) NEWS
7 August 2007
An estimated 116,220 people have been displaced by the simmering ethnic clashes on the Kenyan side of Mt Elgon, the Kenya Red Cross has said in a new report that is likely to re-focus national attention on the crisis.
Out of these, the Red Cross says, the total number of internally displaced persons (IDPs) in Mt. Elgon district itself is 15,870 families, while 2,000 and 1,500 families have been displaced in Bungoma and Trans Nzoia Districts respectively.
The number of those who have died through gunshot wounds, cuts and burns is now 184, while deaths from health problems and malnutrition stand at 69, the Red Cross says in a report on the crisis. The average death rate per week is now estimated to be between 3 and 4 people.
The Mt Elgon clashes pit two clans of the Sabaot in a conflict that residents say was sparked by disagreements over land. Many of the fatalities reported are thought to have been caused by the so-called Sabaot Land Defence Force (SLDF), a rag-tag outfit that the police say they have managed to subdue.
As a result of the clashes, over 9,610 hectares of land in the area, which can produce an estimated 192,200 bags of maize, has not been cultivated this season. The shortfall means that the residents will have to rely on relief food for the foreseeable future. More than 30,000 head of livestock have also either died, moved or have been sold or stolen in the clash-torn area.
Apart from urban crime, the Mt Elgon crisis has this year been Kenya's most serious outbreak of violence, with critics saying that the government was slow to move to pacify the area. Deployment of hundreds of policemen to the area has however reduced the level of violence in the area in recent weeks.
According to the Red Cross report, a worrying new dimension has been added to the crisis, with at least 13 people being mutilated by having their ears cut off. Mutilation is a tactic that has been employed by rebel movements in northern Uganda to terrorise civilian populations, but has not been employed in Kenya before.
The displacement of the Mt Elgon residents, the Red Cross says, has resulted in an upsurge of diseases, with most health indicators, including child mortality, regressing.
Due to the onset of the cold and rainy season, the health situation is worsening, says the Red Cross. There is an upsurge of malaria, pneumonia, respiratory complications, oedema, malnutrition and water borne diseases.
The clashes, the Red Cross says, have also seriously disrupted the education system in the area, with the attendance of classes disrupted for over 10,000 children. Some teachers have died in the violence while many others have sought transfer to safer districts.
Copyright © 2007 East African. All rights reserved.
http://allafrica.com/stories/200708070759.html
Asia Times:
GERMANY, THE RE-ENGINEERED ALLY
PART 1: Readiness for endless war
By Axel Brot
Not so many years ago, many hoped Europe might step up as a counterweight to US imperial policies. Such hopes were focused in particular on Germany - not only as the leading European power, but as a known moderating, non-military force in international politics.
US vituperation of the reputed European preference for diplomacy and peaceful conflict resolution as well as official Britain, in the person of Richard Cooper, former prime minister Tony Blair's international-relations guru, deemed it necessary to lecture "post-industrial Europe" about the need for "double standards" and colonial ruthlessness to beat down benighted non-Westerners, seemed to give substance to these hopes.
Well, Germany and the European Union did step up - but rather differently than expected. And it was no electoral twitch that set the stage for "better be wrong with the United States than being right against it". Since Angela Merkel's visit to Washington (as the conservative opposition leader) on the eve of the US invasion of Iraq, to denounce then-chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's decision to oppose the war, the return to US good graces was not only the main conservative foreign-policy project; it turned rapidly into the supreme project of the German political class - including the Social Democrats.
Merkel became the chancellor-to-go-to, the most trusted European interlocutor for the US political class to work jointly and determinedly to harden US global hegemony against the consequences of America's Iraq-inflicted weakness - this not only in the wider Middle East but also, and especially, with regard to Russia and China, the Bush administration's original enemy of choice before the "birth pangs of a new Middle East" consumed so much of its political capital.
Overcoming the domestic constraints on its ability to use the German army more extensively for "humanitarian interventions", for the defense of "Western civilization" against Islamist terrorism, is an important, though not the most important, part of the Merkel government's "the West united behind the US" policy. Notwithstanding the absence of public debate on its strategic implications - eg, of the US (and Israeli) doctrine of preventive war, the abolition of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's geographical restrictions, the mission of "securing access to raw materials" - the rejection on general principles of a more activist military role by a majority of Germans has not (yet) been overcome.
This has far-reaching consequences: it has, in a significant way, rebooted German elite attitudes and expectations toward the EU, and toward Germany's relationship with France. The public discourse about foreign policy as well as the underlying elite mindset is changing - from "responsibly conservative" to the channeling of the demons Hannah Arendt dealt with in her search for the origins of 20th-century disorder: (British) imperialism, Western militarism and racism. And since the majority of Germans is (again) far behind the curve of elite opinion, the efforts of "re-educating" them (as Der Spiegel recently demanded again) are as consistently strident as they are mythologizing.
But there are also quite a number of senior officials and politicians, still serving or retired, who are looking with dismay or worry at the evolution of German policies in response to the crisis of US-German relations. Their publicly voiced concerns are focused on the expansion of German military commitments - of the easy to get into, but next to impossible to get out of sort - and the rapid deterioration of relations with Russia.
In addition, among the small number of senior experts on international economics, a majority are looking with deep foreboding at the mounting instabilities of the international financial system. They see them driven by the huge trade imbalances of the US and the growing threat to leverage them against the creditor nations - in particular against China, Russia, and the members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries that are running large surpluses.
The US congressionally mandated financial sanctions against such countries as Iran, Syria, Cuba and North Korea are taken, moreover, as indicators that the United States is about to destroy the trust the international financial system is based upon. The consequences of its eventual - sooner rather than later - meltdown will be dramatic and uncontrollable.
These warning voices are, though, in the wings of the German debate. The stage is held by the narrative of the terrorist menace. But there are very few serious experts who sincerely believe that Islamist terrorism is motivated by their hate for "Western freedoms and values". Hate and the desire for revenge are certainly crucial elements; but this has not much to do with Western culture or with the alleged humiliating realization of Muslim inferiority.
If one should be looking for causes, the decades of violence the West visited upon these countries, either directly or through its dependent regimes, is a necessary part of the explanation. The other part, of course, would have to face the fact that it was the West that transformed weak and isolated fundamentalist cells into its terrorist Golem. It nurtured, trained, financed, organized and used it for decades in terror campaigns against secular nationalist and socialist regimes and movements until those were defeated or isolated, leaving their compromised remnants to do the Western bidding.
Though Germany was not in the forefront of Middle East meddling, it was fully engaged in creating and empowering a Wahhabi-Salafist coalition to fight the Soviets and the communist regime in Afghanistan - the central front in the global anti-communist offensive that appeared to have turned terrorism on three continents into the Western weapon of choice.
And for the Middle East this still seems to be the case. It is seen in the Western use of Sunni terror groups (and the anti-Iranian-government Mujahadeen-e-Khalq, as well as the Iranian sister organization of the Kurdistan Workers Party) against Iran, and against the ascendent Shi'ites in Lebanon.
But the mythologization of al-Qaeda and the "clash (in German, war) of civilizations" serves to legitimize the readiness for endless war. In the words of a retired German official: "We have been walking the world over the cliff, and are falling into a sea of blood."
All of this does not only involve ideological re-rigging. In the US wake, Germany is running up the pennant of permanent war. The following should serve to provide a view into some of its particulars.
The German-French tandem
Since 1966, after France left the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's military integration, Germany has been France's primary partner, and the French-German tandem was the active core that drove the European Economic Community toward the European Union. Germany handled the tension between its close relationship with the US and the one with France by compartmentalizing: with France, Europe; with the US, NATO and security.
But notwithstanding the efforts to prevent conflicts developing between these two poles of German foreign policy, there was always a strong tendency within the German political class to regard the process of European integration as leading toward an increasing autonomy of European interests and policies from those of the US. The US did not see it differently - particularly after the end of the Cold War. The administrations of Bill Clinton and George H W Bush invested, therefore, a lot of political capital and cunning to prevent that from occurring. Both administrations considered the European relationship with Russia as the key for the viability of such a project and the EU's and NATO's new east European members as the lever to assure its abortion.
But with the alliance crisis of 2002-03 - also, depending on the perspective, the apogee or the nadir of the French-German duo - the US was able to mobilize not only the political elites of the new NATO - and EU - members of eastern Europe as well as those of Denmark, the Netherlands and Spain against the specter of an independent European course. It was the revolt of the French and German US-oriented elites - expressing itself publicly in an incessant and thorough media campaign - that sealed its fate. All of a sudden, the German-French special relationship had lost much of its salience. The horizon of the kind of European integration the United States considered a threat to its own international role revealed itself as much more of a mirage than it appeared before it was put to the test.
Chancellor Merkel is the German incarnation of this revolt. And the lionized champion of the collective European right, the Americans, and the Israelis, Nicolas Sarkozy, is the ideal French president for turning Merkel's great foreign-policy project into a joint venture: welding the EU to the US, making European integration serve the US-dominated, Western international order - whatever the cost.
It is not as if former French president Jacques Chirac and his foreign and military policy bureaucracies had still been able to put the brakes on Merkel. After confronting the US on the Iraq issue in 2002-03, together with then-chancellor Schroeder, and having maneuvered Russian President Vladimir Putin into taking the same stance, Chirac's political will was exhausted and prospects for a more independent European road in international politics was dead. Schroeder's capacity to act in tandem with Chirac was increasingly circumscribed by his domestic weakness; and the US reminded the French administration forcefully of what it means to play hardball with French interests. He was stymied, like Schroeder, by the neo-conservative/neo-liberal, US-oriented majority of the elites.
After 2003, French policies followed Germany somewhat listlessly in supporting the US ones, in particular in the wider Middle East - though still trying to play their own game in Lebanon, while egging on the Americans and Israelis against Syria and Iran. Nevertheless, while conceding the game in the Middle East, Chirac and Schroeder still tried to create a stable framework of relations with Russia and China, the basis of something like a Eurasian common economic region. This notion has already joined the might-have-beens of history.
