Elsewhere Today 460
Aljazeera:
Turkey and Iraq in crisis talks
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 26, 2007
18:04 MECCA TIME, 15:04 GMT
An Iraqi delegation has held talks in Ankara in an attempt to avert military operations by Turkey against Kurdish separatist fighters based in northern Iraq.
The team included Abdel Qader Mohammed Jassim, Iraq's defence minister, as well as Iraq's intelligence chief and officials from the interior and foreign ministries, an Iraqi diplomat said.
As the talks went ahead, Turkish aircraft raided suspected Kurdistan Workers' party (PKK) positions in northern Iraq, Turkey's state-run news agency said.
"The operation is continuing in the mountainous parts of the provinces of Siirt, Hakkari and Sirnak in the border region," Anatolia reported.
There were no reports of any PKK casualties as a result of the Turkish air raids.
Other members of the 11-member Iraqi delegation which visited Ankara included representatives of the two major Iraqi Kurdish parties in northern Iraq and a US military officer, about whom no other details were available.
Abdul-Qader al-Obeidi, Iraqi defence minister, and Sherwan al-Waili, minister of state for national security, met the Turkish foreign and interior ministers on Friday morning.
"We came with concrete steps, concrete proposals," Anatolia news agency quoted Jassim as saying on Thursday.
US request
The Bush administration is urging Turkey not to launch an incursion that would destabilise Iraq's autonomous Kurdish north, Iraq's most stable region.
But Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish prime minister, said the US desire to protect the north would not hinder Turkey's fight against members of the Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK.
The group's fighters use mountain bases in Iraq to rest, train and get supplies in relative safety before returning to Turkey to carry out attacks against government forces in the heavily Kurdish southeast.
"They (the Bush administration) might wish that we do not carry out a cross-border offensive, but we make the decision on what we have to do," Erdogan said during a visit to Romania.
"We have taken necessary steps in this struggle so far, and now we are forced to take this step and we will take it."
He said that the US should repay Turkish assistance for the invasion of Afghanistan with support for Turkey's struggle against the Kurdish separatists, who want autonomy.
Gul's warning
Earlier on Thursday, Abdullah Gul, the Turkish president, warned Kurdish separatists that Ankara's patience was running out after Turkish forces said they had repelled a guerrilla attack near the Iraqi border.
Ankara has massed up to 100,000 troops along the mountainous border before a possible cross-border operation to crush about 3,000 fighters of the PKK.
Turkey has said that it will decide whether to cross into Iraq in pursuit of Kurdish fighters regardless of US objections, as a steady stream of US-made Turkish fighter jets roared into the skies near the Iraqi border.
Turkish television footage meanwhile showed smoke rising from three villages in northern Iraq that were purportedly shelled by Turkish artillery on Thursday.
Dogan news agency said there were no casualties because villagers had already fled their homes.
It did not cite a source.
The agency identified one of the Iraqi villages as Hezil, 5km south of the border with Turkey's Hakkari province, which also borders Iran.
Clash with PKK
The Turkish military said it had spotted a "group of terrorists" near a military outpost in the province of Semdinli close to Iraq on Tuesday and fired on them with tanks, artillery and other heavy weaponry.
It said the group had been preparing for an attack.
The military said on its website that troops kept firing on the group as they escaped towards Iraqi territory.
The report increased the official number of fighters killed since Sunday to at least 64.
The PKK denied any casualties, calling the military statement a "lie", the pro-Kurdish Firat news agency said.
Source: Agencies
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/7B9F1389-E7A5-4287-8777-0220EB942C41.htm
AllAfrica:
Preventing Backslide Into War
By John Prendergast and Colin Thomas-Jensen
Washington, DC
GUEST COLUMN 25 October 2007
Joseph Kabila, the President of the Democratic Republic of Congo, visits the White House today to discuss challenges to his country's fragile democracy. The last time a President of this sprawling Central African nation met with President Bush was 1989 - Congo was then called Zaire and the President Bush in question was our 41st president, George H. W. Bush. The ensuing eighteen years have been calamitous for the people of Congo. The current President Bush can help avert further tragedy by pressing President Kabila to abandon plans to launch a military offensive in Congo's volatile eastern provinces.
With fertile land and abundant natural resources, Congo could be an economic powerhouse and a regional breadbasket. Instead, the country is a basket-case. A brutal regional war ripped Congo apart from 1998 to 2004, and more than four million Congolese died from a destructive cocktail of violence, disease, and malnutrition.
Following a landmark peace agreement and a tumultuous political transition backed by the world's largest United Nations peacekeeping operation, Kabila was elected President late last year. However, elections were not a panacea to Congo's ills. More than one thousand Congolese still die each day from continued hostilities and the crippling effects of widespread displacement.
The presence in eastern Congo of a Rwandan militia called the FDLR - made up of more than 6,000 Hutu rebels with links to the 1994 genocide in their home country - is the proximate cause of a power struggle that threatens to reignite full-scale war. The Congolese army's inability and UN peacekeepers' reluctance to remove the FDLR from Congo creates a security vacuum in the East, where women and girls are routinely subjected to appalling acts of sexual torture.
