Elsewhere Today 455

Aljazeera:
Musharraf 'wins' Pakistan vote

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 06, 2007
13:20 MECCA TIME, 10:20 GMT

Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan's president, has been re-elected by legislators, officials said, although doubts remain over whether the supreme court will let him claim victory.

Politicians voted on Saturday, but a winner will not be declared until Musharraf's eligibility for the poll has been approved by the court, which meets on October 17.

In the two houses of parliament, Musharraf won 252 of 257 votes, and also won the most votes in three of four provincial assemblies, officials said.

About 30 per cent of national assembly opposition politicians resigned before the vote and Benazir Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party abstained.

Counting was still under way in the fourth provincial assembly.

A rival, Wajihdduin Ahmad, a former judge who refused to swear allegiance to Musharraf after the coup that brought him to power in 1999, got two votes. Three votes were rejected.

Ahmad told Al Jazeera that there was a good chance the supreme court would not endorse Musharraf's victory.

"We have a very strong case," he said.

Musharraf has been in conflict with the supreme court since he attempted to sack Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, the chief justice.

Shaukat Aziz, the Pakistani prime minister said after the results were announced, "this result shows the people want continuity of policy."

"It's a very good omen that the election was fair and transparent."

However, Ayaz Amir, a Pakistani political columnist, told Al Jazeera that Pakistanis were very cynical about the validity of the poll.

"People are taking this election with a large bucketful of salt, " he said.

Lawyers protests

Earlier, anti-government protests, led by lawyers, who have spearheaded a campaign against Musharraf in recent months, took place in Karachi, Lahore, Peshawar and Quetta.

Police fired tear gas to disperse lawyers pelting rocks at the North West Frontier Province assembly, and the lawyers also threw a burning effigy of the president on top of an armoured police vehicle.

Before election officials announced the result, Wajiha Mehdi, a lawyer and associate of Chaudhry, told Al Jazeera she believed that any win for Musharraf would be unconstitutional.

"The people of Pakistan are now going to speak. They have had enough."

However, Amir said it was unlikely that the supreme court would overturn Musharraf's victory.

Political wrangling

If his re-election is confirmed, the president has promised to leave his position as head of the army by November 15 and be sworn in as a civilian leader.

Opposition parties have vowed to stage protests over Musharraf's decision not to step down from his army post ahead of the election.

But Musharraf had averted a walk-out by Bhutto's PPP by granting her amnesty from corruption charges, paving the way for a power-sharing deal between the two politicians.

Bhutto, whose party is the country's largest, had earlier threatened to further undermine Musharraf's widely anticipated victory by pulling her MPs from parliament, after other opposition parties also resigned.

The amnesty clears the way for her planned homecoming on October 18 in the run-up to parliamentary elections due by early 2008.

Source: Agencies

http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/671FCF65-C715-49E6-8062-D1D77D132359.htm

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AllAfrica: UN Mission's Military Chief
Meets Government, Rebel Leaders

UN News Service (New York) NEWS
5 October 2007

The military head of the United Nations peacekeeping mission in Côte d'Ivoire (UNOCI) met this week with Government and former rebel army leaders to discuss aspects of the implementation of the Ouagadougou political accord between rival political groups in the divided West African nation.

Held at UNOCI headquarters in Abidjan, participants at the meeting, including UNOCI Force Commander General Fernand Marcel Amoussou, discussed the structure and work of the Integrated Command Centre, created under the Ouagadougou pact to unify the Ivorian military parties.

Participants also conferred on how the Centre can continue to support the ongoing pre-election identification scheme.

The Ouagadougou agreement, reached in March this year, sets out a series of measures to deal with the political divide between the Government, which controls the south of the country, and Forces Nouvelles, which has held the north since 2002.

UNOCI was set up in 2004 with a mandate to monitor the cessation of hostilities between the warring parties and, among other goals, to contribute "to the security of the operations of identification of the population and registration of voters" and support "the organization of open, free, fair and transparent elections."

As of the end of August, the mission had a strength of nearly 9,200 uniformed personnel, including almost 8,000 troops and over 1,130 police.

Copyright © 2007 UN News Service. All rights reserved.

http://allafrica.com/stories/200710051245.html

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AlterNet: Big Banks Are Selling Us
Out on Climate Change

By Tara Lohan, AlterNet
Posted on October 6, 2007

We're nearing the end of the window of opportunity we have to avert the catastrophic effects predicted from the earth's changing climate. We're either going to sink or swim. Our best hope at this time is to drastically reduce our greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, like carbon dioxide.

Global leaders are putting their heads together to come up with solutions. Across the world, countries and municipalities are passing legislation to limit GHG emissions; people are cutting consumption; new technologies are being developed to further alternative energy sources. And yet, in the United States, the coal industry has us poised to move in the absolute wrong direction. Right now, there are about 150 new coal-fired power plants on the drawing board. The amount of polluting emissions they will release is staggering - between 600 million and 1.1 billion tons of CO2 emissions every year, for the next 50 years. And this, according to Rainforest Action Network (RAN), will basically negate every other effort currently being considered to fight climate change.

Over the last 20 years since Bill McKibben wrote the first global warming book for a general audience, only a few things have changed: Scientists have realized the problem is worse than they thought, and the crisis is coming on faster than predicted.

"The final question as to whether we can address it in serious fashion is whether the coal that is in the ground stays in the ground," said McKibben. "We already know that we are going to burn all the oil we can get our hands on because we have gotten our hands on most of it and it is intensely valuable. Coal, on the other hand, is the question. If the 150 power plants get built, there is no use talking about compact fluorescent light bulbs or mass transit or any of those other things ... we'll have no hope of averting climate change short of catastrophic proportions."

And what's the quickest way to halt those plants? Follow the money.

Without funding from banks, companies don't have the resources to front the $140 billion necessary to construct all those new dirty power plants. Rainforest Action Network learned that the money trail is not so complicated; it leads to two main banks - Citi and Bank of America.

The Case Against Citi

Citi currently holds the title as the world's largest bank and biggest company. A few years ago, they also were leading the way in addressing environmental and human rights concerns in their industry. As RAN details in their new report "Banks, Climate Change and the New Coal Rush": In May 2007, Citi pledged to "direct $50 billion over the next 10 years to address global climate change through investments ..." Financing for renewable energy, energy efficiency and improvements in energy infrastructure amount to $31 billion spread across 10 years. While this may seem like a significant commitment, it amounts to less than 0.2 percent of the company's $2.2 trillion in assets. What is Citi doing with the other 99.8 percent? The answer to that question is that Citi has been busy funding dirty energy. Last year they gave 200 times more money for dirty energy than for clean. In the process they've helped underwrite some of the world's worst environmental and human rights offenders. Here's a sample:

* In 2006 they gave $4 billion to Peabody Energy, the world's largest coal mining company, which has been ravaging Dine and Hopi lands for 40 years, taking 2.5 million gallons of water out of their desert watershed each day and leaving behind a trail of toxic waste.
* In 2006 they gave $400 million to Drummond, a mining company, which is facing repercussions for allegedly hiring paramilitary groups to kill Colombian coal miners trying to unionize.
* They've given billions of dollars to Massey Energy, Arch Coal, Alpha Natural Resources, and other coal companies that practice mountaintop removal (MTR) coal mining that involves blowing the tops off of Appalachian mountains, filling valleys, burying streams, poisoning waterways and impoverishing communities.
* Citi helps finance American Electric Power (to the tune of $12 billion), which is working to maintain its designation as the single biggest GHG polluter in the country by building five new dirty coal plants, adding another 21 million tons of CO2 to their annual emissions of 163 million tons.
* Citi is also the top underwriter of scandal-tainted Dynegy (involved in the Enron debacle and price manipulations in California) that is leading the industries' coal rush and plans to build eight new plants, increasing their CO2 emissions by 200 percent.

The case against Bank of America

Bank of America is not far behind Citi. It has also pledged to become an environmentally sustainable business, but it doesn't seem to walk its talk. Last year it spent 100 times more on dirty than clean energy, and it gives less than 0.2 percent to helping fight climate change.

Like Citi, BOA is making friends with some of the world's worst companies.

* They've given big money to companies that are devastating Appalachia with MTR mining. Arch Coal got $700 million and long-repudiated Massey Energy scored $175 million.
* The disastrous Peabody Energy got $4 billion last year from BOA, which should help them on their way to building new plants in New Mexico, Illinois and Kentucky.
* Alpha Natural Resources also got $525 million to help its 27 surfaces mines in Appalachia.

The stupidity factor

The reasons for moving away from coal are overwhelming. Scientists tell us we have about a decade to stabilize CO2 emissions and the easiest way to do that is to cut down on coal consumption - the number one contributor to climate change.

Each year, the American Lung Association reports, an estimated 24,000 people in the United States die prematurely from pollution emitted by coal-fired power plants. And it is not just the burning of coal that is dangerous - extraction, especially practices like MTR coal mining that blow the tops off mountains, are devastating to the land and the people.

"The banks are funding this war on Appalachia, and they are funding domestic terrorism," said Judy Bonds, a 10th generation mountaineer in West Virginia who is the founder of Coal River Mountain Watch and the winner of the Goldman Environmental Prize.

"We are being bombed every day by three and a half million pounds of explosives. We can smell and taste explosives. They damage our homes, shake our nerves and poison our air," she said. "The banks are helping coal to take the wealth from us, to steal us blind and leave us in poverty, and leave us in poison." Despite the overwhelming environmental and humanitarian concerns, even from an investment standpoint, putting your chips on coal is a sure loss.

In the last few years, a political upswing has occurred in the fight against climate change. Al Gore's film and the success of grassroots movements like Step It Up, which organized 1,400 rallies in all 50 states, has garnered momentum.

Other countries have already begun regulating carbon, and the United States will follow suit. Currently there are a handful of bills in Congress to cap emissions and establish a carbon-trading program in the United States, making polluters pay.

"Coal looks cheap at the moment because we charge it nothing for its environmental damage," said Bill McKibben. "But when we do, you need to be a real sucker for wanting anything to do with new coal."

Coal, he added, "is about to become as expensive fiscally as it is environmentally."

Laying out money for dirty energy just doesn't make good business sense. When investors look at the proposition of financing coal plants, they have to look at future returns, and when you look at banks like Citi and BOA, said Leslie Lowe of the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility, "you have ask, 'what are they thinking?' It is clear we will have a cost for carbon in this country, so every coal plant that emits more CO2 will be a liability long-term."

Funding the future

Fortunately, we have the choice to move this country in the right direction by pressuring Citi and BOA to fund clean, instead of dirty, energy.

If those banks took the $141 billion they plan to spend on building new coal plants, and instead invested it in energy efficient measures, they could reduce electricity demand by 19 percent by 2025.

