coluichedubita: Elsewhere Today 432

Aljazeera:
Olympia saved but Greeks fume

MONDAY, AUGUST 27, 2007
5:06 MECCA TIME, 2:06 GMT

Firefighters in Greece have managed to save the birthplace of the Olympics, but many ordinary Greeks are questioning the government's sense of priorities, saying they have been left to fend for themselves.

Flames had reached ancient Olympia, burning trees and shrubs just a few metres from the walls of the museum at the 2,800-year-old site.

"Firefighters fought a battle in Ancient Olympia, which was won," the fire department said on Sunday.

Critics say the government won that fight at the expense of villages such as those in the Peloponnese mountains in southern Greece, which are facing the biggest concentration of forest fires.

Many people have been forced to flee homes they have lived in for decades.

Toll rising

Three planes and two helicopters bombarded the Olympia blaze. About 90 firefighters and soldiers were deployed in the area.

The army was called in to create a fire break. "All means are being used, and all necessary measures have been taken," the culture ministry said.

But those efforts were not enough to save the grounds of the International Olympic Academy near the museum, which were completely burned, as was the grove where the heart of Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of the modern Olympic Games, is buried.

And that "victory" did not count for much elsewhere in the country.

Nikos Diamandis, a fire department spokesman, said on Sunday: "Fires are burning in more than half the country."

More than 60 new blazes broke out on Sunday and the fire department said 42 major fires were still blazing out of control.

The fires have now killed 60 people, including two firefighters, since they started on Friday and the toll is likely to rise.

Officials are calling the destruction and carnage an "unprecedented disaster" and the government has declared a state of emergency.

The forest fires, the worst in Greece for decades, broke out on Friday and have since erupted on scores of fronts around the country, prompting Costas Karamanlis, the Greek prime minister, to blame arsonists for some of the blazes.

The government has offered a $1.36m reward for information on suspected arsonists.

Around the town of Zaharo thick smoke blocked out the sun and could be seen almost 100km away.

Laurence Lee, reporting for Al Jazeera from close to Zaharo, said: "In this entire region there are five fire engines. We've seen no army here and I don't think they are expecting to see the army here. They [residents] say they've been abandoned.

"They don't exactly blame the authorities for this - clearly they blame primarily the arsonists - but because this has happened before and because they haven't had any help before they really don't expect anything this time. But the problem is this is clearly so much worse."

State of emergency

In the Peloponnese and across other regions, forest fires have cut a swath of destruction, burning about 500 homes, thousands of acres of forest and farmland and causing thousands to flee.

Foreign firefighters and aircraft, including from Europe and Israel, joined efforts by the Greek military and firefighters to stem the blaze after Greece declared a state of emergency across the country on Saturday.

Nicole Itano, a journalist in Athens, told Al Jazeera: "No one here can remember a time when a national disaster for the entire nation has been called. That is in many ways a reflection of the degree of seriousness of what we've been seeing in the last few days."

She said there was a "political element" to declaring a state of emergency.

"There has been a lot of criticism about the government's handling of this and this is in some ways an attempt to give themselves a bit of breathing space - it makes it very difficult for opposition parties to turn this into a political issue."

The government, which faces snap elections on September 16, has been criticised for reacting too slowly to forest fires in the past and the recent blazes have already election campaigns.

"If they had any self respect, all politicians would resign. There is no state and they are all absent," said a resident in the village of Haria in the Peloponnese.

Politicians interrupted their campaigning because of the fires and flags flew at half mast for three days of mourning.

Itano said: "This is certainly something that is going to be on the political agenda, but I think right now the government would like to focus on fighting the fires rather than fighting the political storm around them."

Source: Al Jazeera and agencies

http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/82E5417C-7678-436F-BC2F-66DC379F6073.htm

AllAfrica: Petroleum Corporation
Cancels Crude Oil Deal With Kenya

By Chika Amanze-Nwachuku
This Day (Lagos) NEWS
27 August 2007

The Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) has terminated the multi-million dollar crude oil contract it signed with Kenya Ministry of Energy over "ripples" which the lucrative deal was causing between the state-owned National Oil Corporation of Kenya (NOCK) and the Kenya Energy Ministry.

THISDAY learnt that under the deal sealed by the parties in 1999, NNPC had been supplying Kenya with crude oil at below-market prices, which was then being sold on Kenya's behalf by international oil traders, who remitted the money to Kenya.

Sources said sequel to a visit to Nigeria in 2003 by Kenyan President, Mwaki Kibaki, NNPC and NOCK had executed a one-year contract for the sale and purchase of 30,000 barrels per day (bpd).

The contract was said to have been further extended after a meeting between NOCK and NNPC, after which the Kenya Energy Ministry directed NOCK to move quickly to contract a new trader.

It was learnt that when the deal was due for renewal early this year, NOCK had put out an international tender inviting bids from crude oil traders to lift the cargo from Nigeria on Kenya Government's behalf, only to be ordered a week later by the ministry of energy to discontinue the procurement immediately, a development which led to the cancellation of the tender quietly.

The grouse of Kenya Ministry of Energy, THISDAY gathered, was that the state oil corporation introduced some terms that were biased against some potential traders.

The tender was said to have been crafted to eliminate competition, as a clause therein stipulated that international traders with outstanding litigation against the corporation would suffer a 35 per cent penalty at the evaluation stage.

Consequently, the ministry was said to have taken over the management of the tender, a development which pitched it against NOCK.

When contacted, NNPC's Group General Manager, Public Affairs, Dr. Levi Ajuonuma, denied any report of irregularities in the crude oil deal and maintained that the contract was "very legal".

Ajuonuma, who also denied that NNPC supplied the product to Kenya at below market prices, argued that Nigeria crude oil price was always higher.

"Our prices are never below international market prices. We have never supplied to them below market prices. Our prices are even higher. Sometimes, they (Kenya) lose and at other times, they gain. That is how the market is," he said.

He also confirmed that the contract was renewed over the years, but that it has been stopped.

The NNPC spokesman who would not disclose why the corporation backed out of the eight-year-old deal, simply said "the contract has been stopped. It has expired."

On the crisis rocking the Kenya Government over the crude deal, Ajuonuma said it had nothing to do with the NNPC.

"If they have any problem, it is with their own dealers and not with us", as according to him, Kenya Government does not lift or sell the product by itself but through its oil corporation (NOCK), which he said, lifts the cargo and gives it to those that will sell and then remit the money to the government.

Government-to-government crude contracts were introduced in 1999 after former president Olusegun Obasanjo cancelled the Nigeria 's 41 existing oil marketing contracts as part of his anti-corruption war.

It was learnt that the battle for control of the Nigerian crude lifting tender in Kenya has come at a time when the operations of trading companies contracted to lift crude on behalf of African governments in Nigeria have been in the spotlight following allegations of unscrupulous dealings between the trading companies and powerbrokers.

"There have been several instances when well-connected individuals were found to have colluded with the traders to channel proceeds from the lucrative deals elsewhere, or converted the money to private use," said a report which cited the management of the government-to-government contract between the South Africa and Nigeria as a case in point.

In 2003, the South African press had carried stories alleging that proceeds from a similar contract, secured with President Thabo Mbeki's help in 1999, had been diverted to an off-shore company, with no benefit to the government or the public.

It was then alleged that top government officials and powerbrokers had quietly incorporated a private company in the Cayman Islands called the South African Oil Company to receive the proceeds from the Nigerian contract. At the same time, a company named South Africa Oil was registered in Pretoria.

Copyright © 2007 This Day. All rights reserved.

http://allafrica.com/stories/200708270023.html

AlterNet:
Who's Really Paying High Prices for Your Pharmaceuticals

By Stan Cox, AlterNet
Posted on August 27, 2007

Hazardous imports have been the top story on the evening news for weeks now. But the poor quality of some foreign-made products is only half the story. Before we ever see those products, manufacturing plants in the countries of origin can pose an even greater danger to human and ecological health.

Take India, which is now our biggest foreign source of pharmaceuticals. A just-published study by Sweden's Goteborg University shows that, whatever the quality of the drugs being shipped out of India, they are leaving behind a toxic mess. Even after days in a water-treatment plant, effluents discharged into streams and rivers in one Indian region show concentrations of antibiotics and other drugs at 100 to 30,000 times the levels considered safe.

In a 2005 story, I described the devastation of water, land and human health that I saw in the area around Patancheru, India - damage that local villagers, doctors and environmentalists attribute to pollution from the 90 or more bulk-drug factories in the vicinity. State law says that the factories must haul their toxic wastes to an effluent treatment plant run by Patancheru Enviro Tech, Ltd. (PETL) on a tributary of the Nakkavagu rivulet. The treatment plant's outflow into the Nakkavagu (which waters a valley dotted with 14 villages) has often been found to carry industrial pollutants at many times the statutory limits.

Now the Swedish study, recently published online by the Journal of Hazardous Materials (abstract here free) has found record-breaking concentrations of 11 drugs - antibiotics and treatments for high blood pressure, ulcers and allergies - in wastes flowing from the PETL plant.

Noting that "to the best of our knowledge, the concentrations of these 11 drugs were all above the previously highest values [ever] reported in any sewage effluent," the authors singled out the antibiotic Ciprofloxacin (Cipro), which flows out of the plant at the rate of 100 pounds of active ingredient per day. That, say the authors, "is equivalent to the total amount consumed in Sweden (population 9 million) over an average five-day period"!

Concentrations of five other antibiotics were found at levels that are toxic to plants, blue-green algae and a range of bacteria. And before it leaves the facility, the stew of drugs is mixed with human sewage, creating perfect conditions for breeding dangerous, antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

In June, a front-page story by Washington Post reporter Marc Kaufman revealed that there are virtually no controls on the quality of drugs being imported from India. He wrote that India and China together supply as much as 20 percent of the U.S. market for generic and over-the-counter drugs and 40 percent of all bulk drugs used here, and that the two nations' share may rise to 80 percent by 2022. India's share of the U.S. market in 2006 was $800 million, exceeding China's.

According to Kaufmann, the FDA conducted 1,222 quality-assurance inspections of domestic drug-manufacturing plants in 2006. That same year, the agency carried out only 32 inspections of Indian drug plants, mostly to check on new import applications, not for quality control by existing suppliers. And "on-the-ground inspections of Indian and Chinese plants remain rare and relatively brief and are always scheduled in advance, unlike the surprise visits that FDA inspectors pay to domestic manufacturers." There is no indication that FDA inspectors pay any attention to environmental impacts of the plants.

The Swedish researchers calculated that if the quantities of pharmaceuticals they detected being released from the Patancheru treatment facility in a single 24-hour period could be collected and sold in Sweden, they would fetch an amount approaching $200,000, even in generic form. But, they wrote, because the production costs are so much lower than the eventual retail price, it is cheaper for companies to waste the drugs than to invest in pollution control.

When I returned to India earlier this year and checked on the current state of pollution in Patancheru, I was told that burgeoning export-drug production is putting more pressure than ever on the system. Meteorologist Dr. S. Jeevananda Reddy - a former chief technical advisor to the United Nations and now a campaigner for tougher policies on pollution in the Patancheru area - told me that the sheer quantity of drugs that plants are producing means that they pump out far more waste water than the treatment plant can handle.

The state permits each company to dispose of only a certain amount of water per day, and if its chemical concentration is too high, the company is fined. But, said Dr. Reddy, "The fines are peanuts to them." And, of course, the effluent is not even tested for presence of pharmaceuticals. The bulk-drug plants are often producing at two, three, sometimes ten times the permitted capacity.

Reddy has watched as tanker trucks full of effluent from drug factories are turned away by the water treatment plant because their company's daily quota has been exceeded. He says that rather than returning to the factory, the trucks will often head out into the countryside to dump their load. Those wastes would contain, if anything, higher concentrations of pharmaceuticals than seen in the Swedish study.

So when we're raising the alarm over hazardous toys, food and drugs imported from China, India or other countries, it's important to remember that it's our own insatiable demand for those cheap products that pushes manufacturers into using slapdash practices - and that it's people living and working downstream or downwind from the foreign factories who could well be paying the highest price of all.

Stan Cox is a plant breeder and writer in Salina, Kan.

© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at:
http://www.alternet.org/story/59986/

Clarín: "Las FARC no entregaremos
a los prisioneros en Venezuela"

ENTREVISTA EXCLUSIVA CON EL SEGUNDO COMANDANTE DE LA GUERRILLA COLOMBIANA

Raúl Reyes hizo esa advertencia, hoy clave, aunque agradeció la mediación de Chávez, quien había ofrecido una zona de despeje en su país. El jefe guerrillero insistió en que Colombia debe abrir un área para el intercambio.