A Congolese General and suspected war criminal named Laurent Nkunda has rebelled from the army to fight the FDLR. Nkunda claims to protect eastern Congo's Tutsi population, but the atrocities committed by his forces are fueling rising anti-Tutsi sentiment in the region. The prevailing climate of impunity allows all sides - Nkunda, the FDLR, the Congolese army, and local militias - to attack and exploit civilians without fear of consequences; nearly 400,000 people have fled their homes since January.
Kabila's government tried to integrate Nkunda loyalists into the national army earlier this year, but the process backfired, strengthening Nkunda militarily and emboldening government officials who favor a military solution over political negotiations. Kabila now rejects calls for a UN special envoy to support talks with Nkunda and last week ordered his military to draw up plans to disarm Nkunda's fighters by force.
Military action would almost certainly be catastrophic. Despite some recent successes, the Congolese army is far too weak to defeat Nkunda's more disciplined forces without help. A growing body of evidence indicates that the Congolese army has made a pact with the devil, collaborating with the FDLR against Nkunda. This alliance threatens to draw the Rwandans more directly into the conflict-on Nkunda's side. Rwandan President Paul Kagame is no huge fan of Nkunda, but a revitalized FDLR poses an exceptional danger that Rwanda will not ignore.
During their White House meeting, President Bush must deliver a clear message to President Kabila that political dialogue is the only acceptable way forward. The State Department is already talking behind the scenes to Nkunda, who recently expressed a willingness to negotiate. Now the U.S. and others - particularly France and South Africa - should press Kabila to accept UN-led mediation.
The U.S. can grease the wheels for a negotiated settlement by helping to develop a coherent international plan to deal with the pretext for Nkunda's rebellion: the FDLR. The FDLR is on a U.S. list of terrorist organizations, and the Bush Administration ought to work through the UN Security Council to implement targeted sanctions against individuals who provide arms and other support to the FDLR.
The U.S. should also press its Rwandan allies to take steps that encourage some of the FDLR rebels to disarm and return to Rwanda. President Kagame understandably refuses to negotiate with genocidaires, but his government knows who among the FDLR bear responsibility for the horrors of 1994. Many of the FDLR rank-and-file were under the age of 12 during the genocide, and providing better resettlement packages could induce defections, isolate the worst war criminals, and eliminate a major source of destabilization in the region.
A single White House tête-à-tête will not resolve the array of problems associated with 10 years of unrelenting conflict in Congo, but President Bush can provide the necessary diplomatic pressure to thwart yet another destructive war in the heart of Africa.
Prendergast is co-Chair and Thomas-Jensen is a policy advisor at ENOUGH: The Project to End Genocide and Crimes against Humanity. Both have conducted field research in eastern Congo this year.
Copyright © 2007 allAfrica.com. All rights reserved.
http://allafrica.com/stories/200710251318.html
AlterNet: Where Does the Right-Wing End
and the Media Begin?
By Rory O'Connor, AlterNet
Posted on October 26, 2007
I had the opportunity to sit down this week with one of America's top economists, Paul Krugman, who of course doubles as an influential op-ed columnist for the New York Times. It's more than a bit surprising when the guy from the New York Times sounds more radical than anyone else in the room, but Krugman and his twice-weekly column have been more consistently surprising and radically different than anything else allowed to appear in the Times (or indeed anywhere else in the so-called "mainstream media") for so long that even Krugman himself no longer seems surprised by the force of his own outrage.
He certainly pulled no punches during our conversation, stating in a forthright manner his opinions on such controversial topics as truth and lies in the newsroom ("The Big Lies are all on the right"), media bias ("A large part of it is in fact right-wing bias, because they are effectively part of the right wing") and corporate pressure ("It's very clear that when the parent companies of the major news sources have issues at stake before the federal government ... this definitely influences the coverage.) Perhaps the fact that he's a tenured professor at Princeton - and not a professional journalist still on the make - has freed Krugman to speak truth to naked emperors and Times readers on a biweekly basis.
We spoke at the beginning of a national publicity tour for Krugman's latest book, The Conscience of a Liberal, which ranges over the history of the past century to explain what went wrong in America - and then attempts to point the way to a "new New Deal." Part of what went wrong with America, of course, was the role played in our democracy by the mass media, as Krugman recognized and parsed in one chapter in his book entitled "Weapons of Mass Distraction."
***
Rory O' Connor: You speak in your book about "movement conservatism," which you call a "radical new force in American politics that took over the Republican Party." What role if any do the media play in movement conservatism?
Paul Krugman: The media are a very important force in it. They shape perceptions, and they conceal issues. Look at the 2000 presidential campaign, for example, where the media were so heavily biased against Al Gore. That's what brought Bush to within a Supreme Court decision of the White House. So if you look at, certainly these last seven years, the role of the media in not telling you reasons why you should be skeptical about the course of the war, for example, it's enormously important.