RAN reports that, "By 2020, the U.S. could meet 20 percent of its electricity needs from renewable sources. This would avert the need for 975 new power plants, allow for the closing of 180 old coal plants and 14 existing nuclear plants, and save consumers $440 billion." The push for no new coal is being echoed across the country. Step It Up and 1 Sky Campaign are both calling for a moratorium on new coal power plants, as well as an 80 percent carbon reduction by 2050 and the creation of 5 million green jobs to help us conserve 20 percent of our energy by 2015.

"By transitioning to a clean energy future that prioritizes energy efficiency - and clean renewable sources like solar and wind power - we can meet our future energy needs, build a stronger economy, keep our communities healthy and curb climate change," RAN's report advises. "Tell Citi and Bank of America to stop funding dirty coal projects and to redirect their resources and investments toward clean energy. Don't let your money be used to fund climate change."

Tara Lohan is a managing editor at AlterNet.

© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at:
http://www.alternet.org/story/64470/

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Clarín:
El mercado de arte, de remate

En la década del 90, el fanatismo de los japoneses por los impresionistas llevó los precios a las nubes. Ahora, la furia compradora es rusa, china, india y de magnates financieros. Además, se acabaron las pinturas de los "clásicos". Y se paga lo que sea por los contemporáneos. Aquí, un intento de explicar por qué.

MERCEDES PEREZ BERGLIAFFA Y EDUARDO VILLAR
06.10.2007 | Clarin.com | Revista Ñ

En una entrevista con el diario inglés The Guardian, Dennis Hopper, actor, fotógrafo, alguna vez modelo de Andy Warhol, contó que una vez compró por 1.100 dólares la pintura "Sinking sun", de Roy Lichtenstein. Durante cinco años la disfrutó en su casa de Los Angeles. En 1969 se divorció y perdió esa y otras pinturas. Su ex esposa le vendió la pintura de Lichtenstein al galerista Irving Blum por 3.000 dólares, y creyó que había hecho un buen negocio. Blum se la vendió a su socio, Helman, por 6.000 y también pensó que había hecho un buen negocio. Helman vendió la pintura en Nueva York hace meses por 15.780.000 dólares. Hopper, que está un poco loco, lo cuenta y se ríe a carcajadas. Pero la pregunta es: ¿Hasta dónde será posible seguir "haciendo negocio" con esa pintura de Lichtenstein? Aparentemente no hay techo.

Locura: 140 millones de dólares por un Pollock, 135 millones por un Klimt, 104 por un Picasso, 72 por un Rothko, 71 por un Warhol. Sotheby's suspende una subasta de piezas que pertenecieron a Rostropovich porque llegó un magnate ruso y dijo "yo compro todo, cuánto es". Damien Hirst, el niño terrible del arte británico, produce "Por amor a Dios", una calavera de platino con 8.601 diamantes engarzados, cuyo precio -algunos dicen que ya se vendió a un fondo de inversión- es de 100 millones de dólares. Locura es la palabra. El arte está de remate. Pocos se arriesgan a explicarlo. Y nadie sabe dónde va a parar.

Mientras tanto, aquí en la Argentina, con muchos y muy buenos artistas, todo sigue más o menos igual: un mercado de arte muy poco transparente -aún menos que el global, si es posible- y poco menos que inexistente, que mira desde lejos cómo crece y crece la burbuja internacional.

Sin salir de su sorpresa, los que saben explican el crecimiento desmesurado de esa burbuja recurriendo a varios factores. Los principales son: el crecimiento de casi toda la economía mundial, con la consecuencia de mu cho dinero dando vueltas en busca de posibles inversiones; la aparición de nuevos coleccionistas: los rusos, los indios, los chinos, y otros países asiáticos, con enormes cantidades de dinero y comportamientos imprevisibles para los occidentales; por último, como siempre, el viejo asunto de la oferta y la demanda: no hay tantas buenas obras en venta.

La aparición de rusos y chinos en el escenario alteró bastante las cosas. En los primeros días de junio pasado, el lugar obligado para los amantes (ricos) del arte era Venecia, donde se inauguraba la bienal, la Meca del arte contemporáneo. Y la ciudad fue invadida por los rusos. Pero para muchos la escena era tan novedosa que ni siquiera sabían que la bienal era una muestra y no una feria para comprar arte. Se querían llevar todo. Y aunque no pudieron, algunos se conectaron con quien había que conectarse para reservar las obras que les interesaban y adquirirlas una vez finalizada la bienal. Janna Bullock, por ejemplo, se aseguró, entre otras obras, tres de la británica Tracey Emins.

Otra novedad importante fue la aparición, del lado de la demanda, de los llamados hedge funds, que aportan pools de nuevos compradores. Son fondos de inversión alternativa grupales, gestionados por sociedades profesionales. Pero no ingresa cualquiera: requieren importes mínimos de inversión muy elevados. Esto contribuye al boom del mercado pero no al crecimiento institucional, porque un fondo de inversiones compra arte como puede comprar esmeraldas, acciones, bonos o moneda extranjera.

Dice un viejo conocedor de la economía y, sobre todo, de sus males: "Los coleccionistas tradicionales en general tienen su origen en la industria, en la producción, donde, en general, los precios atractivos son los precios bajos. Muchos nuevos coleccionistas provienen del mundo financiero, donde lo atractivo son los valores en alza, donde conviene que las cosas suban. En parte por eso suben de esa manera disparatada los valores del arte. Porque se ha instalado una lógica financiera. Pero es una burbuja que en algún momento va a aexplotar".

Los hedge funds hasta ahora tienen éxito en el mercado de arte, lo que tal vez impulsó a muchos de sus gerentes, riquísimos novísimos, a invertir también personalmente en arte. Uno de ellos es Steven Cohen, que empezó a coleccionar arte en el año 2000. Se sabe que compró un Picasso por 25 millones de dólares, un Warhol por la misma cantidad. Pero probablemente su mayor fama es haber comprado en 8 millones de dólares una emblemática obra del arte contemporáneo de hoy, el tiburón de Damien Hirst flotando en formol llamado "La imposibilidad física de la muerte en la mente de alguien vivo". Y su fama creció considerablemente cuando, pese al formaldehído, el tiburón, convertido en obra de arte 10 años antes, comenzó a pudrirse y requirió la intervención urgente de su creador.

Según Karl Schweizer, especialista en arte del banco suizo UBS, hay tres factores que empujan los precios hacia arriba: los ricos son cada vez más ricos, se sienten más cómodos con inversiones alternativas como el arte, y hay pocos artistas modernos clásicos (activos entre 1870 y 1950).

Con matices, claro, más o menos eso dicen los que saben. Uno de los que saben mucho en la Argentina y suele decir cosas distintas, es Mario Gilardoni, editor desde hace 25 años de la revista especializada Trastienda, dirigida a coleccionistas, rematadores, galeristas y anticuarios, que la siguen con fidelidad proverbial. Consultado por Ñ, Gilardoni dice que el fenómeno más interesante de mercado es el del arte contemporáneo. "Porque -explica- si uno compra un Picasso o un Van Gogh está comprando un cheque, se supone que eso no perderá valor". Gilardoni habla de un exceso de dinero en el mundo: "Lo que sobra es el dinero -dice-, y no hay demasiadas inversiones alternativas". Y habla también de un doble fenómeno: "Mucha gente que invirtió mucho dinero en los 90 sufrió el posterior desplome del mercado. En su momento, se compraron obras por muchos millones de dólares y, después de clavarse muchos años, los dueños buscan venderlas ahora que hay una burbuja. Entonces aparecen en el mercado para hacer un recupero algunas obras de Van Gogh o Picasso que fueron compradas en los 90 a alrededor de 100 millones de dólares. Por otro lado hay quien tiene una obra muy importante y la guarda porque si la vende tiene más plata, pero ¿qué hace con la plata? De modo que, salvo excepciones, no aparecen grandes obras de ese sector 'tradicional'. La gente no se desprende, guarda, conserva".

Esa escasez de obras clásicas para abastecer un mercado ávido de arte parece ser resuelta hoy por los artistas contemporáneos. "Sotheby's y Christie's, las dos casas de subastas que dominan el 80 por ciento del mercado, no pueden dejar de vender. De modo que recurren a lo contemporáneo como una reserva. No digo que lo hagan directamente pero indirectamente promueven todas esas obras muy contemporáneas, algo que es acompañado por una política mundial que intenta privilegiar todo lo muy contemporáneo".

Ese impulso a "lo muy contemporáneo" es algo que se siente con mucha fuerza en el sistema del arte. Es difícil saber si empezó por una necesidad de mercado, pero en la Argentina y en el mundo está muy presente en quienes toman decisiones en los museos y galerías, en los artistas y curadores, y hasta en la crítica. La presión en ese sentido es tan fuerte que no es arriesgado afirmar que para seguir siendo artista plástico un artista joven y sin demasiada trayectoria está prácti camente obligado a ser contemporáneo.

Fuera del boom

El mercado argentino -ya se dijo- no es significativo ni participa del boom internacional. Comparar algunos números es suficiente para comprobarlo. El mercado global de subastas públicas de arte generó el año pasado ingresos por 6.400 millones de dólares, un 52 por ciento más que en 2005. En la Argentina, mientras tanto, no llega a los modestos 15 millones de dólares anuales que pueden llegar al doble si se considera las ventas realizadas fuera de los remates, generalmente en negro y, por lo tanto, imposibles de cuantificar. La obra argentina vendida a mayor precio -según los infalibles registros de Gillardoni- es "Ramona espera", de Berni, a 717.500 dólares. "Chelsea Hotel", también de Berni, se subastó a 442.500 dólares y ocupa el octavo lugar de las obras argentinas. Antes, hay dos de Prilidiano Pueyrredón, un Pettoruti, y "La Fogata de San Juan", que también es de Berni. Las de Pueyrredón -explica Gilardoni- son dos obras excepcionales, que estaban en Londres, acá no eran conocidas -temas de campo, caballos gauchos pialando- se vendieron en un remate acá, en la Argentina, en 541.000 dólares una y 506.000 la otra.

Pero son, a todas luces, excepciones. Algunas obras pueden salir aquí a subasta con valores de base que superan los 20 o 30 mil dólares. Esas obras -de artistas como Quirós, Fader, Pettoruti o Figari, por ejemplo- pueden considerarse importantes para la magnitud del mercado local.

¿Quiénes son los que compran estas obras? ¿Cuál es el perfil del comprador argentino medio? "El que compra en una subasta -dice Manuel Ramón, director de la galería y casa de subastas Arroyo- es una persona cultivada a la que le interesa la pintura más que la inversión. Creo que en realidad compra esa obra para disfrutarla, porque le gusta convivir con el arte".