Neither would have led the election of Sarkozy's competitor, Segolene Royal, to a greatly different conception of French foreign policy. Royal was groomed by Francois Mitterrand, the Socialist president who had brought to perfection the art of decorating with left-wing flourishes an exceedingly hard-nosed, rather vicious, covert-operations approach to foreign policy.
In fact, the different versions of the French Socialist Party after World War II were never known for particularly salubrious policies: from their alliance with the Corsican heroin mafia in Marseilles to their support of French colonial wars, from bombing Greenpeace ships to involvement in the Ruanda genocide. There is nothing surprising, therefore, that both Royal and Sarkozy are close to the particularly shrill French version of "humanitarian interventionists", drawing from the same stock of civilizational warriors that dominates French public discourse.
Sarkozy's choice for foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, is therefore less of a peace offering to the Socialists than an indicator of ideological commitments. Kouchner is not only one of the ideological godfathers of "anti-totalitarian, humanitarian interventionism", he is also the one under whose benevolent eyes - in his function as its United Nations administrator - Kosovo acquired the makings of the first, ethnically almost pure, European mafia-state. During the 1980s, some of his Medecins du Monde (which he founded after splitting from the Medecins sans Frontiãres) assisted the Afghan mujahideen with somewhat more than medical-only rear services.
Though he might not be tainted with aiding the Americans (as some suspected), as other non-governmental organizations are, in turning the Cambodian refugee camps in Thailand into bases for the reconstitution of the Khmer Rouge as US proxies, his record, nevertheless, justifies Colin Powell's famous dictum about NGOs as US "force multipliers" avant la lettre: human rights and medical services for US friends and clients, none for the opposition.
Sarkozy's ideological baggage also contains the French-Israeli business lawyer Arno Klarsfeld,a rather hysterical campaigner for the rights of Israel and the defense of Western civilization as well as the son of noted Nazi hunters Serge and Beate Klarsfeld. He volunteered in 2002 to serve in the Israeli Defense Force and accompanied the Israeli border guards as a member on their rampage through the Palestinian territories. Klarsfeld was Sarkozy's leading candidate for heading the controversial new Ministry for Immigration and National Identity - a move comparable to Bush proposing right-wing Israeli political leader Avigdor Liebermann as the head of a new department for Hispanics, Muslims and African-Americans. For the time being, though, Sarkozy seems to have reconsidered this exceedingly provocative appointment.
Widely quoted as mentor and inspirer of Sarkozy's "anti-totalitarian" outlook is philosopher André Glucksmann: one of the many minor embodiments of Hannah Arendt's insight about the French haute bourgeoisie's romantic infatuation with the rhetorical bombast of ideological rogues and the titillations of violence. During the 1980s he marketed nuclear war as an antidote against the European addiction to peace and to save humanity - and Western civilization - from communism. After the Soviet collapse, he agitated for Europe to join any American or Israeli war in reach against the "new Hitlers" (Milosevicz, Saddam Hussein, Arafat, Assad, etc) and "Islamofascists", as well as for his kind of moral policies against "totalitarian" China and "newly-totalitarian" Russia.
These attractions, however, did not remain limited to the Parisian salons and media: As the preferred French interlocutor for castigating the German lack of martial fiber, while in Germany Glucksmann briefly replaced on "high-brow" TV the well-respected, though liberal and measured, specialist on German-French relations, Professor Alfred Grosser. In 2002, Grosser had committed the rather deadly mistake of criticizing instead of defending Israel's right to do as it likes in the Palestinian territories. He disappeared from German screens as did many of the German correspondents of the public media who had failed to appreciate the Palestinians as the new Nazis.
In view of the fact that most European mainstream conservative parties (and even some Social Democratic currents) propagandize the immigrant issue increasingly in terms of the "clash of civilizations" and the "new antisemitism", they have spurred an interesting change of orientation in the extreme right with all the potential for open (like in Denmark or Italy) or tacit alliances (like in Spain).
The extreme right (Front National, Vlaams Belang, Lega Nord, Allianza Nazionale, Parti van de Vrijheit etc) and its nebula of goon squads have also been busy building bridges to Israel and to the violence-inclined, but tightly leashed, Zionist right (Likud Europe, Betar, Jewish Defense League, etc) in the struggle against "Eurabia". One might, therefore, wonder whether Sarkozy has not already taken his commitment to fight against the "new antisemitism" and to defend French "national identity" a tad too far. Given the thousands of maimed or dead Arab, Asian, and African immigrant victims of racial violence in Western Europe during the last 15 years - underinvestigated, underreported, and underprosecuted in Germany as well as France - one might even wonder whether the call to arms against the rise of antisemitism is not misdirected and whether Sarkozy and his circle do not do double duty as arsonists in the fire-brigade.
Bur Sarkozy is not only a civilizational warrior. He and his advisers - the CEOs of the largest media conglomerates and the insurance business - are committed to a radical restructuring of the distribution of power between the patronat and the unions, between state and society, between the workers and the haute bourgeoisie.
Sarkozy has marketed himself as the energetic executor of a consensus in search of an executor for the last 20 or so years. Delegitimizing the whole system of social protections with their institutional underpinnings has been at the center of what amounted to a psychological warfare campaign against the idea that there is a legitimate claim on social justice. After several false starts, this program seems to have found with him the echoes of the pre-World War II deep right's "patrie, famille, travail", instead of "liberté, fraternité, égalité".
Even the Socialist leadership, not at all discomfited by Royal's defeat - as testified by its well publicized collective sigh of relief - is into the spirit of things. French Socialist Party politician Dominique Strauss-Kahn's "the red flag is in the mud for good" phrase renders unsurprising that not a few voters might have pondered the advantages of getting the unavoidable up front instead of in fits, starts, and misdirection.
Neither the French elites, nor the German chancellor, nor the US, are in the mood for dealing with qualms and hesitations a la Royal. Sarkozy, in contrast, has the intention, the will, the energy, the support of the political class, as well as the conception of himself as the right man for the job, to pull France to the American good side. A "noble competition" between Merkel and Sarkozy might even be shaping up, regarding who is going to work more closely with the US - especially since Merkel is at a disadvantage. She is burdened with a Social Democratic coalition partner trying to save the remnants of Schroeder's Russian policies and under pressure from the pacifist left, and more importantly, from a new, non-sectarian left-wing party that is eating into its electorate and party membership.
Given the fact that the majority of the German political class and the media are running again a high Russophobe fever, there is not much chance that these remnants will be salvageable. It is, instead, possible that Germany will join in when a sufficiently strong catalyzing event tips relations with Russia into a no holds barred effort to get to the end of the "Russian problem". In the meantime, the Russians will carry on as if they had a "strategic partner" in Merkel, and Merkel will continue to signal her dissatisfaction with Russia's delivering on Western demands - and leave it to the Social Democratic leadership to deal with its nostalgia.
Refitting Turkey for its proper role
One of the most interesting policy initiatives of the new German-French tandem may appear to be a sideshow but is, in fact, emblematic of the shape of things to come: replacing the EU horizon for Turkey with one more fitting for an oriental strategic asset.
Merkel and Sarkozy are now jointly leading an EU-wide coalition dead set against making good on the decades-old promise for the integration of Turkey into the EU as soon as it is able to implement the acquis communautaire (total body of EU law). With the election of Sarkozy the "open-ended" accession negotiations have no chance of remaining open-ended and with his help Merkel will be able to outmaneuver her Social Democratic baggage while still insisting on negotiating with Turkey in good faith.
For Merkel, Sarkozy and their civilizational warriors, Turkey has no European "vocation", for cultural, Christian, and occidental reasons. Merkel promises, instead, a "special relationship" and Sarkozy proposes to sponsor a "Mediterranean community", anchored on Turkey, Israel and Morocco, as a geopolitical barrier against African immigrants, Islamic fundamentalists, and as an additional venue for Israeli ambitions.
The question, though, is how to make Turkey give up its EU aspirations and fall into line with whatever plans are made for it. And the main problem is, in fact, that Turkey's most committed Europeanists are to be found in the moderately conservative and moderately religious center-right Justice and Development (AKP) party, the first governing party after World War II which is fairly clean, rather competent economically, and tenaciously digging at the immensely corrupt and criminal "deep state": the conglomerate of politicians, military intelligence, special police squads, and their legions of cut-outs, cut-throats, and patsies, the Turkish mafia, Grey Wolves (ie, rightwing terrorists), feudal landowners, and associated business ventures. This government is trying to drain a swamp in which German intelligence was up to its knees since the days of its being tasked with chaperoning the "Trident" intelligence coordination between the Turkish, Iranian, and Israeli intelligence services.
Turkey's "deep state" has been (and, to some degree, still is) the enabling environment - and with Israel, the Eastern Mediterranean hub - for the interbreeding of intelligence, the security business, terrorist groups for hire, and mafia operations. It has produced the strangest, rather frightening, but most lucrative, hybrids between black operations, subversion, targeted killings and kidnappings, and the whole panoply of the drug, protection, organ harvesting, black medical research and pharmacology, the emigration, slave labor, weapons and technology, counterfeiting, money laundering rackets. Joined to Israel's netherworld, its reach extends from the Arab countries to Africa, from Russia and the CIS to western and Central Asia, and, of course, to Europe.
This is what the Turkish government - with a strong popular mandate - is trying to reform in order to conform to the requirements of EU membership. The AKP is, for good reasons, strongly committed to the EU: by itself it would be quite unable to make its sanitation mandate work, whatever the strength of its electoral base. It is only via the EU that it can even approach the holy of holies, the constitutional Praetorian prerogative of the Turkish military. Its defenders - the parties of the secular "White Turks" (ie, the urban elites) who regard the reforms the EU accession process imposes as endangering their ownership of the state - are precisely those Sarkozy and Merkel are relying on to derail Turkey's EU prospects.