We have a situation right now in which there are several major parts of the news media that are for all practical purposes part of "movement conservatism" - Fox News, the New York Post, the Washington Times - and in which other news organizations are intimidated, at least to some extent. I sometimes talk about what I call "asymmetrical intimidation." If you say a true but unflattering thing about Bush or in fact about any other prominent conservative, oh, boy! People are going to go after you. I mean, I've got people working full-time going after me, right? But if you say a false, unflattering thing about a Democrat or a progressive, no risk ... And that shapes coverage, no question about it. It's better now, but it's still very asymmetric. The other thing we should mention about the media is their addiction to the trivial. We've got the most substantive election coming up, I think, ever. We've got clear differences on policies between parties. And what are we seeing news stories about? John Edwards' hair and Hillary Clinton's laugh ... this is horrifying! And again - it's asymmetric. I can think of lots of unflattering things to say about any of the Republican candidates - Mitt Romney's saying his sons are serving the country by helping him get elected! - but it doesn't get nearly as much play in the media.
ROC: It sounds like you're saying there's a bias in the media. If you are, what is the bias?
PK: The media's bias, a large part of it is in fact right-wing bias, because they are effectively part of the right wing. Fox News ... there's nothing like Fox News on other television networks that you can look at. There is no liberal equivalent of Fox News, there is no network that, if a conservative got the Nobel Peace Prize, would have responded the way Fox News did to Al Gore's Peace Prize, by first saying nothing at all, then when they figured out the line, talking about how fat he is ... So there's no correspondence there.
Beyond that, there's two things at least; first, the hatred of substance - they really want to talk about all that trivia - and there's also the fetish of evenhandedness. If one candidate says something that's completely false, and the other something that's true, the media will say, "Some people believe what that guy said was false, and some people say it was true." Way back in the 2000 campaign, I wrote a piece in which I said that if Bush said the earth was flat, the headline would read: "Opinions Differ on Shape of the Planet." I was thinking specifically about what Bush was saying about taxes and Social Security, which were just out and out lies! But no one would say that, and they still won't. It's better now, a little, but they still won't say it, and that tends - I imagine in some future environment that might work to the advantage of some dishonest candidates on the left - but the fact of the matter is the Big Lies are all on the right right now. So it works much more to their advantage.
ROC: Do you think it's possible that economics is driving politics in the media?
PK: The role of economics in driving the media is an interesting one. One question is simply, "Do they respond to what sells?" And to some extent the focus on the trivial is there due to that. And also, by the way, talking heads screaming at each other is a lot cheaper than actually having reporters out in the field doing reporting, so that's one reason why you get that.
I guess the question that you want to ask is, "To what extent is news coverage biased by the corporate interest of the parents?" And that's hard to pin down in any direct way, but one of the interesting things that you notice right now is the remarkable reluctance of some of the networks to follow what the viewer ship numbers seem to be saying. I mean, look at Olbermann's show versus anything else at MSNBC, for example. Why aren't there more programs like that? Why is CNN still trying to be Fox Lite, when you clearly can't outfox Fox and there clearly seems to be a bigger market opportunity on the other side? And you really do start to think that - there probably aren't, at networks other than Fox, there probably aren't memos saying here is how we are going to slant the news today - at Fox there are, every day. But there's probably this general sort of pressure to go for the views that won't upset the CEO of the firm that controls the network that has a lot of business interests that are best served by one side or the other ... so yes, this is a problem.
ROC: So deregulation, consolidation and corporate issues like that might affect news coverage?
PK: Oh sure. It's very clear that when the parent companies of the major news sources have issues at stake before the federal government - and if one party controls the White House and both houses of Congress, and has made it very clear that it keeps lists and remembers who its friend and not-so-friend are - this definitely influences the coverage. A lot of people I talk to in the media say that they have received pressure in ways that only seem to make sense if you think that at some level management - not the guys that think about audience shares but the guys who think about broader concerns - are taking into account the political liabilities. Which is one reason why it is remarkable, although it's still not what I want, that the news coverage has gotten a whole lot better - funny, no? - after the polls really turned the other way.
ROC: In your book, you talk about the media's use of "storylines" and what you've called the "Rambofication of history."
PK: Yes, I'm rather proud of the term "Rambofication." In the years immediately following Vietnam, all of this stuff that now seems so much a part of the story - that we lost the war because we were stabbed in the back, that the "weak" politicians, the Democrats, can't be trusted on national security - wasn't very much out there. I actually went back and looked at a lot of polling and what people had to say at the time. In 1977, people still remembered what Vietnam had actually been like, and why we needed to get the heck out of there.
It wasn't really until the 1980s that the history began to be re-invented, so if only we'd let Sylvester Stallone flex his muscles, we could have gone back and won the war. The idea of Democrats as "weak" on national security really got invented then - and you know there were a couple of events that played into that, such as the collapse of the Soviet Union, which I really don't think had much to do with Reagan, but helped make the storyline. So when 9/11 came along, the realities of 9/11 were that the Clinton people had been working pretty hard to try to so something about Bin Laden, and the Bushies said as soon as they came in, "We're not interested, we want to think about a war with China." But the storyline that the media fell into was that, "We're the tough guys, the other guys neglected it." And that gave them a good run - they won two elections, in '02 and '04, which I think otherwise they would have lost - by playing on this notion of "We're strong, and they're weak." I guess the sort of good news is that they have done such an incredibly terrible job at all of that that we may have at least a while before all that scare tactic stuff comes back.
ROC: Or we may hear in four years how the Democrats "lost Iraq."