En el grupo pequeño de grandes coleccionistas argentinos se destacan Nelly Arrieta de Blaquier, Jorge Helft y Mauro Herlitzka, ex director de arteBA y actualmente uno de los organizadores de base de PINTA, la feria de galerías de arte latinoamericano que se realizará por primera vez en Nueva York en noviembre próximo. El explica a Ñ desde esa ciudad, donde se encuentra preparando PINTA, cómo su familia comenzó a coleccionar arte: "Mi abuelo era un ingeniero italiano que llegó al país a principios del siglo XX. Había estudiado en Turín y en Berlín. Con el tiempo, mi familia se dedicó al negocio de las usinas y compañías eléctricas, estuvo vinculada a empresas de electricidad y, en un principio, pertenecíamos a la alta burguesía a la cual, por su desarrollo de vida y por su nivel cultural, le inte resaba rodearse de buenas cosas, buenas posesiones. Tenemos desde entonces una colección con objetos generales de arte como alfombras, platería y también pintura, tal como pintura europea del siglo XVII al XX. Pero personalmente, decidí explorar ese tipo de coleccionismo relacionado con el arte contemporáneo y argentino, me pareció interesante eso. Y a diferencia de otros coleccionistas, también me interesó la gestión pública, con fines benéficos o filantrópicos".

Sobre lo reducido del mercado local, dice Herlitzka: "Hay un trabajo fuerte de parte de las galerías pero les falta acumulación de capital, o sea, les falta tener ventas y ganancias como en cualquier otro negocio".

Pasa que el mercado del arte necesita de un sistema para poder funcionar. Necesita, según Mauro Herlitzka, que exista una producción de obra, su exhibición, su venta, un público y un coleccionismo. "Para que funcione bien -dice- tienen que estar cubiertas todas estas áreas".

Latinoamérica en N. York

Según Marcelo Pacheco, curador en jefe del Malba, "El mercado, tal como el arte, tiene que ver con la potencia económica de los países y con cómo sus circuitos privados intervienen en el Norte". Herlitzka, Blaquier y Helft pagan alrededor de 25 mil dólares para sentarse como miembros del consejo del MoMA (Museum of Modern Art de Nueva York). Como contrapartida, de esta manera posicionan sus colecciones. Es, también, una estrategia para meterse en el medio y actuar de otra manera, un poco más potente, como miembros inversores fuertes y latinoamericanos dentro de un contexto que domina el Norte.

Hay interés en invertir en el arte latinoamericano porque el mercado está cambiando, explica desde Gran Bretaña Gabriel Pérez Barreiro, curador del Museo Blanton de Texas y director de la actual Bienal del Mercosur. "Ahora -asegura- son los coleccionistas norteamericanos los que quieren agrandar sus colecciones en esas áreas. Y para eso hay que educarlos. La mejor manera de que un coleccionista se eduque es integrándose a grupos como el Latin American Art Acquisition Comitee del MoMA o el Latin American Circle. Se incorporan a este grupo, viajan, ven colecciones, ven lo que están haciendo los museos y tienen línea directa con sus curadores".

Es que ellos, los curadores, son personajes que influyen mucho en la dirección que el mercado de arte va tomando. Aunque las líneas se cruzan. Fue desde el esfuerzo de la millonaria coleccionista venezolana Patricia Phelps de Cisneros y de otra coleccionista que apoya al arte de esta región, Estrellita Brodsky, que el curador Enrique Pérez-Oramas asume el nuevo puesto de curador del MoMA en arte latinoamericano y del Caribe. El será, principalmente, quien decida sobre las adquisiciones que el museo realice en estas áreas.

¿Buen negocio?

"Algo que no se dice con todas las letras -dice Gilardoni- es que el arte, desde el punto de vista estrictamente económico, no es una buena inversión. En términos generales y a largo plazo, tienen más rentabilidad, por ejemplo los bonos de Estados Unidos. A menos que uno sea un genio, que sabe comprar en el momento en que un artista vale poco y acertar con todos los artistas que uno compra."

Es obvio. Hay mucho de esnobismo en este mercado. Hay en Miami y en Beverly Hills y en todos lados gente que tiene mucho dinero y poca sensiblidad. Pero todo se consigue: se contrata como asesor a alguien que tenga no el dinero sino la sensibilidad o el conocimiento y se le pregunta qué comprar. Y se compra. Listo. ¿Qué es lo que se está comprando en realidad?

Le dice a Ñ León Ferrari, uno de los artistas argentinos que más ha vendido en los dos últimos años: "Cuando faltan o sobran papas su precio sube o baja. Con las cosas que llegan a la categoría de coleccionables, como las estampillas, sucede algo parecido, las tiramos cuando ya están selladas y usadas, y valen disparates cuando quedan dos o tres. Con las pinturas es diferente: el coleccionista se viste de prestigio con su colección. A diferencia de la biblioteca, de la literatura, que te obliga a leerla y comprenderla, los cuadros no requieren tiempo para que empiecen a embellecernos: se cuelgan en la sala y desparraman como una bruma de prestigio que acompaña al propietario donde quiera que vaya. En el caso del Rothko vendido a 72 millones de dólares, por ejemplo, el comprador se alegra cuando el precio sube porque sube su imagen: las pinceladas de Mark Rothko son como las de un maquillador que se esmera en disimular arrugas y asperezas del propietario".

Copyright 1996-2007 Clarín.com - All rights reserved

http://www.clarin.com/suplementos/cultura/2007/10/06/u-00611.htm

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Guardian: I am creating artificial life,
declares US gene pioneer

· Scientist has made synthetic chromosome
· Breakthrough could combat global warming

Ed Pilkington in New York
Saturday October 6 2007

Craig Venter, the controversial DNA researcher involved in the race to decipher the human genetic code, has built a synthetic chromosome out of laboratory chemicals and is poised to announce the creation of the first new artificial life form on Earth.

The announcement, which is expected within weeks and could come as early as Monday at the annual meeting of his scientific institute in San Diego, California, will herald a giant leap forward in the development of designer genomes. It is certain to provoke heated debate about the ethics of creating new species and could unlock the door to new energy sources and techniques to combat global warming.

Mr Venter told the Guardian he thought this landmark would be "a very important philosophical step in the history of our species. We are going from reading our genetic code to the ability to write it. That gives us the hypothetical ability to do things never contemplated before".

The Guardian can reveal that a team of 20 top scientists assembled by Mr Venter, led by the Nobel laureate Hamilton Smith, has already constructed a synthetic chromosome, a feat of virtuoso bio-engineering never previously achieved. Using lab-made chemicals, they have painstakingly stitched together a chromosome that is 381 genes long and contains 580,000 base pairs of genetic code.

The DNA sequence is based on the bacterium Mycoplasma genitalium which the team pared down to the bare essentials needed to support life, removing a fifth of its genetic make-up. The wholly synthetically reconstructed chromosome, which the team have christened Mycoplasma laboratorium, has been watermarked with inks for easy recognition.

It is then transplanted into a living bacterial cell and in the final stage of the process it is expected to take control of the cell and in effect become a new life form. The team of scientists has already successfully transplanted the genome of one type of bacterium into the cell of another, effectively changing the cell's species. Mr Venter said he was "100% confident" the same technique would work for the artificially created chromosome.

The new life form will depend for its ability to replicate itself and metabolise on the molecular machinery of the cell into which it has been injected, and in that sense it will not be a wholly synthetic life form. However, its DNA will be artificial, and it is the DNA that controls the cell and is credited with being the building block of life.

Mr Venter said he had carried out an ethical review before completing the experiment. "We feel that this is good science," he said. He has further heightened the controversy surrounding his potential breakthrough by applying for a patent for the synthetic bacterium.

Pat Mooney, director of a Canadian bioethics organisation, ETC group, said the move was an enormous challenge to society to debate the risks involved. "Governments, and society in general, is way behind the ball. This is a wake-up call - what does it mean to create new life forms in a test-tube?"

He said Mr Venter was creating a "chassis on which you could build almost anything. It could be a contribution to humanity such as new drugs or a huge threat to humanity such as bio-weapons".

Mr Venter believes designer genomes have enormous positive potential if properly regulated. In the long-term, he hopes they could lead to alternative energy sources previously unthinkable. Bacteria could be created, he speculates, that could help mop up excessive carbon dioxide, thus contributing to the solution to global warming, or produce fuels such as butane or propane made entirely from sugar.

"We are not afraid to take on things that are important just because they stimulate thinking," he said. "We are dealing in big ideas. We are trying to create a new value system for life. When dealing at this scale, you can't expect everybody to be happy."

* Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2007/oct/06/genetics.climatechange

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Jeune Afrique:
Blaise Compaoré : « J’assume »

Par Patrick Ifonge
BURKINA FASO - 30 septembre 2007

Le 15 octobre 2007 marquera le vingtième anniversaire de l’arrivée au pouvoir de Blaise Compaoré. Dans un entretien exclusif accordé à l’hebdomadaire Jeune Afrique (n°2439, à paraître le 8 octobre 2007), le président Burkinabé dresse le bilan de ses 20 ans à la tête du pays des Hommes Intègres. Et aborde les grands sujets de la politique internationale : la crise ivoirienne, la relation France-Afrique, l’avenir de l’Union Africaine, etc.

Médiateur dans le processus de paix en Côte d’Ivoire, il précise qu’il n’a aucun intérêt à provoquer une crise dans ce pays. «Nous sommes condamnés à nous entendre avec les Ivoiriens, quels qu’ils soient», clame-t-il. Et estime que l’échéance d’octobre 2008 pour l’élection présidentielle est plus raisonnable que celle de décembre 2007, annoncée par le président Gbagbo.

Considéré, il y a quelques années comme un déstabilisateur de la sous-région de l’Afrique de l’Ouest, cet ex-militaire rappelle qu’il n’a pas changé et qu’il ne s’est pas métamorphosé en pacificateur : « Moi, quand j’aime ou que je n’aime pas quelqu’un, je ne m’en cache pas. Mes opinions m’ont amené à soutenir des personnes et, la plupart du temps, des causes », se défend-il. Il a notamment appuyé l’ex-président libérien Charles Taylor, et il ne s’en cache pas, bien au contraire. Quant au procès de ce dernier, il ne voit pas en quoi cela peut l’inquiéter.

Alors qu’il accorde très peu d’interviews aux médias français, il profite de l’entretien accordé à Jeune Afrique pour fustiger les débats sur la colonisation française (« Demandez aux Français si l’occupation allemande a eu des effets positifs… »), sur le discours de Sarkozy à Dakar (« Il m’arrive moi-même de critiquer les Européens en des termes peu sympathiques… »), ainsi que sur la Françafrique (« Le monde entier a considérablement changé en 30 ans. La France n’est plus ce qu’elle était. De nouvelles puissances émergent…).

Il est cependant moins disert sur l’héritage de Sankara, dont le vingtième anniversaire de la disparition sera commémoré ce 15 octobre. S’il reconnaît le côté unique de la révolution, il en retient surtout les erreurs : « La révolution a montré ses limites…Il vaut mieux vivre dans le Burkina d’aujourd’hui, même avec des difficultés matérielles, en jouissant de la liberté de presse, d’opinion, d’association, etc. ».