Pablo Biffi
26.08.2007 | Clarin.com

El "comandante" Raúl Reyes es el número dos de las guerrilleras Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) y uno de los siete miembros del Secretariado del Estado Mayor, conducido por el mítico Manuel Marulanda Vélez, Tirofijo, quien lleva casi 60 años en la clandestinidad. Creadas en 1964, las FARC se definen marxistas leninistas y "campesinas y bolivarianas". En una entrevista exclusiva con Clarín en un campamento transitorio montado para el encuentro con este diario en la selva del sur de Colombia, Reyes dio la bienvenida al aporte del venezolano Hugo Chávez para un canje de unos 50 rehenes -entre ellos la ex candidata Ingrid Betancourt- por 400 guerrilleros presos. Pero aclaró que no aceptan entregar a sus prisioneros en Venezuela, tal como propuso el líder bolivariano quien el viernes se reunirá en Bogotá con su colega Alvaro Uribe. "El está haciendo su aporte y lo agradecemos. Nosotros pensamos que es un inicio, es un nuevo impulso, un nuevo oxígeno que se le puede dar al tema del intercambio humanitario. Pero seguimos sosteniendo que el canje, por ser un problema derivado del conflicto interno, debe solucionarse en Colombia. No vamos a entregar prisioneros en Venezuela", dijo.

Con 30 años dentro de la organización -el grupo cuenta con alrededor de 17.000 hombres en armas-, un pasado vinculado al Partido Comunista y como concejal de un pueblo en Caquetá, Reyes tiene tres hijos de un matrimonio en la vida civil -cuando era Luis Edgar Devia Silva- y dice estar "cerquita de los 60 años". Para el líder guerrillero, Ingrid Betancourt no está en carácter de "secuestrada" desde febrero de 2002, sino como "prisionera política, por ser parte de un régimen que nosotros combatimos". A lo largo de un día, Clarín compartió con Reyes un extenso diálogo en el que negó los vínculos de las FARC con el narcotráfico y rechazó que sean una organización terrorista.

-¿Por qué es tan difícil un acuerdo humanitario para liberar rehenes que algunos ya llevan 10 años prisioneros?

-Es que este gobierno no tiene la más mínima intención de hacerlo. Las FARC han insistido desde hace más de 5 años para conseguir el acuerdo, un canje entre unos 50 rehenes y 400 presos guerrilleros. Y hay que recordar que en los diálogos de paz con el gobierno de Andrés Pastrana liberamos unilateralmente a más de 300 soldados y policías. Y sólo obtuvimos la liberación de 14 guerrilleros enfermos. El resto de los rehenes que teníamos quedaron en nuestro poder para buscar un acuerdo humanitario.

-¿Por qué insisten en el despeje militar de dos municipios de 800 kilómetros cuadrados, Florida y Pradera, para el canje?

-Cuando asumió este gobierno en 2002 le propusimos el despeje de dos municipios en Caquetá, que eran San Vicente del Caguán y Cartagena del Chairá. Pero Uribe dijo que proponíamos esos sitios porque las FARC se sentían acosadas militarmente y querían recuperar terreno. Nosotros dijimos entonces: bueno, que sean otros así el gobierno no cree que queremos sacar ventaja.

-¿Pero no se puede hacer de otra manera el intercambio?

-No, no se puede hacer de ninguna manera porque las FARC no tienen la más mínima confianza en los representantes de Uribe, porque es un gobierno ilegítimo, narco paramilitar, un gobierno que no tiene un interés distinto al de la guerra. Además, pensamos que es poca cosa desmilitarizar dos municipios por 45 días para un acuerdo de tanta envergadura.

-Pero el gobierno insiste en que no desmilitarizará y Uds., que sin desmilitarización no hay canje ¿Cómo se sale de esa trampa?

-Pensamos que de esto se sale con la presión nacional e internacional, para sensibilizar a Uribe que entienda que la única forma de llegar al acuerdo es desmilitarizando los municipios. No es Uribe el que ha hecho la propuesta, son las FARC las que la hicieron. Por eso es que hemos valorado muchísimo el papel que jugaron y juegan Francia, Suiza y España buscando el acuerdo. Pero la política de Uribe es la del rescate por la fuerza, sin importarle lo que les pase a los prisioneros, ya que él lo que quiere es mostrar resultados en la ejecución del Plan Patriota y el Plan Colombia financiados por Estados Unidos, y demostrar que está derrotando a las FARC.

-¿No le parece que es un juego de fuerza entre gobierno y FARC usando a los rehenes?

-Lo que pasa es que en Colombia hay un conflicto interno, una confrontación de más de 43 años sólo con las FARC, donde el Estado ha querido acabar con la guerrilla. Cada presidente utilizó cantidad de hombres y de recursos en buscar liquidar a las FARC. No lo lograron. Hemos crecido y hoy tenemos presencia en todo el país. Esto hace que la clase gobernante se preocupe.

-Insisto ¿No es un juego de fuerza con los rehenes de por medio?

-Es que el gobierno quiere hacerle creer al país y al mundo que nos está derrotando y que nos va hacer negociar bajo presión. Nosotros estamos fuertes y no negociamos bajo presión.

-Hace unos meses el gobierno liberó un centenar de guerrilleros y por pedido del presidente francés se liberó al "canciller" de las FARC Rodrigo Granda. Se esperaba un gesto recíproco de ustedes como dejar libre a Ingrid Betancourt, pero no hubo nada.

-Es que fue un hecho unilateral del gobierno en el marco de una campaña mediática para tapar el escándalo de la "parapolítica" que lo complica, y no producto de una negociación. Y en cuanto a la liberación de Granda, nosotros agradecimos el gesto del presidente Nicolas Sarkozy. Pero tampoco hubo un compromiso de las FARC con Sarkozy para que Granda fuera liberado.

-¿Pero no hubiera sido importante liberar a Ingrid o a Clara Rojas y su hijo de tres años, que nació en cautiverio?

-El problema del acuerdo humanitario deriva del conflicto interno colombiano y cualquier acuerdo debe hacerse en Colombia. Cualquier intervención en favor del canje es provechosa. Pero quienes deciden son el gobierno de Bogotá y las FARC.

-Chávez ofreció su país y una zona despejada para el canje ¿Aceptarían hacerlo en Venezuela?

-Yo quiero agradecer a través de Clarín al presidente Chávez por ese gesto, por esa generosidad, por ese sentido de solidaridad con Colombia, y con los familiares de los prisioneros, y las FARC. Pero es necesario aquí recordar que el presidente Chávez hace esta oferta después de que la senadora Piedad Córdoba, del Partido Liberal y opositora a Uribe, le pidiera que contribuyera con el acuerdo. Y él está haciendo su aporte, que nosotros pensamos que es un inicio, un nuevo impulso que se le puede dar a este tema del intercambio humanitario. Pero seguimos sosteniendo que, por ser un problema derivado del conflicto interno, el canje debe solucionarse en Colombia.

-¿Entonces ustedes rechazan entregar rehenes en Venezuela?

-Sí, nosotros lo que seguimos solicitando es la desmilitarización de Pradera y Florida y le pediríamos al presidente Chávez que, dado su peso político, contribuya para que se logre ese despeje que nos lleve a sentar a las partes a una mesa y concertar el acuerdo que ponga fin al cautiverio de los prisioneros.

-¿Van a negociar en Venezuela?

-Sí, nosotros no tenemos problemas en dialogar en cualquier sitio, pero la entrega de prisioneros debe ser en Colombia.

-¿No es un acto demencial tener personas retenidas durante tanto tiempo como Betancourt, que lleva más de 5 años en manos de las FARC?

-Para nosotros en ningún caso hay secuestro, porque se trata del resultado de una confrontación del pueblo en armas, las guerrillas revolucionarias en Colombia, y un Estado que tiene una ramificación en los tres poderes, Ejecutivo, Judicial y Legislativo. Los soldados en nuestro poder son prisioneros de guerra y el resto prisioneros políticos. En el grupo que nosotros denominamos "canjeables", está Ingrid Betancourt, una candidata a la presidencia y antes senadora, pero del sistema que combatimos. Por eso no es una secuestrada.

-¿Y en el caso de los tres estadounidenses que tienen desde febrero de 2003?

-Ellos son agentes norteamericanos. Las FARC no los fueron a capturar en Washington, Nueva York, Texas o Boston, sino que los tomó prisioneros en territorio colombiano cuando hacían espionaje en nuestro país.

-El gobierno y Estados Unidos dicen que eran contratistas civiles...

-Esa es la gran mentira. Eran agentes que hacían espionaje en Colombia, violando nuestra soberanía, violando nuestra independencia. Pese a ello, los incluimos entre los canjeables y aspiramos a liberarlos una vez que sean liberados los camaradas Simón Trinidad y Sonia, presos en Estados Unidos y todos los guerrilleros y guerrilleras que tenemos en las cárceles de Colombia.

-¿Por qué toman como rehenes a empresarios?

-No. ¿Cuáles empresarios?

-¿No hay empresarios?

-Que yo conozca, no. Y si hay es porque ellos no han pagado el impuesto de nuestra Ley 02, que es un impuesto que cobran las FARC a los empresarios, que son los mismos que financian la guerra contra el pueblo colombiano. Hay muchos que pagan ese impuesto sin necesidad de hacerlos prisioneros y otros que no lo pagan. Y como no lo hacen entonces los hacemos prisioneros. Esos no están incluidos dentro del paquete de canjeables porque una vez que paguen la deuda con la organización quedan libres.

-¿Cuánto tienen que pagar?

-El 10 por ciento de las utilidades que obtengan cada año.

-Usted habló de Simón Trinidad y Sonia, presos en EE.UU. ¿Cree posible una negociación con Washington para canjear a ellos por los tres estadounidenses?

-Habría que ver en qué términos, pero nosotros no tendríamos problemas, en la medida en que se haga a través del gobierno colombiano. En definitiva, Uribe no es más que un empleado de ellos y hace lo que le mandan.

-¿No es un mito eso?

-No, eso es real.

-¿Cómo se manifiesta?

-Los mismos norteamericanos lo reconocen. Es una realidad que se expresa en que ellos saben perfectamente quién es Uribe y sin embargo lo apoyan a sabiendas de su pasado bastante oscuro de paramilitar, de narcotraficante. Lo apoyan a pesar de conocer el fraude que ha hecho siempre, la compra de votos, a pesar de conocer quiénes estuvieron en las listas con él y de dónde vienen sus votos. Y lo acompañan a pesar de las mentiras que les dice diariamente con supuestos triunfos que no tiene. Le han dado mucho dinero para el Plan Colombia, y no les ha podido mostrar los resultados que se comprometió a entregarles. El les ofreció acabar con las FARC muy rápido en su primer gobierno, se comprometió también a rescatar a sus prisioneros sin necesidad del acuerdo. Tampoco lo logró.

-Nunca quedó claro cómo murieron el 18 de junio los 11 diputados en poder de las FARC ¿Qué pasó realmente?

-Dijimos que una fuerza no determinada causó la muerte de los diputados. Hasta hoy no hemos podido identificar qué ocurrió.

-¿Por que?

-Porque en la región donde estaban los 11 diputados hay confrontación permanente, porque hay todo tipo de fuerzas, como el ejército oficial, la policía, los paramilitares al servicio del Estado, bandas de delincuentes armadas por los narcotraficantes. Por eso las FARC no quisieron aventurarse a responsabilizar a ninguna fuerza de ese lamentable suceso.

-El gobierno dice que ustedes los asesinaron.

-Eso no es cierto. Es parte de la campaña mediática.

-¿Pero no hay responsabilidad en las FARC? Porque ustedes tienen la responsabilidad por la vida de los rehenes.

-Claro que hubo fallas en la seguridad. Hubo fallas de nuestra gente, que tenía la responsabilidad de cuidar a los prisioneros.

Copyright 1996-2007 Clarín.com - All rights reserved

http://www.clarin.com/suplementos/zona/2007/08/26/z-03215.htm

Clarín: "Las FARC podrían participar
en una administración socialdemócrata"

COLOMBIA/ ENTREVISTA AL SEGUNDO JEFE DE LAS FARC/II PARTE | REPORTAJE EXCLUSIVO A RAUL REYES

El Nº2 de la guerrilla dijo que aceptarían integrar un gobierno que no fuera socialista.