PK: I'm worried, obviously. Clearly, if it's a Democrat who withdraws from Iraq, which it appears likely it will be, then it will be more of the, "We were winning, we were on the edge of victory, then they stabbed us in the back ..."
ROC: "They spit on our soldiers ..."
PK: Yeah, that's amazing, the "spitting on our soldiers" thing - because it never happened, there are no documented cases - but it became part of the storyline. Will that happen again? Certainly they'll do their damnedest to make it happen ...
I guess I'm more optimistic about the American public, that it will take a lot more than four years, for us to see that again, because it took more than four years after Vietnam, and right now the American public has a pretty good sense of just what a disaster that's all been ... I think people have made up their minds that this is a disaster. Maybe 10 years from now, they'll have forgotten and be willing to, you know, see movies in which some heroic guy goes back and wins the Iraq war but ... not for a while anyway.
ROC: Well, I'm more of a Mencken disciple when it comes to the American public, but I hope you're right.
PK: I hope I'm right too!
Filmmaker and journalist Rory O'Connor is now completing AlterNet’s first-ever book, which is on the subject of right-wing radio talkers like O’Reilly, and will be available early in 2008. O'Connor also writes the Media Is A Plural blog.
© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at:
http://www.alternet.org/story/65870/
Asia Times:
'War on terror' is now war on Iran
By Pepe Escobar
Oct 27, 2007
Scores of middle-aged, mild-mannered, bearded gentlemen - the technocrats of the Iranian military bourgeoisie - are now officially enjoying the status of "terrorists", at least from a Washington point of view.
The demonization of Iran drags on relentlessly as the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) has been officially branded a proliferator of weapons of mass destruction and its elite Quds Force a supporter of terrorism. The latter has for months been accused of supplying Shi'ite militias in Iraq with weapons that are killing US soldiers.
The new round of US sanctions also targets Iran's Defense Ministry, as well as three major Iranian banks accused of financing "the usual suspects"; Shi'ite militias in Iraq, Hamas in Palestine, Hezbollah in Lebanon and - absurd as it may sound - the Taliban in Afghanistan. The banks are the state-owned Bank Melli, Bank Mellat and Bank Saderat.
The US State and Treasury departments jointly announced the new sanctions, citing the Islamic Republic's defiance over its continued nuclear program and its alleged involvement with terrorist organizations. The new restrictions are unilateral and aim to prevent businesses and other groups both within and outside the US - but that do work within the US - from dealing with individuals who are part of any of the banks, military forces and other organizations in Iran that were named, including the IRGC.
The move follows President George W Bush's comments last week that implied that Iran obtaining nuclear weapons could lead to "World War III", and Vice President Dick Cheney's speech on Sunday in which he said that "the international community is prepared to impose serious consequences" if Iran does not comply with demands.
Sanctions do bite - as some Iranian conservatives have started to publicly admit. But Tehran won't be in a hurry to mount a hug-and-kiss expedition to Washington. Cuba has been fighting a US blockade and sanctions for almost five decades - and has managed to survive with dignity.
The more than 20 companies and individuals affiliated with the IRGC that are now excluded from the American financial system - and nodes of the international banking system - will still have plenty of opportunities of doing business with Russia, China or Arab monarchies. They may barter. They may exchange goods with services. And they may resort to the black market.
As far as Moscow and Beijing are concerned, they are hardly shivering with fear in the face of renewed State Department "warnings" to China not to invest and Russia not to sell weapons to Iran.
This new round of sanctions is just one side of the demonization of Iran campaign - as US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was once again spinning the other side of the same old scratched vinyl, that of preventing "one of the world's worst regimes from acquiring the world's most dangerous weapons". The International Atomic Energy Agency still has not found any evidence Iran is developing a nuclear program for military use, and has called for the further engagement of Iran, rather than its isolation.
Meet the terrorists
The IRGC was founded by a decree of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the leader of the Islamic Revolution, in May 1979. In the beginning, in pure revolutionary fashion, it was the "eyes and ears" of the revolution, its trusted popular army fighting the enemy within - which could be, according to revolutionary whim, the deposed Shah's supporters, communist militants, ethnic minorities like the Kurds in the northwest or Arabs in oil-rich Khuzestan province, or Western-educated, influential intellectuals.
The early revolutionaries in 1979 had two fears: a military coup orchestrated by remaining Shah supporters, or an attack by the US. What happened was the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988), started by Saddam Hussein with the hardly silent support of the US and the West. So the popular army immediately had to be converted into a parallel - and soon very powerful - fighting army.
Almost 1 million IRGC people - pasdaran (soldiers) and bassijis (young militiamen under their control) - died in that horrendous war, and are today revered as martyrs.
The IRGC today numbers, according to their bureau in Tehran, about 130,000. Ground forces have 105,000 soldiers - four divisions, six mechanized divisions and one marine brigade. The air force has 5,000 men and the navy 20,000, with an undisclosed number of vessels equipped with anti-ship missiles. Three separate units man the Shahab-3 missiles, with a 1,500-kilometer range; the new Shahab-4 has a range of 2,000 kilometers.
