Elsewhere Today 422

Aljazeera:
Pakistan confusion over emergency

THURSDAY, AUGUST 09, 2007
11:36 MECCA TIME, 8:36 GMT

The leader of Pakistan's ruling party has said there is no chance that Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan's president, will declare a state of emergency.

Earlier on Thursday, the minister of state for information said emergency rule may be declared due to "external and internal threats".

Official sources said Musharraf had called a meeting of senior aides at his camp office in Rawalpindi, near the capital Islamabad, to decide on the issue.

Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain, the president of Pakistan Muslim League, however, told reporters at parliament: "There is no possibility of an emergency."

A senior government official who requested anonymity said Musharraf had already held several meetings on Wednesday with Shaukat Aziz, the prime minister, legal experts and senior members of the ruling party.

Tariq Azim, the minister of state for information, said a state of emergency was being discussed because of "some external and internal threats and the law and order situation".

During a state of emergency, the government can restrict the freedom to move, rally, engage in political activities or form groups as well as take a slew of other measures, including restricting the parliament's right to make laws.

It can even dissolve parliament.

Under Pakistan's constitution, the president may declare a state of emergency if it is deemed that the country's security is "threatened by war or external aggression, or by internal disturbance beyond" the government's authority to control.

If a state of emergency is to be extended beyond two months, it must be approved by a joint sitting of parliament, the constitution says.

Kamal Hyder, Al Jazeera's correspondent in Pakistan, said the state of emergency would give the government greater control and suspend rights such as to free speech.

No show

Earlier on Wednesday, Musharraf pulled out of a peace meeting with tribal elders in Afghanistan.

The president told Hamid Karzai, his Afghan counterpart, that he would send his prime minister in his place.

The council meeting was to start on Thursday and had been brokered by the US president.

A US state department official speaking on condition of anonymity initially said the Bush administration was surprised and dismayed by Musharraf's pullout.

But Sean McCormack, the department's spokesman, later said: "President Musharraf certainly wouldn't stay back in Islamabad if he didn't believe he had good and compelling reasons to stay back. Certainly we would understand that."

Source: Al Jazeera and agencies

http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/E8767DCE-E9B2-4E0C-A9E5-C9B3EE56E03E.htm

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AllAfrica: More Death And Destruction
As Floods Spread to Central Region

UN Integrated Regional Information Networks NEWS
7 August 2007
Lagos

As the rainy season begins to peak throughout Nigeria, a farming district in the centre of the country is the latest area to go underwater.

Crops were destroyed and at least 17 people died in the area. Untold homes have also been washed away, local officials said on Monday.

As of Monday at least 10 communities on the Wase River in Plateau state had been affected by the floods as a river overflowed its banks, local government official Abubakar Mohammed told reporters.

Apart from the town of Wase, other towns affected in the area include Gyambar, Kukawa, Saluwe, Anguwan Gar, Wase Tofa, Zanko, Gandu and Gwaiwan Kogi.

Among the casualties were 11 passengers of a bus who drowned when the inundation upturned their vehicle, Mohammed said. Other people drowned as waters flooded their homes.

Household items, livestock and farmlands were also destroyed, he said.

Thousands of displaced people are sheltering at the Duwil Primary School in Wase town, Mohammed said. Aid organisations so far have provided families with 200 blankets as well as sleeping mats and grain.

"These are not enough but we are expecting more assistance from the state and the federal government as well as humanitarian agencies," said Mohammed.

In the past week, floods hundreds of kilometres southwest in Lagos and Ogun states made thousands of people homeless, while in northeast Borno State some 1,000km away at least nine people died and thousands were forced from their homes.

Health officials say flooding has also caused pollution in wells, rivers and other drinking water sources.

[ This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations ]

Copyright © 2007 UN Integrated Regional Information Networks. All rights reserved.

http://allafrica.com/stories/200708070970.html

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Asia Times:
GERMANY, THE RE-ENGINEERED ALLY

Part 2: Everything is broken

By Axel Brot

(For Part 1: Readiness for endless war, click here)

Broken machinery
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.

It is from this vantage point that arises the resigned and poignant expectation that the US will permit neither a stable Russia nor a non-cataclysmic accommodation of China's rise. American politics now have just enough flexibility to negotiate the short-term priorities of whom to put under the pressure of regime-changing demands; but the system is rigged not to reward persuasion or accommodation but toward increasing confrontation, deadline diplomacy, and grandstanding on principles that carry the load of broken credibility.

Notwithstanding the worthy efforts of the Iraq Study Group or the Princeton Project on National Security to get some means-to-ends rationality back into US policies, politics are impaired by the lack of discipline and prudence that come with the reinforcement of the imperial mind-set of official Washington by the media and think tanks.

Unfortunately, this mind-set is not only the defining attribute of the present administration but of both parties - and abundantly so, of the serious contenders for the next US presidency. They are already competing in burning the bridges to a somewhat more patient approach to imperial policies while berating the present administration for its weakness. Different combinations of bombing Iran, breaking Hezbollah, confronting the Russians, sanctioning the Chinese, squeezing the Saudis and Pakistanis, pressuring the Indians into a subordinate relationship, installing an "accountable" dictatorship in Iraq (and/or taking it apart), are on the menu of the main candidates - plus unfettering US "soft power" and hitching the allies more effectively to whatever load is to be pulled.

It is therefore all too easy to see in the current travails of global diplomacy efforts to adapt to the implicit American choice of "either the US or chaos". But the lessons are not only Iraq and Afghanistan, but the failed attempts of Serbia (1999), Iran (2003) and Syria (ongoing), to bow to US/Western demands while keeping a measure of independence and dignity. In fact, looking at the last 16 years or so, at the fate of the former Soviet Union in the 1990s, of the former Yugoslavia, and of Iraq or Afghanistan, they may come to the conclusion that they have nothing to lose even in a military confrontation.

And since the march of empire is tuned to the racial - alias "civilizational" - superiority (of the "Anglosphere"), non-Western elites may interpret this choice as "the US and chaos". If it is their ambition just to loot their countries and then to set-up shop in one of the Western tax-sheltered playgrounds or to turn into sharecroppers of their countries´ resources, the choice is a good one. If they are at all attentive, reasonably patriotic, and have a measure of pride, they cannot but resist it.

It is, in the last analysis, also a question of self-esteem and a sense of historical accountability. Can elites in their right mind bear to be the butt of a sardonic witticism like the one going around among Anglo-Saxon officials, targeting the Saudi combination of immense corruption and paying immense protection money: the Saudis "prefer to suffocate on their knees instead of dying on their feet".

But contempt and the lust for chaos ("creative destruction") have become the coin of the realm. They are heated by fantasies of a global caste society where "The Shield of Achilles", "Imperial Grunts", "Left Behind", and "The Diamond Age" are busy cross-pollinating the imperial imagination. One might add that a Pentagon (Office for Net Assessment) study of the consequences of climate change provides a window into the darkest, survivalist corner of this mind-set and implies, in addition, an answer to the questions "who is the West?" and "who is superfluous?"

The return with a vengeance of the "covert operations approach" to US international policies, therefore, has much more to do with this sinister self-fictionalization than with the nature of threats or the simple availability of the instruments. While for most periods of the Cold War, concerns about exposure, blowback, and provoking war with the Soviets kept it somewhat under control, it has slipped the leash. Everyone who can has gone into business. It is not only the White House that is exceedingly liberal in its use of privateers, frequently retreaded intelligence and military officials who should have been disposed of out of harm's way.

There is the evolution of a huge gray zone of private "consultancy" enterprises of former government officials who parlay their international contacts with state and sub-state actors, with insurgencies in search of upscale sponsoring, and policy-lobbying groups, as well as their international business contacts - in particular with the energy, financial, arms and security industries - into business and influence. On returning to government service, their pet projects, policies and money-spinners don´t just go into hibernation, they are continued as government policies. The merchandising of imperial policies and the mercantilization of military violence have become the hallmark of this strange combination of militarism and venality. One of the new breed of temporary, parvenu officials demonstrated its bottom-line aspect with the pithy question: "What is the use of empire when you can´t make money out of it?"

On the policy level, the concern about blowback and exposure has all but disappeared, except as a weapon of bureaucratic bloodletting when the hunt for the scapegoat is on. It can only operate as a restraint if a sense of moderation can be imposed and if its consequences have a deterring effect. None of this pertains. US policies, instead, gestate in the world of the much-quoted Melian Dialogue where a sense of impunity and omnipotence have destroyed any regard for prudence. Since the tyro-days of retired Air Force Major General Richard Secord's rubbing shoulders with the cocaine mafia in order to finance the Nicaraguan Contras, this state of affairs has given a completely new meaning to "unleashing covert operations", "plausible deniability", and, of course, to Ronald Reagan´s famous "boys will be boys" mentality.

The more vicious side of the problem, though, exposes the meltdown of the firewalls between the branches of government, between the executive branch and Congress, between public and private, between business and government - in a witches' brew of projects and interests. And no government agency has the clout or the will to turn off any of the cross-married projects of policy-lobbying, intelligence and black operations that acquired godparents in government, in Congress, or with one of the powerful lobbying outfits.

They may sink, perhaps, below the awareness threshold of the principals, but move they will unstintingly, metamorphosing, mutating and spawning descendents in the fetid swamp of subcontractors, public-private intelligence outfits, mercenaries, fundamentalist missionary organizations, security firms, to reappear someday as "operation in place", and thus renewing the cycle. The Sudanese troubles are a prime example of how this itinerant ecosystem produces and reproduces ever increasing mayhem in weak states cursed with strategic significance.

But all of that does not even begin to address the destructive effects of its frequent connection to the underworld, of the illicit trade in weapons, raw materials, etc, or to the globally operating crime syndicates and their economic infrastructure.

It is only logical that the selection of policy-making personnel seems now to follow the Israeli, Italian, and Japanese model, moving ever deeper into the world of clan loyalties (the neo-conservatives are only the most self-consciously "family-oriented" clan) where the distinction between loyalty to office and loyalty to clan disappears completely at the level of deputy assistant secretary.

And it is starting to infect Germany. Not only because many corners of the German foreign intelligence apparatus are, by design and tradition, bespoke to US and Israeli intelligence, and its political control mechanisms are slick even by Western standards. It is the osmosis of bad habits via the demands of Western solidarity.

In a moment of unguarded candor, the Berlin correspondent of the conservative Swiss daily Neue Zürcher Zeitung bemoaned the unrestrained recruiting of journalists and NGO representatives by German intelligence as far worse than spying on journalists to plug leaks. This comment illuminated for a short moment one of the rooms in the sub-basement of German foreign policy.

Of even greater salience for the shape of things to come is the introduction into Germany of the linkage of intelligence and business, and of both to covert operations. A story is floating around in the international media that the former head of German intelligence and current member of parliament Bernd Schmidbauer is allegedly the facilitator for an Israeli intelligence agent turned businessman who is deeply involved in Israeli projects in Iraqi Kurdistan. Using Schmidbauer's contacts among the leadership of the Iraqi Kurds, the Israeli agent reportedly secured land contracts worth many millions of dollars to give the Kurds a greater share of the (disappeared) billions from the oil-for-food account.

It is probably just an interesting, albeit rather disingenuous cover-story. But whatever the details, it is a fact that Schmidbauer is using his former office for that kind of purpose, and that is the message. And it is hard to judge what is worse: Schmidbauer involved in Israeli shenanigans that connect covert operations to business profits; or a private venture doing the same.

The discontent with German military involvement
More immediate, however, are concerns that German soldiers are already being sent into open-ended missions in potentially casualty-rich intervention environments - environments where American (British and Israeli) policies have publicly, contemptuously, and irreversibly debauched 100 years' worth of international law that tried to regulate the use of military violence. The German allies are running a kind of social-Darwinian selection experiment in their militaries, to weed out the conscience-ridden, the susceptible, and the whistle-blowers and to breed back the mind-set of colonial warfare against "enemy populations", with all the repercussions on civil society that this entails.

The resulting mercenary habits and "warrior ethics" - moral inhibitions restrained in favor of racial contempt as part of unit bonding - cannot but infect and then corrode the restraint trained into the "citizen-soldiers" of a parliamentary army. The more they are committed to operations in the "war on terror", the more they will encounter the desperate hate of those who have been exposed to the US ways of pacification, and the greater the danger of contamination.