Homme libre et pragmatique, il apparaît très satisfait des relations économiques et politiques qu’il entretient avec Taïwan (« Ils nous aident énormément, n’ont qu’une parole, sont fidèles et sérieux, forment des gens au Burkina…). Mais il émet tout de même des réserves sur l’apport de la Chine dans le développement économique du continent (« Ce sera bénéfique s’il y a transfert de technologie »).

Et en ce qui concerne la création des Etats-Unis d’Afrique, il considère qu’il est préférable, dans un premier temps, de développer les structures régionales (« Il y a trop de différences et de disparités pour décréter que nous pouvons créer rapidement les Etats-Unis d’Afrique »).

Pas du tout usé par 20 ans de magistrature suprême, il n’envisage pas encore sa vie après le pouvoir. D’autant plus qu’en 2010, il aura encore la possibilité, s’il le désire, de briguer un dernier mandat. Pour le moment, une seule certitude : il ne souhaite pas que son conseiller et frère Eric lui succède.

http://www.jeuneafrique.com/jeune_afrique/article_
depeche.asp?art_cle=WEB62307blaisemussa0

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New Statesman:
Sick: The great American con trick

Opinion polls in the US show that many believe health care, not the Iraq War, is the nation's biggest problem. The middle classes now realise they have been duped.

Andrew Stephen
Published 04 October 2007

Before the beginning of summer I had my annual medical. It was only a matter of seconds before my doctor, a decent old salt who's seen it all, began complaining about his lot. Like every doctor I've spoken to throughout the US in the past two or three years, he didn't know whether he could take the chaos of American health care much longer. The previous month, he had seen a very elderly patient who was already dying from malignant melanoma; but as he was examining the old man, he happened to notice that one of his toes had developed a bad fungal infection. He duly whipped off a prescription for the standard treatment - a daily dose of 250mg Lamisil tablets for 90 days - and thought nothing more of it.

In any western country with a national health service, that certainly would have been the end of the matter - but not in the US. The old man had full insurance, my doctor went on, but his insurance company refused to pay for the tablets until a lab had confirmed that he really was suffering from a toenail fungus. "Now any medical student on their first day - no, you - could diagnose a simple thing like that," he told me. It meant nothing that my doctor had more than four decades of experience: the dying patient had to shuffle back into his surgery to have a swab taken to prove that the doctor's diagnosis was correct. This minor incident, my doctor said, was the kind of thing that was happening dozens of times a day in his practice alone.

To me, that casual little anecdote was emblematic of the dire health system that so many Americans (and slavishly pro-American Brits such as Tony Blair and Gordon Brown) still delude themselves is the envy of the world. An already very ill patient had to make a hellish journey; my doctor's valuable time was taken up going through a procedure he knew was pointless. The insurance company ended up having to pay not only for the swabbing and subsequent lab test, but for the medication, too. And the cost of that little bottle of tablets? I checked with my local CVS drugstore last weekend and established that, in America, 90 Lamisil tablets cost (I'm not making this up) a cool $1,379.99.

But Americans will never accept - shock, horror, gasp - socialised medicine, will they? Letting the government dictate which doctor they should have and what treatment they receive? Like those poor old washed-up Brits? For decades, that contrived chorus of indignation from the combined might of the medical industry itself, the pharmaceutical giants, the supine politicians who do their bidding and the pliant, unquestioning media has worked wonders in perpetuating a con trick. The result until recently has been that, aided by stupendous self-delusion and ignorance, most Americans really have been brainwashed into thinking they have the best health care system in the world.

Now, however, changes are afoot. Every Democratic president since Truman has promised health care reform and then been thwarted by that collective might; LBJ came closest in 1965 when he signed bills setting up Medicaid (for the very poor, and usually for limited periods) and Medicare (for those over 65 who have paid their social security contributions). The result in 2007 is that 47.7 million often relatively prosperous, middle-class Americans have been caught in the trap in between, unable to afford health insurance or land a job that comes with it. Families USA, a non-profit consumer health care advocacy organisation, says that the true figure is actually much higher - and that no fewer than 89.6 million Americans found themselves uninsured for at least some period during 2006-2007.

But now, like a giant that's been tranquillised into quiescence for decades, the middle class is beginning to wake up and realise it has been duped. Opinion polls show that many believe health care, rather than the Iraq war, is the biggest problem facing the US. All the empirical evidence shows that Americans do favour "social ised medicine", or at least some version if it.

Hillary Clinton, currently the clear front- runner to become president in 2009, unveiled her health plan last month - a relatively simple and feeble set of proposals set out in just nine pages with 11 footnotes, compared to the 1,342-page proposal with which the Clintons came into the White House in 1993. The apparent complexity of that plan played into the hands of right-wing propagandists - and was quickly destroyed by a $100m blitz of clever but wickedly disingenuous television adverts financed by the Coalition for Health Insurance Choices, a front group for the health insurance companies.

That debacle in turn led to a Republican rout in the 1994 midterm elections and sustained the fiction that Americans simply will never accept health care reform.

Hillary Clinton now proposes that those with private insurance should keep their policies as before, but that insurance for the rest must be financed by rolling back George W Bush's tax cuts for the very wealthy.

"This is not government-run. There will be no new bureaucracies," she says. "You can keep the doctors you know and trust [and] the insurance, if you have it. This plan expands personal choice and increases compe tition to keep costs down." She says her scheme would cost $110bn a year, but some analysts believe that figure to be a huge underestimate.

Bang for their bucks

Predictably, leading Republican presidential contenders such as Mitt Romney jumped in to denounce the Clinton plan as "European-style socialised medicine" - even though only last year Romney himself, in the days when he was the moderate Republican governor of Massachusetts, introduced a remarkably similar scheme in that state. But Senator Clinton is perhaps the most steely and self-disciplined politician I've ever encountered, and says she has "learned some valuable lessons" from the failures of 1993.

I suspect that, ultimately, the most persuasive argument against the present system, for most Americans, will be that they are simply not getting bang for their bucks. Last year they spent $2.1trn, or roughly $7,000 per American, on health care - a figure expected to double by 2016, and which represents 16 per cent of the nation's GDP. Half of this is spent on just 5 per cent of the population. The average yearly cost of a family insurance plan purchased by employers is now $12,106, plus an additional $4,479 paid by the employee; as a result of these hugely increased costs, only 59.7 per cent of American workers are covered by their employers' health plans.

Yet what do Americans get from all this monumental expenditure? The leitmotif of Michael Moore's latest fulminating documentary, Sicko, which has already grossed more than $25m in the US since its release in June and opens in Britain this month, is that Britons, Cubans and the French receive much better health care than Americans - a theme that is largely true, but undermined by Moore's portrayal of those countries' systems as positively utopian. Britain spends just $2,560 per citizen on health care, Australia $3,128 and France $3,191; yet a report this year by the Commonwealth Fund (a highly respected American charity) found that the US lags well behind these countries in the quality, access, efficiency and outcome of their wildly differing expenditures.

Put more brutally, the US ranked 22nd in infant mortality (between Taiwan and Croatia), 46th in life expectancy (between St Helena and Cyprus) and 37th in health system performance (between Costa Rica and Slovenia). In the "efficiency" ratings, the US came last. More American women are dying in childbirth today than were decades ago. The non-partisan Kaiser Family Foundation reports that 28 per cent of Americans have delayed their medical treatment, often for serious conditions, because of cost. And the Institute of Medicine calculates that 18,000 Americans die unnecessarily every year because they have no medical insurance.

Exactly when Americans will finally abandon their Alice-in-Wonderland, ostrich-like refusal to face the realities of their health care mess is anyone's guess. The proposals of all the leading Democrats, including Hillary Clinton, are lukewarm in the extreme - but they will still be ruthlessly fought by a health care industry machine that has four lobbyists operating on Capitol Hill for every one congressman. Drug prices, for example, will remain ludicrously high: US sales of just one, the anti-cholesterol medication Lipitor, raked in a tidy $12.9bn for Pfizer last year. It is probably too late for that poor old fellow patient of mine, but the patent on Lamisil finally expired last June and 90 generic tablets can now be had for a bargain, er, $362.

Nonetheless, I believe that positively seismic rumblings have begun deep inside the American soul. The right has long convinced the masses that big government is bad and doesn't work. This has always been a very selective argument: nobody has tried to argue, for example, that taxpayers should not pay for universal free education, or that schooling across the country is really "socialised education".

But the collapse of American health care provision - and shocks such as the hopelessly inadequate response to a natural disaster like Hurricane Katrina - have shown many Americans that strong government is sometimes not only desirable, but downright necessary if they are to enjoy the life, liberty and pursuit of happiness that the US Declaration of Independence bestowed on them as inalienable rights. Nor can they continue to avoid a central and highly relevant question: why is it that America, the world's richest nation, provides such shamefully lousy health care for its people?

http://www.newstatesman.com/200710040028

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New Statesman:
Still a messiah?

Forty years after his death, Che Guevara has little to offer as a guide for making revolution. So why does his image continue to inspire an almost religious following?

Isabel Hilton
Published 04 October 2007

In 1968, when the photographer Don Honeyman was experimenting with Alberto Korda's iconic image of Che Guevara, he discovered something curious. Honeyman had been experimenting with a process of solarisation as a way of making fashion images more exciting and had been asked by a poster company to try the same thing with Korda's photograph of Che - said to be the most reproduced photo in the world. But he was having trouble duplicating the look of the image as it had first been published in Europe by the revolutionary press.

"I worked over the image for several days," Honeyman wrote, "but couldn't seem to get the same idealistic gleam in Che's eyes. I finally compared the first Che with the second, and discovered that some canny designer, presumably at [the original Italian printers], had made Che slimmer and his face longer, by about one-sixth. It was so effective that I, too, stretched him, and it worked like a charm. It doesn't really do to have a revolutionary who's too plump."

There is something fitting about the world's most iconic revolutionary image having been manipulated. Che's legacy, 40 years after his death in a failed attempt to ignite revolution in Bolivia, rests heavily on an image so powerful and so plastic that it still serves both as a generalised inspiration to rebel and as a vehicle for the sale of everything from ashtrays to T-shirts.

The photograph was taken in March 1960 at the funeral of the victims of an explosion on board the French freighter La Coubre in Havana harbour, in which 81 people had died. The Cuban leadership suspected sabotage by the CIA and the funeral, attended by Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, among others, became an anti-American rally. Guevara did not speak, and came into view only briefly for Korda, who was recording images of the event from the crowd. Korda had started out as a fashion photographer, but was then Fidel's personal photographer. He managed two shots with his Leica before Guevara disappeared from view.

The pictures were not published in the reports of the event, but Korda pinned them up in his studio in Havana, and in 1967 gave two of them to the Italian publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, who was planning to publish Che's Bolivian Diary. Within six months Che had been assassinated in Bolivia and both Feltrinelli and the Cuban government published the first posters.