The Quds Force of the IRGC - the key target of US ire - may have as many as 15,000 men. They are specialists in surveillance and
special operations. It is the Quds Force that trained Iraq's Badr Brigades, the paramilitary arm of the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, the party of Abdul Aziz al-Hakim allied with the US. The Badr are firmly ensconced at the Iraqi Ministry of Interior - and it is they who have spawned death squads and accelerated ethnic cleansing in Baghdad. Instead of accusing Iran without any evidence, Washington should take a good look at what its Iraqi allies are up to.
The Quds Force has four main bases in Tehran, aside from bases in Mashhad, Qom and Tabriz and a semi-secret base in eastern Lebanon. These bases would in all certainty be hit in the event of an American - or Israeli - strike. It is the IRGC that supplied Hezbollah with the rockets and anti-tank missiles that caused havoc during the Israeli invasion of southern Lebanon in the summer of 2006.
In bed with business
After the Iran-Iraq war, the IRGC quickly diversified from the battlefield into real estate development. The man who actually gave the go-ahead was then-president Hashemi Rafsanjani, the wily, indestructible pragmatist who is today the actual number two of the regime, behind only Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
The business-minded IRGC thrived during the 1990s. Today it controls more than 100 large companies involved in telecoms, road and dam construction, luxury hotels, the auto industry (the Mazda assembly line in Iran) and, crucially, oil and gas exploitation at the giant South Pars field.
The IRGC power play is visible in upscale north Tehran in a cluster of high-security buildings occupied by the revolutionary bonyads (foundations). That's also where the IRGC elite enjoys itself in restaurants like the Talaie, with its water fountains and tearoom. The foundations - many directed by IRGC people - don't pay taxes and their budget is under direct supervision of the Supreme Leader. So the IRGC in fact controls an array of both public and private companies, financed by their own network linked to the Iranian Central Bank. They also have extensive connections in the black market - one reason why US sanctions may not bite as much as the Americans believe.
President Mahmud Ahmadinejad is an ex-pasdaran himself - thus also a "terrorist" according to Bush administration logic. The same applies to no fewer than two-thirds of the members of the Majlis (parliament). Most of the leadership at the Ministry of Interior is also ex-pasdaran. Five IRGC generals are already under United Nations sanctions, as they are responsible for Iran's nuclear and missile program.
The bassijis - essentially a gigantic militia - are the IRGC at street level. They number about 100,000, but in theory could instantly draw on as many as 20 million people - hence they are known in Iran as "the army of 20 million". The bete noire of the bassijis include students (especially those attracted by the West) and Western-minded women and girls bent on showing off their stylish hairdos, fancy makeup and curves under their chadors. The bassijis' main bases virtually surround Tehran; they are capable of blockading the whole city in less than half an hour.
We'll bomb you to bits
During the years of reformist president Mohammad Khatami (1997-2005), the Supreme Leader cleverly manipulated the IRGC for political ends, thus preparing for the arrival to power of Ahmadinejad and his IRGC buddies. Dejected reformists in Tehran swear the IRGC now controls everything: power, wealth and weapons.
The IRGC is accused of being involved in all sorts of rackets, from oil smuggling with Iraq to opium trafficking with Afghanistan. Hard evidence is extremely difficult to come by. Investigative reporting in Iran inevitably lands practitioners in jail. What is certain is that the IRGC is flush: US$12 billion in contracts in 2006 alone, including a mega-pipeline and the Tehran metro. A few Iranian ministerial officials, when pressed, admit strictly off the record that the IRGC is in fact a huge industrial-military complex - not exactly like that of the US but rather similar to that of the former Soviet Union - ghostly and as Kafkaesque.
Even well-positioned Iranians cannot clearly distinguish who is manipulating whom in the wide net involving the Supreme Leader, the IRGC, the fervent bassiji masses and business and national security interests. By branding the IRGC as terrorist, Washington has in fact declared war on the Iranian power elite.
One can imagine what would happen if any developing country branded the US industrial-military complex as "terrorists" - and any number of countries would have plenty of reasons to do so. By stretching its "war on terror" logic to actually naming names, the Bush administration has boxed itself into no other option than regime change in Iran.
Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007). He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.
Copyright 2007 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/IJ27Ak03.html
Clarín / iEco:
Geografía de la pobreza argentina
La sociedad no puede desentenderse del fenómeno de la pobreza. Es una responsabilidad colectiva. Columna de Leonardo Iurcovich, secretario de la Comisión de Economía del CAI.
iEco.com.ar
25.10.2007
Se clasifica como pobres a las familias cuyos ingresos no alcanzan a satisfacer el costo de la canasta básica, y se considera en extrema pobreza o indigencia a las familias cuyos ingresos no alcanzan para cubrir la canasta básica de alimentos, sin agregar otros gastos como transporte, salud, vestimenta, educación.
La pobreza es una enfermedad esencialmente de "origen" social que tiene lugar en el seno de la sociedad y, como tal, es un producto de esta. De ahí que el ataque a la pobreza tiene dos tipos de justificaciones: una ética y otra económica.
Ambos enfoques se entroncan en la naturaleza social de la pobreza. La sociedad no puede desentenderse del fenómeno de la pobreza, ya que se trata de una responsabilidad colectiva. Es incuestionable que tiene costos y que la sociedad debe controlarlos y reducirlos.