Pablo Biffi
27.08.2007 | Clarin.com

El "comandante" y número dos de la guerrilla colombiana de las FARC, Raúl Reyes, dijo a Clarín que ellos podrían participar de un gobierno de corte progresista o socialdemócrata, que ayude a poner fin a la guerra de casi 50 años que azota a Colombia. En esta segunda parte de una extensa entrevista -la primera entrega fue publicada ayer-, Reyes también elogió los procesos políticos en Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia y Argentina. Sobre el presidente Néstor Kirchner dijo que "vemos en su gobierno un avance sustancial, luego de la debacle en que se encontraba ese pueblo por el neoliberalismo de Carlos Saúl Menem". -¿Por qué las FARC no tienen en este momento un brazo político público?

-Porque la asesinan, la masacran, como hizo el Estado con la Unión Patriótica en los años 80. La UP fue creada por las FARC y ahí están los registros de cerca de 5.000 asesinados. Nosotros hoy tenemos organizaciones políticas en la clandestinidad. Es el Movimiento Bolivariano por la Nueva Colombia, que tiene presencia en todo el país. Y fuera de esa organización, tenemos el Partido Comunista clandestino, un partido que como su nombre lo indica, no aparece por ningún lado.

-¿Cuál es la valoración que ustedes hacen de los nuevos gobiernos de América latina?

-Nos merecen respeto y admiración por sus pueblos, porque lo que han hecho es demostrar su inconformidad con los gobiernos anteriores, con las políticas neoliberales. En el caso de Venezuela vemos a un gobierno revolucionario, que quiere llegar al socialismo, un gobierno apoyado por la inmensa mayoría, que también dispone de muchísimos recursos y que sabe administrar bien. Todavía le falta desarrollar mucho a favor de su pueblo, eso es cierto, y seguro que pensando en eso es que Chávez considera vital continuar muchos mas años dentro del gobierno. De igual modo vemos con mucha simpatía los procesos de Ecuador con Rafael Correa y de Bolivia con Evo Morales.

-¿Y cómo ven el gobierno de Kirchner en Argentina?

-Vemos también un avance sustancial, luego de la debacle en que se encontraba ese pueblo, producto de la crisis económica, producto de los desastres de gobiernos anteriores, sobre todo del señor Carlos Menem. Hoy ya se ha superado bastante esa parte, se ha logrado incursionar en la comunidad internacional, generar confianza y de alguna manera se beneficia el pueblo argentino.

-¿Siguen creyendo que pueden tomar el poder? No se ve un avance de parte de ustedes.

-Tenemos toda la confianza de que podemos llegar al poder, pero ante todo nos proponemos conseguir en Colombia una apertura que tiene que darse mediante la conformación de un nuevo gobierno que quiera la paz con justicia social. Y para eso señalamos la necesidad de un gobierno pluralista, patriótico, democrático, que se comprometa con la paz, con la defensa de la soberanía, con la independencia, que no extraditen más colombianos, que respeten la dignidad de nuestro pueblo.

-Todas esas características podrían ser las de un gobierno apenas progresista ¿Si hubiera un gobierno de esa naturaleza en Colombia las FARC dejarían de tener razón de ser?

-Nosotros exigimos la renuncia del gobierno de Uribe por ilegítimo, por corrupto, por ser el responsable de la narco-parapolítica. Y hemos pensado que debe ser reemplazado por una coalición para conformar un gobierno pluralista, patriótico y democrático, que se comprometa con la verdadera paz. Un gobierno así puede servir también en Colombia, como por ejemplo un gobierno del Polo Democrático Alternativo.

-Pero el Polo es un partido socialdemócrata.

- Sí, pero con una fuerza política de masas, de multitudes, con un programa que de verdad reivindique y dignifique al pueblo colombiano. En ese caso las FARC estarían en condiciones de contribuir en eso, porque nosotros no estamos en la guerra por la guerra. Pensamos que si con un gobierno de estos se pueden abrir espacios de participación que beneficien a la población, pues ése es uno de los objetivos que tenemos.

-¿Pero me está hablando de un gobierno socialdemócrata?

-Sí.

-Pero ustedes son marxistas-leninistas.

-Claro, pero no por ser marxistas-leninistas nos vamos a oponer a que el pueblo viva mejor, porque nosotros lo que queremos es que haya avances en ese objetivo, a sabiendas de que ésa no es la solución definitiva. Pero es un paso importante que puede conducir a soluciones definitorias que tienen que llevarnos a la construcción del socialismo.

-¿Y qué es el socialismo para las FARC?

-Debe eliminar la explotación del hombre por el hombre, poner al servicio del pueblo y de las mayorías toda su riqueza, sus medios de producción, de desarrollo, de tal manera que la población en general, pueda beneficiarse de esa construcción. El socialismo debe garantizarle a la población el derecho a la vida, al trabajo, a la salud, a la educación, a la vivienda.

-El gobierno acusa a las FARC de ser el mayor cartel de la droga de Colombia ¿Cuál es el vínculo de las FARC con el narcotráfico?

-Un gobierno como el actual no tiene ninguna autoridad para señalar de esa manera a una organización revolucionaria.

-¿Pero no tienen ningún vínculo con el narcotráfico?

-No tenemos ningún vínculo con el narcotráfico. Somos una organización revolucionaria, no delincuentes comunes ni terroristas.

-¿No les cobran "impuestos" a los narcos?

-Sí, cobramos impuestos al intermediario.

-¿Pero no es de alguna manera alimentar el negocio del narcotráfico? Ustedes le brindan protección, por ejemplo, al campesino que planta hoja de coca.

-Ninguna. Eso no es cierto. Las FARC son pueblo y contribuyen con los campesinos en organizarlos, en orientarlos. Nuestra organización no es policía para ir a perseguir a los campesinos porque siembran coca.

-Pero se dice que el dinero y las armas que ustedes disponen es producto del narcotráfico.

-Esas son las falacias de las que habla el régimen.

-¿Y cómo se financian?

-Las FARC se financian de los impuestos que cobra a los empresarios y recibimos ayudas voluntarias de muchos amigos. Pero además las FARC siembran, cultivan plátano, yuca, maíz, arroz, de todo, también tiene criaderos de cerdos, de aves, de ganado, de peces.

-¿No es extorsión el secuestro de empresarios para cobrarles?

-No, porque ellos pagan el impuesto para la guerra del Estado. Y si pagan nuestro impuesto, no los retenemos, se van a sus casas.

-Esta guerra deja miles de muertos. ¿Tienen sentido tantas víctimas por un objetivo político?

-Nosotros no iniciamos la guerra. Una elite avara y opresora nos forzó a ella. Pero el caso colombiano no es el único en el que la guerra llevó a tener sociedades más justas.

Copyright 1996-2007 Clarín.com - All rights reserved

http://www.clarin.com/diario/2007/08/27/elmundo/i-01915.htm

Guardian:
Russia to charge 10 over Politkovskaya murder

Luke Harding in Moscow
Monday August 27, 2007

Prosecutors have arrested 10 people and will soon charge them in connection with the killing of the Russian investigative reporter Anna Politkovskaya, authorities said today.

"We have made serious progress in the Politkovskaya murder investigation," the prosecutor general, Yuri Chaika, was quoted by the Itar-Tass news agency as saying.

"Ten people have been arrested in connection with this case and literally, in the very near future, they will be charged with carrying out this grave crime," he said.

The prosecutor told Vladimir Putin about the arrests during a meeting at the president's dacha just outside Moscow.

Politkovskaya's murder in October last year drew widespread international condemnation and prompted concern about press freedoms and the treatment of government opponents in Russia. She was a particularly fierce critic of human rights abuses in the Chechnya war.

Her last incomplete article, published last October, contained allegations of torture by pro-Russian Chechen security forces. Her newspaper, Noveya Gazeta, carried eyewitness accounts and photos of people with injuries said to have been sustained under torture.

Politkovskaya's colleagues from Noveya Gazeta cautiously welcomed the 10 arrests. Vyacheslav Izmailov, a friend and columnist on the paper, said few details of the arrests had been made public.

But he confirmed that the trail appeared to lead to Chechnya. "It's a very complicated case because it involves both those who ordered the murder and those who carried it out. There are Chechens (among those arrested). But not only Chechens," he told the Guardian.

Asked whether those arrested had definitely carried out her killing last October, he replied: "I don't know."

Dmitry Muratov, Noveya Gazeta's editor in chief, said the paper had been satisfied with the level of cooperation from Russian authorities since the murder last year. Asked about the arrests, he said: "I think this is serious. But I can't say more at the moment."

The suspects were arrested between August 15 and 23, he said. "There is no more information we can give at the moment, other to say that people have been arrested and that they include people from different nationalities. Right now they are under active investigation."

Mr Putin has said everything possible would be done to find and punish the killers of Politkovskaya, who was 48 when she was shot dead in the stairwell of her Moscow apartment.

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007

http://www.guardian.co.uk/russia/article/0,,2157067,00.html

Jeune Afrique:
Bilan globalement positif pour Lansana Kouyaté

GUINÉE - 26 août 2007 - par AFP

Le Premier ministre guinéen Lansana Kouyaté, nommé pour faire taire une vague de contestation, a réalisé des avancées, notamment pour améliorer la vie quotidienne des Guinéens même si, selon des observateurs, la mise en oeuvre des réformes s'avère plus longue que prévue.

Au terme d'un premier semestre à la tête du gouvernement, le Premier ministre a revendiqué un bilan "positif", estimant toutefois qu'il faut "aller plus loin", dans un entretien récemment accordé à l'AFP.

La société civile reconnaît dans son ensemble un certain mérite à M. Kouyaté, même si certains regrettent la lenteur accusée par les réformes censées réformer le système guinéen.

"Il était venu pour redresser une situation économique sérieusement affectée par des années de pillage et de gaspillage avec des hommes et des femmes neufs, mais, jusqu'à présent, il n'a pas réussi à faire changer le système dans l'administration, même s'il a fait partir les anciens barons, ministres, gouverneurs et autres préfets", assure Ibrahima Diakité, membre du bureau exécutif du Conseil national des organisations de la société civile (CNOSC).

Au terme d'une contestation populaire durement réprimée qui avait fait au moins 137 morts en janvier-février, M. Kouyaté avait été choisi par le président Lansana Conté sur proposition des syndicats pour occuper cette fonction remplie par le chef de l'Etat depuis l'indépendance (1958).

Diplomate réputé, M. Kouyaté a formé fin mars un gouvernement de technocrates issus de la société civile qui s'est donné pour principal objectif de renouer avec la bonne gouvernance.

Fin juillet, le Fonds monétaire international (FMI) a salué les politiques menées par le nouveau gouvernement et les partenaires internationaux du pays ont dégagé 90 millions de dollars au programme d'urgence portant notamment sur la sécurité, l'eau, l'assainissement et la sécurité alimentaire.

Parmi ses réalisations, le Premier ministre souligne que le pays traverse une période de soudure (de juillet à septembre, ndlr) sans pénuries de vivres ni hausses des produits de premières nécessité, qui avaient provoqué des crises sociales récurrentes pendant cette délicate période depuis 2002.

Selon lui, les services de base, notamment l'eau et l'électricité sont en train d'être rétablis dans des zones qui en ont été privés depuis des dizaines d'années.

M. Kouyaté, affirme notamment avoir rétabli tous les groupes électrogènes défaillants de Conakry afin d'assurer un minimum de distribution d'électricité sur la capitale et ses environs, en proie à des délestages quasi-permanents depuis plusieurs années.

"Pour l'eau (...) nous en sommes au stade des mutations" et le service minimum n'est pas encore assuré, a expliqué le Premier ministre, qui a par ailleurs entamé une révision des contrats miniers conclus par les anciennes autorités dans ce pays au sous-sol très riche.

Pour un responsable syndical interrogé sous couvert de l'anonymat, le nouveau gouvernement a progressivement réussi à "imprimer sa marque".

"Le nouveau gouvernement est le plus transparent que nous ayons connu depuis 20 ans", assure-t-il.

Pour Mme Ramata Bah, chef d'entreprise, le retard pris par certaines actions du gouvernement est essentiellement attribuable au chef de l'Etat, qui tarde à contresigner les décrets gouvernementaux.

"Tous les projets de décret qu'il a soumis au chef de l'Etat traînent des mois et des mois avant d'être soit renvoyés ou soumis à une censure pour ne pas dire à un charcutage en règle", affirme-t-elle.

http://www.jeuneafrique.com/jeune_afrique/article_
depeche.asp?art_cle=AFP42037bilantayuok0#

Mail & Guardian:
Wave of attacks launched in Mogadishu

Mustafa Haji Abdinur | Mogadishu, Somalia
26 August 2007

A wave of attacks killed a civilian and wounded five others in the Somali capital on Saturday, witnesses said, as Islamists vowed to wage a stronger insurgency to drive Ethiopian forces out.