The White Turks' "deep state" is already swinging into action: from a spate of high-profile murders with an ostensible "fundamentalist" background, to the threat of a military coup d'état, from the demonstrations with the malicious slogan "neither Sharia, nor putsch" (trying to taint the AKP with the fundamentalist brush), to the the collusion between acting President Ahmet Necdet Sezer and the Constitutional Court (sworn to uphold the military prerogatives) in provoking a constitutional crisis to block the election of the popular Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul to the presidency.
Since Turkey's main Western allies are decidedly unhappy with the successes of reform and the growing self-confidence of the government of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Merkel and her cohorts are engaged in a rather vicious game of delegitimizing Turkish aspirations through veiled threats and humiliations. It is not only the moving goal posts game that Turkey has to negotiate.
It is the kind of cued European discussion that says in effect, "We will make sure to prevent the EU membership of Turkey" (whatever the domestic repercussions in the several million strong Turkish community in Germany), that is designed to coerce the AKP into giving up. There is also the tidy side-payment to consider, namely, the domestic delegitimization of the AKP and the reempowerment of the deep state, now represented by the Nationalist Movement (MHP) party and Turkey's oldest political party, the Turkish Republican Party (CHP) that has served Western geopolitics oh-so-well.
Tying the Turkish government into knots, the US government and many of the European media are lauding the constitutional vocation of the Turkish military to protect the secular state (implying again that the AKP is intent on turning Turkey into a sharia state) while, at the same time, European politicians raise the specter of the threat of military intervention in Turkish politics as proof that Turkey is not EU material. In the same fashion, "high European officials" do background briefings on how a military campaign against the PKK in Iraq would strain NATO and end Turkey's accession negotiations because it would be proof that the Turkish government - which is against intervention - cannot control its military. It is a perfidious set-up because the US and Israel (with German support) are doing everything to strengthen and use the Iranian PKK network for its proxy campaign against Tehran.
But why are these forces fighting so hard to terminate Turkey's EU prospects?
The answer lies not in the new conservative/right-wing obsession with occidental identity politics or with the enlargement blues. The US was denied the use of Turkish territory for attacking Iraq from the north; Turkey insisted, instead, on its Montreux Treaty prerogative of refusing a permanent American naval squadron in the Black Sea. It has rather relaxed political, and high-growth economic relations with its neighbors, Syria and Iran. It has been accused of dragging its feet on the Nabucco gas pipeline, designed to bring Central Asian gas to Europe and to circumvent the Russian pipeline system.
It has, in fact, excellent political and economic relations with Russia while having gone out of the 1990s business of subverting the Central Asian republics. Furthermore, it angered Israel with its discreet contacts with Hamas and by cooling down the political scope of the military and intelligence relationship (as well as its attendant business opportunties). And it hurt powerful interests with a more serious engagement with Interpol.
In other words, the AKP government is striving to scale down the use of Turkey as a strategic platform for all sorts of mayhem, focusing instead quite successfully on regional trade and investment opportunities to maintain Turkey's economic growth - thus stabilizing a growing middle class of "black Turks". This approach, though, crimps US efforts to expand the strategic threat against Iran. Even more importantly, it limits American access to the Caucasus and Central Asia and hampers its plans for pulling the Ukraine, Georgia and Azerbaijan into a permanent and much more extensive military relationship.
In sum: though prudent enough to have accomodated the Turkish military's usual level of cooperation with Western (US, Israeli, and German) operations against its neighbors, it still disregarded the demands of the Western grand strategy. Its policies did nothing to help in the "great game" of turning the Caucasus and Central Asia into a lever to be used against Russia and China. Neither did the Turkish government do enough for the shorter-term payoff, ie, gaining control over Central Asian oil and gas. All of this did not win the Turkish government friends in the right places. It set itself up, instead, for some variant of a regime-change operation in which the campaign against Turkey's EU aspirations will play a pivotal role.
Though the Turkish military is always good for a coup d'etat, it may be difficult to do it this time without an inopportune level of violence ("Chileanization") since the AKP won the elections resoundingly. There are other options available that might teach the forces of Turkish reform lessons about red lines and overreaching. A short walk down memory lane might illustrate what is possible.
One of the most successful - and "blackest" - of US-British "black operation" against a Western, albeit neutral, country was carried out in first half of the 1980s. In 2000, none other than Reagan's secretary of defense, Caspar Weinberger, declassified it in an interview with Swedish TV in the context of an investigation into the affair of the "Soviet submarines".
Then Swedish prime minister Olaf Palme was a real thorn in Western flesh. Apart from his backing for the Afrincan National Congress and the Palestine Liberation Organization, he was very vocal in his criticism of the increasingly dangerous American confrontation policies towards the Soviet Union. His stance enjoyed widespread support within the Swedish population. This changed rather dramatically with the worldwide frenzy about "the Soviet aggression of neutral Sweden", when Swedish territorial waters were repeatedly "violated by Soviet submarines" and by landings of "Soviet special forces" on the Swedish coast. These "incursions" stopped with the still unresolved murder of Palme in 1986, despite two unsuccessful attempts to convict a man named Christer Pettersson for the crime.
With a pleased smirk, Weinberger confirmed that there was nothing Soviet in the violation of Swedish territorial waters (the Soviets "didn't have the capabilities"). There were, instead, routine exercises, "between the Swedish navy and the American and British navies and since they were routine, the Swedish admiral responsible saw obviously no need to inform his superiors or his subordinates about the nature of the "enemy".
It was, in fact, not quite a "regime change", but a joint US-UK operation together with the top brass of the Swedish navy and Swedish intelligence, conducted against the foreign policy of the Swedish government. Since then Sweden has been rather careful not to challenge American policies - with the exception perhaps of the very popular Foreign Minister Anna Lindh, in line to become the next prime minister. She was stabbed to death in 2003 by a mentally disturbed young immigrant.
At the time, such operations brought the world close to the brink of nuclear war. The Soviets understandably saw this as a crucial indicator that the US was preparing its allies, and battling with a powerful peace movement, for nuclear preemption against the "increasingly aggressive" and "brazen" Soviet Union.
A variant of such an operation today, though sure to have its own blowbacks, would certainly not involve that kind of risk. It would also take into account that the Turkish military and intelligence are not as monolithic as they once were: there is kind of nationalist reaction to the easy contempt with which they are taken for granted. But it would change Turkey's political horizon for good: a policy subjected to a permanent "strategy of tension", countering democratic aspirations with the power of the deep state. And from a certain perspective, this is an eminently desirable outcome. It would make Turkey the grateful recipient of Sarkozy's idea of a Mediterranean community and Merkel's notion of a special relationship.
Gloomy old hands
There might have been room, of course, for a debate in good faith about Turkey's implementation of the EU's acquis communautaire. This is what the "open-ended" negotiating process was all about. It is being poisoned, however, by the bad faith characterizing Merkel's and Sarkozy's approach towards Turkey.
The decay of responsible diplomacy towards an ally and the rise of culturalist demagoguery is the symptom of something one might call a "proto-totalitarian transition" taking place under the guise of the "war on terror". It is led by the decay of responsibility and predictability in the conduct of American foreign policy. Thus, for not a few senior German diplomats - those whose career took off under former chancellor Helmut Schmidt or under foreign minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, and those military planners who still remember the war scare of the first half of the 1980s - there is no light at the end of the tunnel.
The American inability to secure a more stable international environment, the combination of militancy and overreaching, provide the terms of reference for the gloominess of these senior perennials. They are certainly not peace-at-any-price bleeding hearts nor closet dissidents. They have an ingrained propensity to look at the world as the stage of "them versus us". They come from families of civil servants, academics, and military officers who can well sort out the difference between the "upstairs" and "downstairs" - worlds of international politics. In other words, they are as solidly "Western" or "Atlanticist" as one could wish. And they are also the first generation of senior German bureaucrats who have been deeply comfortable with the absence of great power ambitions and with the German role as a civilian power.
Their outlook and their reflection of Germany's collective experience makes them value stability; at least insofar as any blowback resulting from the use of force should be less than the threat countered. This, of course, can be liberally interpreted and does not offer much for dealing with unpredictability. But prudence, skepticism, and an ironclad sense of self-limitation provided the habits for navigating in the wake of US and Israeli policies.
These old hands don't write papers, they do not share their concerns in staff meetings, they may not even communicate them in more formal settings. Nevertheless, the unease is palpable and it is the retirees who are voicing it, with different emphases and different degrees of bluntness. These are men such as Schmidt, with his reputation as a no-nonsense Atlanticist; the conservative former minister of defense, Volker Ruhe; the retired head of the planning staff under Ruhe, Vice-Admiral Ulrich Weisser; the former foreign policy speaker of the conservatives' parliamentary caucus, Karl Lamers.
They are well acquainted with the new crop of their American counterparts who prepare, control or execute American policies with brittle arrogance and with the crisis- and confrontation-prone default setting of American foreign policy formation.
For quite a few of them, however, the most worrying indication that the United States is irrevocably set on dragging the world into a nightmare of continuous and chaotic violence, is twofold: the flight or dismissal of senior, conservative professionals from the executive branch of the government and the unrestrained, strangely exhibitionist glorying of many American politicians at the ability to inflict unrestrained violence.
One might add a third one, relevant especially to diplomats who had been posted in the Middle East, or to the classicists: the wholesale looting and the destruction of 5,000 years of Mesopotamian antiquities, judged on par with the Spanish eradication of the complete written record of the Mesoamerican civilizations as well as the cultural heritage of all Indian cultures that they could lay their hands on; and one that also ranks with the British burning of 3,000 years' worth of Chinese books, historical records, and documents during the Second Opium War. This barbaric lack of respect for one of the most important heritages of mankind speaks volumes about the mindset this war has exposed.
There is the realization that institutional blocks have been disabled and with it their career premium on a healthy sense of the need to employ US power carefully - to acknowledge its executive, legal, and political limitations. But since the 1970s, patient, alliance-building ideologue-adventurers, think-tankers and journalists, have crept up through the institutions, using and being used, joining the fantasies of redemption, revenge, plunder, and control over the world, into an action program for employing American power.
