Elsewhere Today 448
Aljazeera:
Tear gas fired at Myanmar monks
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 18, 2007
17:25 MECCA TIME, 14:25 GMT
Myanmar's security forces have fired tear gas to break up a protest by about 1,000 Buddhist monks and civilians in a northwestern city, according to witnesses.
The demonstration in Sittwe was one of several marches led by Buddhist monks across the country on Tuesday in response to calls for a religious boycott of the military government.
The protests came on the anniversary of a 1988 coup that put the current government in power and triggered a bloody crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in which hundreds are thought to have died.
Three or four monks were arrested as the crowd scattered, and were hit and slapped as well, a witness told the Reuters news agency.
There have been a string of protests by monks since Sunday and witnesses reported security being tightened at temples and monasteries in major cities in advance of Tuesday's anniversary.
Peaceful protest
In Yangon, the former capital of Myanmar, hundreds of Buddhist monks joined a peaceful protest amid signs of increasing tensions with the military government.
About 400 monks chanted prayers but no political slogans as they marched through the city in one of the biggest demonstrations since the current wave of protests began.
Police and plainclothes military intelligence agents reportedly videotaped the protesters in Yangon but took no action against them.
The monks prevented from entering Yangon's Shwedagon pagoda, Myanmar's most important religious site, where they had intended to launch a campaign which would see them refuse to accept alms from anyone connected to the military government.
Tightly controlled by its military rulers, public protest against the government is rare in Myanmar.
However, the past month has seen demonstrations spread across the country after the government announced a massive increase in the price of fuel.
In the latest move, the monks are demanding an apology from the government after reports that hundreds were beaten during protests in the town of Pakokku two weeks ago.
After the protest in Pakokku, about 300 monks took a group of 20 government officials hostage in protest against the violence against peaceful demonstrations.
Religious chants
Over the last few days Buddhist groups have organised marches in cities and townships across the country, reciting traditional religious chants to ward off evil.
On Sunday the group urged all monks not to accept alms from soldiers and their families, a move that is likely to humiliate the ruling generals.
Giving alms to monks is considered an important duty of devout Buddhists.
On Sunday, it was reported that about 300 monks in the town of Magwe had boycotted alms offered by members of the pro-government Union Solidarity and Development Association (USDA), a group said to be behind attacks on several protests.
Khin Ohmar, the co-ordinator for Thailand-based Asia Pacific People's Partnership on Burma (APPPB), said monks call for an alms boycott when they see violence and injustice.
"This is only the fourth time an alms boycott has happened in Burma. The monks know there is no more food in people's kitchens because the alms and donations have dried up," she told Al Jazeera.
"In such situations, Buddhist teachings allow monks to refuse 'tainted' alms from those who use violence and commit injustices against the people."
Democracy movements
In 1988, Myanmar's monks were credited with helping to rally popular support for a pro-democracy uprising led by student leaders that was crushed by the military, leaving hundreds dead.
Khin Ohmar said monks had always been on the forefront of pro-democracy movements since the days before Myanmar won its independence from Britain.
"It is a tradition in Burma that monks lead protests when there is suffering and violence," she said.
"To them, the people's well-being is important, free from hunger and poverty."
She said people also supported the monks because they are considered the highest moral authority in society.
In a statement, a group calling itself The Alliance of All Burma Buddhist Monks urged monks to stage peaceful marches on Tuesday in major cities including Yangon and Mandalay, the Thailand-based Irrawaddy magazine reported.
Source: Al Jazeera and agencies
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/DC120D09-7177-4845-80DE-FA130E3F3154.htm
Aljazeera:
Maoists quit Nepal government
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 18, 2007
10:52 MECCA TIME, 7:52 GMT
Nepal's Maoists have quit the interim government after failing to reach a deal with the prime minister to abolish the country's monarchy.
The former rebels, who had been part of the eight-party coalition, had threatened to quit if certain demands were not met, including the country being declared a republic.
The move is a major setback to last year's peace deal in which the Maoists ended a decade-old conflict and agreed to hold elections for a special assembly to decide the fate of the monarchy.
Dev Gurung, a Maoist cabinet minister, said: "We have submitted our resignations to the prime minister... because the talks were not successful."
Republic calls
Political parties had attempted to convince the Maoists on Monday to remain in the administration and to call off the planned demonstrations.
The Maoists have been insisting the nation must be declared a republic ahead of the November 22 vote, insisting that King Gyanendra and his supporters were trying to sabotage the election.
Now they say they will launch street protests to ensure the election is held on time but will keep to the ceasefire.
The Maoists have called a rally in the capital Kathmandu later on Tuesday when they are expected to announce their campaign.
Some analysts said the Maoists, who entered mainstream politics only recently, could be nervous about the elections and are trying to delay the vote.
Lok Raj Baral, head of the independent think-tank Nepal Centre for Strategic Studies, said there was "a widespread feeling that the Maoists have less chance of winning as many seats as will be wrested by other main parties".
He said the Maoists want to delay the polls so that they are better organised.
The new government has already stripped the monarch of almost all his powers, including his control over the army.
The Maoist conflict that began in 1996 killed around 13,000 people and hit the aid- and tourism-dependent economy of Nepal, one of the world's poorest nations.
Source: Agencies
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/7D1F23D2-3689-4039-9A05-4DC50AF11590.htm
AllAfrica: Gulf of Guinea
- Govt Soft-Pedals On U.S. Military
By Juliana Taiwo, Abuja
This Day (Lagos) NEWS
17 September 2007
A senior government official has given reasons why the Federal Government may soft-pedal on its moves to frustrate the plan by the United States to establish a military base in the Gulf of Guinea.
THISDAY had reported last week moves by the Nigerian government to checkmate the military adventure of the United States in the oil-rich region.
But the official told THISDAY yesterday in reaction to the story that Nigeria cannot ward off the US because Nigeria "has not shown enough commitment in securing the region".
He disclosed that Nigeria government was expected to have invested $1 billion from excess crude account into the coastal security and safety arrangement in the last two years but had failed.
"The point is this, the former President, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, had seen the wisdom as a former military head of state to secure the area and immediately ordered strategic surveillance of the costal zone and the Niger Delta.
"But the Nigerian officials were not comfortable with the way he was going about it because it was supposed to be subjected to debate at the floor of the National Assembly. And Obasanjo knowing that anything on national defence and security issues cannot be subjected to debate went ahead to mobilise the Navy and the Air Force for what the US called minimum security requirement for that zone because oil is important to US," he disclosed.
The senior government official said the US government expected Nigeria to have minimum-security provisions but unfortunately in the last four months the US department discovered that the process was suddenly slowing down and the new government may not go at the speed it expected.
"The US government has completed all the ground work and has moved into the offshore of Sao Tome and Principe, Angola and Guinea to secure position for their submarines and other security facilities. Nigeria is the only country that has the minimum requirement and the financial capacity to provide those facilities (vessels for the Navy and satellite communication facilities amongst others for the Air Force) because these other African countries cannot afford to put down even one per cent of what is required.
"It is a challenge for the President Umaru Musa Yar'Adua to quickly work within his own defence structure and pump the money as well as continue with that his predecessor was doing if indeed it is serious about security that area though I really doubt if they can match the US now," he said.
A senior military official had disclosed to THISDAY last week that the Federal Government had begun moves to frustrate the plan by the United States to establish a military base in the Gulf of Guinea.
Defence sources had further disclosed that the Federal Government was already discussing with heads of government of the African Union and leaders of the sub-regional body, the Economic Community of West African State, on how to block any move by US to establish a base in the gulf.
"Nigeria is not taking the issue lightly at all and the government is not going to allow the US establish any military base anywhere in the ECOWAS region. The interest of the US government in the Gulf of Guinea has reinforced the commitment of the government to intensify its efforts at providing the needed security in the sub-region," the source had said.
The gulf's oil and gas deposit is put in the region of 10 billion barrels.
Copyright © 2007 This Day. All rights reserved.
http://allafrica.com/stories/200709170011.html
AlterNet: U.S. Is Paying Off Iraq's Worst
War Criminals in Attempt to Ward Off Attacks
By Katie Halper, AlterNet
Posted on September 18, 2007
When Bush was in Iraq two weeks ago he posed for photographs with Abdul-Sattar Abu Risha, the leader of the Anbar Awakening, an alliance of Sunni tribes who vow to back the United States and fight against al Qaeda.
Last Monday, General Petraeus testified to Congress that "a year ago" Anbar province "was assessed 'lost' politically ... Today, it is a model of what happens when local leaders and citizens decide to oppose al Qaeda and reject its Taliban-like ideology."
Three days later, the assassination of Abu Risha in Ramadi dramatically undercut Bush and Petraeus' claims of Anbar victory and peacekeeping. But what else is the administration keeping from us about Anbar?
Rick Rowley, a journalist and independent filmmaker of Big Noise Films, was one of the last people to videotape and interview the Sunni sheikh, and his video report Uncovering the Truth Behind the Anbar Success Story, presents a very different picture of the Anbar Awakening.
Embedded with the U.S. Army and Iraqi militias, Rowley shows us that the Sunni "freedom fighters" with whom the United States is now allied are not just insurgents who had been killing Americans but war criminals responsible for sectarian cleansing.
Rowley, and his co-producers David Enders and Hiba Dawood, are the only Western journalists to bring a camera into the refugee camp where the displaced Shiites recount being attacked, bombed and driven out by the very tribes Petraeus and Bush are hailing as heroes.
Rowley's report, which includes interviews with candid U.S. soldiers and footage of a military commander handing a Sunni leader a wad of cash, suggests the role of bribery and coercion in building alliances that serve short-term goals in Anbar province, but in the long run deepen a multisided civil war. I talked to Rick Rowley about his report and what he thinks it indicates about Iraq's future.
Katie Halper: What brought you to Iraq, and what were you hoping to capture?
Rick Rowley: We knew that one of the major stories the Army was going to use to justify keeping troops there was the supposed success in Anbar. The first investigation we did was into the Anbar reconciliation program. We spent six weeks crisscrossing Iraq, embedding with different militias to try to get a picture of the state of Iraq during the surge.
KH: You were the last Western journalists to videotape an interview with Abu Risha. What was he like? What was his significance?
RR: He seemed stiff and scripted. He told us some incredible lies during the interview. Three times he said he was the leader of all the Arab tribes of Iraq - both Shia and Sunni. And like a bad poker player's tell, every time he told a lie he sniffed loudly.
He was a figurehead for a movement, the face they put on this story. Operationally, militarily, he wasn't particularly important. In his interview with us he said there was 100 percent security in Ramadi, that he was head of all of the tribes in Iraq. That has proven, in a horrifying way, to not be true. His assassination has blown a hole in the American story about security in Anbar. It's going to have a chilling effect on other tribes in other parts of the country who were thinking it might be safe to work with the Americans.
KH: Bush and Petraeus are hailing our alliance with Sunni tribes in Anbar. Can you tell us about these "freedom fighters" the U.S. is now allied with?
RR: There have been a lot of reports about the fact that the people who the U.S. is working with, the supposed "freedom fighters," the "counter-insurgents" are former insurgents. They were Iraqi al Qaeda before they started working with the Americans. That is troubling because if they were fighting the Americans once, they'll fight Americans again. And more troubling for the future of Iraq is the fact that many of the tribes that the U.S. is working with are war criminals who are directly responsible for ethnic cleansing and who are using American support to prepare for sectarian civil war. The U.S. is funding Sunni militias. They already funded the Shia militias. They're now funding all sides of this sectarian war.
KH: How did you discover that the Sunni militias with whom the U.S. is working are engaged in this sectarian violence?
RR: We embedded with the Americans for a week, and we found that in the town Fallahat, where there used to a lot of Shia, there are now no Shia. So we tracked down the displaced Shia families and found them living on the outskirts of Baghdad in a refugee camp that no Western media and certainly no camera crews have ever filmed. There are no services, no doctors, no hospitals, no schools, no running water, no work, no sanitation. People have to walk, in some cases, for miles to just get polluted tap water out of hoses. People who have tried to return home to pick up their rations have been killed on the highway. So no one can leave.
The refugees we talked to knew the names of the people who had kicked them out and bombed their houses. And they are exactly the same tribes the Americans are working with. So the people the Americans are working with are responsible for sectarian ethnic cleansing. Malaki's head of negotiations with Sunni groups told us the groups the Americans are working with include some of the country's worst war criminals, responsible for beheadings and mass executions.
KH: Even if these militias are responsible for this violence, how do we know that the U.S. military knows this? Is it possible they don't?
RR: We have proof that the Americans should know it. The American soldiers set their core operating base in a house they knew used to be inhabited by Shia. And all the Shia were gone. So it's just whether they decided to ask the obvious question or not.
KH: How does what Petraeus and Bush are saying contrast with what you saw and filmed on the ground?
RR: The story that Petraeus and Bush are saying is fantastic - a Lawrence of Arabia figure named Abu Risha rose out of the desert and behind him the noble tribes of Anbar rose up and they kicked out al Qaeda. Well, it's safer for American soldiers there, but it's not safer for the Shia citizens there. The U.S. is funding sectarian militias fighting in a civil war in order to momentarily decrease attacks on Americans.
KH: And how, exactly, is the U.S. supporting the militias?
RR: The soldiers on the ground aren't hiding anything. They were amazingly open and honest about the whole process with us. Through a combination of threats and enticements like money and releasing their kids from prison, the U.S. military has gotten groups to join a coalition. They're paid money for small construction projects, and they're eventually incorporated into the Iraqi police force, where they're armed and paid, given a gun, a badge and the power to arrest.
There have been reports that some American army units are directly giving them weapons. I didn't see anyone give an M16 to anyone. But I did see a U.S. captain hand wads of cash to militiamen who were guarding checkpoints. Petraeus says they're not supplying guns. That might be true. But saying the U.S. military is just applauding from the sidelines and not providing material support to these militias is a lie.
KH: Why would the U.S. want to support these militias?
RR: It's an easy way to produce immediate statistical successes on the ground, a decrease in attacks on American soldiers. And this is a long-term strategy. Petraeus came in with Negroponte with the so-called "Salvador Option" for Iraq, arming death squads to kill insurgents as the Reagan administration did in the 1980s in El Salvador. In 2004 he incorporated all of the Shia militias into the Iraqi security forces and basically created Shia death squads and secret torture prisons we've all heard stories of. Now they're funding Sunni militias and Sunni death squads
KH: To be fair and balanced?
RR: Because the Shia don't control Anbar. And because they're worried about some of the elements of the Shia militias too. In the last couple of years there's been another bifurcation. It's not just Sunni vs. Shiite anymore. It's truly staggering that there are so many different civil wars being fought simultaneously. There's a Sunni on Sunni civil war, a Shia on Shia war, a Shia Sunni civil war, an inter-Kurdish struggle and a struggle between the Kurds and the Arabs.
KH: Are we letting them kill each other so they don't kill American soldiers over there?