A gunman killed a local telecom employee in volatile Bakara market, said Salad Ali, the worker's colleague, of latest in a wave of indiscriminate attacks that have convulsed the seaside city of Mogadishu.

Separately, two grenade explosions targeting a police patrol wounded five people, including an officer, near Holwadag police station, witness Mohamed Sheikh Jellow said.

Insurgents overnight fired grenades at the Hotel Lafweyn where Somali National Reconciliation Congress delegates are staying, injuring two, said police spokesperson Abduwahid Mohamed. "They suffered small injuries, but police are investigating the incident," Mohamed told reporters.

Delegate Mohamud Haji Mohamed, who was at the hotel, said one grenade exploded inside the hotel while the rest detonated outside.

Meanwhile, Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, chief of the Union of Islamic Courts, said insurgents will step up their fight until all Ethiopian forces deployed in Mogadishu to bolster the feeble government are withdrawn. "They will be pushed out from Somalia and we will take back our freedom by force ... Until we get that point, we will continue the fighting," Ahmed said in the Eritrean capital, Asmara, the base of the Somali government foes.

The Mogadishu hotel attack came a week after insurgents killed Moalim Harun, a respected Somali elder participating in the laborious government-sponsored peace parley. Although the process is getting international backing, it has been boycotted by the top Islamist militants and a large part of the capital's dominant Hawiye clan.

Instead, there are separate talks in Asmara on September 1, an event that analysts warn will further polarise efforts to normalise the poor nation of 10-million.

Although Ahmed urged the United Nations and Western powers to support his initiative, he renewed salvos against the United States, which backed Ethiopia in its moves to drive Islamists from much of south and central Somalia early 2007, ending their six-month rule.

"The US is a large government, but they are supporting Ethiopia, supporting the dictator [Ethiopian Prime Minister] Meles Zenawi, who is killing our people.

"Instead, we appeal to European countries, to the US, to the UN, to support us," he said, acknowledging Washington's influence in peacemaking.

Mogadishu -- the epicentre of violence -- had experienced a brief relative respite following a tough security crackdown coinciding with the July 15 opening of the talks. The fitful talks have barely made progress despite backing from the West, whose intelligence agencies fear that an unstable Somalia could be a safe haven for terrorists.

Since the Ethiopian-Somali alliance wrested back control of Mogadishu in April, the Islamist-led insurgency has reverted to guerrilla-style tactics, launching daily attacks against government targets.

Eritrea, accused by the UN of arming the Islamists, blamed the Somali chaos on Washington's flawed policy of backing Addis Ababa. "Invasion and repression always give rise to opposition, and thus the current instability in Somalia is a direct consequence of the US's misguided polices," said an editorial in the Profile newspaper, Asmara's mouthpiece.

Somalia, wounded by its long colonial past, was throttled after the 1960 liberation from the British and the Italians by years of a devastating civil war, leading to the 1991 ouster of dictator Mohamed Siad Barre. This touched off a bloody power struggle that has defied numerous peace initiatives, effectively cementing Somalia as an archetypal "failed state", and prompted botched military and humanitarian intervention by the UN and the US in the early 1990s.

Overnight on Thursday, eight people were killed in Mogadishu after intense fighting, the latest in a string of fatalities in the bloody contest for the capital.

The countryside, which has been relatively calm, has seen a surge of interclan anarchy over access to dwindling water and pasture land, with the latest clash last week killing 20 people in central Somalia.

A combined Somalia-Ethiopia forces and at least 1 500 African Union peacekeepers have failed the stem the bloodletting in Mogadishu. Several African nations that pledged to contribute peacekeepers have balked in the face of the escalating insurgency.

Sapa-AFP

http://www.mg.co.za/articlepage.aspx?area=/breaking_
news/breaking_news__africa/&articleid=317534#

Página/12:
“Al héroe lo define la gente que lo rodea”

ALEIDA GUEVARA, HIJA DEL CHE

“La heroicidad está también en no creerte que eres un héroe, ni siquiera que eres alguien importante”, afirmó a Página/12 Aleida Guevara al recordar a su padre, el Che Guevara. “Mi papá era argentino, era un hombre que nunca olvidó tampoco sus raíces”, señaló.

Por Oscar Ranzani
Lunes, 27 de Agosto de 2007

–Si bien usted era muy chica cuando falleció su papá, pero por lo que pudo reconstruir o por lo que le contó su madre, ¿cómo era Ernesto Guevara como ser humano frente a la imagen más conocida de líder revolucionario? ¿Esos dos aspectos eran indisociables?

–Completamente indisociables. Es decir, para ser el revolucionario que fue tenía que ser un hombre con gran capacidad para amar, un hombre además romántico. Si tú no tienes esa capacidad de entrega, esa capacidad de sensibilidad humana no puedes arriesgar tu vida por un ideal, es muy difícil. Mi papá era un hombre muy consecuente, un hombre muy honesto. Antes de exigirle algo a alguien se lo exigía a sí mismo y ésa fue la norma de su vida siempre. Por supuesto que, en ese sentido, desarrolla toda una perspectiva humana extraordinaria en el trato con otras personas. Podía ser muy exigente como jefe militar pero siempre muy humano, muy justo. Y sus subordinados de muchos años, aun de la guerrilla y de cuando era ministro de Industria, lo recuerdan muchísimo con un cariño extraordinario. A mí me gusta compartir con ellos porque aprendo cada día algo de esa etapa que yo casi no viví. Y es lindo que muchos años después cuando un hombre ha desaparecido físicamente sus compañeros se reúnen el mismo día que cayó en combate para hacer un trabajo voluntario en su honor. Y al final de la jornada de trabajo recuerdan alguna anécdota de las que vivieron juntos. Y así me voy nutriendo de esa parte de mi papá que apenas conocí.

–Se cuenta que su papá estaba dispuesto siempre a realizar la misión más peligrosa y que eso generaba admiración entre sus compañeros...

–Yo pienso que la heroicidad es mucho más. La heroicidad es todo el conjunto humano en sí, es el no creerte que eres un héroe, el no creerte siquiera que eres un ser importante. Eso es más heroico todavía. Si cuando tú dedicas y entregas lo mejor de tu vida a una causa, sin creerte por ello ser merecedor de algo especial, eso te hace un héroe.

–El héroe no se autodefine.

–No, al héroe lo define la gente que está a su alrededor. Y es algo que mi papá dijo hace muchos años y que a mí siempre me ha gustado mucho: es preferible hacerte seguir que no tener que empujar. Y para realizar eso es necesario ser íntegro, ser consecuente contigo mismo. Y eso es algo que mi papá hizo todo el tiempo.

–El hecho de que Ernesto Guevara dejara a sus familiares por un ideal profundo, ¿le despertó una especie de molestia por no poder disfrutarlo usted?

–Cualquier hijo quiere tener cerca a su papá. Eso es una reacción humana y nosotros somos humanos. Pero cuando tú vas conociendo a la persona, cuando tú vas respetándola y admirándola, empiezas a amar a esa persona y la amas tal como es. La empiezas a entender también. Entonces, te das cuenta que quizás para él también fue un gran sacrificio tener que perderse el crecimiento de sus hijos, el convivir día a día con ellos, verlos florecer como seres humanos. Esto pudo haber sido muy duro para él también. Y, de alguna manera, piensas que hay cosas mucho más importantes todavía. Hay tantas cosas que hay que hacer en el mundo, hay tantas necesidades que hay alrededor nuestro que uno dice: ¿cómo empiezo?, ¿qué hago? Y él sabía qué podía hacer y lo hizo. Entonces, a ese tipo de hombre tú lo puedes añorar como papá pero, a la vez, sientes tanta admiración que tu papá haya sido un hombre así, que te compensa.

–¿Cómo recuerda el momento en que llegó a interesarse por la lucha de su padre? ¿Qué fue lo que más la motivó a conocerlo como hombre político a la distancia?

–Yo siempre lo conocí como un hombre muy humano y mi mamá me lo acercó todos los días. Mamá no hablaba de él así: “Si tu papá estuviera haría...” No, no. Nunca usó ese mecanismo. De pronto, como si no viniera al caso, ella hablaba de mi papá y dejaba caer algo con todo el peso de la verdad con relación a la actitud de mi papá ante la vida. O nos contaba algo que había pasado en un momento determinado. Y de alguna forma, ella fue sembrando ese respeto y esa admiración a él como hombre. Mamá lo amó extraordinariamente. Lo notas a través de cartas, de fotos, de mirarla a ella cuando habla sobre él. Hay un amor profundo que no pudo borrarse nunca. Entonces, ella fue capaz de llevar ese amor a sus hijos, de educarnos así, de forjarnos así. Pero ella tuvo una gran responsabilidad porque quedó educando a muchachos muy pequeñitos sola pero también quiso que fueran hijos dignos de su papá y que si él estuviera vivo se sintiera orgulloso de sus hijos. Entonces, mi mamá asumió una responsabilidad tremenda, un compromiso moral con mi papá muy grande. Ella fue la que más sufrió todas estas cosas. Si nosotros teníamos un fracaso en la escuela, ella se sentía responsable. Si teníamos una indisciplina, ella se sentía responsable. Es decir, ella quería educar a sus hijos de forma tal que el hombre que no pudo hacerlo físicamente, si estuviera presente, estuviese complacido. Yo creo que mi mamá hizo un trabajo útil porque nosotros somos cuatro hermanos y los cuatro estamos integrados al proceso revolucionario cubano; de una u otra manera pero todos estamos dentro del proceso revolucionario y todos trabajamos junto al pueblo cubano. Y mi papá dijo que él no quería que sus hijos fueran nadie especial, él quería que sus hijos fueran dignos del pueblo donde vivía. Entonces, esto nos da la posibilidad también de cumplir con él. Es decir, no nos exigió mucho más de lo que nosotros podíamos dar como seres humanos: simplemente ser consecuente con tu gente, ser solidaria. Y eso uno lo va mamando desde que nace porque lo vas viendo en tu mamá, en la gente que está a tu alrededor, cómo se comporta con los demás, cómo actúa, cómo era mi mamá, por ejemplo, con sus padres. Eso lo vas aprendiendo desde el primer momento, y después lo vas integrando a tu propia vida, con mayor o menor grado, depende de tu personalidad. La cosa más importante es que cuando ella creyó que nosotros teníamos edad suficiente, comenzó a darnos poco a poco dosis del comandante, dosis del ministro, dosis del economista. Poco a poco ella fue poniendo en nuestras manos escritos de él, documentos, notas de viaje. Entonces, yo me fui identificando con ese papá mío. Y en ese sentido, lo fui aprendiendo a conocer.

–El Che decía que para ser revolucionario lo primero que había que hacer era una revolución. Es decir, que de nada servía el esfuerzo aislado, individual si se hacía solitariamente. Hablaba en relación con la necesidad de que todo un pueblo se movilizara. ¿Cómo piensa esta idea cuando cada vez más gente está desinteresada de la política?

–Una de las cosas que decíamos en distintas actividades con distintos compañeros es que yo no puedo dar una receta a ningún pueblo del mundo de cómo resolver sus problemas. No puedo porque yo no vivo esa realidad. Por lo tanto, sería una falta de respeto de mi parte. Lo único que yo puedo decir es lo que yo he vivido. Para que Cuba sobreviva a esa presión de Estados Unidos, lo único que nos posibilitó eso fue la unidad del pueblo cubano. Cuando un pueblo se une no hay fuerza capaz de detenerlo. Pero eso sí: tiene que tener claros sus objetivos y tiene que olvidarse del “yo”. Ahora, lo que vale es el “nosotros”. Y eso puede ser que la gente no lo acabe de entender. Pero hasta que no lo entienda como algo intrínseco no podremos seguir adelante porque nos van a comprar, nos van a dividir, nos van a utilizar y perdemos la fuerza como pueblo. Por lo tanto, la unidad es fundamental: el olvidarse de tus cosas personales y buscar un objetivo común para todos. ¿Cómo lo vas a lograr? Eso yo se los dejo a ustedes. Tienen que ser ustedes los que lo decidan: qué camino tomar. Pero eso sí, sin apoyo del pueblo, no hay posibilidades de triunfo.

–¿Por qué el Che siempre renunció al poder?