Even in death, Che was lucky with his photographers. Freddy Alborta, the only professional photographer allowed to see his body shortly after his execution in Bolivia, wired a haunting photograph of the corpse, lying on a table, surrounded by military men. The image is Christ-like and has been compared both to Andrea Mantegna's Lamentation Over the Dead Christ and to Rembrandt's Anatomy Lecture of Dr Nicolaes Tulp. But it was Korda's lucky shots that ensured Che Guevara was not for gotten. Korda's photograph, suitably doctored, took on a life of its own, creating an irresistible combination of celebrity and rebel glamour that gave Che an influence in a world that had long forgotten the details of his exploits.

Through the image, the complexities of Che's life and thought are reprocessed into an abstraction that can serve any cause. It was later used in a fake Warhol, a fake that Warhol authenticated, on condition that the revenues go to him. Che's transformation from revolutionary martyr to pop celebrity, with all that it implied in ubiquity, was complete. Forty years on, it is still going strong: when the Victoria and Albert Museum in London mounted an exhibition last year of the history of the Korda image, the curators assembled objects from more than 30 countries, used in contexts as diverse as Madonna's album American Life and Ricky Gervais's Politics DVD to Jean-Paul Gaultier's sunglasses campaign. It has been painted as graffiti in Bethlehem, carried in demonstrations from Palestine to Mexico and borrowed by such artists as Pedro Meyer, Vik Muniz, Martin Parr and Annie Leibovitz. It has been used to represent causes as diverse as world trade, anti-Americanism, teenage rebellion and Latin American identity. It has sold dolls, French wine, model cars, cigarette packets, stamps, Swatch watches, Austrian skis, ashtrays, mugs, keyrings and nesting Russian dolls. Nor is it under capitalism only that Che's image stimulates sales: souvenir shops in Cuba are festooned with Che tourist tat, and in Bolivia, where the left-wing president, Evo Morales, has installed Che's image constructed from coca leaves in his presidential suite. Tourist agencies even offer package tours to the spot where he died.

Emotional appeal

Che's durability owes little to his revolutionary achievements, though his revolutionary credentials are authentic. He was radicalised as a young man by the US-backed coup in Guatemala that overthrew the elected government of Jacobo Árbenz and he played a central part in the Cuban revolutionary struggle. After the revolution he served as finance minister, but grew increasingly alienated from the Castro brothers. He went to the Congo to support revolution there before setting out on the fatal Bolivian adventure, hoping to spread revolution across the subcontinent. Ernesto Guevara was certainly a revolutionary, but so were many others whose names have long been forgotten and whose records inspire more critical assessment.

Che's appeal is emotional. His death in Bolivia as a relatively young man created Che as secular Christ, the man who took upon himself the sins of the world and gave his life for the cause of the oppressed. His memory remains available to the oppressed; his image continues to inspire the hope of change and the virtue of rebellion, enhanced rather than diminished by his defeat. Christ, too, was defeated on earth and, again like Christ, Che's death conveys a promise of redemption through inspiration. He is the rock-hero biker revolutionary, the martyr to idealism, a James Dean in fatigues. When Pope John Paul II celebrated mass in Havana's Revolution Square, the giant image of Che that hangs there served as a revolutionary counterpoint.

But beyond his quality of universal icon of rebellion, what survives of Che's life's work? The promotion of Marxism and violent revolution? Forty years after his death, it is hard to imagine what an octogenarian Che would have felt about his younger self or about the world that he did not live to see. Would his personal and political asceticism have survived in an age in which rampant consumerism has captured the mass imagination? Would he have been distressed or gratified that the USSR, embraced by Fidel Castro against his objections, had collapsed? In 1964 he called Russia a "pigsty" because of the conditions in which it kept the workers. Would he have been any more gratified by the conditions of Cuban workers, nearly 50 years after the revolution? Would he have been encouraged by the rise of China, whose revolution he praised, or appalled at China's new character as a state-managed market economy?

In Cuba his image serves the mythology of the revolution that is used to glamorise a sclerotic state structure: old men in freshly laundered fatigues preside over a dollarised economy, heavily dependent on tourism, in which young women turn to prostitution to buy the consumer goods their counterparts in Miami take for granted.

In wider Latin America, his legacy is mixed. The perceived failure of the neoliberal reforms of the 1990s has intensified opposition to the Washington consensus and produced a series of left-wing victories at the ballot box that guarantee his name is honoured - as in 2006, when Daniel Ortega's Sandinista movement, now a party of dubious revolutionary credentials, was elected to power and the party faithful wore Guevara T-shirts to the victory party. Hugo Chávez, the populist leader of Venezuela, who is known for his eagerness to wear the clothes of the Cuban revolution, often dons a Che T-shirt. Some of his ideas, too, are back in vogue with Latin America's new left: pan-Americanism, support for the region's popular movements, nationalisation and centralisation of government. The various "expressions of the popular will" that he favoured over ballot-box democracy - neighbourhood courts and the Committees for the Defence of the Revolution - have found new expression in Venezuela and Bolivia.

But even here, Che might have felt a little unease. He was critical of much of the Latin American left for its rejection of the armed struggle, and grafted his Stalinism on to the tradition of revolutionary petit bourgeois nationalism in Cuba exemplified by José Martí, much as the Sandinistas were to use Sandino as an inspiration in Nicaragua. Yet many of those now most enthusiastic about his memory came to power through the ballot box. Only in Colombia, where he remains an inspirational figure for the dissident Farc, would he recognise true heirs.

Politically, there is no movement that could be called Guevarist. In Peru, Fidelistas and Guevarists are in opposing camps, as they are in Panama and Mexico. For contemporary intellectuals of the left, Che's legacy, with its romanticism and heroisation of the guerrilla, is problematic. For instance, Jorge Castañeda, the Mexican writer and sociologist, wrote in his biography of Che that Che's ideas had nothing to offer present generations. For Castañeda, his "refusal of ambivalence" and his unwillingness to understand life's contradictions were relics of a damaging era in Latin America. In an age in which the absolutes of Marxism and market capitalism were judged to have failed, Che had nothing to say.

Nor has his popularity in the west translated into any coherent politics. Che's image is still carried by the left, but is also adopted by thousands who have only the vaguest idea of his life, beyond the Hollywood version of The Motor cycle Diaries. In London, a small torchlit rally held in Trafalgar Square to commemorate the 35th anniversary of his death gave a flavour of the portmanteau character of Che's image. In the heroic prose of the participants, "banners and placards were held high" and "chants and speeches rang out from the megaphone across Trafalgar Square to the listening ears of the demonstrators and the passing public and readings from Che's writings were read out". Speakers came from Rock Around the Blockade, Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism!, Victory to the Intifada, the Colombia Solidarity Campaign, the Africa Liberation Support Campaign and the people's movement of the Philippines.

To this assorted list, as to oppressed peoples elsewhere, Che has little to offer as a guide to making revolution. What he does have is the messianic image of sacrifice for the sins - or sufferings - of others. Regardless of his failures and contradictions, or the obsolescence of his methods and ideology, the potency of that image, with its symbolic, religious quality, continues to inspire.

As the Portuguese writer José Saramago wrote, in characteristically mystical terms: "Because the photo of Che Guevara was, before the eyes of millions of people, the image of the supreme dignity of the human being. Because Che Guevara is only the other name of what is more just and dignified in the human spirit.

"He represents what sometimes is asleep in us. It represents what we have to wake up to know and to learn to know even ourselves, to add the humble step of each one of us to the common road of all of us."

http://www.newstatesman.com/200710040026

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Página/12:
¿Un mundo bipolar?

Por Juan Gelman
Sábado, 06 de Octubre de 2007

Es difícil precisar el carácter del gobierno Putin. La eminente politóloga Margarete Mommsen apunta: “Es una democracia que se encamina hacia un régimen autoritario”. El juicio del viceministro alemán Gernot Erler es más benevolente, pero también concluye que Rusia oscila entre la “democracia dirigida” y la “democracia autocrática”. En un folleto publicado con ocasión del 90 aniversario de la revolución de febrero de 1917 del que se editaron medio millón de ejemplares que se repartieron en toda Rusia, el Nobel Solzhenitzyn elogia a Putin, a quien ve como un nuevo autócrata que no debiera cometer los mismos errores de Nicolás II, el último zar. En opinión del jurista Wolfgang Seiffert, el gobernante ruso se atiene a los límites de la Constitución del país para lograr sus fines políticos: utiliza prolijamente los espacios que aquélla le brinda. En todo caso, la definición del “sistema Putin” no se encontrará ciertamente en los denuestos y acusaciones que le propina la Casa Blanca y que no obedecen a un capricho.

La caída del “socialismo real” en los países de Europa del Este, la reunificación alemana, el lugar cada vez más importante que países asiáticos como China y la India ocupan en la arena internacional y el empeño de EE.UU. y Gran Bretaña de controlar militarmente los recursos energéticos mundiales, han creado eso que Washington llama “el Nuevo Orden Mundial” y que para Moscú y Pekín es el “mundo unipolar”. Rusia no está dispuesta a aceptarlo y dispone de instrumentos para hacer valer su peso.

La Federación Rusa es una potencia nuclear, posee el derecho a veto en el Consejo de Seguridad de la ONU, es el único país, además de EE.UU., con presencia permanente en el espacio, ocupa el segundo lugar en el comercio de armas del planeta, exporta petróleo y gas, sus reservas monetarias ascienden a 182 mil millones de dólares, su superávit fiscal es de 83.200 millones de dólares y ha reembolsado casi toda su deuda exterior. Las inversiones extranjeras en Rusia superan a las rusas en otros países, el crecimiento del PIB fue del 6,4 por ciento en el 2006 y el alza real de los salarios fue del 12,6 por ciento. Agréguese a esto la consigna “Rusia para los rusos” que el gobierno repite y se comprenderá por qué los rusos están contentos con Putin, a pesar de la pobreza y la corrupción imperantes.

La anunciada extensión a Polonia y la República Checa del escudo antimisiles estadounidense reavivó los temores de Rusia –y de China– de que la Casa Blanca se propone cercar a ambos países para garantizar su proyecto hegemónico. Esos temores habían acercado ya a Moscú y Pekín en 1996, cuando firmaron un documento en el que asentaron su oposición a un mundo unipolar, y en 1999 mediante una declaración conjunta en la que manifestaban su resistencia al “Nuevo Orden Internacional” y demandaban un orden global económico y político de mayor equidad. En la declaración se denuncia que EE.UU. promueve los movimientos separatistas en Rusia y China y se propone balcanizar a las naciones de Eurasia. Teóricos del imperio como Zbigniew Brzezinski proclamaban que era preciso descentralizar y aun dividir a la Federación Rusa. En julio de 2001, Moscú y Pekín firmaron el Tratado de buena vecindad y de cooperación amistosa que, bajo lenguaje tan florido, consiste en un pacto de defensa mutua contra EE.UU., la OTAN y la red de bases militares que gobiernos asiáticos pro EE.UU. han ido instalando alrededor de China. Este otro, incipiente, polo mundial busca consolidarse por otras vías.