RR: I don't know. Ascribing motive to people is always difficult. I think it's a systemic thing. When counterinsurgency fails, civil war is the next option. Another way of saying it is divide and conquer. In 2004 when Americans were defeated on the ground, when they had to fight a two-front war against a Shia insurgency in Najaf and a Sunni insurgency in Falluja, from that point on the Americans took a strategy of trying to divide the insurgents against each other. They incorporated the Shia militias and turned all their energy against the Sunni. Now they're incorporating another chunk of the Sunni militias.
KH: Given that your films and journalism are critical of the war in Iraq, why did the U.S. Army let you embed?
RR: Anbar is their big success story. They don't think that anyone who comes up there is going to go to the refugee camps and see the other side of it, or going to speak enough Arabic, which David Enders and Hiba Dawood do, to figure out what's going on. I think they were desperate to get people up there. It was all good news to them. And it was truly amazing. We were able to walk in the street and take our flack jackets off in a neighborhood, which just six months ago had been one of the most dangerous places in the country, where tanks couldn't even go. And that image is the image they wanted to circulate. Of course that's only possible because the people who were shooting at them six months ago are now on the payroll.
KH: How has the media been picking up your story?
RR: It's on Al Jazeera English, which 65 million households see. And internationally, reports have picked up on the story from there. But in the States, it's only been picked up by outlets like Democracy Now! and the Pacifica stations. There's a lot of noise now, everyone's talking. There are so many lies in Petraeus' report that it's hard to focus on just one.
KH: When they do discuss Iraq, the U.S. media, politicians, Americans in general are more focused on what's going to have a direct impact on U.S. soldiers than on Iraqis. Do you think they see this as their issue, their problem? Something that is irrelevant, or eclipsed by the fact that fewer American soldiers are shot?
RR: If Americans ever want their soldiers to leave, then they have to deal with this civil war that we are stoking. Short-term gains for the American army are obvious; there will be fewer attacks on Americans in the short run. But the Shia refugees are not able to return to their homes and as long as you have these misery belts with millions of people living in cinder block houses with no services, no water, you're going to have a continual engine that drives violence, and you're just making the problem more intractable in the long run.
This is a huge problem nationwide, there are 4 to 6 million refugees in Iraq who have been forced to flee their homes because of sectarian violence. It's making the problem infinitely more intractable. It's making it impossible to leave. We're arming both sides of the civil war. The longer we're there, the worse the civil war will become. And the worse it will be when we leave. And the more cataclysmic the civil war will be once the U.S. leaves.
KH: So then what do you see as the solution?
RR: The U.S. has to leave immediately. Overwhelmingly, that's what Iraqis want, what Americans want. And if you look at the most reliable opinion polls, a recent ABC/BBC poll shows a massive drop in support for American presence. Iraqis are saying the situation has worsened since the surge. And more want the Americans to leave immediately.
© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at:
http://www.alternet.org/story/62827/
Asia Times:
French-kissing the war on Iran
By Pepe Escobar
Sep 19, 2007
President George W Bush goes to New York next week for the annual United Nations General Assembly to ratchet up the demonization of Iran, confident that his new French ally is doing "a heck of a job". President Nicolas Sarkozy - widely referred to in Paris as King Sarko the First - has let loose the dogs of war with more panache than a madame from the chic seventh arrondissement parading her miniature Pinscher.
The Sarkozy-sponsored, Europe-wide demonization-of-Iran campaign has now begun. Hot on the heels of Sarkozy coining the ultimate catch phrase - "the Iranian bomb or the bombing of Iran" - it was the turn of his glamorous, dashing, humanitarian top diplomat.
"We have to prepare for the worst, and the worst is war," said Bernard Kouchner, foreign minister and founder of Doctors Without Borders (Medecins Sans Frontieres) on French 24-hour news channel LCI.
In the reasoning of the "French doctor", as he is known around the world, there was always the unspoken aside during the negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program that it might proceed "right to the end". But then came the assumption, set in stone, that an Iranian nuclear bomb is inevitable and will pose "a real danger for the whole world".
The Bush White House, opportunistic Republicans and assorted neo-conservatives obviously loved it. From Vienna, Mohamed ElBaradei, the chief of the United Nations' nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), abandoned his cautious demeanor in an effort to dismiss all the hysteria set off by the French comments, saying, "We need to be cool and not hype the Iranian issue."
ElBaradei has not endeared himself to Western powers led by the United States and France over the IAEA's agreement with Iran requiring it to answer questions about past secret nuclear research but without addressing its uranium-enrichment program.
ElBaradei's remarks are a reminder to all the players that only the UN Security Council is entitled to authorize the use of force against Iran, and recall events leading up to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the elusive search for weapons of mass destruction.
"There are rules on how to use force, and I would hope that everybody would have gotten the lesson after the Iraq situation, where 700,000 innocent civilians have lost their lives on the suspicion that a country has nuclear weapons," ElBaradei said.
A measure of the perplexity in European diplomatic circles was contributed by Austrian Foreign Minister Ursula Plassnik: "I don't understand why he [Kouchner] resorted to martial rhetoric at this juncture," she said at the sidelines of an IAEA meeting in Vienna.
As much as Europe may be divided over the issue, the problem is there's a looming fatalistic atmosphere in most European chancelleries, not to mention the European Union in Brussels, that an attack on Iran is all but inevitable.
The white man's oil burden
Meanwhile, it seems clear that Sarkozy's game is playing messenger to big (energy) business. He is well known in Paris as the man of the CAC 40 - the French equivalent of the Dow Jones index.
The French rapprochement with the Bush administration - in both Iraq and Iran - could not but revolve around oil, what has been called "the entry of France into Mesopotamia and Persia". The former US Federal Reserve oracle and the world's most powerful central planner, Alan Greenspan, finally admitted what even the mineral kingdom already knew: Iraq was invaded because of oil. An attack on Iran, if it happens, will also be because of oil (and gas).
The huge Majnoun oilfield in southeast Iraq, near the Iranian border, the fourth-largest in the country with reserves of more than 12 billion barrels, had been awarded by Saddam Hussein to Elf of France. The US occupation obviously nullified all of Saddam's contracts.
Then last month US giant Chevron and Total of France signed an agreement to prospect and develop Majnoun together. They already have a partnership regarding the Nahr ben Omar field in southern Iraq (6 billion barrels).
The recent Kouchner trip to Baghdad had a non-humanitarian central theme: oil. But there's a huge catch: the new oil law - the key Bush "benchmark", meaning a de facto denationalization of the Iraqi oil industry - has to be approved by the Iraqi Parliament (the debate has already been postponed for months).
In June, Chevron and Total executives met with Iraqi government representatives to discuss their agreement - but there was still no new oil law. And even if there were a law, there would have to be some sort of security on the ground, what with the Sunni Arab resistance attacking oil installations on a daily basis.
Meet the charming hot warrior
Former UN secretary general Boutros Boutros-Ghali described Kouchner as "an unguided missile". The missile is moved by a lethal weapon: vanity. There's a lot of murkiness behind the glowing, vapid, ingratiating profiles of this charming "humanitarian patriot".
It's a long time since the barricades of May 1968 at the Latin Quarter in Paris, when he wanted to change the world by defying the "square" bourgeois order; a long time since the 1970s when he was sent by the visionary Jean-Francois Bizot, the founder of the swingin' countercultural Actuel magazine, all over the world as a reporter to document the planet's ills; a long way from a medical non-governmental organization founded - with the discreet Richard Rossin - to alleviate people's misery and suffering and defend their human rights in war theaters.
Kouchner was in favor of the war on Iraq - on the basis of human rights serially violated by Saddam (as if the US occupation would turn Iraq into Sweden). Recently, he became the first French foreign minister to go to Iraq since 1988 - vainly offering French mediation as an "honest broker" among Sunnis, Shi'ites and Kurds, none of whom, perhaps wisely, bothered to take it.
Another myth perpetrated by the majority of the French, and large sectors of the US, press is that Kouchner and Sarkozy harbor "humanitarian motives" for an intervention in Darfur in Sudan. There are rumors in Paris of a dodgy French-supported coup about to be engineered against the government in Khartoum. The motive in this case is precious Sudanese oil - which simply cannot be allowed to be solely in the hands of the Chinese.
Media hero? Certainly. Shameless egomaniac? Most of the time. There are reasons to believe Kouchner may also be quite a distorted humanist. The French doctor is arguably the most popular European proponent of imperialism with a human face. The phenomenon has been dissected with implacable brilliance by Jean Bricmont in his book Humanitarian Imperialism: Using Human Rights to Sell War (Monthly Review Press, New York, 2006).
Bricmont is a first-class, rigorous European intellectual, a professor of theoretical physics at the University of Louvain, one of the executive directors of the highly respected Brussels Tribunal (an association of "intellectuals, artists and activists who denounce the logic of permanent war promoted by the American government and its allies"), and recently a co-organizer of an extensive Noam Chomsky compilation at the prestigious French collection L'Herne.
In his book, Bricmont describes how humanitarian imperialism became the ordre du jour:
Moralizing rhetoric combined with perfectly cynical practice (notably in Afghanistan) was amazingly successful. In Europe, especially in France, where revolutionary illusions were fading, the intelligentsia took charge of a major reversal, from the systematic criticism of power, associated with [Jean-Paul] Sartre and [Michel] Foucault, to its systematic defense - especially the power of the United States - symbolized by the emergence of the "new philosophers" as media stars. Defense of human rights became the theme and principal argument of the new political offensive against both the socialist bloc and Third World countries emerging from colonialism.
Gone are the days when France, as Bricmont writes in his book regarding the war on Iraq, could "act independently of European Union structures" and oppose US hegemony "without firing a single shot". In a recent piece on Counterpunch.org, Bricmont explained how there won't be any opposition at the core of Europe to an attack on Iran:
France has been changed from the most independent European country to the most poodlish (this was in fact the main issue in the recent presidential election, but it was never even mentioned during the campaign). In France, moreover, the secular "left" is, in the main, gung-ho against Iran for the usual reasons (women, religion). There will be no large-scale demonstrations in France either before or after the bombing. And, without French support, Germany - where the war is probably very unpopular - can always be silenced with memories of the Holocaust, so that no significant opposition to the war will come from Europe (except possibly from its Muslim population, which will be one more argument to prove that they are "backward", "extremist" and enemies of our "democratic civilization").
Kouchner is of course aware he's playing in the "winning" camp. Nevertheless, quite a few top European intellectuals are baffled that a doctor who created an association helping populations destroyed by war is now all but advocating war (humanitarian imperialism as a way to "save" the women and the youth of Iran). By following the dictates of Sarkozy - whose knowledge of foreign policy rivals Miss France's - Kouchner seems to ignore how Iraq turned into an ethical, political, strategic - and humanitarian - disaster of biblical proportions.
French public opinion, though, simply will not swallow Sarkozy basking in the glow of a self-appointed role as preferred Bush courtesan. The excellent French blog Rue89.com has pointed out how foreign policy in France is woven "without a national debate, even a parliamentary discussion".
"Unguided missile" Kouchner has been to many a theater of war to know better: he should beware his missiles don't reduce himself - and his master - to collateral damage.
Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007). He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.
Copyright 2007 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/II19Ak05.html
Guardian:
Iraq gets tough with foreign security firms
Fred Attewill and agencies
Tuesday September 18, 2007
The Iraqi government declared today it would examine the status of all foreign security firms amid growing anger over the death of eight Iraqis after US private contractors opened fire.
The decision came despite the US secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, apologising for the deaths in an attempt to prevent the expulsion of the American firm involved, Blackwater USA.
Staff of other foreign companies - believed to number up to 180,000 personnel - may now face restrictions or even expulsion.
Government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh said today: "It is necessary to review the status of local and foreign private security companies working in Iraq according to what is suitable with Iraqi laws."
Mr al-Dabbagh said the cabinet had confirmed the interior ministry's decision to withdraw Blackwater's licence, launch an investigation and ensure all those who attacked civilians were held accountable.
"The company should respect Iraqi laws and the dignity of the citizens," he said.
Eight Iraqi civilians were killed and 13 wounded in Mansour, Baghdad, when shots were fired from a US state department convoy on Sunday.
Brigadier-general Adam-Karim Khalaf, an interior ministry spokesman, said that foreign security contractors opened fire after mortar rounds landed near the convoy. "They opened fire randomly at citizens," he said.
A Blackwater spokeswoman said the company had not been formally notified of any expulsion.
"Blackwater's independent contractors acted lawfully and appropriately in response to a hostile attack in Baghdad on Sunday," she said. "The civilians reportedly fired upon by Blackwater professionals were in fact armed enemies and Blackwater personnel returned defensive fire.
"Blackwater regrets any loss of life but this convoy was violently attacked by armed insurgents, not civilians, and our people did their job to defend human life."
Under a law issued by the Coalition Provisional Authority before Iraq regained sovereignty in June 2004, the companies have immunity from Iraqi prosecution.
The private security firms have proven controversial and many Iraqis view them as trigger-happy. US soldiers can face court martial if accused of unprovoked assaults or over-reaction, although the ratio of those convicted is low. But the law in relation to private security firms remains vague.
Hassan al-Rubaie, a member of the Iraqi parliament's security and defence committee, said an investigative panel had been formed to consider abolishing the immunity law.
The radical Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr called for all foreign security firms' contracts to be annulled and blamed the government for failing to protect Iraqis, claiming that the shootings occurred on a busy square filled with Iraqi troops.
Meanwhile at least 18 people died today in a series of bomb attacks in Baghdad.
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,2171904,00.html
Jeune Afrique: De nombreuses victimes
des déchets toxiques pourraient ne pas être indemnisées
CÔTE D'IVOIRE - 18 septembre 2007 – IRIN
Parce qu’elles ont été soignées dans des centres de santé non agréés par le gouvernement, des milliers de personnes empoisonnées par des déchets toxiques illégalement déversés en Côte d’Ivoire en août 2006 risquent de ne recevoir aucune indemnisation, selon un chercheur, qui a étudié les cas des victimes ; et ce malgré les 198 millions de dollars versés à l’Etat par les responsables dans le cadre d’un règlement à l’amiable. D’après le chercheur, son étude est la seule à dresser le bilan des victimes dont le nom est susceptible de ne pas figurer sur les listes d’indemnisation du gouvernement, listes qui reposent sur les registres d’inscription des hôpitaux agréés par l’Etat.
Seize personnes ont trouvé la mort et des dizaines de milliers d’autres sont tombées malades en août 2006, lorsque des déchets toxiques, acheminés par bateau, ont été déversés dans des quartiers résidentiels d’Abidjan, la capitale commerciale. Le gouvernement – après avoir signé un accord sur cette décharge illégale en février – a dressé une liste de quelque 95 000 victimes, en tenant compte des informations communiquées par les hôpitaux publics. Or, de nombreuses personnes sont allées se faire soigner dans des centres non agréés par l’Etat ou auprès de guérisseurs traditionnels, et ne se sont pas présentées à ces hôpitaux pour y être inscrits. Ces victimes, selon le chercheur, pourraient ne pas être indemnisées. « Il est évident que selon les critères [du gouvernement], de nombreuses victimes ne seront pas indemnisées, bien qu’elles continuent de souffrir », a expliqué à IRIN Dongo Kouassi, du Centre suisse de recherche scientifique (CSRS), en marge d’une conférence qui se tenait à Abidjan, la capitale commerciale.