Los pobres no pueden garantizarse aspectos esenciales para la vida y dignidad humana: alimentación, salud, vestido, vivienda. La Argentina es uno de los mayores países productores de alimentos del mundo; está entre los cinco paises, a nivel mundial, en producción y exportaciones de alimentos básicos, como el trigo, la soja, el maíz y carnes, entre otros.
Exportamos alimentos que podrían abastecer a 330 millones de personas. Tenemos 37 millones de habitantes y la paradoja es que 1 de cada 5 niños -un 20% -tiene problemas de desnutrición en el Gran Buenos Aires.
En nuestro país no faltan alimentos, ni platos, ni maestros ni médicos. Lo que falta es voluntad política, imaginación institucional, comprensión cultural, y, fundamentalmente, ganas de construir una sociedad que asegure a cada niño argentino las oportunidades vitales para que se desarrolle con salud y pueda crecer con dignidad.
En la década del noventa nuestro país crecía a un 50% de su economía real sobre la base de las privatizaciones y el endeudamiento externo, el desempleo creció 123% pasando del 6, 5 al 14, 5% .
Estos datos son sin incluir a los desempleados, a las personas incorporadas a los programas de asistencia social, en cuyo caso el desempleo habría crecido un 250% .
Por otra parte, las tasas de mortalidad infantil son significativamente mas elevadas. Mientras el promedio nacional se ubica en el 16% , en Formosa trepa al 28% y en Chaco y Corrientes llega al 24% .
En el Conurbano Bonaerense vive la mitad de los pobres del país. En el 2003 fueron identificados como pobres estructurales 1.042.000 hogares (27%) 4.365.000 personas (34%), lo cual configura al área como la de mayor concentración de pobreza estructural.
El grupo de población joven es el más afectado. Más del 70% de los hogares con necesidades básicas insatisfechas (NBI) cuentan con menores de 14 años o menos.
Es preciso tener en cuenta que en este contexto, los jóvenes deben enfrentar un mercado laboral cada vez más exigente en cuanto a los conocimientos y habilidades requeridas.
Lo único que les cabe esperar es, en el mejor de los casos, oportunidades de empleo limitadas, inserción precaria y salarios bajos.
Revertir la tendencia es un imperativo social y ético que no puede ser banalizado a través de la aplicación de políticas públicas de carácter asistencialista.
Hablamos del 32% de la población (12,2 millones de menores de 18 años), 3% padecen de desnutrición aguda por hambre, que asciende al 6% si se hace foco en la población del NOA, NEA, y cordones de Rosario y el Gran Buenos Aires.
En la actualidad (2007) el índice de pobreza es del 33% , y bajo el nivel de pobreza para menores de 14 años es del 48% , es decir, que dos de cada cinco menores lo están.
El 49, 5% de la población de menores de 14 años es pobre. El 20, 5% es indigente.
La mortalidad infantil alcanza a 16 muertes cada mil nacidos vivos (en Chile es el 8).
Entre el 5 y el 9% de los niños que van de los 5 a 13 años trabajan. Asisten a la escuela y repiten grado el 35% (datos del Gran Buenos Aires).
El 12% no completa el sexto grado; el 39% no tiene perspectivas de terminar el polimodal.
En la zona del GBA, 1 de cada 5 adolescentes entre los 14 y 17 años trabaja, y de ellos, 1 de cada 4 lo hace de noche.
2007 - iEco.com.ar - All rights reserved
http://www.ieco.com.ar/notas/2007/10/25/01526639.html
Guardian:
The right medicine
Barbara Stocking
October 26, 2007
As a former director in the NHS I have worked within a public healthcare system that, despite its critics, continues to provide a high level of care for all, irrespective of ability to pay. Michael Moore's latest film, Sicko, on the other hand, illustrates how a privatised health system can deny many their basic right to health.
Like most of Moore's films, Sicko will have its critics - some more thoughtful and justifiable than others. But what is undeniable about the issue Moore highlights is that healthcare can be delivered to all and it is the government's responsibility to do so, especially for the world's poorest people.
Sadly this fact is lost upon some of the major aid donors, particularly the World Bank, which has been pushing the privatisation of public services in developing countries since the 1980s via conditions on its aid. The World Bank has been joined by some rich country donors in promoting policies that shrink the role of governments in health through contracting out services to the private sector and charities. For the poorest people this is disastrous.
There is plenty of evidence that governments can deliver healthcare for everyone. Policies that promote the market over the state tend to serve only the wealthier sector of society and, despite popular assumptions, often prove less efficient. Evidence shows that the administration costs for US private health insurance companies can range from 10-30% of total healthcare costs, compared to 1% for the government run Medicare. The end result is clearly illustrated by Sicko: people are forced to make choices between seeking medical care and other essentials including food and housing. Healthcare is a basic right we should all enjoy - it must be accessible to all and not the privileged few who can afford to pay for it.
Sicko gives strong examples of countries where governments are responsible for significant progress in delivering healthcare - and it isn't just rich countries that can do this. Despite the US government spending 37 times more per person than the Sri Lankan government on health care, the probability of a women receiving skilled assistance during delivery is almost identical and the immunisation rate for one-year-olds is higher in Sri Lanka than in the US. Sri Lanka's success has been achieved by prioritising healthcare in its national budget, making services free, ensuring services are adequately staffed, ensuring healthcare is available in rural areas as well as towns and cities and by making services work for women and girls.