–El problema no es renunciar al poder. El problema es continuar caminando. Fidel no pudo salirse de Cuba, tenía una gran responsabilidad sobre sus hombros y, por lo tanto, tiene esa presión sobre él. El Che cuando habla con Fidel en México, lo primero que le dice es: “Si yo sobrevivo a la batalla de Cuba, debo estar libre, entonces, para seguir mi camino”. Y mi papá era argentino, era un hombre que nunca olvidó tampoco sus raíces. El se identificó con el pueblo cubano, él se sentía hijo del pueblo cubano pero nunca olvidó sus orígenes. ¿Y qué haces entonces? ¿Te quedas allá en otro pueblo cuando ves al tuyo sufrir, cuando ves que hay necesidades y que tú puedes hacer algo como ser humano por ese pueblo? ¿Qué harías tú? Es lo que hizo él. Es decir, hizo lo que creía que tenía que hacer. No es un problema de poder, es un problema de necesidad. Es un problema de hacer algo más que tú sabes que todavía tiene fuerza, energía para hacerse. Y eso es lo que intentó hacer.

–¿Cuál es el recuerdo de su padre si tuviera que hablar de la solidaridad?

–Yo siempre digo que lo más importante de mi papá era su gran capacidad para amar. Eso es lo que hace de él un hombre muy especial. No tenía miedo a expresar sentimientos. No tenía ningún temor, ningún problema. Decía lo que sentía y él practicaba lo que decía. Fue un hombre muy consecuente y un hombre que puede convertirse en un símbolo de verdad para ser imitado por muchísimos hombres y mujeres en este mundo.

–¿Se puede pensar a la Revolución Cubana como un acontecimiento histórico que tuvo dos etapas absolutamente diferentes, es decir, la de la acción armada al 1º de enero de 1959 y la de la transformación política, económica y social de ahí en adelante?

–No, yo no creo que sean dos etapas diferentes sino la continuidad, es el crecimiento lógico. Piensa en un niño chiquito. ¿Dices hay dos etapas en un ser humano cuando está gateando y cuando comienza a caminar? Son etapas lógicas del desarrollo de una persona. Bueno, eso es lo que ocurre en un proceso revolucionario: se toma el poder y después viene la maduración de ese poder que es el proceso más difícil. Porque tomar el poder con un poco de fuerza y unidad se logra, pero mantenerlo, desarrollarlo y perfeccionarlo, ésa es una tarea de titanes, de verdad. Y más en las condiciones en que vivimos nosotros, los pueblos llamados del Tercer Mundo. Entonces, no hay etapas diferentes, en ese sentido. Lo que hay es una continuidad de crecimiento, de perfeccionamiento de un proceso revolucionario que todavía tiene que seguir perfeccionándose y todavía tiene que seguir creciendo.

–¿Y cómo viven las nuevas generaciones la Revolución y el futuro sin la presencia física de Fidel?

–Igual que lo estamos viviendo ahora. Es decir, Fidel es indiscutiblemente uno de los hombres más lindos de la historia cubana pero yo digo que quizás podría ser catalogado como el resumen de lo mejor del pueblo cubano. Pero del pueblo cubano. No es extraterrestre. Es el fruto de ese pueblo. Y sin ese pueblo, Fidel Castro no hubiera podido llegar a ser lo que hoy es, el estratega que hoy es. Sin el apoyo indiscutible de su pueblo la Revolución Cubana no hubiera podido triunfar y muchos menos perfeccionarse. Entonces, ustedes tienen que aprender a ver al pueblo cubano. Que su guía realmente es Fidel, nadie lo discute. Que es un hombre excepcional, soy incapaz de negarlo. Para mí es uno de los mejores hombres que he conocido en mi vida. Lo quiero muchísimo también como un padre. Pero yo conozco a mi pueblo. Y mi pueblo, una de las cosas más lindas que tiene es que sabe agradecer. Es un pueblo que tuvo la oportunidad de vivir de una forma diferente cuando Fidel y sus compañeros llegaron al poder. A partir de ese momento, la vida del pueblo cubano cambia. Voy a dar datos muy fríos pero rápido: en 1959 al iniciarse la Revolución, Cuba tenía una mortalidad infantil de 60 por mil nacidos vivos. Hoy tiene 5,1. En 1959, Cuba tenía un 33 % de analfabetismo total y hasta un 60 % de analfabetismo medio. Hoy no hay analfabetos en Cuba. Y tenemos 25 mil profesionales de la salud cubana trabajando en Venezuela y otros tantos trabajando por todo el mundo, cada vez que es necesario. Más del 60 % de la población cubana está estudiando ya nivel preuniversitario. Tenemos, por ejemplo, el derecho de las mujeres que antes eran explotadas por ser mujeres y pobres, doblemente por ser mujeres. Hoy más del 60 % de la fuerza intelectual de Cuba, de profesionales cubanos, somos mujeres. Veinte mil hectáreas de la mejor tierra cubana pertenecían a Estados Unidos. Hoy la tierra cubana no se negocia. Es propiedad indiscutible del pueblo cubano, única y exclusivamente. La Banca Nacional Cubana pertenecía a Estados Unidos y hoy es nuestra. Es decir, son cosas que te das cuenta que cambiaron totalmente, radicalmente la forma de vivir de ese pueblo. Que tenemos carencias, es cierto. Nadie puede negarlas. Pero no son carencias fundamentales.

–¿Cuáles considera que fueron los aportes fundamentales de la Revolución Cubana a los movimientos revolucionarios de América latina?

–La posibilidad de que sí se puede. Verlo ahí en la práctica. ¿Qué nos diferencia a Cuba del resto de América latina? ¿Por qué Cuba puede tener una salud pública gratuita para todo el mundo? ¿Por qué Cuba puede tener una educación soberana, gratuita para todo el mundo? ¿Por qué? ¿Qué nos diferencia de los argentinos, por ejemplo? Lo único que nos diferencia es la sociedad socialista. No hay nada más. Entonces, yo no les puedo decir a los argentinos: “Ustedes tienen que hacer la sociedad socialista”. No puedo hacer eso. Pero yo les estoy mostrando es que así fue como Cuba resolvió sus problemas internos. Así es como Cuba es dueña de su territorio nacional, y nadie se lo vende, nadie se lo negocia. Es así como Cuba tiene posibilidades de ser dueña de los pocos recursos que tiene para invertirlos en beneficio de su propio pueblo y no que transnacionales te sigan desangrando como si fueras un cadáver expuesto a las aves de rapiña. ¿Entiendes? Yo no te puedo decir: “Mira, tienes que hacer esto”. No puedo hacer esto. Sólo te puedo mostrar lo que yo he logrado con mi proceso social y si eso te conviene, que puede ser una alternativa, para ti, pues ¡aleluya!

–El Che hablaba de que debían abrirse nuevos caminos que confluyeran a la identificación de los intereses comunes de los países subdesarrollados. ¿Cómo analiza, en ese sentido, los cambios que ha tenido Latinoamérica desde la muerte de su padre?

–Yo no hablo nunca de muerte, como si en un momento determinado se hubiese perdido algo irrecuperable. Y no es verdad. Ningún hombre es imprescindible. Ninguno. Por muy grande, por muy completo que sea. Entonces, empezamos a decir precisamente que los cambios de los pueblos tienen que estar basados, primero, en condiciones objetivas. Este es un momento especial para América latina, el que estamos viviendo hoy. Hay un desarrollo de distintos movimientos sociales dentro del continente que hacen como una efervescencia en la base de nosotros, de nuestros pueblos. Están los movimientos indígenas. Por primera vez, un presidente indígena toma el poder. Hay un cambio social importante en Venezuela, buscando alternativas como las del socialismo. Por primera vez ese pueblo es dueño de lo que produce. Está el Movimiento Sin Tierra en Brasil, un movimiento unificado, fuerte y digno. Hay movimientos que hacen que la base de esa sociedad capitalista que vive este continente, se empiece a tambalear y fuertemente. Entonces, yo pienso que cuando papi hablaba de la necesidad de que estos movimientos tomaran fuerza, está hablando de romper también las fronteras, de mirar los defectos que tenemos cada uno de nosotros, aprender de estos errores, no repetirlos, mejorar ese trabajo y, por primera vez, darnos cuenta que, de verdad, somos una gran familia latinoamericana.

–En un mundo globalizado donde el capitalismo no ha sido condenado con la misma fuerza que el socialismo, los caminos de cambio parecen poco claros...

–Primero, hay que abrir las entendederas. Van más de doscientos años de capitalismo, y no está resuelto el mayor problema de la humanidad: más del 80 por ciento de la población mundial vive en la pobreza. Entonces, ¿qué ha hecho el capitalismo por nosotros? Nada. Ha hecho cosas interesantes explotando los cerebros que se ha encontrado en distintas partes y dándole posibilidades económicas han florecido. Pero, para el resto de la humanidad, ¿qué ha hecho?, ¿qué ha resuelto? Cada día es peor la situación de nuestros pueblos. ¿Tú te imaginas que Argentina puede producir alimentos para nutrir prácticamente a un tercio de la humanidad y que haya niños argentinos muriendo de hambre en el norte de este país? Hombre, eso para mí es inadmisible. O Brasil, con esa tierra superfértil que tiene, con todos los climas, tiene fruta, tiene vegetales, tiene todos los alimentos; que haya un solo brasileño pasando necesidad es inadmisible. ¿Qué ha hecho el capitalismo realmente por nosotros en ese sentido? Solamente explotarnos, explotarnos y explotarnos. Que haya dos o tres familias, pongamos hasta veintipico de familias que vivan bien, ¿y los demás qué? ¿No contamos? ¿Qué somos? Pero nosotros tenemos que tomar conciencia de eso. Hasta que no tomemos conciencia de eso, no vamos a avanzar. Tenemos que empezar a unir nuestros intereses como pueblos rompiendo las fronteras que fueron impuestas muchas veces por un sistema colonial externo a nuestros propios pueblos. Martí decía que “el amor madre a la patria no es el amor ridículo a la tierra, ni a la hierba que pisan nuestras plantas; es el odio insensible a quien la oprime, es el rencor eterno a quien la ataca...” Y nosotros somos una gran Patria, desde el Río Bravo hasta la Patagonia. Todo un pueblo. ¿Cuándo nos vamos a unir? ¿Cuándo nos vamos a dar cuenta de esa necesidad y de esa fuerza que tenemos? Esa es la pregunta. Esa es la situación que tenemos que resolver.

–Volviendo al tema de las nuevas generaciones, ¿qué opinión le merece que haya chicos que usen remeras o prendedores de su padre y que no sepan de quién se trata? ¿Considera que el sistema capitalista lucra con el mito o que buscó absorberlo?

–Claro, es una política del sistema capitalista vender hasta su propia madre si es posible. Esto es lógico en ese sistema. Pero además, vaciar esa figura de contenido. Eso sería su sueño hecho realidad. Y es verdad que algunos muchachos no lo conocen pero también es verdad que muchos jóvenes sí lo conocen. Yo he tenido ejemplos que puedo mostrar. Por ejemplo, en una manifestación estudiantil en Portugal, un muchachito de doce o trece años aproximadamente iba con una bandera roja con la imagen de mi papá. Cuando un periodista le preguntó: “¿Tú qué haces con esa bandera?”, él dijo: “Porque al igual que el Che voy a luchar hasta la victoria siempre”. Y era un niño portugués. Entonces, de alguna manera, esta figura va entrando a la gente. Y si logramos que algunos de estos jóvenes que no saben quién es, se pregunten: ¿quién es?, ¿qué hizo?, ¿por qué lo tengo en la remera?, ya es un paso de avance.

–¿Qué sentía usted cuando Fidel referenciaba siempre en sus discursos el pensamiento de su padre?

–Que es lógico, es una cosa natural para nosotros porque ellos dos están siempre muy unidos como pensadores, como artífices de una revolución. Ellos van muy mezclados como personas. Y los dos tienen una gran cualidad: son hombres capaces de ver las cualidades de otro hombre. José Martí decía que el ser humano que ve las cosas lindas de otro ser humano es porque las lleva en sí mismo. Y yo creo que eso es verdad.

–¿Qué siente cuando vuelve a leer la carta de despedida que su padre les dejó a usted y a sus hermanos?

–Muchas veces después las he leído o los niños la leen para mí y no me conmueve como aquella primera vez que la escuché en la voz de mi mamá rota por el dolor. No es igual. Eso es un momento único en mi vida. Pero la carta me ha servido para guiarme en mi vida: “Sean capaces de sentir en lo más profundo la injusticia cometida contra cualquiera en cualquier parte del mundo. Es la cualidad más linda de un revolucionario”. Eso, para mí, es lo que me hace realmente vivir.