The style betrays the character. Since the ambitions of these ideologues are much larger than their education, they flatter themselves into believing they are the New Romans, that they write history on a even greater scale than Titus Livius; and their vanity expects awe, not reason. But they are acting out the grand guignol version of empire whose points of reference might be Sallust, Petronius or Procopius, those who castigated or ridiculed or despaired at the corruption and the pretentions of its personnel.
It is the remarkable lack of decorum, the intentional staging of bullying language, rich in threats and insults, the resentful hypocrisy, the slightly unhinged display of bad faith when diplomacy and suasion are the order of the day, that has convinced even some of the "just-a-bad-patch" hopefuls that the bad times are here to stay.
The fear beneath much of the uneasiness has to do, of course, with memories of what happens when the resentments and dreams of omnipotence of a political class are hijacked by those who promise to give them satisfaction on a historic scale.
During the Cold War, there was always a mad, though well-connected, fringe that gravitated towards American strategic policies: eg, Edward Teller with his notion of rescuing the very small, "valuable" part of humanity in the depths of mines in order to reseed the earth after nuclear war; Sidney Hook with his conviction that Western belief in the transcendent gave it the crucial nuclear-war edge over the communists who only believed in the here and now; the psychopaths within the CIA, like Sidney Gottlieb who headed the agency's MKULTRA mind control program, or counter-intelligence chief James Jesus Angleton; and the many secular and religious milleniarists in the White House, the military, in Congress, and in think-tanks, who were intent on an apocalyptic resolution to the seemingly endless uncertainties of the Cold War. But to the end, wiser heads prevailed - if only just.
It did not last. The American political class seems to have drawn all the wrong conclusions from the end of the Cold War and the breakup of the Soviet Union. Its leisurely stroll towards permanent global hegemony just did not happen. Thus, frustration and the craving for revenge have become main drivers of US policies. The events of September 11 focused their common dysfunctionality, but they are not its root cause.
Tomorrow, Part 2: Broken machinery: Forces that oppose or even appear to question American interests face a simple choice: "Us or chaos."
Axel Brot is the pen name for a German defense analyst and former intelligence officer.
Copyright 2007, Axel Brot
© Copyright 1999 - 2007 Asia Times Online
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/IH08Aa01.html
Clarín:
Secretos de una leyenda sueca
Separados por un día, esta semana murieron dos monstruos del cine: Ingmar Bergman y Michelangelo Antonioni. Aquí, la entrevista que el director de "El séptimo sello" definió como "la última" de su vida. Además, la opinión de Jorge Carnevale, la reflexión de Sergio Wolf sobre este doble golpe para el cine de autor y un repaso a sus filmografías.
ALAN RIDING
04.08.2007 | Clarin/Revista Ñ
Ingmar Bergman, el legendario director sueco que murió el 30 de julio, se retiró del cine en 1983 para dedicarse a escribir y a la dirección teatral. Según sus propias palabras, también se jubilaba de las entrevistas. Se retractó de esa decisión sólo en raras ocasiones, entre éstas, una entrevista que concedió a The New York Times en relación con un festival de Nueva York en 1995 dedicado a su obra cinematográfica, televisiva y teatral. Esa entrevista salió publicada el 30 de abril de 1995 y se reproduce a continuación.
"Por supuesto que soy autobiográfico", dice Bergman. "Soy autobiográfico de igual manera que un sueño transforma la experiencia y las emociones todo el tiempo". Pero dice que siempre fue así. Desde su infancia, lo que hizo fue siempre jugar con la fantasía y la realidad. "Las puertas entre el viejo actual y el niño siguen estando abiertas, abiertas de par en par", dice Bergman.
"Puedo recorrer la casa de mi abuela y saber exactamente dónde están los cuadros, dónde estaban los muebles, cómo era, la voz, los olores. De noche, hoy mismo puedo ir desde mi cama hasta mi infancia en menos de un segundo. Y tiene exactamente la misma realidad". Su talento, naturalmente, siempre consistió en saber cómo traducir sus recuerdos, de dolor y placer, en arte. "Cuando escribo algo horrible o deprimente, no es que esté deprimido u horrorizado. Simplemente estoy trabajando. Y lo que escribo está muy lejos. Puedo estar en el centro de un drama, oyendo lo que dicen las personas que me rodean. Puedo escuchar exactamente cómo hablan y las veo y simplemente escribo, porque lo que dicen puede resultarme muy impresionante. Pero en general es algo ya pasado".
Ingmar Bergman confiesa que toma tranquilizantes aun para el breve vuelo a Estocolmo desde su casa en la isla de Faro. "Odio viajar. No voy a ningún lado", dice. Por supuesto, como era de esperar del enigmático artista sueco, la cosa no es tan simple. Viajar también altera la vida ordenada y de introspección que lleva en la actualidad. Parecería que hasta los "demonios" que trató de exorcizar en muchos de sus filmes están bajo control.
En su casa, en la isla de Faro en el Mar Báltico, pasa sus mañanas escribiendo novelas, obras y guiones para televisión. Pero desde que dejó de hacer películas en 1983, se alejó deliberadamente de su fama. Parece aliviado de esta distancia de las candilejas. El rodaje de Fanny y Alexander (1983) le llevó siete meses y agotó en él la voluntad de seguir haciendo cine. Quería tiempo para enfrentar los temas inconclusos de su vida sin las interrupciones de la realización cinematográfica.
"Pensé: ahora se acabó. Fue una sensación agradable. Y decidí, como principio, no dar más entrevistas", dice. De este propósito, sin embargo, se apartó. Gracias a la persuasión de Lars Lofgren, el director artístico del Teatro Dramático Real de Suecia, donde Bergman ha montado varias obras, está sentado una tarde en la oficina de Lofgren, mirando con aire resignado un grabador. Viste de manera informal, con un cardigan verde sobre un suéter marrón y una camisa escocesa. Pero, pese a su barba frondosa, su rostro largo y melancólico, no ha cambiado mucho. "Soy muy tímido con las personas que no conozco", dice.
Preocupado por su inglés, pidió una intérprete para más seguridad. Pero también hizo un convenio consigo mismo: en ésta, que describe como "la última entrevista" de su vida, "trataré de ser absolutamente franco", dice.
Se refiere, como más tarde quedaría claro, a que la conversación de tres horas sobre la obra de su vida involucraría sólo una mención periférica de sus más de 45 películas, sus numerosos dramas para TV, las alrededor de 130 obras de teatro y el puñado de óperas que produjo, y el montón de obras, la autobiografía y las novelas que escribió. Es como si todo esto ya hubiera adquirido vida propia o hubiera muerto. Lo que le interesa, son los recuerdos y los sentimientos que todavía le pertenecen y definen su trabajo.
Con todo, pese a ser un hombre que ha revelado tanto sobre sí mismo en sus películas y, más recientemente, en su autobiografía Linterna mágica (1987), no siempre le resulta fácil hablar. Por momentos, se queda callado o suspira profundamente.
"Yo estaba muy enamorado de mi madre", dice unos minutos después de iniciada la entrevista. "Era una mujer muy cálida y muy fría. Cuando era cálida, yo trataba de estar junto a ella. Pero podía ser muy fría y expulsiva". A los 19 años, ya en muy malos términos con sus padres, el joven Ingmar abandonó su casa y, después de un breve paso por la universidad, encontró un trabajo menor en la pera de Estocolmo. Fue su presentación con el mundo del teatro. Empezó a escribir piezas teatrales, que ahora califica de "muy flojas" y muy pronto también a dirigir obras en teatros estudiantiles. A los 24, Svensk Filmindustri, una importante productora y distribuidora sueca lo contrató para "pulir guiones" y el cine entró en su vida.
"Fue una buena manera de aprender a escribir guiones porque lo que veíamos era cine estadounidense y lo que admirábamos era su estructura dramática, su forma de contar historias, recuerda. Fue así como aprendí el oficio. Más tarde, cuando adquirí experiencia, dejé esa forma de lado y empecé a hacer las cosas a mi modo".
En un año, uno de sus guiones ya había sido llevado al cine, Tormentos (1944), por Alf Sjoberg, un director sueco muy reconocido en su época y uno de los ulteriores mentores de Bergman. Este éxito le dio a Bergman la posibilidad de dirigir su primera película, Crisis (1946) y enseguida vinieron otras. A mediados de los 50, empezando con El séptimo sello (1957) y Fresas salvajes (1957), las películas que cimentaron la leyenda de Bergman comenzaron a surgir. Enseguida le llegó el reconocimiento: La fuente de la doncella (1960) y Detrás de un vidrio oscuro (1961) ganaron el Premio de la Academia a mejor película extranjera en años sucesivos. Un hecho crucial fue que en 1960 Bergman también comenzara a trabajar con Sven Nykvist, el director de fotografía sueco que filmó 22 de sus filmes.
A lo largo de toda la década del sesenta, definidas por los amargos recuerdos de su infancia, sus filmes reflejaron su visión sombría de la vida y la muerte. A comienzos de los 70, ingresó en otra faceta turbulenta de su vida —sus cinco matrimonios y numerosos romances apasionados — y en películas como Gritos y susurros (1972) y Escenas de la vida conyugal (1973), ahondó en las relaciones hombre-mujer.
"Bergman fue quien incorporó por primera vez la metafísica —religión, muerte, existencialismo— en el cine, dice Bertrand Tavernier, el director francés. "Pero lo mejor de Bergman es la forma en que habla de las mujeres, de la relación entre hombres y mujeres. Es como un minero que excava buscando pureza".
Con Escenas de la vida conyugal Bergman también descubrió la televisión. Y ésta le recordó los cuentos que le leía su madre en la infancia. "Me leía durante una hora, después cerraba el libro y yo tenía que irme a la cama", dice. "Pero yo sabía que el miércoles siguiente estaríamos de nuevo sentados ahí. Y la televisión es para mí una narradora maravillosa. La familia puede reunirse, discutir lo que ve".