Rusia y China crearon la Organización de Cooperación de Shanghai, que integran además Kazajstán, Kirguisistán, Tadjikistán y Uzbekistán y en la que son observadores Irán –en realidad, miembro pleno de hecho–, India, Pakistán y Mongolia: persigue el objetivo de articular las economías euroasiáticas contra el dominio de la “Trilateral” formada por EE.UU., Europa Occidental y Japón. También se propone combatir “el terrorismo, el separatismo y el extremismo”, aunque esto debe entenderse como la represión contra grupos creados y/o financiados, armados y entrenados por EE.UU. y el Reino Unido con el fin de desestabilizar a algunos de esos países. Rusia estableció la Organización del Tratado de Seguridad Colectiva, de naturaleza militar, que agrupa además a Armenia, Bielorrusia, Kazajstán, Tadjikistán y Kirguisistán. Y luego: las “revoluciones de color” –Naranja en Ucrania o Rosa en Georgia– fracasaron en Asia Central. La luna de miel EE.UU./Uzbekistán creada por la invasión a Irak se rompió abruptamente cuando el gobierno uzbeko ordenó en el 2005 el desalojo de la base militar que había otorgado a las fuerzas estadounidenses.

Brzezinski había formulado en 1997 (The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geoestrategic Imperatives) la advertencia de que podría crearse una coalición euroasiática hostil “que eventualmente procuraría enfrentar al dominio estadounidense”. Pareciera que está ocurriendo. Lejos quedaron los tiempos en que la China de Mao y la URSS de Brezhnev dirimían a tiros su soberanía sobre la isla de Zhenbao/Damanski. Corría el año 1969 y cuentan que entonces Carlos Marx se subió a una colina en medio de las fuerzas combatientes y exigió por un megáfono: “¡Proletarios del mundo, separaos!”.

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

http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/contratapa/13-92548-2007-10-06.html

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The Independent: Why? Six years on
from the invasion of Afghanistan

As another British soldier is killed in Afghanistan, Patrick Cockburn asks what is the point of the mission

Published: 06 October 2007

Six years after a war was launched to overthrow the Taliban, British solders are still being killed in bloody skirmishing in a conflict in which no final victory is possible. Tomorrow is the sixth anniversary of the invasion of Afghanistan by the US, Britain and allies, an operation codenamed Enduring Freedom. But six years on, Britain is once again, as in Iraq, the most junior of partners, spending the lives of its soldiers with little real influence over the war.

The outcome of the conflict in Afghanistan will be decided in Washington and Islamabad. There is no chance of defeating the Taliban so long as they can retreat, retrain and recoup in the mountain fastnesses of Pakistan.

Yesterday, we learned of the death of another British soldier. Although his identity has not been released, it is believed that the dead man acted as a mentor to Prince William. Two others were injured when their vehicle was caught by an explosion west of Kandahar, bringing the number of British soldiers killed in Afghanistan to 82 since 2001.

The drip-drip of British losses underlines how little has been achieved in the past six years, and how quickly any gains can be lost. Most of southern Afghanistan was safer in the spring of 2002 than it is now and at no moment during the years that have elapsed is there any evidence from the speeches of successive British ministers that they have much idea what we are doing there and what we hope to achieve.

This week, the Conservative leader David Cameron told supporters that he would restore Afghanistan to the "number one priority in foreign policy" . The remark highlighted how this conflict has all but slipped from the political agenda.

Yet, Afghanistan is filled with the bones of British soldiers who died in futile campaigns in the 19th century and beyond. The lesson of these long forgotten wars is that military success on the ground in Afghanistan is always elusive and, even when achieved, seldom turns into lasting political success.

The Taliban came to power in Afghanistan through Pakistani support and it was when this support was withdrawn in 2001 that the Taliban abandoned Kabul and Kandahar in the days and weeks after 7 October without a fight. But six years later, the Taliban are back.

The violence shows no sign of ending. Suicide bombings, gun battles, airstrikes and roadside bombs have killed 5,100 people in the first nine months of this year, a 55 per cent increase over the same period in 2006.

I went to Afghanistan in September 2001 a few days after 9/11 when it became obvious the US was going to retaliate by overthrowing the Taliban because they had been the hosts of Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida.

It was a very peculiar war that followed, distinguished, above all, by a lack of real fighting. When Pakistani support and Saudi money were withdrawn, the Taliban's regime unravelled at extraordinary speed. By early 2002, I was able to drive from Kabul to Kandahar without feeling that I was taking my life in my hands.

But, for all the talk of progress and democracy and the presence of thousands of British, American and other Nato troops on the ground, it is impossible to undertake such journeys across the country safely.

Yet, back in 2001, from the moment I saw the first American bombs falling on Kabul and the sparks of light from the feeble Taliban anti-aircraft guns, it was obvious the two sides were completely mismatched.

Taliban fighters who expected to be targeted, simply fled before they were annihilated. The victory came too easily. The Taliban never made a last stand even in their bastions of support in the Pashtun heartlands in south. It was a very Afghan affair in keeping with the traditions of the previous 25 years when sudden betrayals and changes of alliance, not battles, had decided the winner.

Driving from Kabul towards Kandahar in the footsteps of the Taliban, I visited the fortress city of Ghazni on the roads south where the Taliban had suddenly dematerialised and received a de facto amnesty in return for giving up power without a fight.

Qari Baba, the ponderous looking governor of Ghazni province, who had been appointed the day before, said: "I don't see any Taliban here", which was surprising since the courtyard in front of his office was crowded with tough-looking men in black turbans carrying sub machine-guns.

"Every one of them was Taliban until 24 hours ago," whispered a Northern Alliance officer.

One fact that should have made the presence of British, American and other foreign troops easier in Afghanistan was that the Taliban were deeply hated for their cruelty, mindless religious fanaticism (leading to the banning of chess and kite flying) and the belief that they are puppets of Pakistani military intelligence. And unlike Iraq, the foreign presence in Afghanistan has had majority support, though that is slipping.

Drawing parallels between Iraq and Afghanistan is misleading because Saddam Hussein had sought to run a highly centralised state. In Afghanistan power had always been fragmented. But Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003 were mired in poverty. One reason why both the Taliban and Saddam Hussein went down so quickly is that Afghans, like the Iraqis, hoped for a better life.

They did not get it. Lack of jobs and services like electricity, clean water, hospitals and food continued or got worse.

Iraq is potentially a rich country because of its oil wealth. In Afghanistan the only equivalent to oil money is the money from the poppy fields on which impoverished farmers increasingly depend. One of the reasons the Taliban lost the support of Pashtun farmers in 2001 – though this was hardly highlighted by the victors – is that they enforced a ban on poppy growing which was highly effective. If the US adopts a policy of killing the poppy plants by spraying them with chemicals from the air, then they will also be engulfed by the same wave of unpopularity. The opium trade is fuelling lawlessness, warlordism and an unstable state.

Both Afghanistan and Iraq are notoriously difficult countries to conquer. They have for centuries, been frontier zones where powerful neighbours have fought each other by proxy.

Victory in Afghanistan six years after the start of the war to overthrow the Taliban is not likely. Even massively expanding troop levels would just mean more targets, and more losses. Armies of occupation, or perceived occupation, always provoke a reaction.

Ultimately what happens in Afghanistan will be far more determined not by skirmishes in Helmand province, but by developments in Pakistan, the Taliban's great supporter, which are wholly beyond British control. And the agenda in both the Afghan and Iraqi wars is ultimately determined by US domestic political needs Successes in faraway wars have to be manufactured or exaggerated. Necessary compromises are ruled out, leaving Iraqis and Afghans alike with the dismal outlook of war without end.

Six years in Afghanistan

* October, 2001 – British-backed US-led air strikes against Taliban strongholds. Taliban leader Mullah Omar flees to Pakistan border as his forces forced to withdraw.

* December, 2001 – The Bonn deal on the future of Afghanistan sees the creation of an interim government, headed by the US-backed President Hamid Karzai. .

* January, 2002 – Nato peacekeepers arrive with a year-long mandate.

* June, 2002 – The "grand assembly" selects Hamid Karzai as interim president.

* July, 2002 – Attacks increase throughout country and a vice-president, Haji Abdul Qadir, is shot dead with his son-in-law in Kabul.

* September, 2002 – Assassination attempt on President Karzai.

* January, 2004 – The Assembly backs a new national constitution

paving way for elections.

* September, 2004 – Another attempt on life of Karzai who is confirmed as President with 55 per cent of vote in elections - first for a generation.

* Spring/summer, 2006 – Taliban regroup in the south and carry out a series of fierce attacks there and elsewhere.

* July-October, 2006 – Nato peacekeeping forces, 18,500 and rising, take over full control.

* Spring, 2007 – Renewed efforts made by British-led coalition troops to force Taliban out of south.

* October, 2007 – Violent incidents, especially suicide bombings, are up 30 per cent on last year, with an average of 550 a month.

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/asia/article3033321.ece

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The Nation:
The Fight to Save Congo's Forests

by CHRISTIAN PARENTI, LAURA HANNA & HIDDEN DRIVER
[from the October 22, 2007 issue]

At the heart of central Africa's great rainforests lies Kisangani, a small city in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) some 1,300 miles from the mouth of the Congo River. The town began as a Belgian trading post, Stanleyville, and was Conrad's model for Kurtz's inner station in Heart of Darkness. No roads connect Kisangani to the rest of the world; over the past two decades they have all collapsed and been retaken by the jungle. Even river navigation is blocked beyond here, as a massive course of falls stretches for sixty miles upstream.

If the vast and isolated forests of the Congo Basin-the second-largest tropical woodlands on the planet-had a capital, it would be this sleepy city of crumbling colonial-era Art Deco buildings and empty boulevards. Down by the river women sell caterpillars to eat, but no one buys them. The sky is low and gray, but it never seems to rain. In the government buildings, yellow-eyed malarial old men sit in empty offices next to moldering stacks of handwritten files. There are no computers, electricity or, in many offices, even glass in the dark wooden window frames.

In a strange twist, this general dilapidation-the result of Congo's traumatic history-has inadvertently preserved Congo's massive tropical forests. First, Mobutu Sese Seko's thirty-two-year kleptocracy destroyed what infrastructure the Belgians had built. Then years of civil war and invasion by Uganda and Rwanda took an estimated 4 million lives, through violence and the attendant ravages of disease. All this chaos warded off the great timber interests. As a result the Congo Basin's massive forests-most of which lie within the DRC-are the world's healthiest and most intact.