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

http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/dialogos/21-90356-2007-08-27.html

The Independent: Mia Farrow's
exclusive dispatch: I am a witness to Darfur's suffering

Published: 27 August 2007

My first visit to Darfur was in 2004. It changed the way I needed to live my life. I have just returned from my seventh trip to the region. I don't think I have the words to adequately represent what I have seen and heard there.

Incomprehensibly, it has now been more than four years since the killing began. Some experts believe half a million human beings have died thus far. Others bicker about the exact death toll - as if it makes a shred of difference to how we must respond.

Only the perpetrators dispute that hundreds of thousands of innocent men women and children have been killed, in ways that cannot be imagined or described. It is all the more appalling that we cannot know - that no one is yet able to count the dead. And the dying continues.

We can, however, know with certainty that more than four million people are dependent on food aid because their homes, villages, and the fields that sustained them, are ashes now. We also know that two and a half million human beings are struggling to exist amid deplorable conditions in squalid camps across Darfur and eastern Chad. I am a witness to their suffering.

The stories of those who survived the attacks are numbingly similar. Without warning, Antonov bombers and attack helicopters filled the morning skies and rained bombs upon homes and families as they slept, as they played, as they prayed, as they tended their fields. Those who could run tried to gather their children and fled in all directions.

Then the Janjaweed - government-backed Arab militia - attacked on horseback and on camels (and more recently in vehicles). They came shouting racial epithets and shooting. They shot the children as they ran, they shot the elderly.

I spoke to mothers whose babies were shot from their backs, or torn from their arms and bayoneted before their eyes, whose children were tossed into bonfires. I met men whose eyes were gouged out with knives. Strong women in frail voices described their gang rapes; some were abducted and assaulted continuously over many weeks.

"No one came to help me," they said, as they showed me the brandings carved into their bodies, and tendons sliced and how they hobble now.

"Tell people what is happening here" implored one victim, Halima. Three of her five children had been killed. "Tell them we will all die. Tell them we need help." I promised her I would do my best to tell the world what is happening there. In the years since 2004, over and over and over, in camp after camp, and deep in my heart I have made this promise.

In October, I will return to the region. People will tell me their stories and again will ask for protection. I will listen, I will take more photographs, and I will keep trying to tell the world what is happening there. The people of Darfur continue to plead for protection, and still no one has come. What does this say about us?

Last week, on the Chad-Darfur border, in a region where genocide is occurring now, we lit a symbolic Olympic flame. The flame honours all those who have been lost, and those who suffer; it celebrates the courage of those who have survived, and is a symbol of hope for an end to genocide everywhere.

We lit the flame again in Rwanda where the agony of survivors is palpable - and without end. We gathered strength from their strength.

In Kigali, survivors expressed their wish to join their spirits with ours as we take the flame to other communities of survivors: Cambodia, Armenia, Germany, Bosnia.

Today, I look at Rwanda and see the abysmal failure of the United Nations and of all the nations of the world. Collectively and individually, we failed in our most essential responsibility to protect the innocent from slaughter and suffering.

We look to world leaders and our own governments and see that they are mired in self-serving interests. What are we to do about this? I tell my children that "with knowledge comes responsibility." Yet our leaders do not reflect this at all.

Most of us do not want innocent people to be slaughtered. Most of us wish others well and hope for a world in which all people everywhere can be safe. Yet, in the face of power and politics, we tend to feel overwhelmed, so we step aside and attend to our own business. The future of the world, if there is to be a future, surely lies in humility and in human responsibility. Let us draw strength and courage from the survivors of genocide and conviction from the voices of the dead.

After the Nazi Holocaust, the world vowed "never again". How obscenely disingenuous those fine words sound today. As we look at Darfur and eastern Chad - a region that has been described as "Rwanda in slow motion" - are we to conclude that "never again" applies only to white people?

I hope that caring people of the world will band together and with one voice demand an end to the terrible crime of genocide.

For more information, go to www.miafarrow.org

From Hollywood to human rights

Born to Catholic parents in 1945, Mia Farrow followed her film director father and actress mother into the industry, appearing in a number of critically acclaimed movies. Over the course of her career she has won numerous awards including seven Golden Globes. Her very public marriages and divorces to Frank Sinatra and later Woody Allen, in whose films she regularly appeared during the 1980s, meant the Farrow family were rarely out of the media spotlight.

One of Hollywood's most prolific campaigners, she has been involved in activism since the 1970s when she became an advocate of adoption rights after adopting three children from south-east Asia with her second husband André Previn. She has since gone on to adopt 11 children. A childhood survivor of the post-war polio epidemics, she has also campaigned for the eradication of the disease which has paralysed one of her adopted children. After becoming a goodwill ambassador for Unicef, she has turned her attention towards Africa and in particular, raising awareness of the genocide in Darfur.

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/africa/article2898438.ece

The Times Picayune:
MORE THAN MEMORIES

Many of our local touchstones are back, and with them, a sense of comfort. But many may be gone for good, kept alive only in our thoughts.

By Frank Donze
Saturday, August 25, 2007

White linen napkins are lining the Camellia Grill counter in Riverbend and frozen mugs of beer are sliding across the bar at Liuzza's in Mid-City. Hubig's pies are baking again inside Faubourg Marigny ovens and the thoroughbreds are preparing for the traditional Thanksgiving opening at the Fair Grounds in Gentilly.

No, Hurricane Katrina didn't change everything. But two years after an epic event that took lives and leveled neighborhoods, aftershocks continue to rattle the collective psyche of a region that embraces custom, tradition and its odd sense of place.

The list of touchstones lost to the storm is long and growing longer.

Big Charity, the behemoth hospital on Tulane Avenue that's been a portal for birth and death for generations of New Orleanians, is shuttered and likely never to reopen. St. Frances Cabrini Church in Gentilly and the Plaza shopping center in the East are piles of rubble. Plantation Coffee House in Lakeview may have brewed its last pot and it looks like there will be no more catfish-and-potato-salad dinners served at Barrows in Hollygrove.

While the sight of empty buildings and vacant lots may pale in comparison to the visions of death and destruction that still haunt so many lives, each little faded memory can take its own special toll.

"Like all communities, we in New Orleans have a microscopic perception of culture," said Xavier University sociologist and pollster Silas Lee. "It's a way of living -- the food we eat, the institutions we're committed to, the people we're used to interacting with."

Lee said that "psychological and cultural infrastructure" was torn apart by Katrina, leaving an emotionally wounded population to ponder how much of what they regard as normal will return.

"Anyone who loses a component of their culture, it's like losing an immediate family member, a part of your soul, the essence of what makes your community. It's part of the spirit of a neighborhood."

Damage more than physical

Since its founding, New Orleans has been a city of neighborhoods.

In recognition of that history, City Hall has pledged to focus its recovery strategy on restoring commercial corridors where locals traditionally have gathered. One of the target areas is the intersection of Claiborne and St. Bernard avenues, where the flood-ravaged Circle Food Store sits dormant.

Community activist Barbara Major says she has mixed feelings about the news that the Circle might be restored.

"To me, that place is the people I knew -- my daughter's girlfriend who worked behind the meat counter, the police officer who knew everyone who came in the front door," she said. "I could always find my certain sausage, my thick-cut bacon, and it's gone. And even if it does come back, will it come back and be the Circle?"

For writer and part-time philosopher Ronnie Virgets, part of Katrina's lingering emotional damage is the disappearance of "places that make you feel part of a larger whole."

As examples, he cites St. Claude Avenue institutions like Mandich's Restaurant -- "the Galatoire's of the 9th Ward, if there is such a thing" -- and the funky St. Roch Market.

"Mandich's was a neighborhood joint that also was trying for sense of style, whether they captured it or not," Virgets said. "And then there's St. Roch, where you could get a po-boy and pick up a live turtle. It's was a kind of trapped-in-time place. I don't know if I ever saw a color photo of it. It just seemed like it ought to be photographed only in black and white."

Writer and magazine editor Errol Laborde laments the demise of the last of the seafood shacks in Bucktown and West End, two once-bustling areas that were on the ropes before Katrina threw the knock-out punch.

"I'll never forget the little shell road where Sid-Mar's was," he said. "I went there the week before the storm. I don't know if I was ever inside my whole life. I was always on that screened porch. What drew me was the smells, the sights of it, the glimpse of the lake."

Across the 17th Street Canal bridge was Brunings, which lost its original home to Hurricane Georges in 1998 and had relocated next door to a building that once housed Papa Roselli's restaurant, which Katrina washed away.

From that crossing, Laborde said, he often watched old men fishing and boys leaping into the water. "I used to joke that we and the pelicans were looking for the same thing -- a fish dinner," he said.

Laborde recalls a menu that was simple but elegant.

"Stuffed flounder on a bed of toast. Green salad, with a dollop of mayo on the side," he said. "But it wasn't just the food. It was the whole experience. And it's just gone."

Sounds of the city

Before the storm, a ragtag band of teens armed with trumpet, tuba, trombone and percussion would show up every weekday around 5 p.m. outside an office building at 1010 Common St., home to the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra's offices.

"You could set your watch by it. They would catch the going-home crowd," said Sharon Litwin, a top administrator for the LPO. "Twenty-one floors up, I could hear them as they cracked a note or busted a rhythm. Towards the end they were getting a little better, but sometimes it sounded like they were playing four different songs at once."

After two years of hard work, the symphony is almost back to full strength but still awaiting news on whether its home, the flood-ravaged Orpheum theater, will be restored. Even as she deals with the myriad needs of dozens of accomplished musicians, Litwin says she can't help but wonder what happened to the youngsters who capped so many of her days with off-key performances.

"I don't even know where they came from," she said. "What breaks my heart is I don't know where those kids are now. I'd venture a guess they haven't returned, but I would give anything to get them back because that's what the street band sound of New Orleans is all about."

As the lyricist and lead vocalist for "Ain't Dere No More," Benjamin Antin (a.k.a. Benny Grunch) is New Orleans' unofficial chronicler of vanished icons. From Schwegmann's to McKenzie's to A&G's cafeterias, Antin has taken on the role of oral historian, dedicated to preserving what Yats knew and loved and will never see again.

Antin, who has penned an updated version of his signature song called "Temporarily Ain't Dere No More (A Tale Of Two Cities -- Lakeview & St. Bernard)," says he sees a big difference between the treasures that have slipped away slowly over time and those that were washed away in an instant.

"When evolution takes something, you're a little bitter at first," he said. "Then the bitter wears off and you get used to it. Since the storm I feel like the bitter lasts a little longer.

"We all want to blame somebody. You ask yourself, 'Was is necessary? Did it have to be?' Even if it's your neighbor's house, it's like a little piece of you inside that's gone."

As personal examples, Antin cites the Bud's Broiler on City Park Avenue and the Lake Pontchartrain lighthouse at West End -- a structure he said "was there before I was born, so long that you didn't think anything could knock it over."

On the flip side, Antin said his spirits are occasionally lifted by little signs of normalcy, like the miniature locomotive that once again chugs around the perimeter of City Park.

"I don't know why, but when I hear that whistle blowing way off in the distance, it does me a lot of good," he said.

Deep-fried salvation

As Katrina's two-year anniversary draws near, photographer Harold Baquet says he is still adjusting to the seismic changes wracking his hometown.

"Man, the church you were baptized in -- that's something that's supposed to last as long as your face," he said. "And all of a sudden it's gone. Or maybe it's your alma mater that's gone. Or it's redefined and absorbed into a new structure.

"Cabrini. Gone. St. Theresa the Little Flower Church on the Palmetto Canal. They had a vibrant gospel choir in a vibrant neighborhood. A thriving community. And they're gone."

When the storm flooded out one of Baquet's favorite lunch spots, Dunbar's on Freret Street, he said the pain was visceral.

"I used to eat there with my back to everybody just to have my cholesterol moment -- just me and my fried chicken and my potato salad," he said. "Sitting down at Dunbar's took me back 20 years in my head and my heart."

But the story has a happy ending now that Celestine Dunbar has reopened on the Loyola University campus, where Baquet works.

"It's little things like this that help you make those connections. It's why you stay here," he said. "You can't get her fish or her chicken in Memphis or Alabama or Arkansas. To come back here, it's a nostalgic journey for me. It's my little renaissance."

Parades keep rolling

The passion that Arthur Hardy has for Carnival tradition is no secret. As publisher of the Mardi Gras Guide, he makes a living from the celebration and serves as its No. 1 cheerleader.

In those dark days right after the storm, Hardy often took part in discussions about whether the city should cancel the "Greatest Free Show on Earth." While the party in 2006 was a scaled-back version, the 2007 edition was the real deal.