In other words: there is fear that German forces will absorb this mentality by participating in these society-destroying operations whose results can already be seen in Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine - and in future campaigns that have the potential to deteriorate into annihilation warfare. The fear is not far-fetched: one might look at the doctrinal evolution with regard to warfare in the "global ghettos" or, by way of example, scrutinize the strategies considered and the fervor for a war against Iran.

Those with legal training and some historical awareness cannot but see parallels between what is happening now and the judicial and propaganda preparations during the run-up to the German attack on Soviet Russia: imprinting on the soldiers' minds that they are going to confront a sub-human, vicious, cruel, and cunning enemy; then denying whole categories of enemy combatants any legal status, depriving others of the protections of the Hague Conventions, and limiting the protection of civilians by the code of military justice to the bare bones of maintaining combat discipline and preventing the army from turning into a raping, looting, murdering mob (which it did anyway, more often than not, especially after the expected short road to victory turned into the long slog towards defeat).

Thus, classifying anyone as a terrorist who fights, or as a supporter of terrorism who could harbor hostile intent against, or support organizations judged hostile to Western interventions and interests, wards and dependents, simply extends the German experience of how to create a perverted ius in bello from Soviet Russia to the whole globe. It aims, of course, to delegitimize all armed (and increasingly unarmed) resistance to Western military expeditions and occupation, even trying to get international law to proscribe it because there is a population in the way ("human shields") of killing the terrorists. Less concerned with finding a way around the Geneva Conventions or the jurisdiction of Nuremburg is the innovative Israeli concept of "terrorist population". It just puts a new title over an old dictate: "Exterminate with extreme prejudice."

In the meantime, getting around the Geneva Conventions provided a challenging occupation for the lawyers of the Bush Administration. They decided the Taliban were "unlawful combatants" - though they were the soldiers of a country the Clinton administration exercised heavy pressure on Germany to recognize - because Afghanistan was a "failed state". Even if Afghanistan under the Taliban would justify the term "failed state", it is useful to keep in mind that the West bears a heavy responsibility for making it thus. One has only to look at the textbooks and instruction material provided to the mudjahedin by the US and its co-workers in the 1980s.

Particularly disturbing, though, is the deliberately transparent hypocrisy that does not cover but flaunts a kind of violence that elementary common sense (not to mention a sense of shame) would keep sporadic and isolated. But there are now tens of thousands of victims of the institutionalized global archipelago of black torture prisons and camps. They have been subjected by a select and trained force to the result of decades of research into techniques of torture and sexual humiliation, as a way, one is led to believe, of "searing defeat into their minds", to spread the message that there is no recourse, no redress, no defense; any resistance will just hasten the transition to the violent dissolution of society, of the underpinnings for a functional state.

Moreover, the right to kill at will outside this system in covert free fire zones, to keep the subcontracting domestic security apparatus of dependent states on torture and assassination standby, cannot but herald the willful surrender of any credible claim by these governments to legitimacy or capacity for creating order. The United States and its allies are setting the stage for the kind of massive violence last seen in the "pacification" campaigns in colonial Africa and Asia. This time, however, it is for everyone to see - and for quite a number of its strategists, this seems to be part of the purpose.

The German political class and the media make all efforts to keep the scale and ramifications of this system as far as possible from public debate and from itself; if it deals with it at all, then it is as the unavoidable, though ugly, battle scars on the face of Western values. The contortions involved in refusing its connection to German military commitments and the ever more drastic, networked security measures are nothing if not remarkable.

There is, nevertheless, a black thread connecting Germany to the explosion of fundamentalist terrorism, buried in files and memories that reach back to the late 1970s. At that time, Germany sought to assure the ascendancy of Islamist right-wing organizations over its large Muslim community, to neutralize the influence of left-wing organizations. The consequences of this kind of social engineering are still in evidence today, and much bewailed by the political class.

Germany hosted also a substantial emigre community of fundamentalists from secular Arab countries - especially from Syria. Since Israeli intelligence had the free run of Germany, and parts of German intelligence (as well as its Bavarian godfathers) were at the beck and call of the Mossad, recruiting among the Syrian Muslim Brothers in Germany for a terrorist campaign against the government of Syrian President Hafez al-Assad could have been called a joint operation. Co-financed by Saudi money, Israel and its South Lebanese mercenaries trained them in camps in south Lebanon, advertized at that time as the top-of-the-league graduate school offering instruction in all these interesting techniques which make Western life now so thrilling.

This operation led, of course, to serious bloodletting in Syria. The survivors either returned to Germany, possibly as recruiters for the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan, or transferred their talents directly to this new theater of Western endeavors

Recruiting for subversion and terrorism requires screening, interrogation of the bad apples and of the doubtful cases, and holding them for future use. Germans helped in the screening but avoided the other procedures (at least, one may hope so). The Khiam prison in south Lebanon was used for these purposes - for torture and prisoner-breaking beyond the Israeli rule-book (high-value kidnappees, though, are still kept in the "black wings" of Israeli prisons, also designed to be beyond the reach of the already exceedingly permissive rule-book).

The German connection to Israeli operations reached the awareness of some senior German bureaucrats and exposed them to the meaning of "black prison" via Khiam - which can be taken as one of the models for the American system. The horror and revulsion of the susceptible ones had at least the effect of making life difficult for former German foreign affairs minister Joschka Fischer when he had to assert piously that there were "no violators of human rights" among the 300 Lebanese torture- and rape-artists Germany accepted from Israel.

The will to ignorance that dominates the German debate makes it all too easy to sideline concerns about the myriad ways this system has begun to infest Germany: via its special forces, trained in the US, Israel, and Great Britain; or the officer exchange program with the US Army general staff college (where its ideological underpinnings are taught in the writings of Israeli Arabist Rafael Patai); via the busy network of itinerant torture specialists, bent psychologists and MDs, interrogation trainers, and anthropologists. The political principals are colluding with it behind the back of the less controllable members of parliament, and frequently against the better judgment of senior career officials.

What began in 2002 as a way to show solidarity with the Americans and went into high gear in 2003 to rebuild bridges to the US, transmogrified the enthusiasm of former Social Democratic interior secretary Otto Schily ("if they want death, they can have it"), the cravenness of former foreign minister Joschka Fischer, and Merkel´s impeccable "pro-American" credentials into an ideological program to make Germany (and the EU) fit for eternal war against the enemies of the West.

For decades, Germany, like the Netherlands, Sweden, and Norway, managed to be regarded as more of a global social worker than as one of the closest American allies. Its role was well served by keeping aloof from military interventions, sticking scrupulously to its commitments, striving to coopt the modernizing elites of developing countries into the Western system, even at the price of high politics keeping itself ignorant of its netherworld's doings, and of sometimes diverging from US policies. Germany´s good name was a net provider of legitimacy for the West.

But under the new dispensation when the netherworld has become the main show and the compensatory human rights rhetoric an ever more strident exercise in hypocrisy, legitimacy seems to come from impunity. And the American political class has no more patience with divergent interests, claims of independent judgment, or "decent respect for the opinion of mankind".

The discontents with German-Israeli jointness
Last year, Germany inserted itself militarily into the Middle East's troubles with a naval squadron off the Lebanese coast. Its mission: to prevent the replenishment of Hezbollah armament stocks from the ocean. It has openly taken sides, notwithstanding its sub rosa alliance with Israel for decades, thus becoming part of a problem without a solution. Not only a majority of the population refuses to support the German commitment; it is also accompanied by the misgivings of quite a number of professionals - for good reasons.

One of them is rooted in the conviction that the pounding the US and Israel are inflicting on the Middle East is locking the West into an unending cycle of violence. Driving it is Israel's inability to consider peace more desirable than keeping its conquests. Though it would be a real career killer to admit to fears that Israel might use, or ignite itself, another conflagration in the Middle East to resolve its Palestinian problem once and for all - and, at the same time, to destroy all challenges to its hegemony - it is impossible not to be aware of this prospect. It informs concerns about the impact of the "war of civilizations" rhetoric that German (and European) opinion leaders are spreading in the media; a rhetoric,that can turn any moment into a free ticket for the Israeli leadership to get serious about what it has prepared its allies to expect and what a majority of its population demands.

In fact, indicators that the Israelis might limit their ambition to establishing a Bantustan-like system run by the Dahlan-Balusha goon squads of Fatah appears to be taken by official Germany as testimony to admirable and forward-looking Israeli restraint - to be encouraged, legitimized, and paid for to keep the Israelis from "acts of desperation".

The use of the term "Bantustan" in this context has nothing to do with an anti-semitic slur: when former South African premier and Nazi sympathizer John Vorster visited Israel in 1976, Shimon Peres, Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Rabin, Yitzhak Shamir , et al, lauded the South African system of racial separation as a role model for dealing with "their kushims" ("niggers"). And the conservative part of the German political class (especially in Bavaria, where the rather incestuous relationship between German intelligence and the Christian Social Union had sired its own foreign policy priorities) was deeply involved in the strategic cooperation between Israel and South Africa. Examples include support for the Mozambican National Resistance (Renamo) - also dubbed the "Khmer Noir" for starting the African plague of recruiting small children by traumatization - to WMD research, to the illegal transfer of blueprints for a new class of cruise-missile capable submarines. In the 1990s, by the way, Germany donated several of these submarines to Israel.

During the 1970s and 1980s Israel and South Africa were joined at the hips in their common fight against the kushims (and against the still numerous Jewish communists, hated by the Israeli political class more than the remaining German Nazis). And from some German conservative nooks and crannies, there was always facilitation, scientific support, or co-financing available.

But the above-board German support for Israel has also a tradition of unconditionality - since the 1970s especially - in co-financing the Israeli ways of occupation and never holding Israel to its obligations under the Geneva Conventions. During the Schmidt and Kohl governments it was tempered, nevertheless, by their commitment "to facilitate dialogue". Much of the reporting from the German embassy served to gauge where and when discrete German assistance could make a difference in encouraging contact between official Israel and chosen Palestinian interlocutors .

Under Green neoconservative foreign minister Fischer, though, not only context had changed. He threw the principle of differentiation out of the window. He chose himself as the main propagandist of Israeli claims that Palestinian violence had nothing to do with the occupation but with the failure of Palestinian leadership and institutions, with foreign instigation (led by Iran and Syria), and that Israel is under "existential threat" by a tide of anti-semitism rooted in cultural and political retardation. As rumor has it, he even forbade any in-house discussion that went counter to his view of the world, valuing Israeli (or US) instruction much higher than the briefings of his desk officers.

At any rate, "unconditional support" came to mean no more in-house dissonances in analysis or judgment from the "solitary" interpretation of Israeli policies, motivations, and their consequences. The Merkel government then screwed tight Fischer´s proactive approach towards unconditionality - not only in supporting audibly and energetically last year's efforts to destroy Hezbollah, but working up toward military involvement on the Israeli side; its precise meaning will become much clearer with the next round of war.

The direction of Germany´s involvement, though, is unambiguous: Germany colluded avidly in preventing an early end to the Israeli campaign (during the Rome Conference) and left no doubt about its underwriting the Israeli right to kill and kidnap in Lebanon at will. In addition, in a gauche effort to rally public support for intervention on the Israeli side, Merkel dubbed Germany´s naval detachment in Lebanese waters (as well as the expanded United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon's presence on the ground) as an "Israel Protection Force". It goes without saying that Germany's assistance for Israeli operations in Lebanon, Iraqi Kurdistan, and Iran (in all three Germany has a heavy intelligence presence) has grown in scope and risk.

Now, support for Israeli projects appears not any longer to be limited to coordinating policies and information, or providing German passports for Israeli undercover work in Iran (as had been reported in Der Spiegel), or a pipeline to agents in Lebanese General Security (tracking Hezbollah leaders) or, for that matter, to taking the lead in poisoning the initial investigations into the assassination of Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri (which was not the beginning but a second spike in a series of assassinations - the first one being the 2002 bombing of former Lebanese militia leader and Syrian politician Eli Hobeika, who allegedly intended to testify in Brussels against Ariel Sharon concerning the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre). Germany seems to have jumped with both feet into the sectarian violence game, not (yet?) with hits but by slaving at different levels of regional engagements to the commands of Israeli and, to a more limited extent, to American operations.

If Israel's ambassador in Berlin, Shimon Stein, had not reckoned with the domestic constraints on official Germany's solidarity with Israel, he could claim for Germany what Justice Minister Haim Ramon and Daniel Ayalon, Israel's ambassador in Washington, asserted blandly for the US last year: "… even if our army should commit a 'mass massacre', the United States will still support us" (quoted in Le Monde Diplomatique).