« Selon les conclusions d’une enquête menée par le centre, la première du genre dans le pays, plus de 60 pour cent des victimes des déchets toxiques sont allées se faire soigner dans des centres de santé non-conventionnels, non-reconnus par l’Etat », a-t-il expliqué au cours de sa présentation, lors de la conférence. « Dès lors, il est évident que la majorité des victimes ne recevront rien ». Selon M. Kouassi, dans le cadre de son enquête, menée à la fin de l’année 2006, le CSRS s’est rendu dans plus de 800 foyers situés près de 14 sites pollués, à Abidjan. Le CSRS prévoit de présenter ses résultats au gouvernement à la fin du mois de septembre, avant de publier son rapport. Selon la liste du gouvernement, 95 247 personnes auraient été touchées par les déchets, acheminés jusqu’au port d’Abidjan à bord d’un navire affrété par Trafigura, une multinationale néerlandaise. Trafigura a eu recours aux services d’une société ivoirienne agréée par le gouvernement pour décharger les boues, déversées dans toute la ville. Le problème repose en partie sur le fait que l’on ne sait pas vraiment quelles sources a utilisées le gouvernement pour dresser sa liste. « Nous devons déterminer clairement quels noms figurent sur la liste et comment ils y sont arrivés », a déclaré M. Dongo à IRIN. M. Dongo a dit espérer que la présentation des données recueillies sur les personnes qui sont allées se faire soigner dans des centres non-agréés permettra d’assurer que celles-ci seront ajoutées à la liste. Un porte-parole du ministère de la Santé a reconnu que certaines victimes risquaient de ne pas être indemnisées. « Nous savons que certaines personnes ont reçu des soins médicaux dans des centres [non-agrées] ou d’autres endroits », a admis N’da K. Siméon. « C’est dommage qu’elles aient été exclues », a ajouté M. N’da. « Nous ne nous occupons pas de cette question d’indemnisation. C’est l’unité présidentielle qui en est chargée et qui a défini les règles sans nous consulter ». Toutefois, à en croire le bureau présidentiel chargé de la question des déchets toxiques, ce serait l’inverse. « [La liste] nous a été envoyée par le ministère de la Santé et de l’Hygiène publiques », a indiqué Mathieu Zadi à IRIN. « Ce travail a été réalisé par l’Institut d’hygiène publique, financé par l’Organisation mondiale de la santé. Si le ministère de la Santé ne reconnaît pas cela, c’est qu’il refuse de prendre ses responsabilités ». Les responsables du bureau présidentiel n’ont pas souhaité s’exprimer spécifiquement au sujet de l’étude du CSRS. Selon un avocat représentant les victimes des déchets toxiques, ses clients font pression en faveur d’une liste d’indemnisation supplémentaire. « Le gouvernement a dressé une liste des personnes qui sont allées se faire soigner dans les centres de santé publics », a expliqué Martyn Day, avocat au cabinet britannique Leigh Day & Co ; celui-ci représente quelque 8 000 Ivoiriens qui disent avoir été affectés par les déchets toxiques, dans le cadre d’une action collective intentée par M. Day contre Trafigura, la multinationale pétrolière. « Ils ont fait un excellent travail, en dressant cette liste de 100 000 personnes qui [sont allées se faire soigner dans les centres publics]. Néanmoins, il est aujourd’hui évident que la liste ne tient pas compte de certains centres publics – nous pensons qu’il s’agit tout simplement d’une erreur administrative – ni des centres de santé privés. Nos clients demandent au gouvernement de dresser une liste supplémentaire qui inclurait [les personnes qui ont été soignées dans ces centres] ». « Nous suggérons [le recours à] une nouvelle méthode qui permettrait d’identifier les victimes réelles et de leur apporter l’aide dont elles ont besoin, au risque de les voir périr », a déclaré M. Dongo du CSRS, lors de la conférence d’Abidjan. Dans le cadre d’un règlement à l’amiable conclu en février, Trafigura a accepté de verser l’équivalent de 198 millions de dollars au gouvernement ivoirien. Une partie de cette somme doit être consacrée au nettoyage des sites de déversement des déchets, une autre partie à l’indemnisation des victimes. Selon les autorités, la procédure d’indemnisation compensation est une tâche délicate qui prend du temps, compte tenu du risque de revendications frauduleuses et parce qu’il est important d’indemniser les victimes légitimes. Selon le site du gouvernement, le 11 septembre, 36 467 victimes ou familles de victimes décédées avaient reçu des dommages. Les versements ont débuté le 29 juin et se poursuivent.
Tous droit de reproduction et de représentation réservés IRIN
http://www.jeuneafrique.com/jeune_afrique/article_
depeche.asp?art_cle=IRI05727denomsesinm0
Mail & Guardian:
Lottery of life
Ghaith Abdul-Ahad in Baghdad
17 September 2007
At a checkpoint leading on to the airport highway in west Baghdad this week, a policeman blocked the traffic. Dressed in a blue-checked uniform, Kevlar helmet, a Kalashnikov slung on his shoulder and a whistle in his hand, the last button of his uniform was missing, exposing a hairy stomach that hung over his military belt.
The sun was setting quickly and the policeman shouted, blew his whistle and pointed his gun at a queue of impatient drivers, ordering them to stay in line.
Something was happening but none of the drivers of the dozens of cars waiting in the early evening heat knew what it was.
About 30 gunmen milled around the checkpoint. Two young men in Iraqi army uniforms sat on the front of an armoured personnel carrier. Three men, wearing blue shirts and dark blue trousers, stood next to a green SUV.
A further dozen gunmen wearing camouflage uniforms, red berets and carrying the insignia on their shoulders of the Ministry of Interior commandos stood in the shade of concrete blast walls that make the checkpoints.
The commandos are accused of being nothing but a Shia death squad, so when one of them, wearing°© weight-lifting wristbands, passed between cars looking at faces, the drivers’ heads sunk into their chests and they looked away.
One driver suggested that others join him in driving on a parallel road that passed through west Baghdad neighbourhoods, assuring others that the area had become safe.
“Ami [my uncle] do you want to kill us,” one driver said, raising his two hands. “The roads are filled with fake checkpoints killing people on the haweya [ID card].”
“And what do you know about this checkpoint,” answered the man and nodded towards the gunmen. “Look at them, they are militiamen.”
In that exchange lies the lottery of life in Iraq today. A wrong turn, a wrong checkpoint or a wrong ID card can sometimes be the difference between life and death.
Baghdad was never a beautiful city but as cars whizz through its emptying streets negotiating their way around concrete blocks and checkpoints, the city looks more than ever like a battle zone. But despite those indicators of a city at war, the question many Iraqis have been asking is whether the surge of troops brought in to protect them has made any difference to their lives.
With that in mind The Guardian has spent the past two days travelling the city, gauging that mood.
In the Yarmouk district, like many areas, wrecks of trucks and cars mingle with collapsed metal and sand barriers by the sides of roads. Some people have improvised their own security plan by placing tree trunks in front of shops to stop suicide bombers parking their cars there.
Concrete walls and checkpoints have divided Baghdad into isolated neighbourhoods ostensibly to prevent militia attacks. On the surface they appear to have brought some stability and better security. But in many neighbourhoods it has come only through a process of sectarian cleansing - Shia driving out Sunni and Sunni driving out Shia.
In Dora, in the south of Baghdad, Sunni extremists have fought street battles against Shia militias and have now cleansed the area of its Shia residents. The American security plan has divided the northern part of the district into fenced neighbourhoods with checkpoints at all the entrances.
“Bodies were piled in the street outside my house every morning,” said one resident, a shopkeeper, remembering the fighting. “We live in an isolated area, but at least we have peace - we don’t leave our area because once we are on the highway, we have to pass through the commandos’ checkpoints and we will be killed.”
Another resident, a father-of-three who lives in the south section of the divided Dora, in the Mechanik district, says gunmen still roam the streets freely. “I see them in the streets all the time; the American and the Iraqi army don’t dare to come into our areas, the gunmen only hide when they see US planes - they drive in cars with no windows so they can attack easily.
“Most of them are fighters from other areas who have settled here. I just saw two gunmen kidnap a man this morning from the highway; it’s my morning routine. I have to leave this area, I have to leave but where do I go.”
Another area mentioned as an example of progress is Ameriya, a once secular neighbourhood in west Baghdad that had become a base for Sunni al-Qaeda insurgents.
Laith, in his mid-20s, his three brothers and two uncles are working with Ameriya Revolutionaries, a local militia that is cooperating with US forces to drive al-Qaeda gunmen out. “We can walk in the streets now, we have shops reopening,” he said. “All the al-Qaeda fighters have fled into neighbouring Khadra’a area.”
But just like Dora the sense of security is accompanied by a ghetto arrangement. “When we wanted to bring trucks to clean the area, we had to bring them from Ramadi [100km away]. Do you think we can bring trucks from Shu’ala [a neighbouring Shia area]? Of course not, they are Mahdi army.”
The frontlines between Jihad, once a Sunni area and now totally Shia, and Ameriya are sealed with blast-walls but mortars are still falling.
“When I leave my area, I have another ID card,” says Laith. “Do I dare to come with my own? No.” He pauses for a second and then says: “But as long as I can stand in front of my house, that’s fine for me.”
Mahmoud, who lives in Karrada, now a Shia neighbourhood, says: “The kidnapping is less these days, but the sectarianism is all the same. We are strangers in our own city. Baghdad has been divided; I can’t cross to the west, and I can’t cross the canal into Sadr City to the east. This bit of Baghdad is my city now.”
At the checkpoint on the airport highway the portly policeman was still holding up traffic. Ahmad chatted with another driver. “It’s too late now; where do we get petrol from now?”
“For now?” asked the other driver as he leaned on his old, red Toyota.
“No, for tomorrow,” said Ahmad.
“Let’s live till tomorrow,” said the driver, “and then worry about petrol.”
© Guardian News & Media Ltd 2007
http://www.mg.co.za/articlePage.aspx?articleid=319464&area=/
insight/insight__international/
Página/12:
“El cabaret todavía fascina con su ironía y su sarcasmo”
ENTREVISTA A LA CANTANTE ALEMANA UTE LEMPER
Experta en la estética de la República de Weimar pero, también, en el París de posguerra y en los laberintos de Nick Drake o Elvis Costello, la intérprete y compositora actuará hoy y mañana en Buenos Aires. “Me gustan las canciones que muestran una época”, señala.
Por Diego Fischerman
Martes, 18 de Septiembre de 2007
Podría parecer fría. Pero nada es más diferente de lo frío que el hielo que lastima. Nada es más distante de lo inexpresivo que lo que lacera la piel. La frialdad de Ute Lemper, en todo caso, es la de la hoja de un cuchillo. En los antípodas estilísticos de Marianne Faithful, su aproximación al mundo del cabaret alemán de principios del siglo XX aparece cargada de una perversidad que su apariencia hierática sólo aumenta. Sus armas son la perfección más absoluta, la capacidad para delinear cada matiz con un detalle sobrehumano y para pasar de la expresión de la más incondicional de las entregas amorosas al desprecio o la ira. Experta en la estética de la República de Weimar pero, también, en el París de posguerra y en los oscuros laberintos de Nick Drake o Elvis Costello, bailarina, pintora y escritora, además de cantante, Lemper actúa hoy y mañana nuevamente en Buenos Aires. Esta noche será solista junto a la Filarmónica de esta ciudad en una obra ejemplar de Kurt Weill y Bertolt Brecht, Los siete pecados capitales. Y mañana presentará un espectáculo cuyo título, Angeles sobre París y Berlín, no podría ser más explícito. Ambos recitales se desarrollarán en el teatro Gran Rex.
Nacida en Münster en 1963, hija de una cantante de ópera y de un empleado bancario, Ute Lemper empezó a estudiar danza y piano a los nueve años. Luego se perfeccionó en el Seminario Max Reinhardt de Viena, en Salzburgo, Colonia y Berlín y, a los 19 años, fue descubierta por Andrew Lloyd Webber, que la llamó para formar parte de la producción vienesa de Cats. En 1984, el célebre director de escena argentino Jérôme Savary la conoció en el Stadtheater de Stuttgart y le propuso un papel que resultaría premonitorio: Sally Bowles en la versión teatral de Cabaret, de Bob Fosse. El espectáculo se presentó en París, Lyon, Düsseldorf y Roma y, con él, Lemper ganó el codiciado Premio Molière como mejor actriz del año.
“No sé exactamente en qué momento dejé de ser una principiante y me convertí en profesional”, contó Lemper a Página/12, desde su casa en Nueva York. “Ese tránsito es como el paso del río al mar. Hay un momento en que con certeza se trata de agua de río. Hay otro en que el agua es sin duda agua de mar. Pero, ¿quién puede decir exactamente en qué momento dejó de ser una para convertirse en la otra? El recuerdo que tengo es el de tener muchísimo trabajo. Vivía estudiando, tratando de perfeccionar cosas, buscando papeles. Y nada fue de golpe. Los papeles en Cats y después en Peter Pan no eran como para que una se hiciera famosa. El cambio vino con Cabaret. Ahí era la protagonista. Y las críticas hablaban de mí y yo me daba cuenta de que estaba empezando una buena carrera. Creo que en ese momento, por primera vez, pensé que si no hacía nada especialmente malo me iba a ir bien. Desde ahí era difícil volver atrás. Podría haberme dedicado más a la actuación. O exclusivamente al teatro musical. Pero difícilmente hubiera podido retroceder.”
Lemper trabajó también bajo las órdenes de Robert Altman –fue Alberta, la mujer embarazada que desfilaba desnuda en Prèt â porter–, Peter Greenaway –hizo el papel de Ceres en Prospero’s Boob, su versión de La tempestad de Shakespeare–, Pina Bausch –en un espectáculo sobre Weill– y Maurice Béjart –que coreografió para ella una obra con nombre de cerveza belga, La mort subite–. “Con cada uno de los que trabajé, también con Savary y con directores de cine como Altman, aprendí a tratar de ser un instrumento. A ser dócil. Creo que recién cuando uno sabe cumplir los pedidos de otro, amoldarse a una estética ajena, hacer propio lo que otro está pensando acerca de lo que uno tiene que hacer, se está preparado para pensar un espectáculo propio. No sabría decir qué hay de Savary, qué de Greenaway o qué de Béjart en mis propios espectáculos, en mi manera de moverme sobre el escenario, en cómo pienso los ritmos. Pero seguro que hay cosas de cada uno de ellos. Tuve la suerte de trabajar con grandes directores y es una suerte que espero no haber desperdiciado. Por otra parte, si bien el trabajo en cine y en teatro es totalmente distinto, porque en cine se parece más a un rompecabezas y uno a veces no conoce la escena completa hasta que la ve en la pantalla, creo que ambas maneras de trabajar enseñan lo mismo. Por un lado, a ser disciplinado. Por el otro, que el material de un actor o un bailarín –y para un cantante lo es también en gran medida– es el espacio. Creo que con ellos aprendí a manejarme en el espacio.”