Cuando Escenas de la vida conyugal, que originalmente se filmó por capítulos para la pantalla chica, fue transmitida en la televisión sueca, lo sorprendió su impacto. "Tuve que cambiar mi número de teléfono porque la gente me llamaba para consultarme sobre sus problemas matrimoniales".
Pero durante toda su carrera, hacer películas le generó ansiedad. Era una de las razones por las que le gustaba trabajar rápido — "30 días sí, 40 días está bien, 50 días era demasiado". Y fue quizá la principal razón por la que se sintió aliviado al dejar el cine. "Trabajando ocho horas se hacen tres minutos de película y uno sabe que esos tres minutos tienen que ser absolutamente fantásticos. A veces me volvía loco", recuerda.
El teatro, por el contrario, le daba estabilidad. Se sentía fuertemente atraído por los clásicos — Shakespeare, Molière, Ibsen y sobre todo por su compatriota August Strindberg — pero también dirigió obras de Albee, Anouilh, Pirandello y Tennessee Williams. Entre 1952 y 1966 fue sucesivamente director de los principales teatros de repertorio en Gothenberg, Malmo y Estocolmo.
Justamente, mientras estaba ensayando La danza de la muerte, de Strindberg en 1976, lo detuvieron por un breve período acusado de evasión fiscal. Eso le produjo una crisis nerviosa y, aunque el caso no prosperó, se sintió tan traicionado por su país que optó por exilarse en Munich, Alemania. Allí vivió durante nueve años. Una vez más buscó refugio en el teatro dirigiendo 11 obras y haciendo sólo dos largometrajes, entre ellos Fanny y Alexander, que ganó cuatro premios Oscar. Hasta que finalmente volvió a su "casa" en el Teatro Dramático Real, donde había visto por primera vez una obra a los 9 años. Recuerda incluso la ocasión — una matinée de domingo en marzo de 1928 — y el lugar donde se había sentado.
"A veces, en la hora silenciosa de la sala, entre las 4 y las 5 de la tarde, voy y me siento en esa butaca", confiesa. "Sentimental, nostálgico. Pero en realidad he vivido en esta casa toda la vida". Como para volver a anclarse en su país —"este país de compromisos grises y aburridos que amo tanto" — eligió obras de Strindberg, El sueño y Miss Julie entre sus primeras producciones.
"Cuando era joven, me asustaba muchísimo la muerte", dice. "Pero ahora, me parece un plan muy, muy sabio. Es como una luz que se extingue. No hay por qué preocuparse tanto al respecto". Es pesimista. ¿Cómo no serlo estando rodeados de una realidad "tan horripilante e insoportable?", pregunta. Pero no se siente triste. "Si estoy de buen humor, soy un pesimista de buen humor. Y no me autorizo mis depresiones". Sólo ocasionalmente aflora el Bergman oscuro.
"¿Sufrir será parte de nuestra formación como seres humanos?", se pregunta en voz alta. "¿Hay una estructura que no vemos? ¿Sufrir es parte de esa estructura? ¿Hay en ello una verdadera gracia o es una coincidencia?" Suspira. "No estoy listo para hablar de eso", dice. Pero es evidente que la edad lo serenó. Ha encontrado paz en su larga convivencia con Ingrid Karlebo, una mujer rica que, con apenas más de cuarenta, abandonó a su marido en 1971 para casarse con el director. Bergman ve sus aventuras de los primeros tiempos, cuando era muy mujeriego, como "un gran error". Los años de alejamiento de varios de sus nueve hijos también quedaron atrás. Lo fundamental es quizá que a través de los libros que ha escrito en los últimos años, Bergman hizo las paces con sus padres. El tono ferozmente confesional de Linterna mágica marcó el punto de partida. A continuación escribió tres novelas, una sobre sus padres — Con las mejores intenciones, película premiada dirigida por Bille August —, una sobre su padre —Sunday''s Children, llevada al cine por su hijo Daniel— y una sobre su madre —Confesiones íntimas—, cuya versión televisiva fue dirigida por Liv Ullmann.
Esta última fue la más difícil porque implicaba descubrir a una madre distinta, una mujer cuyos sentimientos más íntimos eran reservados para un diario secreto que llevó hasta dos días antes de morir en 1966. Bergman recuerda a su padre leyéndolo con una lupa y dándose cuenta lentamente de que "no conocía a la mujer con la que había estado casado". Con un episodio de ese diario Bergman completó la trilogía.
"Tengo la sensación de que fui muy injusto con mis padres cuando era joven", dice. "Ahora me siento muy satisfecho y feliz de haber hecho esto".
Mira el reloj de la oficina de Lofgren y advierte que pronto tendrá que irse. Hubo una última pregunta: ¿Se convirtió en un analista tan agudo de la conducta humana haciendo terapia? "No, nunca", responde rápidamente. "Si no tuviera mi profesión, creo que estaría sentado en un manicomio. Pero he trabajado sin cesar, y eso fue muy saludable para mí. De modo que no necesité terapia".
Se levanta muy despacio. El director que siempre preparó meticulosamente cada película y cada obra parece haber puesto también orden en su vida. "Haré algunas producciones aquí en este teatro", dice Bergman refiriéndose a sus planes inmediatos "e iré a mi isla para leer libros que no he tenido la paciencia de leer o la paciencia de comprender. Y escucharé música. "Pienso que será una muy buena vida".
(c) The New York Times y Clarín, 2007. Traducción de Cristina Sardoy
Copyright 1996-2007 Clarín.com - All rights reserved
http://www.clarin.com/suplementos/cultura/2007/08/04/u-01470385.htm
Guardian:
US uneasy as Britain plans for early Iraq withdrawal
Americans would prefer UK troops to remain in position as long as they do
Ewen MacAskill in Washington, Julian Borger and Patrick Wintour
Wednesday August 8, 2007
The Bush administration is becoming increasingly concerned about the impact of an imminent British withdrawal from southern Iraq and would prefer UK troops to remain for another year or two.
British officials believe that Washington will signal its intention to reduce US troop numbers after a much-anticipated report next month by its top commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus, clearing the way for Gordon Brown to announce a British withdrawal in parliament the following month. An official said: "We do believe we are nearly there."
It is not known whether George Bush expressed concern about the withdrawal of the remaining 5,000 British troops when he met Mr Brown in Washington last week. But sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the administration was worried about the political consequences of losing British troops.
One source said: "If the difference is between the British leaving at the end of the year or staying through to next year or the year after, it is a safe assumption that President Bush would prefer them to stay as long as the Americans are there."
The Bush administration - focused on the north, west and central Iraq and the "surge" strategy that has seen 30,000 extra US troops deployed - has until recently ignored the south, content to leave it to the British. Now, however, it is beginning to pay attention to the region, amid the realisation that what has been portrayed as a success story is turning sour.
The UK government no longer claims Basra is a success but denies it is a failure, with British troops forced to abandon Basra city for the shelter of the airport.
On Monday the vice-president, Dick Cheney, warned against an early withdrawal. In words thought to be aimed at Congress rather than the British, he said: "No one could plead ignorance of the potential consequences of walking away from Iraq now, withdrawing coalition forces before Iraqis can defend themselves." The US defence secretary, Robert Gates, signalled at the weekend he had hoped for a modest US troop reduction by the end of the year but this has been complicated by the political instability gripping the Iraqi government.
Ken Pollack, a foreign affairs expert at the Washington-based Brookings Institution, who returned last month from an eight-day visit to Iraq in which he spoke to US officers and officials, predicted that US and Iraqi forces would have to go to the south to fill the vacuum with the same level of commitment they were showing with the surge.
He said Mr Bush would prefer the British to stay: "What Bush needs is for there to be a Union Jack flying somewhere in Iraq so he can trumpet that as full British participation, but that participation has been meaningless for some time."
Mr Pollack, who wrote on his return that there were signs that the surge was working, was dismissive of the British contribution over the past 12 to 18 months. He said: "I am assuming the British will no longer be there. They are not there now. We have a British battle group holed up in Basra airport. I do not see what good that does except for people flying in and out.
"It is the wild, wild west. Basra is out of control."
The British say that their forces have handed over to the Iraqi military and the violence is at a much lower level than in Baghdad, with most of it directed towards British forces as Shia militia seek to claim credit for driving them out.
Mr Brown has insisted that he will make his decision exclusively on the basis of British military advice, and there is no connection between the British and US military withdrawal decisions. He has hinted that British forces will switch from combat to surveillance roles in Basra, allowing them to be reduced and withdrawn to Basra airport, a highly protected base from which British troops could ultimately withdraw.
Gen Petraeus and Ryan Crocker, the US ambassador to Baghdad, will present an assessment on the impact of the surge to Congress on September 15. Their report is expected to show a mixed picture, with a sufficient number of positive points to justify an end to the surge. In such an environment the scaling down of the British presence in the south would not appear disloyal, the Brown government hopes.
"The British are doing everything to avoid embarrassing the Americans, while at the same time continuing the withdrawal," said Rosemary Hollis, the director of research at the Chatham House think-tank.
However, it is not clear how the prime minister would react if Mr Bush defied expectations once more and decided to press on with the surge next month.
Colonel Sam Gardiner, who is retired but still carries out war games for the Pentagon, said the violence in the south was problematic for the US military who need secure north-south communications for when they begin to move out of Iraq. He said US forces could be out of the country and into camps in Kuwait within two months, but it would take a further 10 months or so to remove all the heavy equipment - though he believed some of it could be left for the Iraqi security forces. Referring to Basra, he said: "We have trouble in the rear right now. The rear has got problems."
Some military analysts argue that private contractors are already protecting the convoy supply lines but Col Gardiner said that a British pull-out would mean "we would have to establish security for the route from Baghdad to Kuwait. Troops would have to be taken from other missions to protect the road."