An estimated 40 million people depend on these woodlands, surviving on traditional livelihoods. At a global level, Congo's forests act as the planet's second lung, counterpart to the rapidly dwindling Amazon. They are a huge "carbon sink," trapping carbon that could otherwise become carbon dioxide, the main cause of global warming. The Congo Basin holds roughly 8 percent of the world's forest-based carbon. These jungles also affect rainfall across the North Atlantic. In other words, these distant forests are crucial to the future of climate stability, a bulwark against runaway climate change.

But the isolation of the DRC's woodlands is ending. Since 2003 a massive United Nations mission has helped create relative stability, though several vicious and overlapping wars continue to gnaw at the country's eastern regions. Now most of the DRC is safe for logging. Over the past four years timber firms have set upon the forest in search of high-priced hardwoods. They control about one-quarter of Congo's forests, an area the size of California.

Blessed by the World Bank as catalysts of development, the companies operate largely unsupervised because the DRC lacks a functioning system of forest control. The government has written a new forestry code that requires companies to invest in local development and follow a supposedly sustainable, twenty-five-year cycle of rotational logging. But many companies ignore these stipulations; some have used intimidation and bribery; others log in blatantly illegal ways with no regard for the long-term damage they are causing.

And now the massive mahogany, afromosia, teak and wenge trees of Congo are making their way downriver, past the lower falls and over the sea to re-emerge as parquet flooring and lawn furniture in the homes of French, Italian and Chinese yuppies.

If these woodlands are deforested, the carbon they trap will be released into the atmosphere. Environmentalists say that if deforestation continues unabated, by 2050 the DRC could release as much carbon dioxide as Britain has in the past sixty years. On the ground, this would likely mean desertification, mass migration, hunger, banditry and war.

But an effort is afoot to halt Congo's plunder. "This is a make or break period," says Filip Verbelen, a forest campaigner with Greenpeace. "Logging is not helping the DRC's economy, and it is destroying the environment. The damage has to be contained now before it is too late."

Among the major timber firms in the DRC is an American company called Safbois, owned by a secretive family firm called the Blattner Group. The Blattners' other Congo-based businesses include construction, road building, telecommunications, aviation, trucking, port services and agriculture. The managing director, Daniel Blattner, splits his time between a Philadelphia suburb and the DRC, where his family has run businesses since just after independence.

The Blattners have operated in Congo for forty-six years. They purchased some of their best assets after the despotic Mobutu seized them from their Belgian owners. Environmentalists charge that Safbois is logging in violation of local agreements and national laws and with no regard for the well-being of people or the environment.

To investigate all this, I set out to visit Safbois's main timber concession, a 667,000-acre expanse of public land the firm gets to log. It lies near the town of Isangi, where the Lomami River meets the Congo. It is an area of tremendous biodiversity, home to 32,000 people, mostly subsistence farmers.

The first leg of the trip is a flight to Kisangani. I am carrying five forms of official documentation, yet the authorities insist I need more. The underpaid civil servants here toy officiously with the components of a defunct colonial police state, not for the sake of law and order but to demand survival-level bribes. When the authorization is finally ready, it is handwritten on old brown paper, but stamped and signed. On the verso is a typed document concerning veterinary medicine. It reads: "Congo Belge, District de Stanleyville, Secrétariat... 7 février 1957."

To reach the Safbois concession, a local guide and I ride motorcycles west from Kisangani along the Congo on trails that only twenty years earlier had been blacktop roads. The bridges are mostly washed away or blown up, so we cross each tributary by loading our motorcycles into dugout canoes. A continual string of villages unfolds, each composed of thatched-roof mud huts. At times the path is filled with a sweet floral fragrance and clouded with white and purple butterflies. Forests give way to patches of grassland, then clumps of bamboo and then more forest.

After a day of riding, a modern multistory brick building emerges from the wall of jungle greenery: we have arrived at the Institut Facultaire des Sciences Agronomiques de Yangambi. Built in the late 1960s with Belgian aid, the old forestry university at Yangambi is now closed; only a skeleton crew maintains the buildings. But the university still houses a huge biological archive: stuffed birds, pressed leaves, wood samples, 150,000 species in all. There's a dusty old lab, abandoned offices and, according to the watchman, "a cave where King Leopold liked to hide." But the Belgian King Leopold, who owned Congo as a personal fiefdom between 1885 and 1909, never actually set foot in Congo. The university starts to feel like a Surrealist's jungle amusement park, or a monument designed to mock Congo's pathetic lack of a real forest policy. It is the embodiment of everything that should be, but is not.

The next day we cross the Congo and ride deep into the Safbois concession to Baluolambila village. Along a flat stretch of road we stop to talk with a village chief. "This company came here just to cut trees, and from the beginning it has been nothing but lies, lies, lies," says the chief, Frédéric Makofi, as several men gathered around nod their approval. Chief Makofi wants clinics and schools and building materials and transportation. He says much of this was promised but not delivered.

The new Congolese forest code requires that logging companies draw up social responsibility contracts with the communities in their concessions-essentially the law asks the firms to set up company towns. Greenpeace, among others, has attacked this corporate-centered model because it undermines the state's responsibility to create a functioning system of social services. But in the Isangi concession, people say the Blattners won't even create a company town. They claim Safbois used intimidation to force through an agreement and then failed to deliver the promised schools and clinics.

"According to Section 89 of the forestry code, the company must build schools and clinics while they cut the trees. But they are only cutting," says Chief Makofi. He says the company gave the people some gifts and started construction on one school. "At first the people were happy that the company had arrived because they thought logging would equal development." But, Makofi says, it hasn't.

"We don't have any norms or restrictions to impose on the company. This is our first time dealing with anything like this. There are places that are sacred and the company has gone in to those places and cut trees there. Those trees they are cutting were helping us," explains Chief Makofi. "We want development in exchange." Like many people, Makofi thinks that a well-managed forestry policy could ensure that trees are replanted and allowed to grow while still providing enough timber and income to help raise the standard of living here-balancing environmental protection and development.

His complaints are echoed throughout the Safbois concession. In another village, a mile or two away, we meet a farmer named François Likungo. "There is nothing for our benefit," says Likungo. "And the forest has changed-all the animals have gone. We used to catch antelope and porcupine and possums in snares. But now the animals flee the noise of the machines. Before Safbois came we ate meat five times a month. But now it is just vegetables and cassava."

Two women standing nearby explain that childbirth is risky because the closest clinic has no medicine. School and medicine cost money, but this is an almost cashless society. Among the mob of kids clustered around are several with ringworm sores on their scalps and faces.

We ride farther in and soon the jungle opens onto huge smoldering clearings. Here another Blattner company, Busira Lomami, is clearing land for palm oil groves. It's a dramatic example of the chain of exploitation created by logging: first come the roads, and the companies take a few hardwoods; then on those roads come poachers, settlers and agricultural companies, and the deforestation starts to pick up speed.

At the Safbois compound-a cluster of trailers and mud huts surrounded by a stockade wall-I meet Kanzi, the company's chief engineer. Several months ago, when a Safbois official tried to sink a boat full of activists, a Greenpeace researcher and an Italian journalist were on board and filmed the event. The company came off looking thuggish, so now Safbois is on its best behavior. Kanzi stiffly but politely explains the situation from the company's point of view.

He says that there have been big misunderstandings. The company stopped building the one school after conflicts emerged between villages. The company is waiting for agreement from all the people in the concession before beginning to build schools and clinics in earnest. And he says that far from being exploiters, the company is harassed by environmentalists, who force it to tiptoe around the elephants, okapi and other exotic forest-dwelling animals.

According to Kanzi, tax collectors besiege the company. He offers a rather unimpressive example. "We had to pay $10 just to bring in 20,000 liters of gasoline here at our port. That is very expensive." He says, "The local people are happy to see us. But their friends and brothers, who have gone off to be educated, the intellectuals, they come back and excite the people to do bad things. They stir up trouble." When I ask how much they have logged, Kanzi snaps that it is none of my business.

After our interview I tour the logging camp with another foreman. A stoned police officer with a pet monkey on his shoulder wanders around, and in the distance one can hear chain saws. A harsh sun breaks through the clouds. The foreman explains that the workers are all from distant parts of the country. At the Safbois camp they and their families live in dirt-floored huts. The foreman tells me (and my little video camera) that the Blattners have not paid the eighty or so loggers here since April-five months ago.

To understand the local government's strange relationship of dependence on Safbois, I interview Crispin Kakwaka, the Administrateur de Territoire, at his office back in Isangi. Kakwaka describes the local government's appalling lack of resources. "We have nothing for forest control," he says. "The company gave us a few motorcycles for transportation, that is all. But we can't even inspect the amount of timber the company is sending downriver. We have to rely on whatever statistics they supply."

Coordinating opposition to Safbois is a small NGO called CAPDH. It survives on little grants, mostly from the Belgian government and UN civic education contracts it received during recent elections. Not quite a social movement or a social service organization, CAPDH is a network of about two dozen local intellectuals-part-time teachers, clerks, literate river pilots. Most, though not all, are men, and many of them studied for a few years at the provincial university in Kisangani.

"They [the police and provincial officials] forced the chiefs to sign the social agreement," says Delphin Ningo Likula, CAPDH's leader. "They surrounded the meeting and sent police after the chiefs who would not come to the meeting." Another CAPDH activist, Emmanuel Bofia, tells me, "The company hides logs in the forest, so the true amount they are cutting is not known. They cut trees in graveyards, trees in village meeting areas. They take the caterpillar trees. They are even cutting in the nature preserves deep in the jungle."

How does Safbois respond to these charges? Reached on his cellphone in Philadelphia, owner Daniel Blattner is irate. He denies that his firm is running amok in Isangi and explains away the villagers' frustration as follows: "We have a twenty-five-year concession, and we are building infrastructure as we go. We cannot-it is impossible-to build it all at once! We gave out plenty of support-over sixty bicycles, farming implements. They want 450 kilometers of road. By the time we leave, they'll have 1,000!"

About ten days after I left the Safbois concession, villagers, angry about broken promises and environmental damage, marched on the Safbois compound, pelting it with rocks. Police were called in and fired their guns into the air. Two protesters were reported injured. Days later, a survey party from a different timber firm was attacked near Isangi. The situation in the forest is tense. But to understand the forces driving these events, one must venture beyond the realm of villages, loggers, rough-edged timber camp managers and even comfortable Philadelphia-based capitalists like Daniel Blattner.

The real power behind the throne in Congo is the World Bank. It is the single largest lender to this hugely indebted government-$4 billion so far. In 2002 the government of Joseph Kabila signed a moratorium on new timber contracts. But the edict was contradicted by other new laws. Now the Bank is funding a complicated, painfully slow process of timber contract review. The government of the DRC will determine the legality and environmental impact of all 156 industrial timber concessions; tax cheats and despoilers will (in theory) have their contracts revoked. But so far the process is badly behind schedule. Meanwhile, the logging goes on.

In Kinshasa, I meet Kankonde Mukadi, the Bank's forest specialist. Why doesn't the Bank move forcefully to save Congo's forests? His response is high-minded flimflam: "This is a sovereign country. We can only make recommendations based on research."