However, the reality for other poor countries is less encouraging. Millions of people in Nepal, Ethiopia and Liberia, for example, can't afford to even see a doctor, let alone get the treatment they need. We can't allow the poorest people in countries to go unnoticed or uncared for. It is a government's responsibility to provide basic healthcare for all of its citizens. One essential step towards achieving this is to prioritise healthcare in national budget allocations. It's the donor's responsibility to provide aid that is long term, predictable and free of harmful economic conditions.
Rather than replicate the mistakes in the US, which has one of the most unequal health systems in the world, rich countries and institutions like the World Bank should support developing countries in building healthcare systems that work for the poorest people. Today, good quality, affordable healthcare is a dream for millions of people. We must make this dream a reality.
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/barbara_
stocking/2007/10/the_right_medicine.html
Jeune Afrique: Plus d'un Africain sur deux
vivra en ville à l'horizon 2050
AFRIQUE - 25 octobre 2007 - par APANEWS
L'urbanisation est plus rapide en Afrique que partout ailleurs dans le monde, avec un exode massif des populations vers les centres urbains, a-t-on relevé dans un rapport présenté jeudi à la réunion à Addis-Abeba, du Comité Africain sur le Développement Durable.
Selon l'étude, les Africains vivant en ville représenteront, à l'horizon 2050, pus de la moitié, soit 55 % de la population totale du continent, contre 38% en 2000. Le même document indique que plus de 90% de ces citadins, vivront dans des taudis.
Le rapport présenté par Alioune Badiane, directeur du Bureau Régional pour l'Afrique et les pays arabes (UN-HABITAT), indique qu'environ 70% des citadins africains vivent dans des bidonvilles, et occupent moins de 10% de l'espace urbain et périurbain.
'Ceci représente un énorme déséquilibre dans l'accès des différentes composantes de la population urbaine, à la terre et le statu quo semble beaucoup plus favorable aux personnes riches', a expliqué M. Badiane.
'Du fait que plus de 70% des citadins africains vivent dans des bidonvilles et des habitations spontanées, de nouvelles pratiques novatrices de gestion devraient être mises en ?uvre, pour permettre aux autorités locales et aux municipalités, de prendre en charge ces besoins urgents', a soutenu M. Badiane.
Selon lui, ces terres sont souvent la source de conflits en Afrique, ce qui peut souvent mener à des situations très délicates à gérer, s'agissant notamment de la gestion des droits fonciers post conflit qui nécessitent de profondes réformes de redistribution, de restitution, de relogement, etc.
'Un bref survol du continent permet de se rendre compte que la plupart des dossiers portés devant le justice dans plusieurs pays, sont relatifs à la terre. Par exemple, entre 60 et 80% de ces dossiers traités à Yaoundé, Accra ou Kigali, ont des soubassements fonciers', poursuit le rapport.
'La terre cause beaucoup de soucis mais reste tout de même l'atout le plus important des pays africains et de leurs citoyens. Les chiffres montrent qu'environ 70% de la richesse des pays en développement provient du logement et de la terre', conclut le document
http://www.jeuneafrique.com/jeune_afrique/article_
depeche.asp?art_cle=APA52107plusdnoziro0
Mail & Guardian:
Corpses and alleged cop killings terrify Kenyans
Jeremy Clarke and Duncan Miriri | Nairobi, Kenya
26 October 2007
A wave of alleged executions by Kenyan police is terrifying anyone with links to those killed, while families of the missing fear their corpses could turn up next.
Kenyan police came under fire this week from local rights groups, who say they executed scores of suspected members of the dreaded Mungiki criminal gang and dumped their bodies outside Nairobi after a morgue in the capital was filled to capacity.
Police deny any wrongdoing in their fight against the group blamed for a spate of beheadings across the centre of the East African country earlier this year.
But relatives of the victims - who were identified mostly from bloodied scraps of clothing and shards of hyena-chewed bone - say they are so petrified they can't properly mourn the dead.
"No one will come to my brother's funeral," 28-year-old Margaret Waithera, who was visiting the city morgue to collect her older sibling's remains, told Reuters.
"Everyone is scared the police will think they are Mungiki and kill them."
Standing in the pouring rain with her father, she said she learned of brother's fate only by watching television.
"He went missing, then we saw his clothes on the nightly news where they were ripped up in Ngong Forest," she said. Her brother had been shot twice: in the eye and in the forehead.
She denied he had any links to the Mungiki gang.
'Idi Amin regime?'
Mungiki, which means "multitude" in the language of central Kenya's Kikuyu tribe, emerged in the 1990s as a quasi-religious sect. But it has fast grown into the nation's biggest criminal operation, running protection rackets worth millions of dollars.
It reared its head again ahead of December 27 elections, raising fears of bloodshed before the polls. Analysts say some politicians have had close links to the secretive Mungiki in the past, for instance using gang members as muscle-for-hire.
Police were accused of - and denied - extrajudicial killings during two anti-Mungiki raids in Nairobi's Mathare slum in June that killed more than 30 people.