In fact, in earlier days official Germany would have looked discreetly away or apologized "off the record" for the Israeli penchant for atrocities such as the Kfar Qana massacre in south Lebanon - which Israel never made a real effort to hide under its peculiar doctrine of deterrence. As General Motta Gur said as long ago as 1978: "... the Israeli army has always struck civilian populations purposely and consciously … the army … has never distinguished civilian [from military] targets" (quoted in Haaretz). Now Israel is demanding that official Germany demonstrate the correct attitude against "terrorist populations" - and it does, in the name of the "struggle against terrorism" and of preventing (!) "a war of civilizations".

For obvious reasons, Germany's original economic support for Israel could never have been considered leverage. But over the decades, its dimension and its aggregate impact contributed decisively to the fact that Israel had never to make hard choices; it subsidized the built-in maximalism in Israel's approach toward its neighborhood and the pretension that its wars of choice were wars for survival.

Separate from the meager individual recompensations, restitutions, etc, as managed (very badly for the destitute) by the Jewish Claims Conference or the Israeli state, German transfers up to now amount to at least 140 billion euros (US$193.2 billion) from the federal government in cash, goods, weapons and patents, another 20 to 30 billion euros in public-private partnership arrangements, plus billions more via EU mechanisms.

It is not surprising, therefore, that there is an uneasy awareness of German co-responsibility in fostering the combination of economic dependence, foreign funded militarism and the peculiar and exceedingly corrupt nature of the Israeli Praetorian state. The permanent state of siege and its steadily more powerful racist undercurrents have become the source of its cohesion and define its relationship to the world. As anyone knows who is acquainted with the Israeli debate, the old mantra that Israel will make the "concessions necessary for peace" if it feels sufficiently secure and supported, is good for public consumption and perhaps self-hypnosis, but nothing else.

Since Israel managed to persuade the Western political classes (the most fragile and corrupt Arab regimes need no convincing) that Palestinians' aspirations - as well as their rights under the Geneva Conventions - are unrealistic and therefore basically illegitimate, they have become a sideshow. Especially Europe appears resolved to stabilize it in limbo with lip service and sporadic shows of activism - but with hard support, of course, for those Israeli measures designed to break the last strands of Palestinian political and social cohesion.

As any undergraduate in coercive social engineering knows, destroying the social and economic infrastructure of a society to the extent that there are no more sources of independent social authority that could regenerate organized resistance, leaves the field to the broken, the cynics, the corrupt, the self-haters, the fantasists, and the criminals - and inflicts them on a dispirited, disposable mass of humanity.

The Iranian ascendancy, in contrast, is billed as the main show. And it was Fischer (ably assisted by France and Great Britain) who took the lead in navigating the European negotiating position between the American-Israeli push for war and the need to avoid it in view of the to-be-expected domestic repercussions; between the resolve to deny the Iranian right to close the nuclear fuel cycle and to hide the bad faith of their negotiating approach. Fischer made the issue repeatedly clear: the Iranian nuclear program signals the will to achieve "regional hegemony" to the detriment of the Israeli - and for him, the only legitimate one - claim to regional predominance.

When the government of then-Iranian president Mohammad Khatami offered in 2003, practically hat-in-hand, to negotiate with the US all outstanding bilateral problems - only to be refused, as he was part of the "axis of evil" - this was absorbed in a European proposal, that offered vague promises and no security guarantees, for the dismantling of the whole Iranian nuclear complex (including the courses and training in advanced nuclear engineering), plus the hobbling of its missile program.

Through the subterfuges and permutations of these negotiations, the German commitment to a peaceful resolution was always highly conditional, and Israel acquired something like a behind-the-scenes veto on the limits of the German position. It could (and can) well appreciate that for Germany - praised by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert as the best Israeli ally - to join a war against Iran would at that time have destroyed Fischer´s Green Party as well as the government (and it still might do so now); not to join it would have created another trans-Atlantic rift, much deeper than the one caused by the Iraq war. Such rifts have a logic of their own and the potential to deeply fracture the German (and European) political landscape.

The German political class is hamstrung and duly embarrassed over the lack of martial spirit in its population. But under the banner of "anything but war (now)", it maneuvers and waits for the right constellation that frees its hand: a Western uproar over a Gulf of Tonkin-type incident, a major terrorist event in the US or Germany, which will have nothing to do with Iran but could create the right popular mood. It compensates in the meantime with German overt and covert involvement for Israel's willingness not to put quite yet German domestic politics to the test. Nevertheless, after so many aborted moves toward war, the "war now" party in the US may any time push the Bush administration over the brink and tell the Germans to deal with it or even make it a test of the Merkel government´s survivability and pro-American stance.

Discontent with the seeding of future conflicts
Paul Wolfowitz noted with satisfaction in 1999 (in The National Interest) that his Lone-Ranger position of 1992 had turned into the bi-partisan consensus of US grand strategy: never to permit again a power, or combination of powers, on the Eurasian landmass to achieve the capacity to act as a "peer challenger" to US interests. And it is this principle that the European political elites are about to underwrite, too. Its apologetics are tried out in working- and study-groups: democracy and free markets can only take root when the Russian state is deprived of the economic, social, and demographic resources for its reconstitution as a viable ("imperial") power; and China, for the same reasons, has to be dissected into five independent states. And all of this by the right combination of applying hard (overwhelming military) and soft (dissolving elite and regime cohesion) power.

These are, of course, just fond hopes or selling points. In reality, it is a prescription for decades of chaos and violence, with a deep impact on Europe and Asia. But even these - one might call them Plan B - prospects may have much to recommend themselves from the American perspective, and they offer even an absolutely convincing, though difficult to pitch, strategic rationale for developing a global ballistic missile defense network.

It is this consensus, nevertheless, that provides the only reliable guide to the course of US policies towards Russia and China - and insight into the nature of the "hedges" against the worsening of relations be it with Russia, be it with China, or both. Since being tougher on national security than the next guy (or girl) or the sitting administration, is the coin of national strategy debates between Republicans and Democrats as well as the ultimate arbiter of the career prospects for elected office, "hedging" has not much to do with taking out insurance. It has, instead, everything to do with being able to initiate confrontations.

"Hedging" with regard to China highlights this approach. The massive building of depth into the American military dispositions in the Western Pacific, the pressures upon Taiwan to get on with its US$12-18 billion arms buying program, the success in integrating the Taiwanese as well as the increasingly offensive Japanese posture into American operations plans, enticing India into sharpening its strategic profile against China, are sold as measures for Asian stability. This is, however, everything that the hawks of the "confront-China" lobby ever demanded, minus the damage to US-Chinese economic relations.

These "hedges" are not designed to work as an insurance mechanism but as the rock slide overhanging China's continuously narrowing path between a sheer cliff face and the abyss. More prosaically, whenever America's internal bargaining comes up with the ace of spades for China, "full spectrum dominance" should be in place. Or so one might think. The problem, however, is the destabilizing consequences of the effort in getting there. The Chinese cannot but react to what they surely appreciate as the tailoring of a strategic straitjacket to immobilize them for vivisection, ie, "soft" regime change.

Similar considerations hold with regard to Russia. The expansion of NATO to members of the former Warsaw Pact and to the Baltic countries, as well as the anticipated one to the Ukraine and Georgia, are equally sold as a joist of Eurasia's security architecture. Ironically enough, the same rationale is given for the German-led efforts to draw the Central Asian and Caucasian republics - and, in particular, the Caspian resources - out of the Russian into the Western orbit. In this, Russia's "true, legitimate interests" are being served because this process encourages democracy, accountable government, respect for human rights, and the non-violent resolution of territorial conflicts.

The tongue-in-cheek character of the "stability" rhetoric reveals itself most clearly in the hasbara about the "missile shield" installations in Poland and the Czech Republic, ostensibly directed against incipient threats from North Korea (which is in the process of denuclearizing itself) and Iran (whose threat potential against the US is as phantasmagorical as its supposed intentions are fictional). They are sold to mass media consumers as insurance against the familiar "madmen"; to the more discerning audience as not directed against Russia (and Russian complaints are sold as Russian mischief-making), and to the more worried western European insiders, in classified briefings, as a "hedge" with growth potential to dissuade the evolution of a greater than expected Russian or Chinese threat.

In reality, as even the more godfearing observers of US policies cannot help but notice, it is a provocative move designed to trap the Russians into easily denouncable, but helpless gestures of protest and to put the onus on them for burdening further the EU-Russian relationship. And Russia has no way to evade the trap: retch or spit, down it will go.

At the same time, it increases the political weight of America's main allies in Eastern Europe. It provides the substance for aligning Poland and the Czech Republic (plus their Baltic retinue) ever closer with US policies - a US-dependent sub-NATO within a sub-EU. In the short term, this issue cannot but further weaken the already fragmenting will of the western European part of the EU to negotiate (in good faith) a successor to the partnership and cooperation agreement between the EU and Russia.

In the longer run, the substantial American military presence these two installations require, will tighten the strategic noose around Russia's throat. In addition, if the US should really place an additional installation in Georgia, this move would deliberately put the detonator for a US-Russian confrontation into the hands of the reckless and irresponsible Georgian leadership. In this context, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's slip of the tongue in terming Russia "the Soviet Union" is not only Freudian but a declaration of intent.

The Kaczynski twins, President Lech and Prime Minister Jaroslaw of Poland respectively, also let everyone have a peek at the cat in the bag. In high dudgeon that its partners in NATO and the EU as well as the Russians might want to have a say in such a momentous decision, they maintained that the missile shield should not worry any "normal country".

But Russia, obviously, is nothing if not an "abnormal" country for the right-wing majority of the Polish political class: still indignant that Russia spoilt the imperial dreams (Poland from the Baltic to the Black Sea) that led General Josef Pilsudski to attack Russia in 1920, only to be defeated by the treacherous Reds; still resentful that World War II did not begin and end differently than it did; resenting that it has not yet managed a place at the Western high table, they expect the United States to procure them, at least, a special role within NATO (it recently blackmailed for itself a special position in the EU), and further down the line, a zone of Polish influence - from the Baltic to the Black Sea - and the right of first look for any territorial bits that may be on offer if or when Russia dissolves further (eg, the region of Kaliningrad).

Viewing these efforts in their full scope while keeping in mind the incessant din of media hostility against Russia (not forgetting the provocative mixture of subtle and crass intelligence operations), all of this is looking less like a hedge than moving the pieces for the endgame. One recent report of the well connected, US-based, private intelligence agency, Strategic Forecasting, Inc or Stratfor, on "The New Logic for Ballistic Missile Defense", spells it out rather bluntly: "… [T]he US is not yet finished with Moscow from a strategic perspective. Washington wants to pressure Russia until its will, as well as its ability, to pose a viable threat completely disintegrates." And the Russians are quite aware of the vector of US policies. Russian President Vladimir Putin's speech at the security conference in Munich, even Mikal Gorbachev´s recent interventions as well as Valentin Falin's widely discussed somber analysis last year, tell the same story.

They are up against the wall and have neither time nor good options. As Germany's Peter Struck, the Social Democratic former secretary of defense and current parliamentary whip, rather smugly, maintained: "The Russians would lose another Cold War". This in response to the "gobbledygook" of Putin's list of grievances at the Munich conference in February. A flash-poll, by the way, did show that a majority of Germans seems to have grasped its import and a majority even supported Putin's sentiments, in spite of the exceedingly derogatory chorus of the German media.

There is some worry that all of this might push the Russians into the arms of the Chinese. It touches, though, the outer limits of what is considered a legitimate worry. But there is the comforting notion that for such a rather fundamental revision of its foreign policy, Russia is neither strong and reliable enough to perform it, nor are the Russian elites ready to support it. Working toward a closer Russian-Chinese relationship - and knowing that China will turn out to be the stronger partner (however carefully the Chinese may defer to Russian sensitivities) - for a measure of security and independence, would require not only despair, but a sea-change in attitudes of the loot-corroded, fantasist and cynical majority of the new Russian elites. As the wag says in Influence 101: "You can always get to the elite Russians; half of them hate Mother Russia because Petersburg and Moscow aren't Paris or London; the other half hate her because she spawned the first half."