–Después de varios años como artista del sello Decca, su último disco fue publicado por un sello más pequeño. ¿Cuál fue el motivo? ¿Existe una crisis del mercado actual del disco o, tal vez, de las compañías grandes?
–Existe, en efecto, una crisis de la industria discográfica, que no ha sabido responder a los cambios en la circulación de la música. Pero, en realidad, el hecho de que este nuevo disco haya salido en un sello pequeño obedece más bien a la casualidad. Koch/Edel me ofreció hacer un disco en vivo, grabado en Nueva York, y eso para mí significaba la primera oportunidad de hacer un álbum de esta naturaleza en quince años. Universal, que es la compañía a la que pertenece Decca, no considera que un disco en vivo sea lo suficientemente comercial. De todas maneras, mis álbumes de estudio continuarán saliendo por ese sello. En cuanto a la crisis, es sencillo; nadie más compra CD. La gente puede tener sus canciones favoritas en el iPod sin necesidad de algo tan engorroso como comprar un disco.
–En Buenos Aires, usted actuará, además de en un show personal, como solista junto a la Orquesta Filarmónica de la ciudad y en una obra del repertorio “clásico”. ¿Qué diferencias encuentra entre abordar este tipo de obras y de conciertos y el resto de sus actuaciones?
–Me encanta interpretar las obras de Weill y Brecht tal como fueron compuestas, con la orquestación original. Es una parte de la historia y me siento feliz de poder presentarla como tal. Además, es maravilloso actuar junto a una orquesta sinfónica, pararse en el centro de las cuerdas y sentir ese placer casi corpóreo que significa estar dentro del sonido de una gran orquesta. Es, desde ya, una sensación muy diferente de la que experimento cuando canto con mi banda. La energía que fluye desde el grupo, en ese caso, es totalmente distinta y tiene más que ver con la improvisación. El hecho de tocar un repertorio más contemporáneo nos condiciona, desde ya.
–Alguna vez los herederos de Kurt Weill habían llegado a manifestarse en contra de que usted hiciera sus obras, argumentando que la tesitura de la voz no era la adecuada. ¿Qué piensa al respecto?
–Por suerte, eso sucedió hace veinte años y nunca más hubo manifestaciones de esa clase. En un punto, era absurdo, porque mi tesitura es la misma que la de Lotte Lenya –aunque más amplia–. ¿Qué puedo decir? Para mí es un placer sentir que soy una embajadora de la obra de Weill y que el público lo sienta de esa manera. Por otra parte, los herederos de Weill han ganado bastante dinero gracias a mí. Tal vez es por eso que ya no dicen nada.
–En un momento de su carrera, usted comenzó a cantar temas propios y a encarar una renovación del repertorio con canciones de autores como Elvis Costello, entre otros. ¿Cuál es el lugar que ocupa ese nuevo repertorio en su actividad actual?
–Acabo de terminar un álbum con mis propias canciones, que se llama Between Yesterday and Tomorrow y, en Buenos Aires, cantaré varias de ellas, además de piezas de autores como Joni Mitchell, por ejemplo. En este momento, mis propias composiciones conviven con naturalidad junto a las de otros. Y es que hay cosas que son muy cercanas a mi expresividad, a mis necesidades, y sólo podría componerlas yo misma.
–Una revista inglesa publicó un reportaje en el que usted se manifestaba de manera muy crítica con respecto a cómo Alemania había procesado el nazismo y su participación en la guerra. ¿Cuál es su posición actual al respecto?
–En primer lugar, debo decir que amo Alemania. Nunca fui tan estricta ni tan militante como para dejar de tener en cuenta ese amor. De hecho, trabajo mucho allí y aprecio muchísimo su estructura social y su sistema educativo. La gente, o por lo menos la del ámbito de la cultura, es allí sumamente abierta. Simplemente, no elijo vivir allí. Necesito un lugar más libre y más anónimo y lo encuentro en Nueva York. Esta ciudad es más heterogénea y está más abierta al mundo. Y mis tres hijos adoran crecer aquí.
–El cabaret creció como género junto a la crítica social y en épocas de grandes convulsiones. ¿Cómo es la actualidad del género y cuáles podrían ser, hoy, los temas del cabaret?
–El cabaret es una vieja manera de decir las cosas, que ya no existe más. Es una forma artística del pasado. Lo que sucede es que, todavía, fascina con su ironía y su sarcasmo y con su particular sentido de la experiencia dramático musical. En algún sentido, es todavía provocativo y lascivo. Su equivalente contemporáneo son las canciones que hablan de nuestro presente como los autores de Weimar hablaban del suyo. No hablaría de cabaret, pero sí de canciones críticas con lo que las rodea y capaces de pintar su propio tiempo: Joni Mitchell, Tom Waits. Esas son las canciones que prefiero; las que tanto antes como ahora muestran una época.
© 2000-2007 www.pagina12.com.ar|Todos los Derechos Reservados
http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/suplementos/espectaculos/3-7665-2007-09-18.html
Página/12:
Una cita anual
Por Norma Morandini
Martes, 18 de Septiembre de 2007
Es mi cita anual: llega septiembre y comienzo a inquietarme por el texto que debo enviar a Página/12 el día 18 de este mes por la desaparición de mis dos hermanos menores, Néstor y Cristina: Los Recordatorios, esas frases breves que acompañan las fotografías de nuestros familiares desaparecidos y el paso del tiempo ya institucionalizó como un cementerio virtual. En un país como el nuestro, sin tumbas ni lápidas, y por eso, sin epitafios, esas inscripciones que se ponen sobre los sepulcros con la humana necesidad de vencer lo único que nos vence, la muerte. Por eso, los Recordatorios cumplen la función que tienen las lápidas, recordar el nombre del muerto. Pero que en Argentina, al inscribirse en un diario, se convirtieron en una resistencia silenciosa, simbólica de nombrar lo que precisamente fue despojado del nombre. Esos sin N.N.: nescio nomen. El carácter más perverso de la desaparición, que no sólo se apropió de las personas, ocultó sus cadáveres, y nos obliga a los sobrevivientes a repetir el nombre para devolver la humanidad del que no está, al que deliberadamente se hizo desaparecer para ocultar el crimen. Aquel que no existió no pudo haber sido asesinado, y esa es la “barbarie moderna”, como la definió el canadiense Alexis Nouss. La negación de los encierros como de los entierros para no dejar rastros. Ni tumbas, ni nombres, ni registros. Nada, la muletilla que repiten hoy los jóvenes, y hace pensar si el origen de la expresión no nace ahí, cuando la vida se hizo superflua, nada, porque como bien lo advirtió Ernst Jünger, lo que “en el fondo se teme es que los muertos regresen a sus tumbas en forma de espíritus y atraigan ofrendas futuras, peregrinaciones futuras”. Un efecto que se perpetúa en el tiempo y exige de los familiares un esfuerzo de la razón para aceptar, también, la ausencia como muerte del que no se vio morir. Sin saber si nombrar al que no está en la intimidad del parentesco, en la comunidad de los afectos, o en ese intangible, llamado historia. Y así vamos, sin saber cómo decir para mejor recordar. Y yo que me gano la vida escribiendo, entrenada en narrar para otros, cada vez que llegan estas fechas me debato entre testimoniar el recuerdo de la ausencia de mis dos hermanos en la mesa de la reunión familiar o si debo expresar la tragedia colectiva, ese Uno personal que se disuelve en el Nosotros de la Historia.
Con el paso del tiempo, y por eso, la disolución de los temores, también fueron cambiando las reacciones a mi alrededor cuando cada septiembre aparecen esos casi niños, inmortalizados en una fotografía de periódico. Y de haber sido evitada como si tuviera lepra, como nos sucedía en el inicio de la democratización a los más recientes, cuando personas cercanas, de colegas a vecinos, que jamás habían mencionado el tema, modifican su conducta, al menos ese día, el 18 de septiembre, como si recién se enteraran. Ese “yo no sabía”, al que prefiero dar crédito, antes que fomentar la desconfianza que como un veneno nos inoculó la dictadura.
Entre nosotros nunca lo conversamos. Tal vez por tener en la familia el oficio de la escritura, soy la que sin consultar escribe ese recordatorio-epitafio, en el que año a año la coyuntura política se cuela, desde la coincidencia de los nombres de la pareja presidencial a esta horrible casualidad, el día en el que, también, desapareció Julio López. Por eso, este septiembre, a treinta años de aquel domingo en el que sacaron a Cristina de mi casa en el Paseo Colón, y Néstor, supuestamente de la otrora Confitería El Molino, el Recordatorio se llena de sentido y ya no sólo busca nombrar lo que se despojó del nombre, sino clama para que los Derechos Humanos, esa bella utopía surgida tras la locura del nazismo, deje de conjugarse con la muerte y, rescatados para la vida, para todos –ésa es la fuerza del valor universal–, sean el mejor antídoto y cuajen definitivamente en una cultura de derechos y ciudadanía que no es otra cosa que el respeto al otro en su dignidad y, por eso, su libertad.
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http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/contratapa/13-91572-2007-09-18.html
The Independent:
Banking crisis: The fear spreads
By Sean Farrell, Financial Editor
Published: 18 September 2007
The Government made an unprecedented intervention in the Northern Rock crisis yesterday by publicly guaranteeing all the bank's deposits. The intervention, by the Chancellor, Alistair Darling, capped a dramatic day that had seen further mass queuing outside Northern Rock branches and billions wiped off banks' shares on fears of contagion.
The worst hit of the other banks was Alliance & Leicester, which tried to stem fears that it would be the next bank to seek emergency funding. Bradford & Bingley was another to feel the pain.
The slump in Alliance & Leicester's shares raised fears of its customers making mass withdrawals of their savings in a second run on a British bank, and the Leicester-based mortgage lender had to act quickly.
But it was the Northern Rock crisis that continued to cause the most concern. The bank's shares fell by 35.4 per cent, and mass withdrawals continued, bringing the total withdrawn in the past week to £2bn.
In an attempt to calm the panic, Alistair Darling, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, said: "Should it be necessary, we, with the Bank of England, would put in place arrangements to guarantee all the existing deposits in Northern Rock during the current instability. This means people can continue to take their money out of Northern Rock but if they choose to leave their money in Northern Rock it will be guaranteed safe and secure."
Mr Darling said that if forced to, the Government would use Northern Rock's assets to fund the deposits. City analysts said that would be tantamount to nationalising the bank.
The Treasury said the Government could provide backing for other lenders if necessary, depending on their financial situation.
Before Mr Darling's statement, thousands of people had continued to queue outside Northern Rock branches and bombard the bank's website to get their money out, causing fears the Newcastle-based bank would be unable to continue trading. About £2bn of the bank's £24bn of deposits was taken out before yesterday with another £1bn likely to have been taken out yesterday.
Geoffrey Wood, economics professor at Cass Business School, said: "What Mr Darling is doing is a good idea. If there is any criticism it would be that he should have done this earlier."
Professor Wood said Mr Darling's action was without precedent because the last time there was a financial crisis of this scale was in 1866.
Mr Darling has been trying since Friday to reassure savers that Northern Rock was solvent and had the backing of the Bank of England. But with no sign of a let-up in withdrawals from Northern Rock he was forced to offer the full guarantee.
Alliance & Leicester was forced to make a statement yesterday after its shares plunged by nearly a third and Bradford & Bingley shares also fell heavily. With relatively few depositors, both banks use the money markets to fund their lending, sparking fears they could face similar problems to Northern Rock.
Alliance & Leicester said it knew of no reason for its shares to fall and that if its business was badly affected it would make an announcement to the Stock Exchange. The share plunge slashed Alliance & Leicester's market value by £1.2bn. Mr Darling said no other bank had gone to the Bank of England for emergency funding.
The Government and the Bank of England have been under increasing pressure over the crisis at Northern Rock. Bankers and economists have criticised the Bank of England's hardline stance on not providing support for financial institutions, and opposition MPs have tried to pin the blame on the Prime Minister for his stewardship of the economy as Chancellor.
http://news.independent.co.uk/business/news/article2973527.ece
The New Yorker:
The Abyss
Music and amnesia.
A Neurologist’s Notebook
by Oliver Sacks
September 24, 2007
In March of 1985, Clive Wearing, an eminent English musician and musicologist in his mid-forties, was struck by a brain infection—a herpes encephalitis—affecting especially the parts of his brain concerned with memory. He was left with a memory span of only seconds—the most devastating case of amnesia ever recorded. New events and experiences were effaced almost instantly. As his wife, Deborah, wrote in her 2005 memoir, “Forever Today”:
His ability to perceive what he saw and heard was unimpaired. But he did not seem to be able to retain any impression of anything for more than a blink. Indeed, if he did blink, his eyelids parted to reveal a new scene. The view before the blink was utterly forgotten. Each blink, each glance away and back, brought him an entirely new view. I tried to imagine how it was for him. . . . Something akin to a film with bad continuity, the glass half empty, then full, the cigarette suddenly longer, the actor’s hair now tousled, now smooth. But this was real life, a room changing in ways that were physically impossible.
In addition to this inability to preserve new memories, Clive had a retrograde amnesia, a deletion of virtually his entire past.
When he was filmed in 1986 for Jonathan Miller’s extraordinary documentary “Prisoner of Consciousness,” Clive showed a desperate aloneness, fear, and bewilderment. He was acutely, continually, agonizingly conscious that something bizarre, something awful, was the matter. His constantly repeated complaint, however, was not of a faulty memory but of being deprived, in some uncanny and terrible way, of all experience, deprived of consciousness and life itself. As Deborah wrote:
It was as if every waking moment was the first waking moment. Clive was under the constant impression that he had just emerged from unconsciousness because he had no evidence in his own mind of ever being awake before. . . . “I haven’t heard anything, seen anything, touched anything, smelled anything,” he would say. “It’s like being dead.”
Desperate to hold on to something, to gain some purchase, Clive started to keep a journal, first on scraps of paper, then in a notebook. But his journal entries consisted, essentially, of the statements “I am awake” or “I am conscious,” entered again and again every few minutes. He would write: “2:10 P.M: This time properly awake. . . . 2:14 P.M: this time finally awake. . . . 2:35 P.M: this time completely awake,” along with negations of these statements: “At 9:40 P.M. I awoke for the first time, despite my previous claims.” This in turn was crossed out, followed by “I was fully conscious at 10:35 P.M., and awake for the first time in many, many weeks.” This in turn was cancelled out by the next entry.