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,2143879,00.html
Guardian:
On the trail of the Yangtze's lost dolphin
An expedition is searching China's great river for any trace of the baiji but it may be too late
Murky water, hazy sky and dull brown riverbanks. Strained eyes peering into the mist. Ears tuned electronically into the depths. And with each hour, each day that passes, a nagging question that grows louder: is this how a species ends after 20m years on earth?
When they write the environmental history of early 21st-century China, the freshwater dolphin expedition now plying the Yangtze river may be seen as man's farewell to an animal it once worshipped. A team of the world's leading marine biologists is making a last-gasp search for the baiji, a dolphin that was revered as the goddess of Asia's mightiest river but is now probably the planet's most endangered mammal.
Environmentalists warn that more and more species are being threatened in China, where forests can be home to more varieties of life than all of the United States and Canada combined.
The baiji expedition started out as a typically modern-day mission: a cascade of beer from the brewery sponsoring the launch, technical support from international research institutes and a shipfull of good intentions and high hopes. But more than halfway through the six-week expedition, the mood is grimmer as the participants contemplate the possibility that man may have killed off its first species of dolphin.
Spotters on the two boats have yet to glimpse a pale dorsal fin or hear the telltale trace of a sonar whistle, but the organisers refuse to give up. "The likelihood of the baiji being extinct in five to 10 years is 90% or more, but we must have hope and do everything possible," says August Pfluger, head of baiji.org, a Swiss-based group devoted to saving whales and dolphins.
Few people outside China have heard of the baiji, a light grey, long-snouted river dolphin that relies on sonar rather than its eyes to navigate through the murky Yangtze water. But even more than the panda, the demise of this mammal illustrates the sacrifices that the world's most populous country has made in its race to grow richer.
In the 1950s, there were thousands of baiji in the Yangtze. By 1994, the number fell below 100. This year, there has only been one, unconfirmed, sighting.
On board the Kekao-1 survey boat, it is not hard to see reasons for the decline. As commerce booms, the Yangtze has grown thick with container ships, coal barges and speed boats, whose hulls and propellers can run down or tear up the dolphins. Others have been blown up by bombs, electrocuted or snarled on 1,000 metre-long lines of hooks set by local fisherman who use unorthodox and illegal methods to boost catches.
Pollution is fouling their habitat. Near Huaneng, the acrid smoke billowing out of a paper factory and coal-fired power plant is so pungent that the crew grimace more than half a mile away. The factory discharges an unceasing torrent of filthy water directly into the river.
The completion of the Three Gorges dam has not helped. Although it is far upriver, the giant barrier has worsened a decline of the smaller fish on which the baiji feed and the shrinkage of the sand bars around which they once played.
Père David's deer
Scientists hope to save the species by capturing and moving specimens to a nature reserve - the 13 mile-long oxbow lake at Tian'ezhou - where they will be protected from river traffic and fishing.
Even with just a couple of dozen baiji, the team believe the population could recover. They point to Tian'ezhou's herd of several hundred Père David's deer. The last 18 deer, which is indigenous to China, were taken to Woburn Abbey in the late 19th century and successfully bred and reintroduced to China.
But so far, not one baiji has been found. With hope fading, the missing dolphin hunt threatens to turn into a murder investigation, a whodunnit for an entire species.
Scanning the water with binoculars, Samuel Turvey, of the Zoological Society of London, said the baiji is a mammal family that diverged 20m years ago from other ancient groups. "Its loss would be a major blow to biological diversity. This isn't a twig - it is a branch on the tree of life. To lose it would be so depressing. Yet nothing has been done for 30 years. Why does nobody pay attention to a species until there are almost none left?"
China's leading baiji expert, Wang Ding, has monitored the river for more than 20 years and acknowledges that action should have come earlier. "When we started we could be certain of seeing Baiji on every trip. It would have been better if we had tried to conserve them then but at the time China was very poor and the government was focused only on economic development. People did not care about the environment at all."
The strain of supporting 400 million people - one in 20 of the world's population - is taking its toll on a river that had been one the most biologically diverse regions in the world. Wang estimates that fish stocks have halved in 10 years. Many of its endemic species are near extinction, including the Chinese alligator, arguably the world's most endangered reptile; the Yangtze giant salamander, one of the world's largest amphibians; and two sturgeon species.
The list is growing. Wang says China will add the finless porpoise - another Yangtze cetacean - to the endangered list this year. In less than a decade, the porpoise population has shrunk by two-thirds to about 1,000. Spotters on the expedition saw only 30, down from about 100 six months before. Wang is increasingly despondent over their fate.
Scientists warn that the river is losing its capacity to support life, which will ultimately affect humans. "The baiji is like a canary in a coalmine," says Zhang Xiangfeng, of the Institute of Hydrobiology. "Since the 1990s, the water in the lakes near the Yangtze has become so polluted that we can't drink from them. Since I entered the institute 23 years ago, there are more and more ships and less and less animals. The river looks like a highway."
China's economic development and environmental destruction are taking place on a bigger scale and faster than ever before. Jim Harkness, the former representative of the WWF in Beijing, assumes the baiji are already extinct. "The ecosystems that have suffered the worst damage in China are freshwater."
Public awareness
Humanity, he warned, is driving animals to extinction many times faster than ever before. And China threatens to accelerate the trend because it has so much to lose. Harkness says the forests of Sichuan province contain more species than in all of North America.
"The problem in China is that it is one of the globe's most important centres of biodiversity, yet it has a huge population. Economic growth and environmental degradation are both proceeding at an unprecedented rate. And because of the political situation, it is not like people can stand up for a species of moss that is being destroyed by mining."
However, public and state awareness about the need for conservation is growing. China has more than 2,000 nature reserves. "China has made an effort to do more but certainly economic development - which leads to changing eating habits, more dams and more roads - is a threat to many species," says Xie Yan, of the Wildlife Conservation Society, which will soon assess how species numbers have changed in recent years. "The biodiversity of China will become an increasingly important topic for people all over the world."
But economics continues to take priority. As a member of the Yangtze management commission, Wang has proposed a fishing ban, but so far there is only a temporary halt during spawning.
Whether this is too little, too late for the baiji will not be conclusively determined by the expedition. But if the most advanced survey of the river yet comes up blank, the baiji's prospects are grim. "If we cannot find any baiji, the message to society will be that there is no hope for them," says Wang.
* Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2006/nov/24/china.travelnews#more-article
Jeune Afrique: Tintin au Congo :
un Congolais porte plainte à Bruxelles pour racisme
RD CONGO - 7 août 2007 - par AFP
Un étudiant congolais a porté plainte fin juillet devant la justice belge pour dénoncer le caractère "raciste" de l'album controversé "Tintin au Congo" et demandé qu'il soit retiré de la vente, a-t-on appris mardi auprès du parquet de Bruxelles.
Etudiant en sciences politiques à Bruxelles, Bienvenu Mbutu Mondondo (38 ans), a déposé plainte contre X et contre la société Moulinsart, en charge de l'exploitation commerciale de l'oeuvre d'Hergé, a expliqué le porte-parole du parquet, Jos Colpin.
L'enquête n'en est qu'à ses prémices, le juge d'instruction Michel Claise n'ayant pas encore décidé si la plainte était recevable.
Dans cette album publié en 1930-31, alors que la Belgique colonisait le Congo, et qui est encore vendu à plusieurs dizaines de milliers d'exemplaires chaque année, le dessinateur belge Hergé représentait l'Afrique "de manière naïve", reflétant l'esprit paternaliste de l'époque, reconnaît Moulinsart sur son site internet.
Le plaignant fait part de son "désarroi face à la persistance de Moulinsart à ne pas décider une fois pour toute de mettre fin à la publication et à la commercialisation de la bande dessinée Tintin au Congo", qu'il juge "raciste et xénophobe".
Il réclame que la société Moulinsart soit poursuivie pour infraction à la loi belge réprimant le racisme.
"Il n'est pas admissible que Tintin puisse crier sur des villageois qui sont forcés de travailler à la construction d'une voie de chemin de fer ou que son chien Milou les traite de paresseux", a-t-il précisé mardi à l'AFP.
"Il faut laisser la justice belge faire son travail", a réagi un porte-parole de Moulinsart, Marcel Wilmet. Il en a profité pour rappeler que Moulinsart n'était pas l'éditeur de Tintin. Celui-ci, Casterman, n'était pas joignable mardi pour un commentaire.
"Sur le fond, a-t-il ajouté, nous sommes étonnés que cette polémique renaisse aujourd'hui, alors qu'Hergé s'était expliqué, disant qu'il s'agissait d'une oeuvre naïve qu'il fallait replacer dans le contexte des années 30, où tous les Belges pensaient faire du très bon travail en Afrique".
Dans les années 70, Hergé avait en effet reconnu que pour cet album, il "s'était nourri des préjugés du milieu bourgeois dans lequel (il) vivait". "Je ne connaissais de ce pays que ce que les gens en racontaient à l'époque", avait-il ajouté.
En juillet, la Commission britannique pour l'égalité raciale (CRE) avait jugé que la vente de Tintin au Congo "dépassait l'entendement". "Ce livre contient des images et des dialogues porteurs de préjugés racistes abominables, où les +indigènes sauvages+ ressemblent à des singes et parlent comme des imbéciles", avait déclaré une porte-parole de la CRE.
Suite à cet avis, le groupe américain Borders a demandé à toutes ses librairies aux Etats-Unis et en Grande-Bretagne de déplacer l'album controversé vers la section des BD pour adultes.
Jozef Dewitte, directeur du Centre belge pour l'égalité des chances et la lutte contre le racisme appelait mardi à une "certaine prudence".
"Il s'agit d'une oeuvre d'art, faite par quelqu'un de décédé depuis longtemps. Je conçois que des gens puissent se sentir insultés, mais plutôt que de tenir des propos +hyper-politiquement corrects+, on ferait mieux de s'attaquer aux discriminations à l'embauche ou au logement", a-t-il réagi.
http://www.jeuneafrique.com/jeune_afrique/article_depeche.asp?art_cle=AFP61907tintiemsica0#
Mail & Guardian:
Beware white men with briefcases
Binyavanga Wainaina: CONTINENTAL DRIFT
16 June 2007
Years ago I had a conversation with somebody in Cape Town who was helping to develop a tourism marketing plan. She told me that the largest number of tourists to South Africa came from the continent and that they spent the most money. None of this was the result of a plan - at least up to that point.