In the end, Hardy said, it is remarkable that only about a half dozen krewes in the metropolitan area folded in Katrina's wake.

"I think we have a deeper appreciation for Mardi Gras in New Orleans after the storm," he said. "There were so many questions about the propriety of having a Mardi Gras, the ability to pull it off. Would there be enough people willing to do it, to spend the money?"

Hardy said the underlying message that emerged after the debate was that the event was not just about fun or economics "it's who we are."

"The choice that we made, the fact that we chose to celebrate rather than surrender, speaks volumes about the spirit of the people and the resilience of this city," he said. "Nobody made us do this, city government didn't do this, the citizens made this happen. And they sent a signal around the world that they might be crazy down in New Orleans, but they're strong and they're smart and you're not going to beat them down."

Defense attorney Mary Howell, who moved here from the rural town of Malden, Mo., 35 years ago to attend law school and never left, said the first time she heard a high school marching band perform after the storm, she got chills.

"They were practicing right before Mardi Gras last year. These were kids, at least some of them, who probably lost everything. And they were playing," she said. "It was extraordinary."

Howell had a similar reaction the first time she saw a tribe of Mardi Gras Indians strut their stuff in the spring of 2006, only months after the storm.

"There was such pride and determination," she said. "There weren't many of them. Some had only half their Indian dress. The other half had been destroyed. But whatever they had, they were in it. It made me think, you'd have to kill every person to wipe out the spark, that as long as there's a speck of life, this will continue.

"And it hit me right then and there, not to be so worried. These people will find their way back because these ties are deep."

Changes bring opportunity

Two years after the disaster, the scarred landscape continues to heal.

Weeks from now, the St. Charles Avenue streetcar is scheduled to roll again -- at least to Napoleon Avenue -- and the refurbished City Park carousel should be spinning to calliope music.

Dooky Chase's restaurant also is preparing to serve its signature gumbo soon.

But changes to the city's landscape remain all but certain.

With the Fairmont Hotel set to become a Waldorf-Astoria , it is still not known whether the new owners will resurrect the twinkling, angel-hair Christmas display that dazzled generations of New Orleanians. Meanwhile, Orleans Levee District officials faced with costly flood protection needs, are making no promises about when they'll be able to power up the Mardi Gras Fountain on the lakefront.

Asked recently about the life-altering changes wrought by the disaster, Mayor Ray Nagin referenced an analysis by a local Realtor who found that for every person leaving New Orleans after Katrina, the city gets two new arrivals, between the ages of 25 and 40.

Recognizing that the data is far from scientific, Nagin says he is nonetheless encouraged by reports that, more and more, young people are viewing the city as a land of opportunity.

That kind of demographic shift has the potential to match Katrina's negative transformation with a positive one, primarily by allowing new residents to put their stamp on old traditions and launch new ones, he said.

A case in point is one of his favorite eateries: Willie Mae's Scotch House, the award-winning fried chicken emporium in Treme that flooded during the storm and reopened in the spring.

While the restaurant's heart and soul, 91-year-old Willie Mae Seaton, is ill and may never return to her stove, a younger generation of Seaton's family is running the place. Nagin said the transition in the kitchen is a poignant example of the cycle of life that Katrina accelerated.

"It makes me think about the good times," he said. "Willie Mae is a special lady. I just remember it being a little bitty place. Depending upon when you went in there, the air conditioner may or may not be on. Miss Willie Mae would come out and call you 'baby' and kiss you.

". . . And you had to wait a long time. But the food was absolutely like I was sitting in my grandmother's kitchen. It was just spectacular."

Even as so many cultural identifiers fade into history, Nagin says he's hopeful that the influx of new blood will make the city a richer place.

"So, you know, somebody will replace (these things). And we'll get better."

. . . . . . .

Frank Donze can be reached at fdonze@timespicayune.com or (504) 826-3328.

http://www.nola.com/news/t-p/frontpage/index.ssf?/base/news-9/1188024487183440.xml&coll=1

ZNet | Foreign Policy
Cold War II

by Noam Chomsky; August 27, 2007

These are exciting days in Washington, as the government directs its energies to the demanding task of “containing Iran” in what Washington Post correspondent Robin Wright, joining others, calls “Cold War II.”[1]

During Cold War I, the task was to contain two awesome forces. The lesser and more moderate force was “an implacable enemy whose avowed objective is world domination by whatever means and at whatever cost.” Hence “if the United States is to survive,” it will have to adopt a “repugnant philosophy” and reject “acceptable norms of human conduct” and the “long-standing American concepts of `fair play’” that had been exhibited with such searing clarity in the conquest of the national territory, the Philippines, Haiti and other beneficiaries of “the idealistic new world bent on ending inhumanity,” as the newspaper of record describes our noble mission.[2] The judgments about the nature of the super-Hitler and the necessary response are those of General Jimmy Doolittle, in a critical assessment of the CIA commissioned by President Eisenhower in 1954. They are quite consistent with those of the Truman administration liberals, the “wise men” who were “present at the creation,” notoriously in NSC 68 but in fact quite consistently.

In the face of the Kremlin’s unbridled aggression in every corner of the world, it is perhaps understandable that the US resisted in defense of human values with a savage display of torture, terror, subversion and violence while doing “everything in its power to alter or abolish any regime not openly allied with America,” as Tim Weiner summarizes the doctrine of the Eisenhower administration in his recent history of the CIA.[3] And just as the Truman liberals easily matched their successors in fevered rhetoric about the implacable enemy and its campaign to rule the world, so did John F. Kennedy, who bitterly condemned the “monolithic and ruthless conspiracy,” and dismissed the proposal of its leader (Khrushchev) for sharp mutual cuts in offensive weaponry, then reacted to his unilateral implementation of these proposals with a huge military build-up. The Kennedy brothers also quickly surpassed Eisenhower in violence and terror, as they “unleashed covert action with an unprecedented intensity” (Wiener), doubling Eisenhower’s annual record of major CIA covert operations, with horrendous consequences worldwide, even a close brush with terminal nuclear war.[4]

But at least it was possible to deal with Russia, unlike the fiercer enemy, China. The more thoughtful scholars recognized that Russia was poised uneasily between civilization and barbarism. As Henry Kissinger later explained in his academic essays, only the West has undergone the Newtonian revolution and is therefore “deeply committed to the notion that the real world is external to the observer,” while the rest still believe “that the real world is almost completely internal to the observer,” the “basic division” that is “the deepest problem of the contemporary international order.” But Russia, unlike third word peasants who think that rain and sun are inside their heads, was perhaps coming to the realization that the world is not just a dream, Kissinger felt.

Not so the still more savage and bloodthirsty enemy, China, which for liberal Democrat intellectuals at various times rampaged as a “a Slavic Manchukuo,” a blind puppet of its Kremlin master, or a monster utterly unconstrained as it pursued its crazed campaign to crush the world in its tentacles, or whatever else circumstances demanded. The remarkable tale of doctrinal fanaticism from the 1940s to the ‘70s, which makes contemporary rhetoric seem rather moderate, is reviewed by James Peck in his highly revealing study of the national security culture, Washington’s China.

In later years, there were attempts to mimic the valiant deeds of the defenders of virtue from the two villainous global conquerors and their loyal slaves – for example, when the Gipper strapped on his cowboy boots and declared a National Emergency because Nicaraguan hordes were only two days from Harlingen Texas, though as he courageously informed the press, despite the tremendous odds “I refuse to give up. I remember a man named Winston Churchill who said, `Never give in. Never, never, never.’ So we won't.” With consequences that need not be reviewed.

Even with the best of efforts, however, the attempts never were able to recapture the glorious days of Cold War I. But now, at last, those heights might be within reach, as another implacable enemy bent on world conquest has arisen, which we must contain before it destroys us all: Iran.

Perhaps it's a lift to the spirits to be able to recover those heady Cold War days when at least there was a legitimate force to contain, however dubious the pretexts and disgraceful the means. But it is instructive to take a closer look at the contours of Cold War II as they are being designed by “the former Kremlinologists now running U.S. foreign policy, such as Rice and Gates” (Wright).

The task of containment is to establish “a bulwark against Iran’s growing influence in the Middle East,” Mark Mazzetti and Helene Cooper explain in the New York Times (July 31). To contain Iran’s influence we must surround Iran with US and NATO ground forces, along with massive naval deployments in the Persian Gulf and of course incomparable air power and weapons of mass destruction. And we must provide a huge flow of arms to what Condoleezza Rice calls “the forces of moderation and reform” in the region, the brutal tyrannies of Egypt and Saudi Arabia and, with particular munificence, Israel, by now virtually an adjunct of the militarized high-tech US economy. All to contain Iran’s influence. A daunting challenge indeed.

And daunting it is. In Iraq, Iranian support is welcomed by much of the majority Shi’ite population. In an August visit to Teheran, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki met with the supreme leader Ali Khamenei, President Ahmadinejad and other senior officials, and thanked Tehran for its “positive and constructive” role in improving security in Iraq, eliciting a sharp reprimand from President Bush, who “declares Teheran a regional peril and asserts the Iraqi leader must understand,” to quote the headline of the Los Angeles Times report on al-Maliki’s intellectual deficiencies. A few days before, also greatly to Bush’s discomfiture, Afghan President Hamid Karzai, Washington’s favorite, described Iran as “a helper and a solution” in his country.[5] Similar problems abound beyond Iran’s immediate neighbors. In Lebanon, according to polls, most Lebanese see Iranian-backed Hezbollah “as a legitimate force defending their country from Israel,” Wright reports. And in Palestine, Iranian-backed Hamas won a free election, eliciting savage punishment of the Palestinian population by the US and Israel for the crime of voting “the wrong way,” another episode in “democracy promotion.”

But no matter. The aim of US militancy and the arms flow to the moderates is to counter “what everyone in the region believes is a flexing of muscles by a more aggressive Iran,” according to an unnamed senior U.S. government official – “everyone” being the technical term used to refer to Washington and its more loyal clients.[6] Iran's aggression consists in its being welcomed by many within the region, and allegedly supporting resistance to the US occupation of neighboring Iraq.

It’s likely, though little discussed, that a prime concern about Iran’s influence is to the East, where in mid-August “Russia and China today host Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at a summit of a Central Asian security club designed to counter U.S. influence in the region,” the business press reports.[7] The “security club” is the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), which has been slowly taking shape in recent years. Its membership includes not only the two giants Russia and China, but also the energy-rich Central Asian states Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Tajikistan. Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan was a guest of honor at the August meeting. “In another unwelcome development for the Americans, Turkmenistan's President Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov also accepted an invitation to attend the summit,” another step its improvement of relations with Russia, particularly in energy, reversing a long-standing policy of isolation from Russia. “Russia in May secured a deal to build a new pipeline to import more gas from Turkmenistan, bolstering its dominant hold on supplies to Europe and heading off a competing U.S.-backed plan that would bypass Russian territory.”[8]

Along with Iran, there are three other official observer states: India, Pakistan and Mongolia. Washington’s request for similar status was denied. In 2005 the SCO called for a timetable for termination of any US military presence in Central Asia. The participants at the August meeting flew to the Urals to attend the first joint US-China military exercises on Russian soil.

Association of Iran with the SCO extends its inroads into the Middle East, where China has been increasing trade and other relations with the jewel in the crown, Saudi Arabia. There is an oppressed Shi’ite population in Saudi Arabia that is also susceptible to Iran’s influence – and happens to sit on most of Saudi oil. About 40% of Middle East oil is reported to be heading East, not West.[9] As the flow Eastward increases, US control declines over this lever of world domination, a “stupendous source of strategic power,” as the State Department described Saudi oil 60 years ago.

In Cold War I, the Kremlin had imposed an iron curtain and built the Berlin Wall to contain Western influence. In Cold War II, Wright reports, the former Kremlinologists framing policy are imposing a “green curtain” to bar Iranian influence. In short, government-media doctrine is that the Iranian threat is rather similar to the Western threat that the Kremlin sought to contain, and the US is eagerly taking on the Kremlin’s role in the thrilling “new Cold War.”

All of this is presented without noticeable concern. Nevertheless, the recognition that the US government is modeling itself on Stalin and his successors in the new Cold War must be arousing at least some flickers of embarrassment. Perhaps that is how we can explain the ferocious Washington Post editorial announcing that Iran has escalated its aggressiveness to a Hot War: “the Revolutionary Guard, a radical state within Iran's Islamic state, is waging war against the United States and trying to kill as many American soldiers as possible.” The US must therefore “fight back,” the editors thunder, finding quite “puzzling...the murmurs of disapproval from European diplomats and others who say they favor using diplomacy and economic pressure, rather than military action, to rein in Iran,” even in the face of its outright aggression. The evidence that Iran is waging war against the US is now conclusive. After all, it comes from an administration that has never deceived the American people, even improving on the famous stellar honesty of its predecessors.