This dreadful journal, almost void of any other content but these passionate assertions and denials, intending to affirm existence and continuity but forever contradicting them, was filled anew each day, and soon mounted to hundreds of almost identical pages. It was a terrifying and poignant testament to Clive’s mental state, his lostness, in the years that followed his amnesia—a state that Deborah, in Miller’s film, called “a never-ending agony.”
Another profoundly amnesic patient I knew some years ago dealt with his abysses of amnesia by fluent confabulations. He was wholly immersed in his quick-fire inventions and had no insight into what was happening; so far as he was concerned, there was nothing the matter. He would confidently identify or misidentify me as a friend of his, a customer in his delicatessen, a kosher butcher, another doctor—as a dozen different people in the course of a few minutes. This sort of confabulation was not one of conscious fabrication. It was, rather, a strategy, a desperate attempt—unconscious and almost automatic—to provide a sort of continuity, a narrative continuity, when memory, and thus experience, was being snatched away every instant.
Though one cannot have direct knowledge of one’s own amnesia, there may be ways to infer it: from the expressions on people’s faces when one has repeated something half a dozen times; when one looks down at one’s coffee cup and finds that it is empty; when one looks at one’s diary and sees entries in one’s own handwriting. Lacking memory, lacking direct experiential knowledge, amnesiacs have to make hypotheses and inferences, and they usually make plausible ones. They can infer that they have been doing something, been somewhere, even though they cannot recollect what or where. Yet Clive, rather than making plausible guesses, always came to the conclusion that he had just been “awakened,” that he had been “dead.” This seemed to me a reflection of the almost instantaneous effacement of perception for Clive—thought itself was almost impossible within this tiny window of time. Indeed, Clive once said to Deborah, “I am completely incapable of thinking.”
At the beginning of his illness, Clive would sometimes be confounded at the bizarre things he experienced. Deborah wrote of how, coming in one day, she saw him holding something in the palm of one hand, and repeatedly covering and uncovering it with the other hand as if he were a magician practising a disappearing trick. He was holding a chocolate. He could feel the chocolate unmoving in his left palm, and yet every time he lifted his hand he told me it revealed a brand new chocolate.
“Look!” he said. “It’s new!” He couldn’t take his eyes off it.
“It’s the same chocolate,” I said gently.
“No . . . look! It’s changed. It wasn’t like that before . . .” He covered and uncovered the chocolate every couple of seconds, lifting and looking.
“Look! It’s different again! How do they do it?”
Within months, Clive’s confusion gave way to the agony, the desperation, that is so clear in Miller’s film. This, in turn, was succeeded by a deep depression, as it came to him—if only in sudden, intense, and immediately forgotten moments—that his former life was over, that he was incorrigibly disabled.
As the months passed without any real improvement, the hope of significant recovery became fainter and fainter, and toward the end of 1985 Clive was moved to a room in a chronic psychiatric unit—a room he was to occupy for the next six and a half years but which he was never able to recognize as his own. A young psychologist saw Clive for a period of time in 1990 and kept a verbatim record of everything he said, and this caught the grim mood that had taken hold. Clive said at one point, “Can you imagine one night five years long? No dreaming, no waking, no touch, no taste, no smell, no sight, no sound, no hearing, nothing at all. It’s like being dead. I came to the conclusion that I was dead.”
The only times of feeling alive were when Deborah visited him. But the moment she left, he was desperate once again, and by the time she got home, ten or fifteen minutes later, she would find repeated messages from him on her answering machine: “Please come and see me, darling—it’s been ages since I’ve seen you. Please fly here at the speed of light.”
To imagine the future was no more possible for Clive than to remember the past—both were engulfed by the onslaught of amnesia. Yet, at some level, Clive could not be unaware of the sort of place he was in, and the likelihood that he would spend the rest of his life, his endless night, in such a place.
But then, seven years after his illness, after huge efforts by Deborah, Clive was moved to a small country residence for the brain-injured, much more congenial than a hospital. Here he was one of only a handful of patients, and in constant contact with a dedicated staff who treated him as an individual and respected his intelligence and talents. He was taken off most of his heavy tranquillizers, and seemed to enjoy his walks around the village and gardens near the home, the spaciousness, the fresh food.
For the first eight or nine years in this new home, Deborah told me, “Clive was calmer and sometimes jolly, a bit more content, but often with angry outbursts still, unpredictable, withdrawn, spending most of his time in his room alone.” But gradually, in the past six or seven years, Clive has become more sociable, more talkative. Conversation (though of a “scripted” sort) has come to fill what had been empty, solitary, and desperate days.
Though I had corresponded with Deborah since Clive first became ill, twenty years went by before I met Clive in person. He was so changed from the haunted, agonized man I had seen in Miller’s 1986 film that I was scarcely prepared for the dapper, bubbling figure who opened the door when Deborah and I went to visit him in the summer of 2005. He had been reminded of our visit just before we arrived, and he flung his arms around Deborah the moment she entered.
Deborah introduced me: “This is Dr. Sacks.” And Clive immediately said, “You doctors work twenty-four hours a day, don’t you? You’re always in demand.” We went up to his room, which contained an electric organ console and a piano piled high with music. Some of the scores, I noted, were transcriptions of Orlandus Lassus, the Renaissance composer whose works Clive had edited. I saw Clive’s journal by the washstand—he has now filled up scores of volumes, and the current one is always kept in this exact location. Next to it was an etymological dictionary with dozens of reference slips of different colors stuck between the pages and a large, handsome volume, “The 100 Most Beautiful Cathedrals in the World.” A Canaletto print hung on the wall, and I asked Clive if he had ever been to Venice. No, he said. (Deborah told me they had visited several times before his illness.) Looking at the print, Clive pointed out the dome of a church: “Look at it,” he said. “See how it soars—like an angel!”
When I asked Deborah whether Clive knew about her memoir, she told me that she had shown it to him twice before, but that he had instantly forgotten. I had my own heavily annotated copy with me, and asked Deborah to show it to him again.
“You’ve written a book!” he cried, astonished. “Well done! Congratulations!” He peered at the cover. “All by you? Good heavens!” Excited, he jumped for joy. Deborah showed him the dedication page: “For my Clive.” “Dedicated to me?” He hugged her. This scene was repeated several times within a few minutes, with almost exactly the same astonishment, the same expressions of delight and joy each time.
Clive and Deborah are still very much in love with each other, despite his amnesia. (Indeed, Deborah’s book is subtitled “A Memoir of Love and Amnesia.”) He greeted her several times as if she had just arrived. It must be an extraordinary situation, I thought, both maddening and flattering, to be seen always as new, as a gift, a blessing.
Clive had, in the meantime, addressed me as “Your Highness” and inquired at intervals, “Been at Buckingham Palace? . . . Are you the Prime Minister? . . . Are you from the U.N.?” He laughed when I answered, “Just the U.S.” This joking or jesting was of a somewhat waggish, stereotyped nature and highly repetitive. Clive had no idea who I was, little idea who anyone was, but this bonhomie allowed him to make contact, to keep a conversation going. I suspected he had some damage to his frontal lobes, too—such jokiness (neurologists speak of Witzelsucht, joking disease), like his impulsiveness and chattiness, could go with a weakening of the usual social frontal-lobe inhibitions.
He was excited at the notion of going out for lunch—lunch with Deborah. “Isn’t she a wonderful woman?” he kept asking me. “Doesn’t she have marvellous kisses?” I said yes, I was sure she had.
As we drove to the restaurant, Clive, with great speed and fluency, invented words for the letters on the license plates of passing cars: “JCK” was Japanese Clever Kid; “NKR” was New King of Russia; and “BDH” (Deborah’s car) was British Daft Hospital, then Blessed Dutch Hospital. “Forever Today,” Deborah’s book, immediately became “Three-Ever Today,” “Two-Ever Today,” “One-Ever Today.” This incontinent punning and rhyming and clanging was virtually instantaneous, occurring with a speed no normal person could match. It resembled Tourettic or savantlike speed, the speed of the preconscious, undelayed by reflection.
When we arrived at the restaurant, Clive did all the license plates in the parking lot and then, elaborately, with a bow and a flourish, let Deborah enter: “Ladies first!” He looked at me with some uncertainty as I followed them to the table: “Are you joining us, too?”
When I offered him the wine list, he looked it over and exclaimed, “Good God! Australian wine! New Zealand wine! The colonies are producing something original—how exciting!” This partly indicated his retrograde amnesia—he is still in the nineteen-sixties (if he is anywhere), when Australian and New Zealand wines were almost unheard of in England. “The colonies,” however, was part of his compulsive waggery and parody.
At lunch he talked about Cambridge—he had been at Clare College, but had often gone next door to King’s, for its famous choir. He spoke of how after Cambridge, in 1968, he joined the London Sinfonietta, where they played modern music, though he was already attracted to the Renaissance and Lassus. He was the chorus master there, and he reminisced about how the singers could not talk during coffee breaks; they had to save their voices (“It was often misunderstood by the instrumentalists, seemed standoffish to them”). These all sounded like genuine memories. But they could equally have reflected his knowing about these events, rather than actual memories of them—expressions of “semantic” memory rather than “event” or “episodic” memory. Then he spoke of the Second World War (he was born in 1938) and how his family would go to bomb shelters and play chess or cards there. He said that he remembered the doodlebugs: “There were more bombs in Birmingham than in London.” Was it possible that these were genuine memories? He would have been only six or seven, at most. Or was he confabulating or simply, as we all do, repeating stories he had been told as a child?
At one point, he talked about pollution and how dirty petrol engines were. When I told him I had a hybrid with an electric motor as well as a combustion engine, he was astounded, as if something he had read about as a theoretical possibility had, far sooner than he had imagined, become a reality.
In her remarkable book, so tender yet so tough-minded and realistic, Deborah wrote about the change that had so struck me: that Clive was now “garrulous and outgoing . . . could talk the hind legs off a donkey.” There were certain themes he tended to stick to, she said, favorite subjects (electricity, the Tube, stars and planets, Queen Victoria, words and etymologies), which would all be brought up again and again:
“Have they found life on Mars yet?”
“No, darling, but they think there might have been water . . .”
“Really? Isn’t it amazing that the sun goes on burning? Where does it get all that fuel? It doesn’t get any smaller. And it doesn’t move. We move round the sun. How can it keep on burning for millions of years? And the Earth stays the same temperature. It’s so finely balanced.”
“They say it’s getting warmer now, love. They call it global warming.”
“No! Why’s that?”
“Because of the pollution. We’ve been emitting gases into the atmosphere. And puncturing the ozone layer.”
“OH NO! That could be disastrous!”
“People are already getting more cancers.”
“Oh, aren’t people stupid! Do you know the average IQ is only 100? That’s terribly low, isn’t it? One hundred. It’s no wonder the world’s in such a mess.”
Clive’s scripts were repeated with great frequency, sometimes three or four times in one phone call. He stuck to subjects he felt he knew something about, where he would be on safe ground, even if here and there something apocryphal crept in. . . . These small areas of repartee acted as stepping stones on which he could move through the present. They enabled him to engage with others.
I would put it even more strongly and use a phrase that Deborah used in another connection, when she wrote of Clive being poised upon “a tiny platform . . . above the abyss.” Clive’s loquacity, his almost compulsive need to talk and keep conversations going, served to maintain a precarious platform, and when he came to a stop the abyss was there, waiting to engulf him. This, indeed, is what happened when we went to a supermarket and he and I got separated briefly from Deborah. He suddenly exclaimed, “I’m conscious now . . . . Never saw a human being before . . . for thirty years . . . . It’s like death!” He looked very angry and distressed. Deborah said the staff calls these grim monologues his “deads”—they make a note of how many he has in a day or a week and gauge his state of mind by their number.
Deborah thinks that repetition has slightly dulled the very real pain that goes with this agonized but stereotyped complaint, but when he says such things she will distract him immediately. Once she has done this, there seems to be no lingering mood—an advantage of his amnesia. And, indeed, once we returned to the car Clive was off on his license plates again.
Back in his room, I spotted the two volumes of Bach’s “Forty-eight Preludes and Fugues” on top of the piano and asked Clive if he would play one of them. He said that he had never played any of them before, but then he began to play Prelude 9 in E Major and said, “I remember this one.” He remembers almost nothing unless he is actually doing it; then it may come to him. He inserted a tiny, charming improvisation at one point, and did a sort of Chico Marx ending, with a huge downward scale. With his great musicality and his playfulness, he can easily improvise, joke, play with any piece of music.
His eye fell on the book about cathedrals, and he talked about cathedral bells—did I know how many combinations there could be with eight bells? “Eight by seven by six by five by four by three by two by one,” he rattled off. “Factorial eight.” And then, without pause: “That’s forty thousand.” (I worked it out, laboriously: it is 40,320.)
I asked him about Prime Ministers. Tony Blair? Never heard of him. John Major? No. Margaret Thatcher? Vaguely familiar. Harold Macmillan, Harold Wilson: ditto. (But earlier in the day he had seen a car with “JMV” plates and instantly said, “John Major Vehicle”—showing that he had an implicit memory of Major’s name.) Deborah wrote of how he could not remember her name, “but one day someone asked him to say his full name, and he said, ‘Clive David Deborah Wearing—funny name that. I don’t know why my parents called me that.’ ” He has gained other implicit memories, too, slowly picking up new knowledge, like the layout of his residence. He can go alone now to the bathroom, the dining room, the kitchen—but if he stops and thinks en route he is lost. Though he could not describe his residence, Deborah tells me that he unclasps his seat belt as they draw near and offers to get out and open the gate. Later, when he makes her coffee, he knows where the cups, the milk, and the sugar are kept. He cannot say where they are, but he can go to them; he has actions, but few facts, at his disposal.
I decided to widen the testing and asked Clive to tell me the names of all the composers he knew. He said, “Handel, Bach, Beethoven, Berg, Mozart, Lassus.” That was it. Deborah told me that at first, when asked this question, he would omit Lassus, his favorite composer. This seemed appalling for someone who had been not only a musician but an encyclopedic musicologist. Perhaps it reflected the shortness of his attention span and recent immediate memory—perhaps he thought that he had in fact given us dozens of names. So I asked him other questions on a variety of topics that he would have been knowledgeable about in his earlier days. Again, there was a paucity of information in his replies and sometimes something close to a blank. I started to feel that I had been beguiled, in a sense, by Clive’s easy, nonchalant, fluent conversation into thinking that he still had a great deal of general information at his disposal, despite the loss of memory for events. Given his intelligence, ingenuity, and humor, it was easy to think this on meeting him for the first time. But repeated conversations rapidly exposed the limits of his knowledge. It was indeed as Deborah wrote in her book, Clive “stuck to subjects he knew something about” and used these islands of knowledge as “stepping stones” in his conversation. Clearly, Clive’s general knowledge, or semantic memory, was greatly affected, too—though not as catastrophically as his episodic memory.