It helps, of course, that Western intelligence and quasi-NGOs are keeping the Russian leadership worried about domestic stability. To enrich its options, the West maintains influence also with the xenophobic right, anti-Chinese liberals, with the fighters for Chechen independence and others interested in ethnic strife games. Meanwhile the "new Russians" hope, against all odds, that Europe might still come around to provide the kind of safe anchorage against hostile policies Germany and France seemed able to offer in 2002/2003 and thus rescue their rent-funded, cosmopolitan dreams.

All of this is close enough to reality to foster the illusion the Russians can be managed; it just needs a little less obvious contempt and hectoring and a little bit more cooperative rhetoric to satisfy their craving for respect. This is more hope than reality, though - hope that will be disappointed, especially since Western politics and the venomously Russophobe media will make sure that the Russians are always aware of the stake which is to be driven through their collective heart.

There is, of course, also the Chinese perspective. Those Western China analysts from which its German section takes its cue seem to draw some satisfaction from observing China and Russia hands wondering whether the Russian leadership is still in thrall to its Western hopes and whether it is not continuing to commit slow suicide. These questions are not unreasonable. Russia is investing everywhere while it has not yet even restored its economy to the levels of 1989. Its industries, infrastructure, research, education, and health are still suffering from catastrophic underinvestment.

Since the West organized and oversaw the liquefaction of Soviet assets and their hemorrhaging out of Russia to the tune of about US$800 billion worth of cash, goods, and patents (including Boris Yelzin's gift to the US of the crown jewels of Soviet military and space technologies), as well as tens of thousands of its best engineers and scientists, one might think it would do all to recover from a disaster at least as bad as what Germany did to the Soviet Union in World War II, and form a peace worse than the one of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty of 1918.

But even here, Western policies make sure that Russians and Chinese cannot but perceive the beginnings of the mobilization for economic warfare against both of them. All of a sudden investment barriers against Chinese and Russian capital appear in the US and in western Europe. There are substantial efforts devoted to coordinate the rolling-back of Chinese encroachment on the Western right to African raw materials - in the name of human rights and good governance (which is like Bluebeard, still gnawing on his latest virgin's femur, complaining about a peasant who sullies his next lunch with exploitive marriage proposals). And there is the hue and cry raised about the Russian and Chinese doing what the US is doing excessively: marking certain industrial sectors as "strategic".

The Chinese Western analysts are quite astute observers of where their Western counterparts are coming from. But educated under the all-encompassing need to gain time and strength to be able to survive gloomy geopolitical weather, the Chinese debate about Russia and the West just echoes the more salient debate: whether they are able to influence American (Western) perceptions and reactions to China's rise, at what price, and for how long. There are still those, frequently highlighted in Western workshops, quoting Russian voices about the impossibility of Russian-Chinese strategic cooperation, referring obliquely and with the due amount of nostalgia, to the golden age of Chinese-American strategic cooperation against the Soviets, and wondering audibly whether its resurrection might not promise another dawn in Chinese relations with the West.

But one does not need to carefully examine these debates. Though there is no audience for bad messages, it has not escaped the attention of the professional worriers that Russian and Chinese decision-makers seem to have concluded that they face a similar and geopolitically connected future. They may expect to be able to delay or blunt it but cannot evade it. The continuous Western efforts to leverage elite dissent as well as to force-grow and groom alternative elites (with their typical mixture of venality and blind idealism) in an increasingly worsening security environment, have hardened the conviction that they are up against a strategy to enable repeats of the Soviet collapse.

Indicators for the expectations of Russian and Chinese decision-makers are percolating through their foreign policy and military bureaucracies and are being picked up: the elimination, defeat, or terminal neutralization of the one will be the beginning of the same fate for the other. And they seem to feel that this is being imposed on them; it has not much to do with their choice of policies. The beginnings of a co-evolution of their strategic doctrines, therefore, has to be taken seriously. They don't care about facing the full range of American military power but think about how to stymie and defeat its deployment in the incipient stages of operations.

How to develop a posture capable of inflicting massive losses on US air power and carrier groups without requiring a hair-trigger posture seems to draw a lot of attention. There appears to be even a debate about preemption. With regard to nuclear deterrence, it appears to be moving toward a marriage between massive retaliation and different options of "technological decapitation" (ie, destroying selectively the netspace of military command and control as well as its fallback operations, plus regime and elite continuity functions).

In order to get a better understanding of its present strategic predicament, the Russian military has even begun to approach, very gingerly, the causes for the erosion of Soviet deterrence in the 1980s, especially the reasons why it could not react by increasing its force readiness to what it perceived as indications of Anglo-American maneuvering towards war.

But whatever the scenarios for the future or the probings of the past, Russia as well as China are for the foreseeable future much too weak to compete militarily at eye level with the West. Both have to struggle uphill just to make their militaries credible defenders of the integrity of the state. And there is almost no military backup for the political task of preventing a further deterioration of their strategic environment. They can neither rely on their ability to deflect the US from efforts to control it nor could they compete for control without mortgaging the survival of the state.

It is the paucity of their military and political choices that drives them together; but the need to avoid the hair trigger of American confrontation renders an explicit military alliance impractical. The Russians know it, the Chinese know it. And strategy-minded Americans count on the fact that a thin mattress makes bad bedfellows. But they also know that American politics are not strategy-minded; they generate their own stimuli for action.

After the Russian 1990s - and the Chinese 149 years after 1840 - no illusions are possible about the fate either of them should the West again gain control over their polities. This plus their weakness, however, should assist not only the credibility of a defensive nuclear posture but also give the Europeans or the Japanese reasons to think about the consequences of strategic desperation. Below this threshold, though, it is all coercive bargaining - be it under the guise of common interests or in the open, "jump, or else". There are no common interests, there is just jockeying for position and deferred hostility.

When Henry Kissinger and Yevgeny Primakov established their joint working-group of American and Russian elder statesmen to deal with "the threat of nuclear terrorism and proliferation" (as Kissinger described it), there is, therefore, a subtext: "Work with us regarding Iran (or the eventual "securing" of Pakistani nuclear warheads) because the first instance of nuclear terrorism could take place in Russia." One does not need to be of a wildly paranoid cast of mind to see the possibilities, eg, in view of the very close relations the British maintain with the Chechen resistance, and the dozens of tons of Soviet warhead material still waiting to be reworked into nuclear fuel rods.

The point is, there is no need for even an implied specific message. The awareness of so many fingers on so many operational triggers is quite sufficient for the prudent assumption: "What is thinkable, is possible; what is possible will happen, sometime, somewhere." In the meantime, one has to act as if some sort of reason and predictability might yet return to the exercise of American power.

Tomorrow, Part 3: Hoisting the American flag. The German educated middle classes, still hung over from their half century of ideological debauche and from Germany's role as a genocidal ogre take great satisfaction in their country's reputation as a mostly harmless global social worker. They are reluctant to subscribe to an ideology of global mayhem and a "defense of Western values". But the German media are working overtime to change their minds.

Axel Brot is the pen name for a German defense analyst and former intelligence officer.

(Copyright 2007, Axel Brot)

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/IH09Aa01.html

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Guardian:
Musharraf considers state of emergency in Pakistan

· Ruling party supremo says crackdown is only 'gossip'
· Musharraf misses Afghanistan tribal council

Declan Walsh in Islamabad
Thursday August 9, 2007

Pakistan's embattled president, Pervez Musharraf, met senior advisers this morning to consider imposing a state of emergency, a government spokesman said.

The stock market tumbled and ordinary Pakistanis read the morning headlines with apprehension as speculation mounted that Gen Musharraf would take what was widely viewed as a gambit to extend his rule.

The minister of state for information, Tariq Azim, said a range of "internal and external threats" had triggered the debate on imposing a state of emergency. "We hope it doesn't come to that but we are going through difficult circumstances. No option can be ruled out," he said.

Mr Azim blamed a rash of suicide bombings and attacks on government forces by Islamist militants in the tribal areas. He also mentioned threatening statements by a number of White House officials and the Democratic hopeful Barack Obama in recent weeks. Talk of unilateral American attacks on al-Qaida targets inside Pakistan had "started alarm bells ringing and upset the Pakistani public", he said.

But hours later, a top figure in the ruling party close to Gen Musharraf dismissed as gossip the reports that a state of emergency was being considered.

"These are only rumors and baseless reports," Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain, the president of the ruling Pakistan Muslim League-Q party, told reporters, Pakistan's Geo television reported.

As speculation swirled about a state of emergency, critics said the security concerns were secondary to Gen Musharraf's principal concern: maintaining his grip on power against an independent-minded and newly emboldened supreme court.

Last month the supreme court damaged Gen Musharraf's authority with a momentous verdict in favour of the suspended chief justice, Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry. Now the court could scupper Gen Musharraf's controversial plans for re-election later this year through a number of legal challenges due to come before the court.

By declaring emergency rule Gen Musharraf could sweep away many of his problems - hobbling the courts, muzzling the press and postponing elections for another year.

But opposition leaders warned that the move would only deepen the country's political crisis. Benazir Bhutto, the exiled opposition leader with whom he recently held power-sharing talks, issued a muted denunciation.

"Imposition of an emergency would not lead to stability and, therefore, I hope that such a big step would not be taken," she told Geo News.

Gen Musharraf's threats could also be linked to a court petition by his arch-rival, Nawaz Sharif.

This morning the supreme court is due to start hearing a petition from the former prime minister to allow him return home after seven years in exile.

There is much bad blood between Gen Musharraf and Mr Sharif, whose botched attempt to fire Gen Musharraf in 1999 triggered the bloodless coup that returned the military to power. A court ruling in favour of Mr Sharif today would pave the way for an immediate return.

One western diplomat said Musharraf may try to have emergency rule mandated by a vote of parliament, which was elected in a rigged vote in 2002 and is dominated by his supporters.

There was also speculation that the Sharif court case would be postponed until next week.

The US secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, called Gen Musharraf at 2am Pakistani time for a long conversation. The diplomat called it a "pretty important call".

Speculation about a state of emergency first surfaced yesterday after Gen Musharraf pulled out of a long-planned peace conference in Afghanistan at the last minute, and spent the day in a series of meetings with political leaders, army generals and his legal counsel.

In Kabul more than 600 elders from both sides of the border attended the jirga, or tribal council, which was opened by the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, and the Pakistani prime minister, Shaukat Aziz. They were discussing ways to end the bloody Taliban insurgency.

But without Gen Musharraf's participation, hopes for the jirga were low. Diplomats and analysts described it as a "first step" towards peace in the region.

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007

http://www.guardian.co.uk/pakistan/Story/0,,2144844,00.html

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Jeune Afrique: L'Assemblée nationale
adopte une loi criminalisant l'esclavage

MAURITANIE - 9 août 2007 - par AFP

L'Assemblée nationale mauritanienne a adopté mercredi soir une loi criminalisant pour la première fois l'esclavage, pratique qui perdure dans certaines parties du pays malgré son abolition officielle en 1981.

D'après cette loi votée à l'unanimité, les personnes convaincues d'actes esclavagistes risquent désormais de cinq à dix ans de prison ferme.

Le texte interdit également toute production culturelle ou artistique faisant l'appologie de l'esclavage, qu'il punit de deux ans de prison, et prévoit des sanctions contre les autorités qui ne s'en préoccuperaient pas.

Le projet de loi, initialement jugé insuffisant par plusieurs organisations des droit de l'Homme, a été fortement amendé et réaménagé par les députés dans le sens du renforcement des peines prévues et de la définition précise des pratiques esclavagistes constatées dans le pays.

L'organisation SOS-Esclaves avait notamment mené une vaste campagne auprès des parlementaires pour obtenir gain de cause.

"Nous sommes très satisfaits, c'est une grande victoire pour les démocrates et le peuple mauritanien et qui n'aurait pas été possible sans cette volonté politique du président (Sidi Ould Cheikh Abdellahi) et de son gouvernement", a estimé Boubacar Ould Messaoud, président de SOS-Esclaves.

Longtemps tabou, l'esclavage est officiellement aboli en Mauritanie depuis 1981 et a fait l'objet en 2003 d'une nouvelle loi en renforçant sa répression.

Mais ces textes étaient contestés par des associations de défense des droits de l'Homme selon lesquelles ils contenaient des aspects vagues sur des questions essentielles et édictait des peines en deçà de celles généralement prévues pour des crimes similaires.

Le 30 mai, le nouveau président, élu deux mois plus tôt au terme d'une transition démocratique de dix-neuf mois, avait réclamé un renforcement du "dispositif de lutte" contre l'esclavage, notamment sur le plan juridique.