Environmentalists laugh at this. Lionel Diss of Rainforest Foundation, Norway, was in Congo on a research trip and summed up the Bank's power thus: "If the Bank cut off funds to the DRC government and started imposing green criteria on new loans, and two or three of the most powerful embassies placed phone calls of concern to ministers, and European governments were ready with forest-conservation subsidies, things could be very different."

But in Congo, the Bank's hypocrisy knows no bounds: Despite its stated concern for the rule of law and sustainable forestry, its International Finance Corporation (IFC) is directly invested in some of the worst Congolese logging.

In mid-August the environment minister in Bandundu province impounded two barges of timber belonging to Olam, a $5 billion-a-year Singapore-based transnational corporation that the DRC accused of lying about the amount of timber it shipped, underpaying its taxes and using special "individual concessions" intended for small Congolese operators. The local government forced Olam to pay $34,000 in back taxes, plus some fines. Then in late August, Olam-still under pressure for what DRC officials say were numerous forms of environmentally destructive fraud-abruptly relinquished its two main timber concessions.

The World Bank, it turns out, had invested $15 million in Olam stock and in August still owned $11 million worth. IFC's spokesperson, Corrie Shanahan, was remarkably unfazed by the scandal. "Olam is a client of ours in several countries. We consider them to be a responsible company," said Shanahan. Asked if the DRC's legal actions against Olam were not grounds to reconsider the IFC's investment, Shanahan said, "We believe that Olam has good intentions, and I can't comment on the opinions of the DRC government."

To follow up on all these matters, I meet the DRC's minister of environment, Didace Pembe Bokiaga, in his mahogany-lined office. Behind his desk is a mounted water buffalo head and rising from the floor, two massive ivory elephant tusks. It's not the greenest image, but Pembe says the right things. "President Kabila is working very hard to root out corruption.... We have already recuperated 18 million hectares [of forest] for the state." This last is true, but most of it was land deemed unworthy of logging by timber firms.

"If these are the lungs of the planet, then the donor countries should subsidize us not to log most of it. But we need employment and we will have a sustainable forestry," says Pembe.

My faith in the minister is later shaken when an important timber executive tells how Pembe doubled the "area tax" on logging concessions, only to offer to undo the increase for a contribution of $300,000. The minister denies this charge.

Whatever the truth in this instance, Congo is still a kleptocracy; its massive civil service preys on every productive aspect of the economy. Transparency International rates it as one of the eight most corrupt nations on earth.

Corruption is a common complaint from the companies operating in the DRC, which also excoriate the government for its incompetence. The former general director of Safbois, Françoise Van de Ven, is secretary general of the DRC's main timber syndicate, the Fédération des Industriels du Bois. In her taut Flemish-accented English, she tells the familiar story of an industry under siege.

"This country is totally broken down. So we have to do everything. We build our own roads, run our own port facilities. You can't even get the normal large ships in the port at Matadi because the government has left it in ruins, undredged, no proper cranes. Everything is on the companies. And it is very expensive. At least 20 percent of operating costs goes to taxes. And what do we get? Nothing. And if we build the schools, which we do, will the government send teachers?" She pauses to take a drag on her cigarette and sip her latte.

Congo's culture of corruption extends even to many village chiefs. In one notorious case, a logging company called Safo provided cement, tin roofing, machetes, nets and other basic wares as part of its social contract. The materials went to village chiefs, but instead of hauling the goods to their communities, a merchant offered the chiefs cash for the supplies and resold the goods in nearby towns. Infuriated, the villagers blockaded roads, made threats of black magic against officials and clashed with police; several activists were detained, and one was beaten to death by cops.

The most cogent critic I met in Congo was Arthur Kepel.Born in Kinshasa, he was recruited into Mobutu's secret police, was later the chief of intelligence for the UN mission here and is now with the International Crisis Group. His summation of the Congolese political class-a group he knows well-is painfully blunt: "They worship money. You should ask them, What are they doing for Congo? You can't blame it all on the Belgians. What are these Congolese doing for their country now?" Not that Kepel spares the Belgians. "They owe a moral debt to this country. They plundered it."

When I ask him about the international community, he again counters with a question. "What international community? Do the Americans and French coordinate against corruption here? Or does each ambassador try to get the best position for their own national interest, build relations that help the companies from their country get better deals? What do you think?"

Are there any politicians in Parliament who are genuinely trying to protect the environment and create development? Kepel pauses, scrolls through his phone, gives me a number. "But I warn you. He doesn't shake hands."

The next day I meet the man in question, Ne Muanda Nsemi, Member of Parliament and spiritual leader of a sect called Bund dia Kongo. Last May 134 of his followers were massacred by Kabila's troops as they protested against dirty dealing in local elections. Nsemi wears yellow and white vestments and receives me at his simple compound in a hillside neighborhood of Kinshasa. He explains that around a distant star circles a planet called Kongo and that the inhabitants of the old Bakongo kingdom, which once ruled parts of western Congo, were descended from extraterrestrials and Ethiopians. The whole story involves a tsunami, sunken continents, migration from Australia and many other surprising details.

I wonder if this is Kepel's idea of a joke. Then I get in a question about forest policy. Suddenly the millenarian discourse gives way to nuts-and-bolts politics. "The international community should pay for conferences that can be broadcast to educate people about the value of the forest and about the law. In Parliament we need to cooperate across party lines." He says the DRC needs sustainable forest industries, scientific management of the resources and subsidies from industrialized economies to preserve the forest for the sake of climate stability. "This planet is getting warmer-everyone needs these forests."

The main Congolese environmental organization working to save the forests is a small NGO called OCEAN, which serves as the link between international outfits like Greenpeace and local community groups in the concessions. This nascent green movement is calling for an immediate halt to illegal logging, by which they mean most logging in the DRC. But they also say that the DRC needs to develop the rule of law if a logging moratorium is to work-a long-term project, to say the least.

If the forests are to be saved, there will have to be north-to-south subsidies-call them conservation concessions or climate reparations. Paying the DRC not to log is hardly without problems, such as the boundless corruption of local officialdom-but even despite this, subsidies could help to keep chain saws and bulldozers out of the forests.

The communities desperately trying to leverage funds from logging firms will need something else in order to survive. And if massive subsidies are good enough for the tidy gingerbread farmsteads of Germany, the pretty backdrops of France and for US agribusiness, then surely the richest economies can spend to save the wilds of Congo, upon which we all depend. If Congo is deforested, the impact will be grim-and global.

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20071022/parenti

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ZNet | Africa
Thomas Sankara Lives!

by Mukoma Ngugi; October 04, 2007

In April this year, we celebrated 50 yrs of Ghana’s Independence. In October, we are marking the 20th year since Thomas Sankara’s assassination – a stark reminder that we are still in the state Odinga Oginga called Not Yet Uhuru. We will be remembering that if Africa suffers today, it is because yesterday its best political minds, and its most fiery and committed sons and daughters were assassinated. All for thirty pieces of silver, for tea, coffee, oil, diamonds, gold, cobalt, uranium and African sweat.

But we should also remember the living. Aziz Fall, the co-coordinator of the International Justice Campaign for Sankara (ICJS) has been receiving anonymous death threats since December 2006. They tell him “stop or be stopped” “commit suicide or face execution” and in the last one, he was informed that his family would be targeted. His crime? Coordinating 22 lawyers dedicated to using legal means to find the truth behind Sankara’s assassination.

The ICJS helped Mariam Sankara, Thomas Sankara’s widow, take her case to the United Nations after, predictably, the legal system in Burkina Faso stalled each time she appeared in court. Finally, in March 2006, the United Nations Human Rights Committee ruled that Sankara’s family has “the right to know the circumstances of his death.” The Committee also argued that failure to correct the natural death entry on Sankara’s death certificate, refusal to investigate his death, and “the lack of official recognition of his place of burial” pointed to “inhumane treatment of Ms. Sankara and her sons” contrary to Article 7 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

Dictators and your torturers all over the world take note! Article 7 declares: “No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.” In a strange way, the death threats against Aziz further validate the UN ruling.

Victoria Mxenge, Ruth First, Steve Biko, Amilcar Cabral, Samora Machel, Chris Hani, Mhodlane, Kimathi and many others dead at the hands of colonialism and apartheid. But what makes the assassinations of Sankara, Lumumba or Maurice Bishop of Grenada all the more painful is knowing that they were betrayed by those closest to them. And their successors are egregiously guilty of violently pulling back their societies miles behind the starting line.

After Lumumba, Mobutu –a common thief who under the guise of a shallow nationalism - maimed, killed and stole in the Congo. In Grenada, Bernard Coard’s bloody counter-revolution allowed a predatory U.S. to invade Grenada. And in Burkina Faso, each day we see what President Blaise Compaore has done with the Sankara revolution.

Life expectancy is 47.9 years, adult literacy, 21.8 percent and Burkina Faso now has the dubious distinction of being ranked the 3rd poorest country in the world with 80 percent of its 13 million people living on less than two dollars a day. In November of 2007, Compaore will be running for presidency, again. I say give him five more years to see if he can do it – Let him get Burkina Faso the coveted first place title of poorest country in the whole world!

For a nation to heal, it must know and come to terms with the truth of its past. And it must make good with the promise of that past. In 1957, Kenya’s Dedan Kimathi was hanged and buried in an unmarked grave in Kamiti Prison by the British, where the post-independence government left him. Having set Kenya on neo-colonial rails and rewarded the collaborators with land, then turned their backs on Mau Mau veterans, both Kenyatta and Moi wanted what Kimathi stood for forgotten. Compaore is afraid of the truth because Sankara is a reminder of how far he has fallen from the promise of the revolution. Compaore knows we know he cannot make good on Sankara’s promise.

We have to remember our dead. But our presidents prefer gold monuments and statues. Sometimes they cultivate heroes’ acres without growing freedom. Better the monument be societies that are free and egalitarian. Instead of grand monuments, it is better we have nations that would welcome the revolutionary dead. Because truth be told, Nkrumah would not have been welcomed to Ghana’s 50 year celebrations. Kimathi would not be welcomed in today’s Kenya and Sankara would be assassinated again in today’s Burkina Faso.

Koni Benson, a friend and agitator, named her son Sankara because, she said, “What Thomas Sankara did, tried to do and what happened to him, should not be forgotten. He is the history and the future of the continent. He dared us to ‘invent the future.’”

As we remember our dead – Let us also remember the living. We have to dare to remember the past. We have to dare to dream again. But also, let us dare to act.


Mukoma Wa Ngugi is the author of Hurling Words at Consciousness (AWP, 2006) and Conversing with Africa: Politics of Change (KPH, 2003), and editor of the forthcoming, New Kenyan Fiction (Ishmael Reed Publications, 2008). He is a political columnist for the BBC Focus on Africa Magazine where this essay first appeared.

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=2&ItemID=13959