Yet semantic memory of this sort, even if completely intact, is not of much use in the absence of explicit, episodic memory. Clive is safe enough in the confines of his residence, for instance, but he would be hopelessly lost if he were to go out alone. Lawrence Weiskrantz comments on the need for both sorts of memory in his 1997 book “Consciousness Lost and Found”:
The amnesic patient can think about material in the immediate present. . . . He can also think about items in his semantic memory, his general knowledge. . . . But thinking for successful everyday adaptation requires not only factual knowledge, but the ability to recall it on the right occasion, to relate it to other occasions, indeed the ability to reminisce.
This uselessness of semantic memory unaccompanied by episodic memory is also brought out by Umberto Eco in his novel “The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana,” in which the narrator, an antiquarian bookseller and polymath, is a man of Eco-like intelligence and erudition. Though amnesic from a stroke, he retains the poetry he has read, the many languages he knows, his encyclopedic memory of facts; but he is nonetheless helpless and disoriented (and recovers from this only because the effects of his stroke are transient).
It is similar, in a way, with Clive. His semantic memory, while of little help in organizing his life, does have a crucial social role: it allows him to engage in conversation (though it is occasionally more monologue than conversation). Thus, Deborah wrote, “he would string all his subjects together in a row, and the other person simply needed to nod or mumble.” By moving rapidly from one thought to another, Clive managed to secure a sort of continuity, to hold the thread of consciousness and attention intact—albeit precariously, for the thoughts were held together, on the whole, by superficial associations. Clive’s verbosity made him a little odd, a little too much at times, but it was highly adaptive—it enabled him to reënter the world of human discourse.
In the 1986 film, Deborah quoted Proust’s description of Swann waking from a deep sleep, not knowing at first where he was, who he was, what he was. He had only “the most rudimentary sense of existence, such as may lurk and flicker in the depths of an animal’s consciousness,” until memory came back to him, “like a rope let down from heaven to draw me up out of the abyss of not-being, from which I could never have escaped by myself.” This gave him back his personal consciousness and identity. No rope from Heaven, no autobiographical memory will ever come down in this way to Clive.
From the start there have been, for Clive, two realities of immense importance. The first of these is Deborah, whose presence and love for him have made life tolerable, at least intermittently, in the twenty or more years since his illness. Clive’s amnesia not only destroyed his ability to retain new memories; it deleted almost all of his earlier memories, including those of the years when he met and fell in love with Deborah. He told Deborah, when she questioned him, that he had never heard of John Lennon or John F. Kennedy. Though he always recognized his own children, Deborah told me, “he would be surprised at their height and amazed to hear he is a grandfather. He asked his younger son what O-level exams he was doing in 2005, more than twenty years after Edmund left school.” Yet somehow he always recognized Deborah as his wife, when she visited, and felt moored by her presence, lost without her. He would rush to the door when he heard her voice, and embrace her with passionate, desperate fervor. Having no idea how long she had been away—since anything not in his immediate field of perception and attention would be lost, forgotten, within seconds—he seemed to feel that she, too, had been lost in the abyss of time, and so her “return” from the abyss seemed nothing short of miraculous. As Deborah put it:
Clive was constantly surrounded by strangers in a strange place, with no knowledge of where he was or what had happened to him. To catch sight of me was always a massive relief—to know that he was not alone, that I still cared, that I loved him, that I was there. Clive was terrified all the time. But I was his life, I was his lifeline. Every time he saw me, he would run to me, fall on me, sobbing, clinging.
How, why, when he recognized no one else with any consistency, did Clive recognize Deborah? There are clearly many sorts of memory, and emotional memory is one of the deepest and least understood.
The neuroscientist Neal J. Cohen recounts the famous story of Édouard Claparède, a Swiss physician who, upon shaking hands with a severely amnesic woman, pricked her finger with a pin hidden in his hand. Subsequently, whenever he again attempted to shake the patient’s hand, she promptly withdrew it. When he questioned her about this behavior, she replied, “Isn’t it allowed to withdraw one’s hand?” and “Perhaps there is a pin hidden in your hand,” and finally, “Sometimes pins are hidden in hands.” Thus the patient learned the appropriate response based on previous experience, but she never seemed to attribute her behavior to the personal memory of some previously experienced event.
For Claparède’s patient, some sort of memory of the pain, an implicit and emotional memory, persisted. It seems certain, likewise, that in the first two years of life, even though one retains no explicit memories (Freud called this infantile amnesia), deep emotional memories or associations are nevertheless being made in the limbic system and other regions of the brain where emotions are represented—and these emotional memories may determine one’s behavior for a lifetime. A recent paper by Oliver Turnbull, Evangelos Zois, et al., in the journal Neuro-Psychoanalysis, has shown that patients with amnesia can form emotional transferences to an analyst, even though they retain no explicit memory of the analyst or their previous meetings. Nonetheless, a strong emotional bond begins to develop. Clive and Deborah were newly married at the time of his encephalitis, and deeply in love for a few years before that. His passionate relationship with her, a relationship that began before his encephalitis, and one that centers in part on their shared love for music, has engraved itself in him—in areas of his brain unaffected by the encephalitis—so deeply that his amnesia, the most severe amnesia ever recorded, cannot eradicate it.
Nonetheless, for many years he failed to recognize Deborah if she chanced to walk past, and even now he cannot say what she looks like unless he is actually looking at her. Her appearance, her voice, her scent, the way they behave with each other, and the intensity of their emotions and interactions—all this confirms her identity, and his own.
The other miracle was the discovery Deborah made early on, while Clive was still in the hospital, desperately confused and disoriented: that his musical powers were totally intact. “I picked up some music,” Deborah wrote, and held it open for Clive to see. I started to sing one of the lines. He picked up the tenor lines and sang with me. A bar or so in, I suddenly realized what was happening. He could still read music. He was singing. His talk might be a jumble no one could understand but his brain was still capable of music. . . . When he got to the end of the line I hugged him and kissed him all over his face. . . . Clive could sit down at the organ and play with both hands on the keyboard, changing stops, and with his feet on the pedals, as if this were easier than riding a bicycle. Suddenly we had a place to be together, where we could create our own world away from the ward. Our friends came in to sing. I left a pile of music by the bed and visitors brought other pieces.
Miller’s film showed dramatically the virtually perfect preservation of Clive’s musical powers and memory. In these scenes from only a year or so after his illness, his face often appeared tight with torment and bewilderment. But when he was conducting his old choir, he performed with great sensitivity and grace, mouthing the melodies, turning to different singers and sections of the choir, cuing them, encouraging them, to bring out their special parts. It is obvious that Clive not only knew the piece intimately—how all the parts contributed to the unfolding of the musical thought—but also retained all the skills of conducting, his professional persona, and his own unique style.
Clive cannot retain any memory of passing events or experience and, in addition, has lost most of the memories of events and experiences preceding his encephalitis—how, then, does he retain his remarkable knowledge of music, his ability to sight-read, play the piano and organ, sing, and conduct a choir in the masterly way he did before he became ill?
H.M., a famous and unfortunate patient described by Scoville and Milner in 1957, was rendered amnesic by the surgical removal of both hippocampi, along with adjacent structures of the medial temporal lobes. (This was a desperate attempt at treating his intractable seizures; it was not yet realized that autobiographical memory and the ability to form new memories of events depended on these structures.) Yet H.M., though he lost many memories of his former life, did not lose any of the skills he had acquired, and indeed he could learn and perfect new skills with training and practice, even though he would retain no memory of the practice sessions.
Larry Squire, a neuroscientist who has spent a lifetime exploring mechanisms of memory and amnesia, emphasizes that no two cases of amnesia are the same. He wrote to me:
If the damage is limited to the medial temporal lobe, then one expects an impairment such as H.M. had. With somewhat more extensive medial temporal lobe damage, one can expect something more severe, as in E.P. [a patient whom Squire and his colleagues have investigated intensively]. With the addition of frontal damage, perhaps one begins to understand Clive’s impairment. Or perhaps one needs lateral temporal damage as well, or basal forebrain damage. Clive’s case is unique, because a particular pattern of anatomical damage occurred. His case is not like H.M. or like Claparède’s patient. We cannot write about amnesia as if it were a single entity like mumps or measles.
Yet H.M.’s case and subsequent work made it clear that two very different sorts of memory could exist: a conscious memory of events (episodic memory) and an unconscious memory for procedures—and that such procedural memory is unimpaired in amnesia.
This is dramatically clear with Clive, too, for he can shave, shower, look after his grooming, and dress elegantly, with taste and style; he moves confidently and is fond of dancing. He talks abundantly, using a large vocabulary; he can read and write in several languages. He is good at calculation. He can make phone calls, and he can find the coffee things and find his way about the home. If he is asked how to do these things, he cannot say, but he does them. Whatever involves a sequence or pattern of action, he does fluently, unhesitatingly.
But can Clive’s beautiful playing and singing, his masterly conducting, his powers of improvisation be adequately characterized as “skills” or “procedures”? For his playing is infused with intelligence and feeling, with a sensitive attunement to the musical structure, the composer’s style and mind. Can any artistic or creative performance of this calibre be adequately explained by “procedural memory”? Episodic or explicit memory, we know, develops relatively late in childhood and is dependent on a complex brain system involving the hippocampi and medial temporal-lobe structures, the system that is compromised in severe amnesiacs and all but obliterated in Clive. The basis of procedural or implicit memory is less easy to define, but it certainly involves larger and more primitive parts of the brain—subcortical structures like the basal ganglia and cerebellum and their many connections to each other and to the cerebral cortex. The size and variety of these systems guarantee the robustness of procedural memory and the fact that, unlike episodic memory, procedural memory can remain largely intact even in the face of extensive damage to the hippocampi and medial temporal-lobe structures.
Episodic memory depends on the perception of particular and often unique events, and one’s memories of such events, like one’s original perception of them, are not only highly individual (colored by one’s interests, concerns, and values) but prone to be revised or recategorized every time they are recalled. This is in fundamental contrast to procedural memory, where it is all-important that the remembering be literal, exact, and reproducible. Repetition and rehearsal, timing and sequence are of the essence here. Rodolfo Llinás, the neuroscientist, uses the term “fixed action pattern” (FAP) for such procedural memories. Some of these may be present even before birth (fetal horses, for example, may gallop in the womb). Much of the early motor development of the child depends on learning and refining such procedures, through play, imitation, trial and error, and incessant rehearsal. All of these start to develop long before the child can call on any explicit or episodic memories.
Is the concept of fixed action patterns any more illuminating than that of procedural memories in relation to the enormously complex, creative performances of a professional musician? In his book “I of the Vortex,” Llinás writes:
When a soloist such as Heifetz plays with a symphony orchestra accompanying him, by convention the concerto is played purely from memory. Such playing implies that this highly specific motor pattern is stored somewhere and subsequently released at the time the curtain goes up.
But for a performer, Llinás writes, it is not sufficient to have implicit memory only; one must have explicit memory as well:
Without intact explicit memory, Jascha Heifetz would not remember from day to day which piece he had chosen to work on previously, or that he had ever worked on that piece before. Nor would he recall what he had accomplished the day before or by analysis of past experience what particular problems in execution should be a focus of today’s practice session. In fact, it would not occur to him to have a practice session at all; without close direction from someone else he would be effectively incapable of undertaking the process of learning any new piece, irrespective of his considerable technical skills.
This, too, is very much the case with Clive, who, for all his musical powers, needs “close direction” from others. He needs someone to put the music before him, to get him into action, and to make sure that he learns and practices new pieces.
What is the relationship of action patterns and procedural memories, which are associated with relatively primitive portions of the nervous system, to consciousness and sensibility, which depend on the cerebral cortex? Practice involves conscious application, monitoring what one is doing, bringing all one’s intelligence and sensibility and values to bear—even though what is so painfully and consciously acquired may then become automatic, coded in motor patterns at a subcortical level. Each time Clive sings or plays the piano or conducts a choir, automatism comes to his aid. But what happens in an artistic or creative performance, though it depends on automatisms, is anything but automatic. The actual performance reanimates him, engages him as a creative person; it becomes fresh and perhaps contains new improvisations or innovations. Once Clive starts playing, his “momentum,” as Deborah writes, will keep him, and the piece, going. Deborah, herself a musician, expresses this very precisely:
The momentum of the music carried Clive from bar to bar. Within the structure of the piece, he was held, as if the staves were tramlines and there was only one way to go. He knew exactly where he was because in every phrase there is context implied, by rhythm, key, melody. It was marvellous to be free. When the music stopped Clive fell through to the lost place. But for those moments he was playing he seemed normal.
Clive’s performance self seems, to those who know him, just as vivid and complete as it was before his illness. This mode of being, this self, is seemingly untouched by his amnesia, even though his autobiographical self, the self that depends on explicit, episodic memories, is virtually lost. The rope that is let down from Heaven for Clive comes not with recalling the past, as for Proust, but with performance—and it holds only as long as the performance lasts. Without performance, the thread is broken, and he is thrown back once again into the abyss.
Deborah speaks of the “momentum” of the music in its very structure. A piece of music is not a mere sequence of notes but a tightly organized organic whole. Every bar, every phrase arises organically from what preceded it and points to what will follow. Dynamism is built into the nature of melody. And over and above this there is the intentionality of the composer, the style, the order, and the logic that he has created to express his musical ideas and feelings. These, too, are present in every bar and phrase. Schopenhauer wrote of melody as having “significant intentional connection from beginning to end” and as “one thought from beginning to end.” Marvin Minsky compares a sonata to a teacher or a lesson:
No one remembers, word for word, all that was said in any lecture, or played in any piece. But if you understood it once, you now own new networks of knowledge, about each theme and how it changes and relates to others. Thus, no one could remember Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony entire, from a single hearing. But neither could one ever hear again those first four notes as just four notes! Once but a tiny scrap of sound; it is now a Known Thing—a locus in the web of all the other things we know, whose meanings and significances depend on one another.
A piece of music will draw one in, teach one about its structure and secrets, whether one is listening consciously or not. This is so even if one has never heard a piece of music before. Listening to music is not a passive process but intensely active, involving a stream of inferences, hypotheses, expectations, and anticipations. We can grasp a new piece—how it is constructed, where it is going, what will come next—with such accuracy that even after a few bars we may be able to hum or sing along with it. Such anticipation, such singing along, is possible because one has knowledge, largely implicit, of musical “rules” (how a cadence must resolve, for instance) and a familiarity with particular musical conventions (the form of a sonata, or the repetition of a theme). When we “remember” a melody, it plays in our mind; it becomes newly alive.
Thus we can listen again and again to a recording of a piece of music, a piece we know well, and yet it can seem as fresh, as new, as the first time we heard it. There is not a process of recalling, assembling, recategorizing, as when one attempts to reconstruct or remember an event or a scene from the past. We recall one tone at a time, and each tone entirely fills our consciousness yet simultaneously relates to the whole. It is similar when we walk or run or swim—we do so one step, one stroke at a time, yet each step or stroke is an integral part of the whole. Indeed, if we think of each note or step too consciously, we may lose the thread, the motor melody.