"Nous avons obtenu une caractérisation satisfaisante de l'esclavage suivant ses manifestations, nous sommes parvenus à une pénalisation basée sur l'islam et de ce fait obtenu l'abrogation de l'article 2 de la loi de 1981 accordant des compensations aux anciens maîtres", a expliqué M. Ould Messaoud.

Le militant anti-esclavagiste a enfin estimé que la Mauritanie opère ainsi un "nouveau départ sur la bonne voie" et qu'il s'agit maintenant "d'appliquer la nouvelle loi dans toute sa rigueur".

Les députés ont recommandé au gouvernement d'entamer une vaste opération de sensibilisation des populations sur les dispositions de la loi et de définir une "politique économique complémentaire de nature à éradiquer les séquelles de l'esclavage".

L'esclavage sous sa forme originelle devient rare en Mauritanie. Il est toutefois encore pratiqué dans toutes les communautés, principalement dans le monde rural.

Il n'existe aucune statistique officielle concernant le nombre de personnes réduites à l'état d'esclave dans la république islamique.

http://www.jeuneafrique.com/jeune_afrique/article_depeche.asp?art_cle=AFP41657lasseegaval0

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Mail & Guardian:
War-scarred youth hold key to Sierra Leone polls

Katrina Manson | Freetown, Sierra Leone
08 August 2007 11:59

In Freetown's rubbish-strewn slums, where sick children defecate in sewers by pot-holed streets, music blaring from shops and taxis tells Sierra Leone's youth that politicians have failed their war-ravaged country.

The West African nation's 1991 to 2002 civil war was infamous for drugged child soldiers who raped and mutilated thousands of civilians, but now young Sierra Leoneans hold in their hands the future of their country, one of the poorest on earth.

At presidential and parliamentary elections on Sunday - the first since a United Nations peacekeeping force pulled out in 2005 and a crucial test of the former British colony's emergence from conflict - over half the 2,6-million voters will be under 32.

"Pack 'n go!" booms the chorus of a dance-floor hit by rappers Jungle Leaders in a stark message to the ruling party. Other songs - in the Krio dialect devised by the freed slaves who founded the colony - urge young people to oust the graft-ridden establishment and take a stand against violence.

President Tejan Kabbah is stepping down at the polls, having picked his deputy, Soloman Berewa, as the ruling Sierra Leone People's Party (SLPP) candidate. But disillusionment is rife with their failure to tackle corruption and curb biting poverty, despite the country's reserves of gold, diamonds and minerals.

"Last time I voted for Kabbah but he did not do what he said," said Osman Koroma (26), a builder who earns less than $1 a day. "I'm angry: there is no light, no roads. We do suffer. [Politicians] do nothing for us. All they do is eat."

Like many voters, Koroma is going to switch his support from the SLPP to the opposition All People's Congress (APC), which is promising zero-tolerance for graft and could mount a strong challenge for power after a good showing in 2004 local polls.

Another song popular on Freetown's rain-soaked streets, by an artist called Emerson, brands politicians as "Tu Fut Arata" - two-legged rats.

"The market is calling for their music," said Nicholas Demeter of United States election monitors, the National Democratic Institute. "But youth can also be manipulated. They're young, and can be bought off with a few dollars."

War changed nothing
Decades of graft under previous APC governments helped spark the rebel Revolutionary United Front's (RUF) uprising in 1991, which signalled the start of a conflict which left 50 000 people dead and displaced more than half a million.

Financed by sales of illegal "blood diamonds" dug from mud pits and river beds, the RUF bought arms from Liberia's former president, Charles Taylor, currently on trial in the Hague for crimes against humanity for his part in the conflict.

Depressingly for Sierra Leoneans, the war achieved nothing. The RUF merged last month with the very party it took up arms to fight, the APC, and graft is worsening: Sierra Leone was ranked the 14th most corrupt state in the world last year by Transparency International, down 16 places from 2005.

Since its unilateral military intervention in 2000, which many observers say saved the country from anarchy, Britain has retrained the army and attempted to rebuild state institutions.

But in April, Britain's overseas development department, DFID, recommended its government withdraw funding from Sierra Leone's Anti-Corruption Commission because it had done nothing to root out high-profile graft, instead pursuing small-scale embezzlers such as a schoolmaster and a hospital caterer.

A survey of more than 5 000 voters nationwide conducted by the UK-funded Westminster Foundation for Democracy showed almost half said they have "complete distrust" for politicians.

"Everybody is so disillusioned that people don't know what to vote," said Iyamide, a Freetown resident. "But it definitely won't be SLPP ... I voted for them the last time but corruption is just too much."

Recruiting ex-combatants
Many young Sierra Leoneans lost a decade of their lives to the civil war, running from camp to camp to escape the rebels. Despite the end of the conflict, they have scant opportunities: according to UN figures, 60% of those under 35 are unemployed and two in three adults are illiterate.

Rural youth who drift to Freetown in search of work are often disappointed, arriving with agricultural skills unsuited to city life and ending up destitute on the streets.

"The youth are prone to violence because of unemployment. That's why most of them got involved in the war," said Abdul Kuyateh, press officer at the UN mission. "The youth are volatile - they have been very much marginalised."

Since the official start of campaigning, intimidation and violence have been widely reported, threatening to jeopardise the credibility of the polls.

Diplomats and military sources say all the political parties have been mobilising youth into thuggish gangs and recruiting some of the 70 000 ex-fighters who were demobilised after the war as bodyguards in the run-up to the elections.

Musicians have also been quick to band together to urge calm. One group styled itself "Artists for Peace" and its track, Go Vote, No Violence, blares out in minibuses across the capital.

With UN backing, the group has taken their song to provincial towns such as Kono and Kenema in the deprived east - diamond-mining hotspots fiercely fought over by rebels during the war.

"This election is make-or-break for this country," said musician Wahid, who sings with Artists for Peace. "If we pick up guns and fight each other again then the country will break. Music is our weapon against violence."

Reuters

http://www.mg.co.za/articlePage.aspx?articleid=316138&area=/insight/insight__africa/#

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Mother Jones: Market Meltdown:
Understanding Climate Economics

Mad Scientists vs. Global Warming

James K. Galbraith
July/August 2007 Issue

Eight years ago in Austin, Texas, pio°©neering climate economist Eban Goodstein drew a thin crowd speckled with hecklers, whose buttons demanded, "Show Me the Science!" When he returned this year, the deniers were gone, the room packed, the mood serious. Thanks to Al Gore, people get the science. Now, they want to know what to do.

To this, Republicans in Congress answer: nothing. House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) has appointed six members to the new climate change committee. Most of them had been global-warming skeptics; now they're policy skeptics. As Rep. John Shadegg (R-Ariz.) stated: "We must be careful not to enact policies that will unnecessarily impose a financial burden on American families." Their new button reads: "Show Me the Economics!"

The British government's Stern Review Report on the Economics of Climate Change is the place to turn for a deep seminar on such matters. Up front, we find these simple words: "Climate change presents a unique challenge for economics: It is the greatest and widest-ranging market failure ever seen." The Stern Review outlines the economic costs of climate change (declining food and water supplies, coastal flooding, storm damage, the extinction of up to half of all land species), the distribution of those costs (to be borne most acutely by poor subsistence farmers), and the economic ethics of why the rich must act to help the poor and why the present must act to protect the future.

Climate-policy skeptics love to dwell on questions like these. To them, the cost of any policy weighs heavily because we pay that cost now, while the benefits will come later and accrue to others. Why, they ask, should we sacrifice in order to help future generations, who will have all the benefits of technical progress and economic growth yet to come? Because, as the Stern Review makes clear, if CO2 isn't stabilized soon, then catastrophe is certain. And extinctions and sea-level changes cannot be reversed by the wealth that might be created in the next 50 years. Facing the judgment of history, no ethical standard entitles us to condemn the future to a hot, dry, famished, and flooded world. For this reason, we must treat the costs and burdens of climate change as if they are already falling on us.

And that's the rub: They aren't. The market's real failure is that it allows for no signal from the future to the present, either from the conditions that will exist 30 years hence or from the people who will be alive and working then. The question becomes: Can we really create a market in which those far-off voices are effectively heard?

Mainstream climate change economics assumes so. "Establishing a carbon price, through tax, trading or regulation, is an essential foundation for climate-change policy," the Stern Review posits. This makes some sense. After all, markets and taxes encourage cheap solutions, and there is plenty of low-hanging fruit. For a start, why not replace state sales and federal payroll taxes with carbon taxes? A cap-and-trade system would lead industry to use low-emissions technologies more and high-emissions technologies less. Business leaders are rallying behind a "carbon price." Fine. Give it to them.

But is tinkering with the market enough? According to the Stern Review, stabilizing atmospheric carbon at 550 parts per million requires cutting total emissions by a quarter by 2050, in the face of population and economic growth. Many experts, including nasa's top earth scientist, James Hansen, favor even more drastic reductions. Goodstein simplifies bluntly: We have 30 years to get the gasoline out of cars and the coal out of power plants, a goal beyond the power of markets.

Market policies rely on competition, and are responsive only to prices. But corporations such as ExxonMobil and txu like to run the world as they see fit. Should we guarantee to them the kind of profits they earn in a carbon-based energy world, as carbon pricing might do? Can they be trusted to invest those profits correctly? No. A real climate solution must shrink some industries and grow others, and that means changing the distribution of profits. Exactly how is something we need to plan.

"Planning" is a word that too many in this debate are trying to avoid, fearful, perhaps, of its Soviet overtones. But the reality of climate change is that central planning is essential, and on a grand scale. It would start with tens of billions of dollars in research to determine what is feasible, what is socially tolerable, and at what cost. A National Institute for Climate Engineering would be a good start. Departments of climate engineering at major universities would follow. Presidential candidates should take the lead by proposing a cabinet department of climate planning.

What then? Which new technologies would get taken up and how quickly? Part of the answer is public investment, big-time—in cities and the ways they use power, in transportation and the energy used for it. Mandatory changeovers in technology would follow. Fuel efficiency, building efficiency, urban density, transportation modes, and requirements for renewable energy must all be part of the mix. Cities from Austin to New York, and states—notably California—are already leading the way. But the laggards—Texas emits more carbon dioxide than California and New York state combined—will determine whether carbon emissions are sufficiently reduced.

So the real test will be whether national decisions are made and enforced. Mandates force the pace of technical change, lower unit costs, and help businesses with their own plans for technical transitions. Plans provide clarity and reduce risk, an essential step in making things happen. Of course, planning can be authoritarian, and planners make mistakes. Much of what goes into a national plan, especially at first, may be wasted. But so what? Waste and inefficiency are part of human endeavor, and markets do not protect against them.

What counts is not whether every single decision is wise. What counts is the possibility that we might prevent catastrophe and at the same time keep people employed and life tolerable, decades and centuries hence. What counts is not the economy we have, but a new economy that we, and future generations, can live with.

It's our job, too, to blaze trails for the rest of the world. As Al Gore said before Congress on March 21: "The best way—and the only way—to get China and India on board is for the U.S. to demonstrate real leadership." This is a worthy mission. Hostile to central planning though we are, we are ironically the only country with the capacity to plan and to change on such a scale. We are also the only country empowered by the world—through its willingness to hold our debts at low interest rates—to pay for it. And we are the only country that can concentrate the scientific, technical, and economic talent necessary to pull it off.

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/news/outfront/2007/07/market_meltdown.html

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Página/12:
“También Dios representa un papel”

LA VIDA Y LA OBRA DE INGMAR BERGMAN

El autor reexamina la obra de Bergman y la articula con su texto autobiográfico Linterna mágica, en busca de claves acerca de la compleja relación entre la creación artística y la experiencia personal del creador.

Por Carlos D. Perez *
Jueves, 09 de Agosto de 2007

“Como todos los directores, él también representaba el papel de director”, opinó alguna vez Ingmar Bergman a propósito de uno de sus maestros, Alf Sjöberg: la afirmación le incumbe. Al director le afecta la pesada duplicidad de ser a la vez quien establece una escena y también un protagonista que desempeña su papel. La constante preocupación de Bergman por esta escisión le posibilitó inflexiones acerca del creador y la obra, principalmente en su libro de memorias Linterna mágica, testimonio de una vida de éxitos y fracasos cuyo referente privilegiado es el máximo director de escena: Dios.