This made sense to me. I had already met and known many Kenyans - mostly business people, often women - who would come to South Africa to buy stock for their businesses or look for universities for their children. They would spend some days in the warehouses of Jo’burg and Durban, sell some things, buy lots of things - then maybe spend two days at Sun City and depart.
Although thousands of Kenyans do this every year, I have never seen a package advertised.
Kenya is like this too. In many unmeasured ways, Nairobi services the business people, agencies and governments of eight countries: Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi, Sudan, Congo, Somalia and Ethiopia. Right now the only new routes Kenya Airways is opening up are lucrative African routes.
Traders come in from all over, looking for spare parts and socks; for new Mercedes-Benzes and toothpicks; for bales of second-hand clothes and banking services; for cement; for cost-effective private schooling; for seedlings and freelance website designers. The most vibrant parts of the city surround the bus ranks that service this massive market.
Of course, our world being what it is, there is no service to make the lives of these poor travellers easier. Kenyan police love to harass black African foreigners because they are more afraid of authority figures than anybody and they will cough up whatever is asked. There is no office set up by the city council to support trade and traders anywhere near Tom Mboya Street - no place to complain, no forum to discuss how to make this business grow.
Instead, there are askaris with clubs. Those billions of shillings that flow into the city every month need to be managed and the management plan is clubs and tear gas and the efficient collection of fines and fees.
These neighbouring countries may be Kenya’s largest source of income, but then we must consider definitions. Take “investor”. An investor is a white man with a briefcase; a brown man with a briefcase is here to “bribe”; a black man with a briefcase is an “illegal immigrant”.
There are signs, though that the thinking is slowly changing. A Sene°©galese company that makes innovative customs software has just won a huge contract for Kenya. The donors were shocked. Who thought technology could be bought and sold within the continent?
Now. The blunt truth of all of this is that there is little meaningful investment that can come from a white man with a briefcase. This is because he lives in a different solar system. What he refers to as a low-cost life for him and his family is beyond the means of Kenya to provide.
There is a lovely story that circulates in Nairobi about the coffee husk project, in which beautiful and environmentally friendly and well-funded coal was produced by men in briefcases for the African market. This was meant to stop people burning charcoal. Problem was, the costs were high: big homes with 24-hour security, broadband internet, private schooling at the international school and so on had to be provided by the funding.
What is not said is that brown men with briefcases are readily available, downloaded from planes from Mumbai with $50 000 and the ability to live on a dollar a day while setting up the Kenya Coffee Husk Charcoal Company, which will undercut the charcoal dealing mafias.
It is for this reason that I am refreshed by the idea that the Chinese government built a mall as part of their trade mission in Nairobi. That they talk about doing business - and mean it. For when you hear our European Union diplomat types talk, you would think all they do is donate and provide “partnership support” - we are not a market, we are a sort of kindergarten that needs a firm hand and bright, bold colors.
A raft of articles has come from concerned people in the West who talk about how China and India are exploiting Africa. But to me it seems that their motives are far more upfront, transparent and sincere than the patronising baby talk that issues from our partners with briefcases who want to start fail-safe businesses by getting pity grants.
I recently met somebody who trains Africans in “income generating activities”. She has never run a successful business. She took a course in development somewhere in Europe. She was flying business class to Amsterdam.
It’s a good gig, if you can get it.
http://www.mg.co.za/articlePage.aspx?articleid=314052&area=/columnist_wainaina/#
Mother Jones:
The Child Soldiers of Staten Island
While Hollywood swoons over teen guerrillas, the real lost boys are hidden in plain sight.
Alissa Quart
July , 2007
this is the year child soldiers went pop. They were the centerpiece of Blood Diamond, in which Leonardo DiCaprio played a child-soldier-rescuing diamond trader. African kids with guns made appearances in The Last King of Scotland and in the latest James Bond movie. Lost introduced a subplot in which the series' West African strongman was revealed to have been a child soldier. Indie actor Ryan Gosling is reportedly set to direct his own script about child soldiers, perhaps inspired by War/Dance, a Sundance award-winning documentary that Variety called "Spellbound with orphans."
In February, a handsome 26-year-old named Ishmael Beah published A Long Way Gone, a bloody, moving memoir of how he went from being a guerrilla in Sierra Leone to getting adopted by an American woman and finally attending Oberlin College. The New York Times Magazine put him on its cover; Starbucks sponsored his 10-city book tour and prominently displayed his memoir in its outlets. Time sneered that we'd hit the "cultural sweet spot for the African child soldier."
This sudden fascination with photogenic survivors such as Beah seemingly reassures us that Africa's young fighters can be redeemed if only they step forward to share their stories or win the heart of a kindly Westerner. But most former child soldiers remain in the shadows, whether they're in West Africa or Staten Island, home to as many as 8,000 Liberian immigrants, and consequently what might be the largest concentration of child soldiers in the United States.
According to Staten Island community activist Rufus Arkoi, around one-fifth of the hundreds of young refugees he has met while working as a youth counselor and soccer coach were once boy soldiers. "They are reliving in their minds the violence and the roles they played. They think about the craziness they did," he says. "They talk easily to me—we are very friendly. Otherwise, they keep the acts they have committed to themselves."
Take Jonathan, a 20-year-old who lives in the borough's Clifton section. Jonathan joined his grandparents in the United States in 1998, one of thousands of young war refugees who, with the help of aid organizations and the U.S. government, were brought to New York and granted political asylum during and after Liberia's long civil war. He may or may not have fought in the conflict; he won't say. In fact, he doesn't want his real name used because of the stigma of just being a Liberian refugee.
Jonathan has gone from whomever he was as a boy to graduating from high school and getting a reasonably paid job as a loader at a giant retail store. "My dad is in Michigan. My mom is in Africa," he explains as we walk down a cold, bare thoroughfare.
Strikingly handsome in a camouflage hoodie, he repeatedly touches the cell phone hanging off his jeans as if it were a talisman. "I help my grandparents," he says. "I give them $100 a week of my pay because I live with them and I'm the only one working." For these reasons, he is viewed as a success story in the Liberian community, although he doesn't feel like it. "Around others, I smile and I act happy," he tells me. "But I am not happy."
Jonathan is clearly struggling to keep from drowning in a flood of bad memories. The trauma remains so intense that when, after some prodding, he finally does talk about the atrocities he witnessed—of men being tied up, guns pointed at people's heads, gunshots like "firecrackers, so bright"—his speech becomes very rapid, almost unintelligibly so.
"I've seen horrible things," he says. "I get up in my sleep. As time went on, when I came here, I stopped having those dreams."
staten island's Liberian immigrants are concentrated in a bleak set of housing projects in the borough's Clifton, Concord, and Stapleton neighborhoods. Swelled by a wave of war refugees in the 1990s, this enclave is now the largest Liberian community outside Liberia. The community is the product of a reverse migration of sorts. What would become the Republic of Liberia was settled by black Americans in the early 19th century as part of a white abolitionist effort to send freed slaves "back to Africa."
In 1989, rebel leader Charles Taylor invaded the country, launching the conflict that would brutalize Liberia for the next 14 years. During the war, government and rebel forces "recruited" 1 out of every 10 children—roughly 20,000 in all. According to Amnesty International, as many as 40 percent of all fighters were under 18. Conscripted into groups such as Taylor's infamous Small Boys Units when they were as young as 10, they were handed Kalashnikovs, sent to fight on the front lines, and forced to commit atrocities such as killing friends and relatives.
The American media paid little attention to oil-poor Liberia's disintegration, except to occasionally portray its young soldiers as an anarchic freak show—drugged; gun-toting; wearing wigs, dresses, and masks; self-christened with noms de guerre such as Sugar Water and Quick to Fire. The Washington Post described a "surreal" and "bizarre" conflict whose cross-dressing teen guerrillas carried "teddy bears or plastic baby dolls in one hand and AK-47s in the other."
For the young Liberians who came of age amid this ferocious fighting, coming to America was an escape, but also an ordeal. The war left many without the education and resources necessary to fit in and succeed, explains Jacob Massaquoi, cofounder of the African Refuge, part of a small nonprofit that provides drop-in counseling for immigrant kids and families. "They have come from a very communal world to a socially isolated one."
Some teens found that the survival skills they'd learned in the bush could help them assimilate—into gang culture. Their reputation for fearlessness preceded them. They smoked marijuana like cigarettes, formed gangs, and acquired new and better guns, Arkoi says.
"Many of the Liberian kids are not being raised by their parents—either they are in foster care or being raised by uncles or grandparents—and the gangs have become like their family," says Sergeant Debbie Edwards, a community affairs liaison for the New York City Police Department. "We want to take these kids back."
George, a 15-year-old boy who came here in 1999, says he usually holes up in his aunt's apartment in the Stapleton projects after school to avoid "getting in trouble" with the kids who "stand there all day, dealing."
"If I go out, I could get hit by a bullet," he says. "I often hear shooting. There's real fighting—crazy, getting high."
In June 2005, a 20-year-old named Mustafa Fully killed an electrician in a drive-by shooting in front of a local deli. Fully, who some in the community believe was once a child soldier, is now in prison awaiting sentencing for second-degree murder. (Through his lawyer, Fully declined to be interviewed for this story.)
Last Christmas, a party for a large crowd of Liberian youth ended in a fistfight. According to a witness, one angry partyer was restrained as he screamed, "I fought in the war, and no one has the right to tell me what to do!"