It may be that Clive, incapable of remembering or anticipating events because of his amnesia, is able to sing and play and conduct music because remembering music is not, in the usual sense, remembering at all. Remembering music, listening to it, or playing it, is wholly in the present. Victor Zuckerkandl, a philosopher of music, explored this paradox beautifully in 1956 in “Sound and Symbol”:
The hearing of a melody is a hearing with the melody. . . . It is even a condition of hearing melody that the tone present at the moment should fill consciousness entirely, that nothing should be remembered, nothing except it or beside it be present in consciousness. . . . Hearing a melody is hearing, having heard, and being about to hear, all at once. . . . Every melody declares to us that the past can be there without being remembered, the future without being foreknown.
It has been twenty years since Clive’s illness, and, for him, nothing has moved on. One might say he is still in 1985 or, given his retrograde amnesia, in 1965. In some ways, he is not anywhere at all; he has dropped out of space and time altogether. He no longer has any inner narrative; he is not leading a life in the sense that the rest of us do. And yet one has only to see him at the keyboard or with Deborah to feel that, at such times, he is himself again and wholly alive. It is not the remembrance of things past, the “once” that Clive yearns for, or can ever achieve. It is the claiming, the filling, of the present, the now, and this is only possible when he is totally immersed in the successive moments of an act. It is the “now” that bridges the abyss.
As Deborah recently wrote to me, “Clive’s at-homeness in music and in his love for me are where he transcends amnesia and finds continuum—not the linear fusion of moment after moment, nor based on any framework of autobiographical information, but where Clive, and any of us, are finally, where we are who we are.”
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/09/24/070924fa_fact_sacks
ZNet | Africa: S.O.S In Eastern Congo:
Magic Sticks, Corrupton & Gorilla Warfare
by Georgianne Nienaber and Keith Harmon Snow;
www.OPEDNews.com; September 18, 2007
Two urgent messages arrived from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in late August 2007—each labeled S.O.S. It is ironic that land-locked Congolese would use the international maritime distress signal S.O.S. to plea for help. As independent journalists, we feel a bit like the captains of the Carpathian in their futile attempt to rescue the passengers of the sinking Titanic. The irony of the Titanic disaster was that the ship California was floating ten miles away and capable of rescuing all onboard—but not responding to the visual S.O.S. The California analogy fits the mainstream media today, as honest men and women fire rocket flare after rocket flare from the depths of Congo, hoping and praying that anyone will take heed of the ongoing conservation and humanitarian disasters.
The puzzled crew of the California watched the Titanic’s distress signals until it was too late. Over 1500 people perished in the legendary wreck of the Titanic. By some accounts, 10 million have vanished in Congo, with 1,000 people dying daily in North Kivu Province alone. Untold lowland gorillas have vanished along with the iconic mountain gorilla. Congo’s Virunga Park is as devoid of life as the hulking wreck of the great ocean liner now rusting on the seabed of the icy North Atlantic.
On August 27, 2007 Congolese national Vital Katembo Mushegezi, a state Conservator and Senior Game Warden in the Virungas National Park, sent out an urgent S.O.S. appeal from the DRC.[I] The second S.O.S. came from a Congolese animal rights organization that has been investigating the gorilla trade and corruption in the ranks of conservation NGOs operating within Virunga Park.
In a stunning revelation, investigators from the Innovation for Development and the Protection of the Environment (I.D.P.E.)—affiliated with the World Society for the Protection of Animals and supported by Animal Rights of Hawai’i—describe “a network of people who are in search for sticks that the big apes, such as those the gorillas and the chimpanzees use.”
The astonishing claim—mysteriously never reported by international primatologists and big conservation NGOs like the Jane Goodall Institute and Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund—is that elderly or handicapped gorillas and chimps use wooden sticks to defend themselves or to support themselves as they walk bipedally. Sorcerers—known as “marabouts”—seek these magic sticks because of the supernatural powers they possess and the sticks fetch a $20,000 price on the international market.
INTERNATIONAL SCANDAL IN CENTRAL AFRICA
Conservator Vital Katembo came under attack from powerful forces seeking to maintain a long-standing silence about corruption, extortion, and criminality involving international non-government organizations (NGOs) working in the conservation, development and humanitarian sector in Central Africa. While previously concerned for his livelihood and security, Katembo was recently barred from his offices at the internationally renowned Congolese Institute for the Conservation of Nature (ICCN) and remains deeply concerned for his life and his family's security.
The ICCN was established in the 1970’s and it prospered in its early years. A much smaller equivalent of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the ICCN was crippled and incapacitated by decades of graft and corruption institutionalized by international NGOs in the so-called “conservation” and, more lately, “humanitarian” business sectors, as they supported the regime of dictator Joseph Mobutu (DRC/Zaire/DRC) while pursuing their self-perpetuating programs.
“The situation remains terrible and I really fear about myself,” Katembo wrote. “The Administrator Director Techniche (ADT), Benoit Kisuki, who is the second in command in ICCN headquarters in Kinshasa, has sent a verbal instruction to many expatriates and to the Provincial Director here in Goma and it’s difficult for me to know what he told them. Many rangers are supportive of my cause and all want to see an independent evaluation to probe the facts and punish all involved.”
The “cause” Katembo refers to is an expose’ of the graft, money laundering and intimidation that has been business as usual in conservation and humanitarian sectors in Central Africa. In the past year Katembo has been increasingly concerned about “conservation” in Central Africa, and he has shown unflinching courage by publicly challenging organizations and individuals who are profiting from the billion dollar conservation, development and humanitarian sectors at the expense of human suffering and exploitation of the environment. Vital Katembo has been increasingly vocal, notwithstanding the threat and actualization of retaliation over the past several months.
An August 16 communication by Mr. Katembo, challenging the activities and agenda of international NGOs in Central Africa, prompted direct retaliation because of a mis-directed email that mistakenly reached Wildlife Direct.
“I have now worked in the Virunga for almost 15 years and my experience of the last 2 years is of deception,” Vital Katembo wrote on August 16, 2007, responding to communication exchanges from Wildlife Direct director Emmanuel De Merode. “Are we saving wildlife or are we trying our best to save so called Wildlife Direct managers and experts? You are not new to learn that good people can do evil and this is so obvious in the conservation arena… Conservation in the Virungas is the last stand of oppression, corruption and colonialism.”
The above statement provoked an attack against Katembo organized by Pasteur Cosma Wilingula, Executive Director of the ICCN in Kinshasa. Katembo’s email was a mild enough comment made off-handedly to Wildlife Direct director Emmanuel De Merode, and to these authors.
Emmanuel De Merode is a Belgian born primatologist married to Louise Leakey, Richard Leakey’s daughter, who has years of association with Congo/Zaire. Richard Leakey is the founder of Wildlife Direct, a non-profit organization registered in Washington DC that operates under the mantle of the Africa Conservation Fund: ACF is affiliated with former U.S. State Department and National Security Agency officials. Wildlife Direct has been at the epicenter of the controversial gorilla killings in Virunga Park, Democratic Republic of Congo.[II]
Within a week of Katembo’s comments the Executive Director of ICCN, Wilingula, was apologizing to and reassuring the international conservation sector; Vital Katembo was suspended, ostracized widely, and threatened.
It is the classic smear campaign to discredit the whistleblower and shoot the messenger.
“By suspending me and not allowing me to work,” Katembo wrote on August 30, 2007, the Executive Director of ICCN “is trying his best to stop me from telling the truth about the weaknesses and failure of management of protected areas in DRC during his tenure and make sure that all goes into silence.”
With nothing more to lose and an eloquent plea to take care of his beloved daughter if anything should happen to him, Katembo, in a courageous move, named those principally responsible for misappropriating funds, skimming, bribery and corruption.
These allegations, leveled by Katembo, need scrutiny. We have sent these charges and others directly to the United States Department of Justice, which has oversight responsibilities on USAID and other grants, including the non-profit status of conservation organizations operating on African soil, but registered as non-profits in the US. It is obvious that the Congolese officials named will not investigate themselves, and there is no other system in place to investigate corruption in DRC.
At the top of the list of alleged corrupt Congolese officials Katembo names are:
[1] Pasteur Cosma Wilingula: ICCN Executive Director;
[2] Djomo Ngumbi: ICCN finance assistant (Wilingula’s brother-in-law);
[3] Georges Mwamba: Cabinet Director and Personal Assistant in Charge of International Cooperation;
[4] Benoit Kisuki: Technical Director and Interim Finance Director or ADT;
[5] Numerous Chief Technical advisors for the EU, GEF-World Bank and UNDP.
“Today the Executive Director of ICCN Cosmu Wilungula can use his power and position to say anything about me,” says Katembo, “but if he was not satisfied of my services and contributions in the Virungas he could have sent me out before—not after—I revealed that he is the master of a corrupt system.”
In Congo there is no national whistleblower protection organization or even the most basic of court systems to assist an honest man like Vital Katembo (journalists routinely disappear or are murdered). Both of the authors of this story have been either detained or briefly imprisoned due to the machinations of corrupt interests. Corruption is widespread, imported and institutionalized by Western power brokers. Katembo’s story will never make 60 Minutes, as did the story of Jeffrey Wigand who exposed the scandal of BIG TOBACCO in the United States or FBI agent Coleen Rowley who exposed the inadequacies of the FBI in the aftermath of 9/11.
Katembo charges that ICCN officials approve budgets and sanction monitoring missions in the field. He lists all the big World Heritage sites in Congo as targets of corruption: Virunga, Salonga, Kahuzi-Biega, and Garamba National Parks and the Okapi Faunal Reserve in Congo’s Ituri region. According to Katembo ICCN bosses “do business” with high-level officials and military in hotels and restaurants in Goma, Kisangani and Bukavu. These associated costs could pay for a group of rangers deployed at strategic field outposts within the park, Katembo says. The “mission reports” by these individuals who never leave the hotels always read the same—“the evaluation mission went on well but problems remain.”
The ICCN “big bosses” and their international collaborators forever justify the need for “capacity building,” which never occurs, prompting more calls for “capacity building,” which never occurs. This institutionalized system of graft perpetually cycles funding back to the international gatekeepers: expatriates with big salaries, GPS equipment, shiny new SUV’s, international travel and conferences, and, increasingly, weapons and other “security” and “logistics” equipment. [III]
Cementing the system in place are the public relations articles and documentaries that peddle white supremacist mythologies in the Smithsonian and National Geographic magazines and films, in Jane Goodall IMAX extravaganzas, and in short pithy fictional “news” pieces by Anderson Cooper on CNN.
It is important for readers not familiar with the Democratic Republic of Congo to understand that most of the city of Goma is overrun with solidified black lava, garbage and human misery, while the relatively untouched embassy row along the shores of Lake Kivu resembles a spa by Congolese standards. There is electricity, Internet access, hot running water and charming colonial era hotels with a 1940’s European flair.
In regional and provincial ICCN offices, directors are appointed to serve the strategic interests of the bosses in Kinshasa to whom they are accountable. “That pleases the bosses above them in Kinshasa,” Katembo wrote, “and oppresses the staff below them without considering the impact on the efficiency of the institution and work.”
International “consultants,” colluding in the “conservation ‘clique,’ gather like hyenas at the kill” of gorilla conservation. We have been provided with the names of individuals associated with well-known international conservation organizations and descriptions of illicit activities of these organizations, some of which are funded through US tax dollars. We are holding them back until DOJ completes its own investigation.
“These people manipulate and handle money from donors on the ground, and the budgets are set accordingly so they remain in good eyes of the Administrateur Directeur General (ADG) and Technical Director (ADT) and their accomplices,” Katembo charges.
Katembo also alleges that UNESCO funding has been expropriated.
Salaries for expatriates, often paid by international donors, are between 5000-6000 Euros ($6850-$8500) per person per month. A measly $200-500 US per month is allocated for Park Operations (includes food, fuel, medicine, logistics needs and equipment purchases). And the Congolese rangers themselves are paid a pittance. Ranger’s bonuses and salaries top out at $20-30 US per person per month—hardly a life-sustaining wage.
In a BBC news opinion piece of September 10, 2007 titled “Conservation Alone is Not Enough,” Wildlife Direct founder Richard Leakey referred to “ludicrously small government salaries” in DRC, where “a ranger earns about $5 a month.” [IV]
Richard Leakey’s opinion piece should be addressing the institutional racism inherent in a system which pays (mostly) white expatriates $6000-$8000 per person per month—with all kinds of travel, health, lodging and vacation perks—and $5 per person per month for black rangers living and dying in squalor. Leakey’s comments are further rendered obtuse when we learn that board members of the Africa Conservation Fund backing Wildlife Direct are involved with multinational corporations plundering gold from eastern Congo. [V]
The disparity between salaries of Congolese rangers and those of conservation expatriates parallel those of Congolese nationals employed by the Western “humanitarian” sector: For one poignant example, national staff on the United Nations Observers Mission to Congo (MONUC) payroll went on strike in August 2007 to protest the $10 a day wages MONUC’s black nationals receive, compared to lucrative salaries of the international staff. Congolese nationals who protest at private NGOs like Doctor’s Without Borders or CARE risk retaliation for the mildest complaints about conditions or salaries. Congolese nationals working at a Medicines Sans Frontieres/Doctors Without Borders supported hospital in Basankusu, DRC, who complained (in solidarity) about wages and conditions were abandoned as MSF closed the program and pulled out.
Humanitarianism, like conservation, is the big international scandal in Africa.
GREASING THE GORILLA SKIDS
In the Virungas, Field Station Senior Staff, including the chief warden and financial managers, are appointed according to favors they can supply either to the ADG, ADT or Director Mwamba. “They are selectively and strategically appointed in areas and positions where they have easy access to finances and all logistical support and other facilities from funded projects—provided that they remember to report regularly to the bosses.”
It is in this capacity that Paulin Ngobobo, who is from the same village as the ADG Cosma Wilingula, and without any previous experience in National Park management, was appointed in the southern sector of the Virungas National Park—where the world recoiled in horror at the record number gorilla killings in recent months.
Anyone who read the regurgitated press releases of Wildlife Direct in the Washington Post or Newsweek will recall that ranger Ngobobo was touted by the mainstream Western media as the gentleman savior of the Virungas—silhouetted against the African sky, nattily attired in spit-and-polished uniform and boots.
Katembo charges that Mr. Ngobobo had other duties as well.
Evidently Ngobobo was tipped by the ADG to report straight to the board members in Kinshasa and ignore Katembo, whose role became that of protocol only. The same situation exists in Kahuzi Biega, “for the same reasons,” Katembo says: the top brass in Kinshasa, who benefit from connections with Western elite organizations and greased the skids for the conservation and humanitarian programs that do not serve Congo, have key gatekeepers positioned to insure that their self-serving agendas are met.