Aunque, ¿no es aplicable también a Dios la aseveración del comienzo?: “Como todos los directores, él también representa el papel de director”. Por más esquivo que resulte, Dios lleva la marca del representante obligado por la escisión, que para ser tal expulsó de sí al Demonio y tuvo que desdoblarse en los tres del catecismo para constituir familia. “Obra para la gloria de Dios” dijo Bergman; la gloria de Dios es esa obra, humana por excelencia, que retorna amenazadora o apaciguante sobre el sujeto para ocupar el lugar vacío de su imaginería, como las sombras que se encienden al proyectar una película. Bergman lo supo; recordando el proyector de cine que le regalaran cuando tenía diez años, escribió: “Esta maquinita destartalada fue mi primer equipo de prestidigitador. Y todavía hoy me digo, con pueril emoción, que soy realmente un mago, puesto que el cinematógrafo se basa sobre el engaño del ojo humano. He sacado en conclusión que, si veo un film que tiene una duración de una hora, durante veinte minutos estoy sentado en la oscuridad más completa: el vacío entre cada toma”.

Cuando, en Cuatro obras (ed. Sur, 1965), refirió su modo de realizar películas, afirmó: “Haciendo caso omiso de mis propias creencias y dudas, que carecen de importancia en este sentido, opino que el arte perdió su impulso creador básico en el instante en que fue separado del culto religioso. Se cortó el cordón umbilical y ahora vive su propia vida estéril, procreando y prostituyéndose. En tiempos pasados el artista permanecía en la sombra, desconocido, y su obra era para la gloria de Dios. Vivía y moría sin ser más o menos importante que otros artesanos; ‘valores eternos’, ‘inmortalidad’ y ‘obra maestra’ eran términos inaplicables en su caso. La habilidad para crear era un don. En un mundo semejante florecían la seguridad invulnerable y la humildad natural”.

No obstante, la vida se le enmaraña; en Linterna mágica, las escisiones siguen rumbos diversos. A veces resultan ostensibles, otras no se las puede discriminar pues los planos se mezclan; el ilusionista nos confunde, se le confunden al ilusionista, sobre todo porque –no podría ser de otro modo– hace obra tematizando el propio padecer. Planos que, al organizarse en torno del director y del protagonista de la escena, producen la escisión de profundas vivencias.

En uno de los primeros momentos significativos de la secuencia que Bergman dispone en el libro, relata lo que presenció al recibir el anuncio de la muerte de su madre. Fue a la casa de ella, encontró el cuerpo exánime y pasó un largo rato sentado a su lado. Impresiona el despojo con que la describe; antes que un hijo hay allí un director que organiza una puesta: “Yacía en su cama, vestida con un camisón de franela blanco y una mañanita azul. Tenía la cabeza ligeramente vuelta hacia un lado y los labios entreabiertos. Estaba pálida, con ojeras, y el pelo, todavía oscuro, bien peinado –no, ya no tenía el pelo oscuro, sino entrecano, y los últimos años lo llevaba corto, pero la imagen del recuerdo me dice que su pelo era oscuro, tal vez con algunas canas–. Las manos descansaban en su pecho. En el dedo índice de la mano izquierda llevaba una tirita”. Sólo la vacilación entre el pelo oscuro y el cano vuelve ostensible su inquietud; lo demás permanece estático, no en la rigidez de lo muerto sino con la quietud de un latido en suspenso.

La vacilación es inquietud ante algo que escapa a la precisión del dato; lo negro, oscuro, y lo cano producen en claroscuro el contraste de vida y muerte. Lo demás son minucias para el director. Lo expresa mediante la negación de una certeza: “Pasé allí sentado varias horas. Las campanas de la iglesia de Hedvig Eleonora (la iglesia donde oficiaba el padre, pastor) tocaban a misa mayor, la luz vagaba por la habitación, se oía música en alguna parte. No creo que sintiera dolor, tampoco que pensara, ni siquiera creo que me observara o me hiciera mi propia puesta en escena –esa deformación profesional que me ha acompañado sin piedad toda la vida y que tantas veces ha robado o escindido mis más profundas vivencias–”. Es lamentable para él que así sucediera, pero de valor inapreciable para su condición de artista, ya que lo impulsó a generar una obra magna de la cinematografía. En El rostro (conocida en la Argentina como El mago), cuatro viajeros en un coche –la troupe de Vogler, un mago ilusionista– encuentran en la espesura de un bosque a un actor moribundo. Lo llevan. Tendido en el piso del coche, dialoga con ellos acerca de la verdad, la mentira, la ilusión, hasta que su muerte parece próxima. Vogler se inclina sobre el actor, quien, manteniéndose impasible (luego se sabrá que su agonía era mentida) dice: “Si desea registrar el momento exacto, mire con detenimiento, señor. Tendré mi cara abierta a su curiosidad. ¿Qué siento? Miedo y bienestar. Ahora la muerte ha llegado a mis manos, mis brazos, mis pies, mis entrañas. Trepa hacia arriba, hacia adentro. Obsérveme detenidamente. Ahora se detiene el corazón, ahora se apaga mi conciencia. No veo ni Dios ni ángeles. Ahora ya no puedo verlos más a ustedes. Estoy muerto. Ustedes se preguntan. Yo voy a decírselo. La muerte es...”.

Cuando, al promediar la película, este actor reaparezca, dirá de sí: “Me he tornado convincente. Nunca lo fui como actor”. Mientras Vogler, al disponer los elementos para su próxima actuación, manipula una linterna mágica (un proyector), el actor extiende una mano y ataja el haz de luz; al proyectarse la silueta en la pantalla dice: “La sombra de una sombra”. Si Dios es un director, hay en él un ilusionista que pretende hacer entrar la muerte en el claroscuro de una escena. Bergman hace explícita esta metáfora en El séptimo sello.

No intentaré la disquisición, tan gratuita como de mal gusto, sobre si Bergman hubiera sido Bergman de no sufrir “esa deformación profesional que me ha acompañado sin piedad toda la vida y que tantas veces ha robado o escindido mis más profundas vivencias”. Pero sí es dable reparar en que, al enunciarlo de este modo, el propio Bergman queda desdoblado en la persona –extraña para los espectadores de su obra– y el creador. Debemos distinguir al menos una tríada: por una parte el autor, en relación con la obra, y por otra parte la persona, cuya vida está signada por cierto padecimiento. El séptimo sello, por mencionar una de las obras mayores, no es el síntoma de un neurótico sino la obra de un genio. Que el señor Bergman haya padecido esto o aquello no equivale a que lo mismo suceda con la obra, aunque el padecer la empape. Si el creador lo fuera sólo por su trastorno, los laberintos borgeanos serían producciones obsesivas, Los hermanos Karamazov se debería a la epilepsia de Dostoievsky y Edipo rey habría resultado de la calentura de Sófocles con la mamá y la rivalidad con el padre. Y no porque los creadores carezcan de tales sufrimientos, al contrario; la cuestión radica en reconocer aquello que caratulamos de obsesivo, epiléptico o edípico, echando mano a una nosografía de bolsillo, como algo inherente a la condición humana.

Ya que comenzamos con la descripción de Bergman acerca de la madre, transcribiré un fragmento que la incluye en una de sus películas. Sabido es el conflicto de Bergman con su padre, un clérigo severo, autoritario, del que tanto deriva su reverencia como su rebelión ante Dios. Si algo tuvo impedido de chico –para decirlo del modo más sencillo– fue el contacto emotivo con sus padres. Pero, cuando el autor se expresa, hay una transformación. Leamos el final del guión de Cuando huye el día: “Un poco más lejos en la orilla se hallaba sentada mi madre. Lucía un llamativo vestido de verano y un sombrero de alas grandes que daba sombra a su rostro. Estaba leyendo un libro. Sara dejó caer mi mano y señaló a mis padres. Luego desapareció. Miré largo rato a la pareja que estaba del otro lado del agua. Traté de gritarles algo, pero ni una palabra salió de mi boca. Entonces mi padre irguió la cabeza y me vio. Alzó la mano y me saludó, riendo. Mi madre levantó los ojos del libro y ella también rió y saludó con la cabeza.

“En ese momento vi el viejo yate con su vela roja. Se deslizaba suavemente impulsado por la tenue brisa. En la proa estaba de pie el tío Aron, cantando alguna canción sentimental y vi a mis hermanos y hermanas y a mi tía Sara, que levantó en brazos al hijito de Sigbritt. Les grité, pero no me oyeron.

“Soñé que estaba junto al agua y gritaba hacia la bahía, pero la cálida brisa de verano se llevaba mis gritos sin dejarlos llegar a destino. Sin embargo, no estaba afligido por esto; me sentía, por el contrario, bastante contento”.

Contrastemos con el libro de memorias, donde menciona su inclinación infantil hacia la mentira: “Creo que yo fui (entre los hermanos) el que mejor parado salió gracias a que me convertí en un mentiroso. Creé un personaje que, exteriormente, tenía muy poco que ver con mi verdadero yo. Como no supe mantener la separación entre mi persona real y mi creación, los daños resultantes tuvieron consecuencias en mi vida, hasta bien entrada mi edad adulta, y en mi creatividad. En ocasiones he tenido que consolarme diciéndome que el que ha vivido en el engaño ama la verdad”. Vivir el engaño, amar la verdad: nuevo modo de formular la escisión; vida como engaño, vivencia enajenada, verdad en la obra, fruto del amor.

“Creé un personaje que, exteriormente, tenía muy poco que ver con mi verdadero yo”: pero el yo miente por definición; el problema es instrumentar la escisión de modo que el yo crea, ilusoriamente, saldar el abismo para ubicarse del otro lado, dejando un lugar vacante –que creemos el yo del sujeto– para que allí nos precipitemos. Esto se llama mentira, según Bergman, una estrategia a costa de que el sujeto robe de sí “las más profundas vivencias”.

El mentiroso

Bergman pagaría caro la mentira, él mismo cayó en su trampa. En 1976, el fisco descubrió que había evadido el pago de impuestos; más aún, que había producido un fraude con sus declaraciones. En un lamentable equívoco, lo llevaron detenido. En lo relativo al manejo económico, él firmaba lo que sus abogados ponían en sus manos. Pero la acusación había tocado un punto sensible: sin que fuera consciente de qué sucedía en su intimidad, Bergman se desmoronó. El Estado Sueco había descubierto su secreto: era un mentiroso. La crisis desencadenada puso de relieve la eficacia inconsciente de la acusación. Sin saberlo, los fiscales del Estado encarnaron la severa imago paterna y la técnica del desdoblamiento se volvió en su contra. Leamos lo que dice al respecto: “El lunes por la mañana se produce el colapso. Estoy en el salón del piso superior leyendo un libro y escuchando música. Ingrid se ha ido a ver al abogado. No siento nada, estoy sereno aunque algo apagado por los somníferos, que jamás utilizo en la vida normal.

“Cesa la música y la cinta se para con un ruidito. Calma total. Los tejados del otro lado de la calle están blancos y la nieve cae lentamente. Dejo de leer, de todas maneras me es difícil entender lo que leo. La luz en la habitación no tiene sombras y es intensa. Un reloj da alguna hora. Tal vez duerma, quizá sólo haya dado el corto paso de la realidad reconocida por los sentidos a la otra realidad. No sé, ahora me encuentro profundamente hundido en un vacío inmóvil, sin dolor y sin sensaciones. Cierro los ojos, creo que cierro los ojos, intuyo que hay alguien en la habitación, abro los ojos: en la implacable luz, a unos metros de mí, estoy yo mismo contemplándome. La vivencia es concreta e incontestable. Estoy allí en la alfombra amarilla contemplándome a mí que estoy sentado en el sillón. Estoy sentado en el sillón contemplándome a mí que estoy de pie en la alfombra amarilla. El yo que está sentado en el sillón es el que ahora domina las reacciones. Es el punto final, no hay regreso. Me oigo lamentarme en voz alta y quejumbrosa”.

El desdoblamiento espanta, a pesar de presentificar la misma escisión que había aparecido antes; el protagonista y el observador disponen la escena pero, atravesando su límite, ambos caen esta vez dentro de ella. Ocurre lo siniestro, en medio de un absoluto silencio y luz intensísima. La duplicación sin espejo tiene la fuerza, y con ella el espanto, de lo real. Ha cambiado el registro: del plano imaginario, donde la imagen presupone el espejo, se ha pasado a lo concreto de una presencia no mediatizada. El espejo desaparece pero el otro sigue ahí.