Suppose that for once Washington’s charges happen to be true, and Iran really is providing Shi’ite militias with roadside bombs that kill American forces, perhaps even making use of the some of the advanced weaponry lavishly provided to the Revolutionary Guard by Ronald Reagan in order to fund the illegal war against Nicaragua, under the pretext of arms for hostages (the number of hostages tripled during these endeavors).[10] If the charges are true, then Iran could properly be charged with a minuscule fraction of the iniquity of the Reagan administration, which provided Stinger missiles and other high-tech military aid to the “insurgents” seeking to disrupt Soviet efforts to bring stability and justice to Afghanistan, as they saw it. Perhaps Iran is even guilty of some of the crimes of the Roosevelt administration, which assisted terrorist partisans attacking peaceful and sovereign Vichy France in 1940-41, and had thus declared war on Germany even before Pearl Harbor.

One can pursue these questions further. The CIA station chief in Pakistan in 1981, Howard Hart, reports that “I was the first chief of station ever sent abroad with this wonderful order: `Go kill Soviet soldiers’. Imagine! I loved it.” Of course “the mission was not to liberate Afghanistan,” Tim Wiener writes in his history of the CIA, repeating the obvious. But “it was a noble goal,” he writes. Killing Russians with no concern for the fate of Afghans is a “noble goal.” But support for resistance to a US invasion and occupation would be a vile act and declaration of war.

Without irony, the Bush administration and the media charge that Iran is “meddling” in Iraq, otherwise presumably free from foreign interference. The evidence is partly technical. Do the serial numbers on the Improvised Explosive Devices really trace back to Iran? If so, does the leadership of Iran know about the IEDs, or only the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. Settling the debate, the White House plans to brand the Revolutionary Guard as a “specially designated global terrorist” force, an unprecedented action against a national military branch, authorizing Washington to undertake a wide range of punitive actions. Watching in disbelief, much of the world asks whether the US military, invading and occupying Iran’s neighbors, might better merit this charge - or its Israeli client, now about to receive a huge increase in military aid to commemorate 40 years of harsh occupation and illegal settlement, and its fifth invasion of Lebanon a year ago.

It is instructive that Washington’s propaganda framework is reflexively accepted, apparently without notice, in US and other Western commentary and reporting, apart from the marginal fringe of what is called ‘the loony left.” What is considered “criticism” is skepticism as to whether all of Washington’s charges about Iranian aggression in Iraq are true. It might be an interesting research project to see how closely the propaganda of Russia, Nazi Germany, and other aggressors and occupiers matched the standards of today’s liberal press and commentators..

The comparisons are of course unfair. Unlike German and Russian occupiers, American forces are in Iraq by right, on the principle, too obvious even to enunciate, that the US owns the world. Therefore, as a matter of elementary logic, the US cannot invade and occupy another country. The US can only defend and liberate others. No other category exists. Predecessors, including the most monstrous, have commonly sworn by the same principle, but again there is an obvious difference: they were Wrong, and we are Right. QED.

Another comparison comes to mind, which is studiously ignored when we are sternly admonished of the ominous consequences that might follow withdrawal of US troops from Iraq. The preferred analogy is Indochina, highlighted in a shameful speech by the President on August 22. That analogy can perhaps pass muster among those who have succeeded in effacing from their minds the record of US actions in Indochina, including the destruction of much of Vietnam and the murderous bombing of Laos and Cambodia as the US began its withdrawal from the wreckage of South Vietnam. In Cambodia, the bombing was in accord with Kissinger’s genocidal orders: “anything that flies on anything that moves” – actions that drove “an enraged populace into the arms of an insurgency [the Khmer Rouge] that had enjoyed relatively little support before the Kissinger-Nixon bombing was inaugurated,” as Cambodia specialists Owen Taylor and Ben Kiernan observe in a highly important study that passed virtually without notice, in which they reveal that the bombing was five times the incredible level reported earlier, greater than all allied bombing in World War II. Completely suppressing all relevant facts, it is then possible for the President and many commentators to present Khmer Rouge crimes as a justification for continuing to devastate Iraq.

But although the grotesque Indochina analogy receives much attention, the obvious analogy is ignored: the Russian withdrawal from Afghanistan, which, as Soviet analysts predicted, led to shocking violence and destruction as the country was taken over by Reagan's favorites, who amused themselves by such acts as throwing acid in the faces of women in Kabul they regarded as too liberated, and then virtually destroyed the city and much else, creating such havoc and terror that the population actually welcomed the Taliban. That analogy could indeed be invoked without utter absurdity by advocates of “staying the course,” but evidently it is best forgotten.

Under the heading “Secretary Rice’s Mideast mission: contain Iran,” the press reports Rice’s warning that Iran is “the single most important single-country challenge to...US interests in the Middle East.” That is a reasonable judgment. Given the long-standing principle that Washington must do “everything in its power to alter or abolish any regime not openly allied with America,” Iran does pose a unique challenge, and it is natural that the task of containing Iranian influence should be a high priority.

As elsewhere, Bush administration rhetoric is relatively mild in this case. For the Kennedy administration, “Latin America was the most dangerous area in the world” when there was a threat that the progressive Cheddi Jagan might win a free election in British Guiana, overturned by CIA shenanigans that handed the country over to the thuggish racist Forbes Burnham.[11] A few years earlier, Iraq was “the most dangerous place in the world” (CIA director Allen Dulles) after General Abdel Karim Qassim broke the Anglo-American condominium over Middle East oil, overthrowing the pro-US monarchy, which had been heavily infiltrated by the CIA.[12] A primary concern was that Qassim might join Nasser, then the supreme Middle East devil, in using the incomparable energy resources of the Middle East for the domestic. The issue for Washington was not so much access as control. At the time and for many years after, Washington was purposely exhausting domestic oil resources in the interests of “national security,” meaning security for the profits of Texas oil men, like the failed entrepreneur who now sits in the Oval Office. But as high-level planner George Kennan had explained well before, we cannot relax our guard when there is any interference with “protection of our resources” (which accidentally happen to be somewhere else).

Unquestionably, Iran's government merits harsh condemnation, though it has not engaged in worldwide terror, subversion, and aggression, following the US model – which extends to today’s Iran as well, if ABC news is correct in reporting that the US is supporting Pakistan-based Jundullah, which is carrying out terrorist acts inside Iran.[13] The sole act of aggression attributed to Iran is the conquest of two small islands in the Gulf – under Washington’s close ally the Shah. In addition to internal repression – heightened, as Iranian dissidents regularly protest, by US militancy - the prospect that Iran might develop nuclear weapons also is deeply troubling. Though Iran has every right to develop nuclear energy, no one – including the majority of Iranians – wants it to have nuclear weapons. That would add to the threat to survival posed much more seriously by its near neighbors Pakistan, India, and Israel, all nuclear armed with the blessing of the US, which most of the world regards as the leading threat to world peace, for evident reasons.

Iran rejects US control of the Middle East, challenging fundamental policy doctrine, but it hardly poses a military threat. On the contrary, it has been the victim of outside powers for years: in recent memory, when the US and Britain overthrew its parliamentary government and installed a brutal tyrant in 1953, and when the US supported Saddam Hussein’s murderous invasion, slaughtering hundreds of thousands of Iranians, many with chemical weapons, without the “international community” lifting a finger – something that Iranians do not forget as easily as the perpetrators. And then under severe sanctions as a punishment for disobedience.

Israel regards Iran as a threat. Israel seeks to dominate the region with no interference, and Iran might be some slight counterbalance, while also supporting domestic forces that do not bend to Israel’s will. It may, however, be useful to bear in mind that Hamas has accepted the international consensus on a two-state settlement on the international border, and Hezbollah, along with Iran, has made clear that it would accept any outcome approved by Palestinians, leaving the US and Israel isolated in their traditional rejectionism.[14]

But Iran is hardly a military threat to Israel. And whatever threat there might be could be overcome if the US would accept the view of the great majority of its own citizens and of Iranians and permit the Middle East to become a nuclear-weapons free zone, including Iran and Israel, and US forces deployed there. One may also recall that UN Security Council Resolution 687 of 3 April 1991, to which Washington appeals when convenient, calls for “establishing in the Middle East a zone free from weapons of mass destruction and all missiles for their delivery.”

It is widely recognized that use of military force in Iran would risk blowing up the entire region, with untold consequences beyond. We know from polls that in the surrounding countries, where the Iranian government is hardly popular - Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan - nevertheless large majorities prefer even a nuclear-armed Iran to any form of military action against it.

The rhetoric about Iran has escalated to the point where both political parties and practically the whole US press accept it as legitimate and, in fact, honorable, that “all options are on the table,” to quote Hillary Clinton and everybody else, possibly even nuclear weapons. “All options on the table” means that Washington threatens war.

The UN Charter outlaws “the threat or use of force.” The United States, which has chosen to become an outlaw state, disregards international laws and norms. We're allowed to threaten anybody we want - and to attack anyone we choose.

Washington's feverish new Cold War "containment" policy has spread to Europe. Washington intends to install a “missile defense system” in the Czech Republic and Poland, marketed to Europe as a shield against Iranian missiles. Even if Iran had nuclear weapons and long-range missiles, the chances of its using them to attack Europe are perhaps on a par with the chances of Europe's being hit by an asteroid, so perhaps Europe would do as well to invest in an asteroid defense system. Furthermore, if Iran were to indicate the slightest intention of aiming a missile at Europe or Israel, the country would be vaporized.

Of course, Russian planners are gravely upset by the shield proposal. We can imagine how the US would respond if a Russian anti-missile system were erected in Canada. The Russians have good reason to regard an anti-missile system as part of a first-strike weapon against them. It is generally understood that such a system could never block a first strike, but it could conceivably impede a retaliatory strike. On all sides, “missile defense” is therefore understood to be a first-strike weapon, eliminating a deterrent to attack. And a small initial installation in Eastern Europe could easily be a base for later expansion. Even more obviously, the only military function of such a system with regard to Iran, the declared aim, would be to bar an Iranian deterrent to US or Israel aggression.

Not surprisingly, in reaction to the “missile defense” plans, Russia has resorted to its own dangerous gestures, including the recent decision to renew long-range patrols by nuclear-capable bombers after a 15-year hiatus, in one recent case near the US military base on Guam. These actions reflect Russia’s anger “over what it has called American and NATO aggressiveness, including plans for a missile-defense system in the Czech Republic and Poland, analysts said” (Andrew Kramer, NYT).[15]

The shield ratchets the threat of war a few notches higher, in the Middle East and elsewhere, with incalculable consequences, and the potential for a terminal nuclear war. The immediate fear is that by accident or design, Washington's war planners or their Israeli surrogate might decide to escalate their Cold War II into a hot one – in this case a real hot war.

[1] Wright, WP, July 29 07

[2] Correspondent Michael Wines, NYT, June 13, 1999. Doolittle report, Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: the History of the CIA, Doubleday 2007

[3] Ibid., 77.

[4] Ibid., 180.

[5] Paul Richter, LAT, Aug. 10, 2007. Karzai, CNN, Aug. 5, 2007.

[6] Robin Wright, “U.S. Plans New Arms Sales to Gulf Allies,” WP, July 28, 2007.

[7] Henry Meyer, Bloomberg, Aug. 16, 2007.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Hiro

[10] Weiner

[11] Schmitz, Weiner.

[12] Weiner. Failed States.

[13] Brian Ross and Christopher Isham, “ABC News Exclusive: The Secret War Against Iran,” April 3, 2007; Ross and Richard Esposito, ABC, “Bush Authorizes New Covert Action Against Iran,” May 22, 2007.

[14] On Iran, see Gilbert Achcar, Noam Chomsky, and Stephen Shalom, Perilous Power (Paradigm, 2007), and Ervand Abrahamian, in David Barsamian, ed., Targeting Iran (City Lights, 2007). On Hamas, among many similar statements see the article by Hamas’s most militant leader, Khalid Mish'al, "Our unity can now pave the way for peace and justice," Guardian, February 13, 2007. Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah has repeatedly taken the same position. See among others Irene Gendzier, Assaf Kfoury, and Fawwaz Traboulsi, eds., Inside Lebanon (Monthly Review, 2007).

[15] Kramer, “Recalling Cold War, Russia Resumes Long-Range Sorties,” Aug. 18, 2007.

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=11&ItemID=13629#_ftnref1

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