Mysterious wire transfers and money laundering round out the picture, leaving little room for the survival of the mountain gorilla. According to Katembo, a man named Djomo Ngumbi connects the old fashioned way via phone with the ADG in order to trade pin numbers attached to wire transfers using “Mistercash” or Western Union through regular ICCN finance channels. (Mistercash is an online money transfer method, developed with the support of Belgian banks.)
Additional eyebrow-raising ICCN behaviors include:
[1] Issuing phony filming permits to international media and pocketing the cash;
[2] Issuing contracts directly to communication networks for cash or favors;
[3] Off-the books purchases of equipment and vehicles not disclosed to the public and/or without public tender.
Katembo charges that those who do the bidding of the big conservation and humanitarian NGOs from Europe, Japan and North America—are rewarded with exit visas and full tuition paid college educations for their children at top colleges in the donor countries. The end result is that expatriate agents of big conservation and the humanitarian misery industry open all the doors for the chosen few at the expense of the excluded many.
“Virunga National Park has a long tradition of being funded and supported,” said Katembo. “For example by the European Union, World Bank, USAID/CARPE, United Nations Development Program, UNESCO, all have been giving and helping in terms of conservation in Virungas. But if we look at the situation now, in 2007, we have to ask where have all the millions and millions gone? ICCN people in Kinshasa, where all these contracts are negotiated, have never been in the field, they don’t know anything about conservation. The members of the Western conservation clique go to Kinshasa and they charm the bosses. It is impossible to question a project after it has been approved in Kinshasa. You will find the Executive Director of ICCN driving a car that is beyond his budget and his salary. Pierre Kakule—the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund big chief from Tayna Conservation Area—has five cars in Goma and a mansion on Lake Kivu. You will find big gaps between what they earn and what you find in their houses. How do these people send their children to America? To Paris? To Yale or Harvard? It is the clique that intervenes now. They get a spokesman, a representative, a bonafide African voice, and in turn he will get gifts. Not a bicycle or a computer, but $50,000 to build a house on Lake Kivu, or a scholarship for their sons and daughters. Everything is greased. The entire process of the application, for example, to an elite college—it’s all insured, it’s all organized for them, and they are protected.”
Regarding this allegation, we have photo documentation of Kakule’s mansion, having been initially tipped by a US embassy official as to its existence.
In other words, Dian Fossey was right when she charged in private correspondences that most money donated to her Digit Fund went directly into private coffers and shiny new vehicles for government officials.
Katembo charges that the same corrupt practices—what we call institutionalized white supremacy—are occurring with the hoardes of Western NGOs descending on war-torn Congo in search of contracts for “relief” and “post-conflict resolution.”
“There is money from Brussels for post conflict resolution,” says Katembo. “There is a lot of money for that. Soon we will have EU and USAID and UNESCO and UNDP and World Bank and Norwegian People’s Aid flags flying everywhere. Since January there have been five EU missions where consultants fly into Congo looking for “priority” projects. An expert comes in and says: ‘You need this, you need that, they target the money, they get the money, and when the money is gotten—then its time to eat—everyone comes together to divide up the money like hyenas at a kill. They bounce from donor to donor, you see them circling and circling, and whoever gets the money first you see all of them displaying the EU flag. Next time it will be USAID or the flag of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife. It’s the same culture with the humanitarian organizations. But they are not doing what Congo needs, and they don’t include Congolese people.”
We personally witnessed SUV’s from the Norwegian Refugee organization packing bar parking lots in Goma, but saw no evidence of them in the villages we visited, or along the roads through Virunga Park.
MAGICICAL MYSTERY TOUR
Carefully orchestrated conservation public relations pitches to the world revolve around seeming concern for the flora and fauna of the Virungas World Heritage Site, especially the mega fauna and flagship species: the embattled and endangered mountain gorilla. But perhaps this public concern masks motives and manipulations from a more sinister master.
In a bizarre twist to a compelling story in which the truth shifts and shapes to fit the motivation of the tellers—big conservation from Western countries and their agents on the ground in Congo—the most recent investigation charges that the sensational gorilla killings of July 2007 were not due to the elusive “charcoal gatherers” fingered by Emmanuel Demerode of Richard Leakey’s Wildlife Direct and the UNESCO investigators flown in from Paris, nor were they due to the trade in infant gorillas or the bushmeat trade that, being the usual suspects, are forever indicting starving African people for their own miseries.
The real reason for gorilla killings may be as old as the soul of Africa—a quest as compelling as that for the Holy Grail—the acquisition of magic “gorilla sticks” fetching up to $20,000. These gorilla sticks are reportedly used as walking sticks or canes for elder gorillas and elder chimpanzees, and according to the recent S.O.S. they are thought to hold supernatural powers. The question that goes hand in hand with the old gorilla walking cane story is why the existence of magic walking sticks has not been raised by either the Congolese rangers—who most certainly understand local customs—or the gorilla organizations that are quick to capitalize on and spread media and academic frenzy over the “tool-using” practices of great apes.
Why haven’t gorilla and chimpanzee primatologists reported on the tool-using capabilities that revolve around magic gorilla sticks?
Meanwhile, the regular Congolese army, in its supposed zeal to rid Virunga Park of an alphabet soup of militia—including Mai Mai, the Interahamwe and the Forces for the Democratic Liberation of Rwanda—not to mention villagers who only want to find a way to survive in the hell that has overcome North Kivu Province—has eaten anything and everything that moves. Virunga has become a “Ghost Park” in the words of the Congolese animal rights’ investigators.
To get these sticks the primate must be killed. According to the Congolese investigators the local militia and soldiers “are engaged in the dirty business.” After the ape is killed, the meat is either taken as a by-product of the kill or left to rot in the bush. Any orphan gorillas are left behind too.
The trade in rhino horn—coveted for its believed aphrodisiac qualities—has eliminated the White Rhino from Virunga and nearly completed the extermination in Garamba, another national park in the north of Congo. The power of the magic gorilla stick is even greater in a region where life and fate turn on a dime.
According to field reports and interviews conducted by independent Congolese investigators who gained the trust of village women by posing as gorilla smugglers, “the stick used by the big apes is supposed to carry magic power useful to protect someone in his job so that he can keep it as long as possible, he must be feared and [can] exert authority on the other workers.”
Local investigations independent of any NGOs or park authorities report that since January 3, 2007, eleven chimpanzees have been killed at Tongo and three mountain gorillas at Rumangabo, two sites in the Virungas landscape. Six of these chimps were reportedly killed on March 19, three on April 16, and two on June 16 by the forces under command of Congo’s resident Rwanda-backed warlord General Laurent Nkunda.
Rubiga, the female mountain gorilla of the Kabirizi Group (family) was killed in Rumangabo on June 8. The baby, Ndakasi, left feeding at its breast was hauled off to Goma amidst much media attention by the Mountain Gorilla Veterinary Project, and the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International (DFGF-I) wasted no time in issuing a press release about its own involvement in the “rescue.”[VI]
The Rumangabo location in the Virungas is noteworthy. We visited Rumangabo in February 2007, and the place was crawling with rangers affiliated with both ICCN and the Frankfurt Zoological Society. The FZS project is run by conservationist Robert Muir, and both projects are closely tied into Richard Leakey’s “elite” Congo Rangers. The Rangers are either operating with rusty machetes or well-oiled machine guns: those who believe the story peddled on July 22 by the Washington Post’s Stephanie McCrummen can buy the “rusty machete” descriptions; those who saw the photos supplied by Robert Muir have to place their bets on a well-trained and incredibly well-equipped mercenary army.
Rumangabo also has a sophisticated communications tower, well stocked food storage areas and, according to local investigators, a lively ongoing trade in gorilla and chimp orphans.
During the course of an investigation regarding the disposition of one baby gorilla, the investigative team brought an interpreter proficient in Kinyarwandan (Rwandan) to “Camp Vodo,” a location a scant fifteen meters from the ranger station at Rumangabo.
Instead of one infant gorilla, the team found a two-month old and a four month old. Price was discussed. The two month old was being offered for $3,000 US and a $5,000 price tag with a special “discount” would nab the second gorilla. Investigators had a digital camera and suggested that their “buyer” would like a photo or two before the price was agreed upon, but “a man who had a soldier’s attitude, but dressed in civilian clothes,” prohibited any attempts at photo documentation.
The investigators recommended that the sellers come with the sting team to Goma to obtain the money for the gorilla, but the sellers and the military spokesman in civilian clothes opposed the plan. It was either turn over the money, or head out, since it was already getting dark and there is no twilight in this part of equatorial Africa. The Rwandan guide, doubling as interpreter, drove the group to a third dealer—this one a woman. The baby gorilla in her possession had a severe wound on its right thigh. The woman appeared to be in close collaboration with the soldiers whom she said would always provide her with as many gorillas as she wanted. The gruesome process was always the same—slaughter the mother, take the baby. The team suggested that the life of the proffered baby gorilla was in danger because of the severe wound, but the woman reassured the team that the baby was under the care of a veterinarian.
The woman then said she had another gorilla at a location eight kilometres away, but this one was older than the others, she said, and the team needed to choose which gorilla it wanted to purchase. Refusing to buy sight unseen, the woman eventually produced a bag of hair and excrement that she said came from the older gorilla.
Investigators reported that the woman appeared confident and said she collaborates with a Ugandan businessman who often arrives in Kiwanja, a village in North Kivu province 10 miles west of the border, from Uganda. While in Kiwanja, the Ugandan teams up with a local businessman by the name of “Bahati” who is connected with a young man called “Kakule.” (We confirmed that this is not the Pierre Kakule of DFGF-I and the Mwami’s Tale “Henchmen and Heartbreak in the Heart of Darkness.”[VII])
A Rwandan businesswoman named Rose Musabuwera controls another network—she is a big provider to the gorilla trade, according to local insiders and investigators. This Madame of the gorilla trade is colourfully referred to as the “motor brain that nourishes the networks.”
When asked the source of the infant gorillas, “motor brain” said the babies are taken from a forest named BUKIMA, within Virunga Park and in collaboration with “armed soldiers.” When asked if any bushmeat was sold, she replied it was sold to the wives of soldiers being integrated into the ranks of the Congolese army at Rumangabo. This could possibly mean the Mai Mai troops or those of Laurent Nkunda. Wildlife Direct has a patrol post in this area, but seems surprisingly ignorant of this ongoing and public trade, and remains silent.
The Congolese investigative team identified the three-pronged “axis” of the trade route: [1] Sake to Goma; [2] Goma to Kiwanja and Rumangabo; and [3] Kibumba. Sake is 25 km from Goma, and Congolese army soldiers control this “axis” with support from MONUC.
Militia and regular Congolese army officers and soldiers are believed to be involved in the hunt for magic gorilla sticks. “All the network of the traders and their facilitators are at work in search for the magic sticks,” reported I.C.P.E. “This business has interested every social class including the responsible at every level as the price is very attractive and can go up to 20.000 U.S. dollars.”
The Kibumba route is especially pourous, in spite of the number of check points erected on this main route through the Virungas. Kibumba is 30 km north of Goma, the site where some 300,000-350,000 Rwandan refugees were herded during the Rwandan genocide. Smugglers are either complicit with authorities or the guards at the roadblocks are accomplices. A motorcyclist told the team that he had transported baby gorillas in cardboard boxes on the Goma road, that is, the Kiwanja-Rumangabo route. He is paid by the hour and considers it “a good job.”
Whether or not one believes in the fantastic tales of magic gorilla sticks imbued with supernatural powers, or attributes the horrific loss of mountain gorillas in July 2007 to human greed, revenge or hunger, several key questions have still not been answered.
After all of the time, money, suffering and blood that have been poured into the World Heritage site known as Virunga National Park since Dian Fossey gave her life in 1985, why has the slaughter of mountain gorillas suddenly been escalated to a degree that Fossey herself did not witness?
Why haven’t primatologists reported the use of walking sticks as tools by the aging patriarchs and matriarchs of the great apes? Why haven’t the big primate protection organizations like Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund and the Jane Goodall Institute and the Gorilla Organization reported the rise of the illegal trade in magic sticks that is reportedly behind the recent gorilla killings? This is the stuff mainstream media latches on to and spreads like plague.
Why did the recent spate of mountain gorilla killings begin in perfect coincidence with the January 2007 appearance of the mercenary forces known as Wildlife Direct? The same thing happened in Kenya when Richard Leakey organized mercenary forces there: elephants were slaughtered in record numbers. In a review of Leakey’s book, Wildlife Wars The respected East African writes:
“When Leakey embarked on a full-scale war against elephant poachers, he was up against well-trained bandits from Somalia. He writes that everyone—the public, the rangers themselves, journalists and even the international press—were so afraid of the poachers that when he made the famous remark that he would invite the press to take snaps of dead poachers, he was seen by reporters as a sort of ‘Clint Eastwood character running amok in the savannah.’ ”
The mountain gorilla is not alone in paying the price for the Western “conservation” and “humanitarian” industry operations in Central Africa. With all the bloodshed, with all the killings come new markets for the Western charity/misery industry, new jobs for white expatriates, new sales of shiny new SUVs for Toyota and Nissan—and the ongoing devastation and death of Congolese people.
Congo today is a humanitarian disaster that makes the Titanic look like a speck in an ocean of blood. Magic gorilla sticks indeed. The people of Congo get the shaft, no matter how you look at it. It is no wonder the local sorcerers and marabouts need a little magic.
Georgianne Nienaber
www.thelegacyofdianfossey.com
&
keith harmon snow
www.allthingspass.com
[I] Vital Katembo is the unnamed corruption informant featured in the KONG series, written by these authors, first published by COANEWS (www.coanews.org) and then picked up by OPED News (www.opednews.com).
[II] See: keith harmon snow & Georgianne Nienaber, KING KONG: EXTRA! EXTRA! STOP THE MAINSTREAM PRESS!:?Gorillas “Executed” Stories front for Privatization of Congo Parks, Truth of Depopulation Ignored,” <http://www.allthingspass.com/uploads/html-210Gorillas_Executed_Final_July30_2007.htm>.
[III] See, e.g., the series of articles by keith harmon snow and Georgianne Nienaber under the title King Kong: Scoping in on the Curious Activities of the International Monkey Business, <http://www.allthingspass.com/journalism.php?catid=45>.
[IV] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6983914.stm
[V] See: keith harmon snow & Georgianne Nienaber, KING KONG: EXTRA! EXTRA! STOP THE MAINSTREAM PRESS!:?Gorillas “Executed” Stories front for Privatization of Congo Parks,Truth of Depopulation Ignored,” <http://www.allthingspass.com/uploads/html-210Gorillas_Executed_Final_July30_2007.htm>.
[VI] http://www.gorillafund.org/about/press_item.php?recordID=54
[VII] keith harmon snow and Georgianne Nienaber, KONG PART THREE: A Mwamis Tale: Henchmen and Heartbreak in the Heart of Darkness, <http://www.allthingspass.com/journalism.php?catid=45 >.
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=2&ItemID=13805
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