La luz que ciega tiene un lugar preponderante junto al silencio, produciendo el viraje hacia una claridad que, de tan acentuada, también extravía. Retomaré ahora la cita de cuando Bergman se encontró ante el cuerpo yacente de la madre, pues allí aparece algo similar. Luego de ocuparse con minuciosidad de la posición y el atuendo, vacilando sólo en el claroscuro de su pelo, agrega: “De súbito una intensa luz de temprana primavera llenó la habitación. El pequeño despertador hacía tictac apresuradamente en la mesilla de noche”. El impacto estético de la frase radica en el juego de contrastes, donde se extiende aquella vacilación entre el pelo oscuro-cano de la madre; ahora es luz intensa-(mesa de) noche, cese del tiempo y tictac apresurado, la muerte, la primavera temprana. En definitiva: luz intensa (vida)-oscuridad cerrada (muerte), elementos que hemos visto reaparecer en el momento del derrumbe: música que cesa, calma total, blancura de los tejados, luz intensa y sin sombras, vacío inmóvil, aquietamiento que anuncia el acontecimiento, desencadenado en medio de una luz implacable. ¿Tan implacable como la acusación del fisco? ¿Tanto como el padre? De tan intensa, ciega, los ojos se cierran, se abren y llega el punto final, de no regreso. ¿Como el de la madre al morir? Preguntas que dejaré en suspenso para captar la certidumbre del instante fatal. La escena imaginaria se cierra, se apaga, y emerge, cegadora, la luz sobrenatural.

Lo internaron en un sanatorio psiquiátrico y de a poco se fue restableciendo, aunque la duplicación se mantenía: “Un día de finales de febrero me encuentro en una habitación cómoda y silenciosa del hospital de Sophia. La ventana da al jardín. Puedo ver la casa rectoral amarilla, la casa de mi infancia, allí en lo alto de la colina. Cada mañana paseo una hora por el parque. A mi lado va la sombra de un niño de ocho años; es a la vez estimulante y escalofriante”.

El contraste se acentúa: en una luz intensísima se ve a sí mismo y alucina, en una sombra lo acompaña la visión de un niño, y oscila entre la fascinación y el horror. Permanece el amarillo, y ahora constatamos su procedencia: el amarillo de la casa de la infancia se había transformado, en aquel terrible momento, en el color de la alfombra, mudo testigo ubicado en medio de los dos Bergman. Antes, aludiendo al pelo de la madre muerta, había vacilado entro lo oscuro y lo blanco. Luz y sombras, vida y muerte, razón y locura. Poco después logrará organizarse merced a la escisión, esta vez partiendo el tiempo, lo cual le hará posible entretejer vida y escena: “Me lanzo al ataque contra los demonios con un método que me ha funcionado bien en crisis anteriores: divido el día y la noche en unidades de tiempo determinadas y lleno cada una de ellas con una actividad o un momento de descanso establecidos de antemano. Sólo cumpliendo implacablemente mi programa, día y noche, puedo defender mi cerebro de unos dolores tan violentos que llegan a ser interesantes. En pocas palabras, recobro la costumbre de planificar minuciosamente mi vida y ponerla en escena”. Esta partición tiene por objeto combatir los demonios, los dioses caídos de la mano de Dios. Hace recordar la fórmula de Borges: “La eternidad, cuya despedazada copia es el tiempo”, deudora de otra, de Platón, para quien el tiempo es “la imagen móvil de la eternidad”. La escena es un recorte de lo inmutable.

Todo esto realza, de modo tan dramático como elocuente, el desdoblamiento entre la mirada cargada de luz, que pone al descubierto la miseria humana, y el protagonista de la escena donde transcurre la trama. Importa el método por el que esa clarividencia deviene lugar ocupado por el director de escena, escindiendo al autor. Tengamos en cuenta que hemos leído el relato entregado por el director, que no hemos asistido a su locura sino a su obra, que, por más autobiográfica que parezca, es un libro escrito por el autor Ingmar Bergman.

* Psicoanalista.

© 2000-2007 www.pagina12.com.ar Todos los Derechos Reservados

http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/psicologia/9-89398-2007-08-09.html

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Página/12:
PsyOp

Por Juan Gelman
Jueves, 09 de Agosto de 2007

El presidente Bush ha modificado las prioridades de sus justificaciones para continuar la guerra en Irak: Osama bin Laden había prácticamente desaparecido de la propaganda oficial y de los grandes medios del país, pero en enero de este año Al Qaida pasó a ocupar el primer lugar en la lista y su centro operativo sería, precisamente, el país árabe. Volvió el argumento que se esgrimió –entre otros– para invadirlo después de Afganistán. Como las presuntas armas de destrucción masiva, nunca aparecieron pruebas de la relación Saddam Hussein/Osama. Colin Powell, entonces secretario de Estado de W., declaró ante el Consejo de Seguridad de la ONU –un mes antes de la invasión– que “Irak alberga hoy una red terrorista mortífera dirigida por Abu Mussab Zarkawi, partidario y colaborador de Osama bin Laden”. Parece que no.

Powell dio el puntapié inicial de una vasta PsyOp –acrónimo de psychological operation–, destinada especialmente a la opinión pública norteamericana y realizada por el equipo de tareas 626, unidad de élite del ejército estadounidense. Zarkawi se declara responsable de hechos bárbaros como la decapitación de un trabajador humanitario japonés (octubre de 2004), el atentado terrorista en un mercado iraquí (julio de 2005), la tortura y decapitación de dos marines y el asesinato de cuatro diplomáticos rusos (junio de 2006), entre otros crímenes incontables. Por ejemplo, la destrucción del domo de la mezquita chiíta de Al Askari.

Las dos campañas de Zarkawi –la terrorista y la propagandística– son analizadas en varios memorándum militares internos a los que tuvo acceso el Washington Post (10-4-06): “Demonizar a Zarkawi” se titula uno de 2004. En otro se asienta una conclusión del general Mark Kimmit, vocero entonces de los ocupantes: “El programa PsyOp Zarkawi es la campaña de información más exitosa hasta el presente”. De desinformación, quiso decir tal vez. Lo que calló es que Zarkawi era una criatura de los servicios de Inteligencia de EE.UU., Gran Bretaña, Pakistán y Arabia Saudita cuyos aportes se encadenaron así: el ISI, servicio de espionaje paquistaní, hace mucho que entrena a mercenarios de Al Qaida con fondos anglosajones que administraba el príncipe saudí y embajador ante EE.UU. Bandar bin Sultan hasta que fue llamado a su país. Instalado en Bagdad el gobierno títere iraquí, los organizadores de esta PsyOp estimaron que Zarkawi ya no era necesario y es muerto –se dice– en junio de 2006.

El empantanamiento en Irak, la caída de la popularidad de Bush al nivel más bajo registrado por un presidente norteamericano desde Nixon y la creciente demanda de la opinión pública de EE.UU. de que las tropas vuelvan a casa requerían la creación de otro temible terrorista de Al Qaida. El 15 de octubre de 2006 las cadenas de TV de EE.UU. y de todo Occidente proyectaron un video en el que un individuo enmascarado, Abu Omar al Baghdadi de nombre, se proclamaba Comendador de los Creyentes y dirigente del “Estado Islámico Iraquí” instaurado por al Qaida. El señor llamaba a todos los jihadistas a cerrar filas bajo su mando para perseguir a los impíos, los cruzados y los judíos (BBC, 15-10-06). En un año, el “Al Qaida de Irak” se atribuye numerosas ejecuciones sumarias, lo cual subraya la continuidad de la amenaza islámica para Occidente. Curioso –¿realmente?– es que no tardara en “declarar la guerra” a Irán y en convocar a los sunnitas a unirse contra los impíos chiítas que lo gobiernan. Otra expresión de la nueva estrategia de la Casa Blanca para atacar al régimen de Teherán (véase Página/12, 5-8-07). De pronto asomó la verdad.

¿Cómo explicar que, pese al aumento de tropas norteamericanas en Irak, mueran marines y soldados cada día –las tres cuartas partes por ataques de Al Qaida, dice el Pentágono–, para no mencionar a los miles de civiles iraquíes? ¿Cómo explicar que no se haya podido capturar aún al terrible Abu Omar al Baghdadi? La respuesta es simple: nunca existió. Lo admitió en Bagdad el 18 de julio pasado el general Kevin Bergner, actual vocero militar de los ocupantes, quien dio una extraña explicación: el personaje era una invención de Al Qaida. El que aparece en el video es el actor iraquí Abu Abdullah al Naima (The New York Times, 18-7-07). Pero W. sigue hablando de las células de Al Qaida que en Irak preparan nuevos atentados en territorio estadounidense. Qué situación.

Hay más curiosidades. Cuando Bin Laden reconoció que era el autor de los atentados del 11/9, confirmó en un video el relato de la Casa Blanca, aunque sobran indicios de que la versión oficial no responde a la verdad de los hechos. Cuando Zarkawi se autoproclamó Comendador de los Creyentes, Osama bin Laden lo declara “emir de Al Qaida en Irak” mediante un video difundido en diciembre de 2004. Cuando Abu Omar al Baghadadi proclama la existencia del Estado Islámico iraquí, Ayman al Zawahiri, número 2 de al Qaida, lo bendice en un video emitido en junio de 2006. Si Zarkawi y al Baghdadi son producto de programas de PsyOp, Osama es un instrumento más de estas operaciones destinadas a convencer al pueblo estadounidense de que la guerra en Irak ha sido, es y será absolutamente justa y necesaria. ¿Quizá por eso nunca lo capturan?

© 2000-2007 www.pagina12.com.ar Todos los Derechos Reservados

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The Nation:
The Terror America Wrought

by Robert Scheer
[posted online on August 8, 2007]

During a week of mayhem in Iraq, in which terrorists have rightly been condemned for targeting schoolchildren, it is sobering to recall that this week is also the 62nd anniversary of a US attack that deliberately took the lives of thousands of children on their way to school in the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As noted in the Strategic Bombing Survey conducted at President Harry Truman's request, when the bomb hit Hiroshima on April 6, 1945, "nearly all the school children...were at work in the open," to be exploded, irradiated or incinerated in the perfect firestorm that the planners back at the University of California-run Los Alamos lab had envisioned for the bomb's maximum psychological impact.

The terror plot worked all too well, as Hiroshima's Mayor Tadatoshi Akiba recalled this week: "That fateful summer, 8:15 AM. The roar of a B-29 breaks the morning calm. A parachute opens in the blue sky. Then suddenly, a flash, an enormous blast-silence-hell on Earth. The eyes of young girls watching the parachute were melted. Their faces became giant charred blisters. The skin of people seeking help dangled from their fingernails.... Others died when their eyeballs and internal organs burst from their bodies-Hiroshima was a hell where those who somehow survived envied the dead."

Like most of the others killed by the two American bombs, neither the children nor the adults had any role in Japan's decision to go to war, but they were picked as the target instead of an isolated but fortified military base whose antiaircraft fire posed a higher risk. The target preferred by US atomic scientists-a patch in the ocean or unpopulated terrain-was rejected, because the effect of hundreds of thousands of civilians dying would be all the more dramatic.

The victims in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were available soft targets, much like the children playing in Iraq, suddenly caught in the crossfire of battles waged beyond their control. In White Light/Black Rain, a devastating HBO documentary released this week, there is an interview with the sole survivor of a Japanese elementary school of 620 students. The murder of the other 619, and the 370,000 overall deaths attributed to the bombings, 85 percent of which were civilian deaths, has never compelled a widespread examination of the "end justifies the means" morality of our own state-sanctioned acts of terror. Indeed, the horrifying footage taken by Japanese and American cameramen soon after the devastation, and shown in the HBO film, was long kept secret by the US government for fear that an informed American public might question this nation's incipient nuclear arms race.

Just exactly what distinguishes the United States' use of the ever-so-cutely-named "Fat Man" and "Little Boy" atomic bombs on cities in Japan from the car bombs of Baghdad or the planes that smashed into the World Trade Center? To even raise the question, as was found in one recent university case, can be a career-ending move.

Of course, we had our justifications, as terrorists always do. Truman defended his decision to drop the atomic bombs on civilians over the objection of leading atomic scientists on the grounds that it was a necessary military action to save lives by forcing a quick Japanese surrender. He insisted on that imperative despite the objections of top military figures, including General Dwight Eisenhower, who contended that the war would end quickly without dropping the bomb.