The stigma of violence hangs over these young men, particularly among the members of their insular community who, a few years ago, might have been terrorized by the kids who are now their neighbors. "People resent them. They are wicked, people think," Arkoi says. "My wife says, 'Let's move. These are bad kids.' People are scared because of what they did. They don't want to have anything to do with them." Chea Dixon, a 25-year-old security guard who firmly tells me he "never held a gun" in Liberia, says he steers clear of other young men who "don't know the difference between right and wrong."
Paradoxically, the community's shared history makes discussing the past harder. "I don't tell people personal things about myself," says George. "I don't know how people are going to react."
Many of the young men I spoke with said simply that they were "in the war," murking up what they may or may not have done—or what was done to them. Not only is telling soldier from victim often impossible, but both groups suffer many of the same problems—growing up amid bloodshed, leaving their families behind at a young age, trading Third World poverty for First World alienation.
George is typical: He was separated from his parents by the war and then placed in refugee camps before being resettled in New York. "Mostly I think about my mother," he says quietly. "I didn't grow up with her. I haven't seen her very much."
Massaquoi says that the former fighters he knows dislike the label "child soldiers"; he insists that they be called "young victims of war." As Jack Saul, a Columbia University psychologist who helped found the African Refuge, explains, "Those who were child soldiers and those who were not were both victims."
in january, Jonathan took some of his American friends to the cineplex to see Blood Diamond. Set during Sierra Leone's civil war, which raged alongside Liberia's, the film tells the story of a brutish white Zimbabwean mercenary, played by DiCaprio, who in the end is won over by a doe-eyed child soldier and uses a giant, rose-colored diamond to reunite the boy with his family.
This triumphal ending of wealth and reunification didn't echo Jonathan's experience. "Black American kids will never understand," he says with a sigh. "They were asking me in the movie theater, 'Is that what's going on back home? That's crazy. Why did you stay?' What was I going to do? I couldn't walk to New Jersey!"
Nevertheless, the movie gave him a way to reveal a glimpse of the personal history he otherwise cannot bring himself to discuss. "It's a good movie about my memories," he says. "But I don't want to talk about it. I don't like talking about back home. I don't go so deep."
This article has been made possible by the Foundation for National Progress, the Investigative Fund of Mother Jones, and gifts from generous readers like you.
© 2007 The Foundation for National Progress
http://www.motherjones.com/commentary/columns/2007/07/witness.html
The Independent:
Lebanese strike a blow at US-backed government
Robert Fisk
Published: 07 August 2007
They've done it again. The Arabs have, once more, followed democracy and voted for the wrong man.
Just as the Palestinians voted for Hamas when they were supposed to vote for the Palestinian Authority of Mahmoud Abbas, so the Christian Maronites of Lebanon appear to have voted for a man opposed to the majority government of Fouad Siniora in Beirut. Camille Khoury - with a strong vote from the Armenian Tashnak party - won by 418 votes the seat that belonged to Pierre Gemayel, murdered last November by gunmen supposedly working for the Syrian security services.
While the Maronite vote had increased against Gemayel's showing in 2005 elections, the result was a stunning blow to the American-backed government - how devastating that phrase "American-backed" has now become in the Middle East - in Lebanon and allowed Hizbollah's ally, ex-General Michel Aoun to claim that "they cannot beat me". Mr Aoun is a candidate in presidential elections later this year.
True, the voting figures showed huge support for Pierre Gemayel's father Amin - himself an ex-president- who was standing for the parliamentary seat of his murdered son. Although he was a weak and fractious leader - Amin paid a state visit to Damascus to re-cement "fraternal" ties after the Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon - he proved himself a brave man in the aftermath of his son's murder, calling upon Lebanese to support the government rather than submit once more to the domination of Syria.
Khoury's score in the Metn hills above Beirut - and a 418 conquest out of 79,000 votes is hardly a crushing political victory - yet again emphasises the divisions among the Christians of Lebanon who have traditionally fought each other - rather than their more obvious enemies - throughout Lebanese history. The Crusaders fought each other in Tyre when Saladin was at the gates of the city; in 1990, Mr Aoun's own Lebanese army fought the Christian Phalangist militia while still trying to defend themselves from the Syrians. They lost both battles.
Amin's father Pierre - grandfather of the MP murdered last November - founded the Phalange in 1936 after being inspired by the Nazi Berlin Olympics. "I thought Lebanon needed some of this order," he admitted to me shortly before his death; the original Phalange dressed in brown shirts and gave the Hitler salute. But they had turned themselves into a neo-respectable right-wing party by 1982 when they were enthusiastically supported by the invading Israeli army which hoped that Amin's brother Bashir would be elected president. Alas, Bashir turned out to be less pro-Israeli than the then-defence minister, Ariel Sharon, hoped, and was himself murdered in a bomb attack shortly before his inauguration.
Old Pierre of Olympics fame is long dead - he did not even know his own age when I last spoke to him - and Amin's brother and son were both assassinated. For the government, there was one electoral light yesterday: the victory of Mohamed Itani in Beirut, a Sunni Muslim who scored 85 per cent of the vote for the seat of Walid Eido who was himself blown up by a bomb in June.
One begins to wonder, in Lebanon, whether the election results are more surprising than the means by which MPs are liquidated.
http://news.independent.co.uk/fisk/article2841338.ece
The Independent: Extinct
the dolphin that could not live alongside man
The Yangtze river dolphin is today declared extinct. It is the first large animal to be wiped from the planet for 50 years, and only the fourth entire mammal family to disappear in 500 years. And it was driven to its death by mankind...
By Jeremy Laurance
Published: 08 August 2007
After more than 20 million years on the planet, the Yangtze river dolphin is today officially declared extinct, the first species of cetacean (whale, dolphin or porpoise) to be driven from this planet by human activity.
An intensive six-week search by an international team of marine biologists involving two boats that ploughed up and down the world's busiest river last December failed to find a single specimen.
Today, the scientific report of that expedition, published in the peer-reviewed journal of the Royal Society, Biology Letters, confirms the dolphin known as the baiji or white-fin in Chinese and celebrated for its pale skin and distinctive long snout, has disappeared.
To blame for its demise is the increasing number of container ships that use the Yangtze, as well as the fishermen whose nets became an inadvertent hazard.
This is no ordinary extinction of the kind that occurs frequently in a world of millions of still-evolving species. The Yangtze freshwater dolphin was a remarkable creature that separated from all other species so many millions of years ago, and had become so distinct, that it qualified as a mammal family in its own right. It is the first large vertebrate to have become extinct for 50 years and only the fourth entire mammal family to disappear since the time of Columbus, when Europeans began their colonisation of the world.
The three previous mammal families gone from the face of the Earth are the giant lemurs of Madagascar, which were eliminated in the 17th century, the island shrews of the West Indies, probably wiped out by the rats that accompanied Colombus on his voyage, and the Tasmanian tiger, the last known specimen of which died in captivity in 1936. (The most famous creature to have become extinct in the past 500 years, the Dodo, was a bird.)
Sam Turvey, conservation biologist at the Zoological Society of London, who led the expedition to find the Yangtze dolphin and is chief author of the paper, said: "The loss of such a unique and charismatic species is a shocking tragedy. This extinction represents the disappearance of a complete branch of the evolutionary tree of life and emphasises we have yet to take full responsibility in our role as guardians of the planet."
Several other species are "just hanging on" in the Yangtze and could disappear within a few years unless action is taken now, Dr Turvey warned. They include the Chinese alligator, the finless porpoise and the Chinese paddlefish, which grows up to 7m long but has not been seen since 2003.
"There is a lot of interest now in the baiji - but it has come too late. Why does no one pay attention to a species until there are none left? We really have to use the baiji as a wake-up call to act immediately to prevent it happening again.
"What is poignant is that the Yangtze is a fast river system with a unique range of endemic species. Once they are lost there, they are lost everywhere," he said.
The object of last December's expedition was to rescue any baiji found and remove them to a 21km-long oxbow lake in the nature reserve of Tian'ezhou for an intensive breeding programme. Each of the two boats operated independently with scientists scanning the water with binoculars - dolphins have to surface to breathe - and listening with hyprophones for the distinctive whistles. Despite the technology, they found nothing.
"We used a very intensive survey technique. Both of the boats counted the same number of porpoises - we saw everything that was there. We didn't see a single dolphin," Dr Turvey said.
The cause of the freshwater dolphin's demise was instead all too plain to the investigators. It had become a victim of the world's most populous country's race to get richer. One tenth of the world's population live in the Yangtze river basin. During the expedition, scientists counted 19,830 ships on the 1,669km of the river they surveyed - one large freight vessel every 800m.
The Yangtze dolphin navigated by sonar - its eyes are useless in the murky water - but in a motorway jammed with container ships, coal barges and speed boats, its sonar was deafened and it ran a high risk of being hit or torn by propellers.
An even greater threat came from the nets and 1,000m lines of hooks used by fishermen.
Although they did not intend to catch dolphins, the creatures became entangled in the nets or lacerated by the bare hooks - almost half of all dead baiji found in the past few decades have died in this way. In addition, pollution had fouled their natural habitat and completion of the Three Gorges Dam worsened the decline in smaller fish on which the baiji fed.
The last mammal families to become extinct
Island shrews
Extinct: 1500
The West Indian "island shrews" or nesophontids are known only from sub-fossil remains. They were about the size of a rat and died out following the accidental introduction of black rats, with which they could not compete, from European ships. They were the most ancient land mammals of the West Indies and their extinction represented the loss of an entire mammalian order.
Giant lemurs
Extinct: 1650
The giant lemurs of Madagascar weighed up to 180lb, more than a silverback gorilla. They died out as a result of hunting by humans.
Tasmanian Tiger
Extinct: 1936
The Tasmanian tiger, or thylacine, left, looked like a large striped dog, with a wolf's head and heavy tail. It was actually a marsupial, related to the kangaroo, with a pouch to raise its young. European settlers feared it and killed it whenever they could. Thylacines never bred in captivity - the last known one dying in Hobart zoo on 7 September 1936.
http://environment.independent.co.uk/wildlife/article2843953.ece
posted by attilav at 10:37
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