The subsequent release of formerly secret documents makes a hash of Truman's rationalization. His White House was fully informed that the Japanese were on the verge of collapse, and their surrender was made all the more likely by the Soviets' imminent entry into the fight.

At most, the Japanese were asking for the face-saving gesture of retaining their emperor, and even that modest demand would likely have been abandoned with the shift of massive numbers of Allied troops and firepower from the battlefront of a defeated Germany to a confrontation with its deeply wounded Asian ally. Instead, the US played midwife to the birth of the nuclear monster, the ultimate terrorist weapon that presents a continuing and growing threat to the survival of human life on Earth.

This is a lesson to be pondered at a time when President Bush plays power games with a nuclear-equipped Russia while coddling Pakistan, the main proliferator of nuclear weapons to rogue regimes, and Congress authorizes an expansion of the US nuclear program to better fight the war on terror by "improving" the ultimate weapon of terror, which the US alone stands guilty of using.

More information: For a fuller explanation of the suppression of footage taken shortly after the Hiroshima and Nagasaki attacks, follow this link.

Copyright © 2007 The Nation

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070813/truthdig2

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ZNet | Mainstream Media
Democracy's invisible line

There's An Alternative World... If Only We Can Find It

by Noam Chomsky; Le Monde diplomatique; August 09, 2007

The US writer Noam Chomsky talks about the mechanisms behind modern communication, an essential instrument of government in democratic countries - as important to our governments as propaganda is to a dictatorship. Noam Chomsky interviewed by Daniel Mermet

DM: Let's start with the media issue. In the May 2005 referendum on the European constitution, most newspapers in France supported a yes vote, yet 55% of the electorate voted no. This suggests there is a limit to how far the media can manipulate public opinion. Do you think voters were also saying no to the media?

NC: It's a complex subject, but the little in-depth research carried out in this field suggests that, in fact, the media exert greater influence over the most highly educated fraction of the population. Mass public opinion seems less influenced by the line adopted by the media.

Take the eventuality of a war against Iran. Three-quarters of Americans think the United States should stop its military threats and concentrate on reaching agreement by diplomatic means. Surveys carried out by western pollsters suggest that public opinion in Iran and the US is also moving closer on some aspects of the nuclear issue. The vast majority of the population of both countries think that the area from Israel to Iran should be completely clear of nuclear weapons, including those held by US forces operating in the region. But you would have to search long and hard to find this kind of information in the media.

The main political parties in either country do not defend this view either. If Iran and the US were true democracies, in which the majority really decided public policy, they would undoubtedly have already solved the current nuclear disagreement. And there are other similar instances. Look at the US federal budget. Most Americans want less military spending and more welfare expenditure, credits for the United Nations, and economic and international humanitarian aid. They also want to cancel the tax reductions decided by President George Bush for the benefit of the biggest taxpayers.

On all these topics, White House policy is completely at odds with what public opinion wants. But the media rarely publish the polls that highlight this persistent public opposition. Not only are citizens excluded from political power, they are also kept in a state of ignorance as to the true state of public opinion. There is growing international concern about the massive US double deficit affecting trade and the budget. But both are closely linked to a third deficit, the democratic deficit that is constantly growing, not only in the US but all over the western world.

DM: When a leading journalist or TV news presenter is asked whether they are subject to pressure or censorship, they say they are completely free to express their own opinions. So how does thought control work in a democratic society? We know how it works in dictatorships.

NC: As you say, journalists immediately reply: "No one has been exerting any pressure on me. I write what I want." And it's true. But if they defended positions contrary to the dominant norm, someone else would soon be writing editorials in their place. Obviously it is not a hard-and-fast rule: the US press sometimes publishes even my work, and the US is not a totalitarian country. But anyone who fails to fulfill certain minimum requirements does not stand a chance of becoming an established commentator.

It is one of the big differences between the propaganda system of a totalitarian state and the way democratic societies go about things. Exaggerating slightly, in totalitarian countries the state decides the official line and everyone must then comply. Democratic societies operate differently. The line is never presented as such, merely implied. This involves brainwashing people who are still at liberty. Even the passionate debates in the main media stay within the bounds of commonly accepted, implicit rules, which sideline a large number of contrary views. The system of control in democratic societies is extremely effective. We do not notice the line any more than we notice the air we breathe. We sometimes even imagine we are seeing a lively debate. The system of control is much more powerful than in totalitarian systems.

Look at Germany in the early 1930s. We tend to forget that it was the most advanced country in Europe, taking the lead in art, science, technology, literature and philosophy. Then, in no time at all, it suffered a complete reversal of fortune and became the most barbaric, murderous state in human history. All that was achieved by using fear: fear of the Bolsheviks, the Jews, the Americans, the Gypsies - everyone who, according to the Nazis, was threatening the core values of European culture and the direct descendants of Greek civilisation (as the philosopher Martin Heidegger wrote in 1935). However, most of the German media who inundated the population with these messages were using marketing techniques developed by US advertising agents.

The same method is always used to impose an ideology. Violence is not enough to dominate people: some other justification is required. When one person wields power over another - whether they are a dictator, a colonist, a bureaucrat, a spouse or a boss - they need an ideology justifying their action. And it is always the same: their domination is exerted for the good of the underdog. Those in power always present themselves as being altruistic, disinterested and generous.

In the 1930s the rules for Nazi propaganda involved using simple words and repeating them in association with emotions and phobia. When Hitler invaded the Sudetenland in 1938 he cited the noblest, most charitable motives: the need for a humanitarian intervention to prevent the ethnic cleansing of German speakers. Henceforward everyone would be living under Germany's protective wing, with the support of the world's most artistically and culturally advanced country.

When it comes to propaganda (though in a sense nothing has changed since the days of Athens) there have been some minor improvements. The instruments available now are much more refined, in particular - surprising as it may seem - in the countries with the greatest civil liberties, Britain and the US. The contemporary public relations industry was born there in the 1920s, an activity we may also refer to as opinion forming or propaganda.

Both countries had made such progress in democratic rights (women's suffrage, freedom of speech) that state violence was no longer sufficient to contain the desire for liberty. So those in power sought other ways of manufacturing consent. The PR industry produces, in the true sense of the term, concept, acceptance and submission. It controls people's minds and ideas. It is a major advance on totalitarian rule, as it is much more agreeable to be subjected to advertising than to torture.

In the US, freedom of speech is protected to an extent that I think is unheard of in any other country. This is quite a recent change. Since the 1960s the Supreme Court has set very high standards for freedom of speech, in keeping with a basic principle established by the 18th century Enlightenment. The court upholds the principle of free speech, the only limitation being participation in a criminal act. If I walk into a shop to commit a robbery with an accomplice holding a gun and I say "Shoot", my words are not protected by the constitution. Otherwise there has to be a really serious motive to call into question freedom of speech. The Supreme Court has even upheld this principle for the benefit of members of the Ku Klux Klan.

In France and Britain, and I believe the rest of Europe, the definition of freedom of speech is more restrictive. In my view the essential point is whether the state is entitled to determine historical truth and to punish those who contest such truth. If we allow the state to exert such powers we are accepting Stalinist methods. French intellectuals have difficulty admitting that they are inclined to do just that. Yet when we refuse such behaviour there should be no exceptions. The state should have no means of punishing anyone who claims that the sun rotates around the earth. There is a very elementary side to the principle of freedom of speech: either we defend it in the case of opinions we find hateful, or we do not defend it at all. Even Hitler and Stalin acknowledged the right to freedom of speech of those who were defending their point of view.

I find it distressing to have to discuss such issues two centuries after Voltaire who, as we all know, said: "I shall defend my opinions till I die, but I will give up my life so that you may defend yours." It would be a great disservice to the memory of the victims of the Holocaust to adopt one of the basic doctrines of their murderers.

DM: In one of your books you quote Milton Friedman as saying that "profit-making is the essence of democracy".

NC: Profit and democracy are so contrary that there is no scope for comment. The aim of democracy is to leave people free to decide how they live and to make any political choices concerning them. Making a profit is a disease in our society, based on specific organisations. A decent, ethical society would pay only marginal attention to profits. Take my university department [at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology]: a few scientists work very hard to earn lots of money, but they are considered a little odd and slightly deranged, almost pathological cases. Most of the academic community is more concerned about trying to break new ground, out of intellectual interest and for the general good.

DM: In a recent tribute, Jean Ziegler wrote: "There have been three forms of totalitarian rule: Stalinism, Nazism and now Tina [the acronym from British prime minister Margaret Thatcher's statement, "There is no alternative" - that is, to economic liberalism and global free-market capitalism]." Do you think they can be compared?

NC: I don't think they should be placed on the same footing. Fighting Tina means confronting a system of intellectual control that cannot be compared with concentration camps or the gulag. US policies provoke massive opposition all over the world. In Latin America, Argentina and Venezuela have thrown out the International Monetary Fund. Washington can no longer stage military takeovers in Latin America as it did 20 or 30 years ago. The whole continent now rejects the neo-liberal economic programme forcibly imposed on it by the US in the 1980s and 1990s. There are signs of the same opposition to the global market all over the world.

The Global Justice Movement, which attracts a great deal of media attention at each World Social Forum (WSF), is hard at work all year. It is a new departure and perhaps the start of a real International. But its main objective is to prove that there is an alternative. What better example of a different form of global exchange than the WSF itself. Hostile media organisations refer to anyone opposed to the neo-liberal global market as antis, whereas in fact they are campaigning for another form of global market, for the people.

We can easily observe the contrast between the two parties because their meetings coincide. We have the World Economic Forum, in Davos, which is striving to promote global economic integration but in the exclusive interests of financiers, banks and pension funds. These organisations happen to control the media too. They defend their conception of global integration, which is there to serve investors. The dominant media consider that this form of integration is the only one to qualify as globalisation. Davos is a good example of how ideological propaganda works in democratic societies. It is so effective that even WSF participants sometimes accept the ill-intentioned "anti" label. I spoke at the Forum in Porto Alegre and took part in the Via Campesina conference. They represent the majority of the world's population.

DM: Critics tend to lump you together with the anarchists and libertarian socialists. What would be the role of the state in a real democracy?

NC: We are living here and now, not in some imaginary universe. And here and now there are tyrannical organisations - big corporations. They are the closest thing to a totalitarian institution. They are, to all intents and purposes, quite unaccountable to the general public or society as a whole. They behave like predators, preying on other smaller companies. People have only one means of defending themselves and that is the state. Nor is it a very effective shield because it is often closely linked to the predators. But there is a far from negligible difference. General Electric is accountable to no one, whereas the state must occasionally explain its actions to the public.

Once democracy has been enlarged far enough for citizens to control the means of production and trade, and they take part in the overall running and management of the environment in which they live, then the state will gradually be able to disappear. It will be replaced by voluntary associations at our place of work and where we live.

DM: You mean soviets?

NC: The first things that Lenin and Trotsky destroyed, immediately after the October revolution, were the soviets, the workers' councils and all the democratic bodies. In this respect Lenin and Trotsky were the worst enemies of socialism in the 20th century. But as orthodox Marxists they thought that a backward country such as Russia was incapable of achieving socialism immediately, and must first be forcibly industrialised.

In 1989, when the communist system collapsed, I thought this event was, paradoxically, a victory for socialism. My conception of socialism requires, at least, democratic control of production, trade and other aspects of human existence.

However the two main propaganda systems agreed to maintain that the tyrannical system set up by Lenin and Trotsky, subsequently turned into a political monstrosity by Stalin, was socialism. Western leaders could not fail to be enchanted by this outrageous use of the term, which enabled them to cast aspersions on the real thing for decades. With comparable enthusiasm, but working in the opposite direction, the Soviet propaganda system tried to exploit the sympathy and commitment that the true socialist ideal inspired among the working masses.

DM: Isn't it the case that all forms of autonomous organisation based on anarchist principles have ultimately collapsed?

NC: There are no set anarchist principles, no libertarian creed to which we must all swear allegiance. Anarchism - at least as I understand it - is a movement that tries to identify organisations exerting authority and domination, to ask them to justify their actions and, if they are unable to do so, as often happens, to try to supersede them.

Far from collapsing, anarchism and libertarian thought are flourishing. They have given rise to real progress in many fields. Forms of oppression and injustice that were once barely recognised, less still disputed, are no longer allowed. That in itself is a success, a step forward for all humankind, certainly not a failure.

Translated by Harry Forster

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