Since then, however, locals say dozens of corpses have been discovered in rural areas outside towns across central Kenya.
Witnesses say most seem to have been shot in the head.
The grim news has kept many Kenyans glued to their television sets in recent days - and none more than the parents of young men who vanished at the time of the police crackdown.
The family of Daniel Nderitu (28) now fear the worst.
"How can he have disappeared without a trace after being arrested?" asked Nderitu's brother James, adding that Daniel was taken by a member of a dedicated anti-Mungiki police squad.
"Is this an Idi Amin-style regime?"
Reuters
http://www.mg.co.za/articlePage.aspx?articleid=323236&area=/
breaking_news/breaking_news__africa/#
Mother Jones:
Brad Pitt and the Girl Guerrillas
The celibates of Ocalan
Reese Erlich
March/April 2007 Issue
The green and brown scrub brush in the Qandil Mountains acquires a thick layer of snow by late fall. In happier times, these peaks at the border between Iraq and Iran would offer tourists spectacular views, but these days the only sightseers are men and women with AK-47s slung over their shoulders. They are Iranian Kurdish guerrillas based among their Kurdish brethren in northern Iraq, and at the moment, they may be the closest thing the Bush administration has to an ally in its confrontation with Tehran.
Kurdish and American sources say the United States has been supporting guerrilla raids against Iran, channeling the money through organizations in Iraqi Kurdistan; last fall, The New Yorker's Seymour Hersh reported that Israel is also providing equipment and training. When I arrived in Sulaymaniyah, the Kurdish city closest to the Iranian border, it was hard to miss the Green Berets in civvies walking down the main street. "Suli is like some Balkan city years ago," one U.S. officer told me. "You've got spies everywhere. Everyone wants to know what everyone else is doing." The seedy Ashti Hotel looked like something out of a Graham Greene novel, its smoke-filled lobby a meeting place for obscure diplomats, businessmen, soldiers, and spies. Men sat around staring at glasses of strong tea; every now and again they'd pour a bit of tea into their saucers, let it cool, and slurp it down. I met a Kurdish military adviser at the Ashti, and when the U.S. Army came to escort me for a story on its operations, Humvees pulled up by the hotel.
Getting to the actual guerrilla camps was relatively easy. Kurdish officials unconvincingly insisted they had no idea how to find the fighters, but cabdrivers had no trouble pinpointing the camps. As my four-wheel-drive vehicle climbed the mountainside, young women in green pants and the distinctive twisted Kurdish headscarf appeared along the road. They were fighters with the Party for a Free Life in Kurdistan, or pjak, which claims its troops are almost 50 percent female.
Part underground movement, part cult, pjak requires its fighters to eschew sex and study the teachings of Abdullah Ocalan, a Nietzsche-quoting Turkish Kurd who is its spiritual leader. Ocalan's political organization, the radical Kurdistan Workers Party (pkk), is classified as a terrorist organization by the U.S. State Department. pjak's relationship with the party is supposed to be arm's length, but I had to pass through two pkk checkpoints on my way to the guerrillas' camp, each of them relaying information up the line via walkie-talkie. Finally, the fighters welcomed me into a room with a threadbare carpet on the floor and a kerosene stove blasting heat; posters of Ocalan hung on the wall along with the pkk flag. While waiting for their leaders to descend from the mountains, I asked one of the women what they did to stave off boredom. "We watch satellite TV," she said, insisting that they cared only for news programs before confessing, with a shy smile, "We like Brad Pitt and Mel Gibson."
That was about the only American influence anyone at the camp would admit to. The fighters' commander had recently died in a flash flood, and his replacement—a fortysomething man with prematurely gray hair who stood perhaps 5 feet 5 inches—introduced himself as Zenar Agri. He informed me that in 2006 the guerrillas had killed about 100 Iranians in their cross-border skirmishes. He said they were not getting U.S. help, then smiled, "But we would love to have American support." He also told me that before the pkk's emergence, "the Kurds didn't know about their history and how to struggle," but now Kurds could follow Ocalan's road to liberation.
Back in the valley, I found a different kind of Kurdish organizing at the University of Sulaimani, where many Iranian Kurdish activists have come to study. The scene could have been any U.S. campus; almost everyone wore blue jeans, and only a few of the women had their heads covered. I sat down with two Iranian students who said they had come to Iraq illegally, following smugglers' trails over the mountains. They talked openly about the competition between Iranian Kurdish parties to attract U.S. support. Hiwa, a film student who described himself as the future Stanley Kubrick of Kurdistan, told me Washington ought to be ecumenical: "All parties should have connections with the U.S."
So far, Washington seems to feel the same way. The two main Iranian Kurdish parties, Komala and the Kurdish Democratic Party of Iran (kdpi), have been allowed to operate openly in northern Iraq; both say their focus is on political organizing within Iran. "We have not opposed armed struggle," Mustafa Hejri, leader of the kdpi, told me. "But for now we believe political activity benefits the party more." Hejri, along with other top kdpi and Komala officials, went to Washington last year for meetings at the State Department and on Capitol Hill. They "listened to us and asked questions," Komala leader Abdullah Mohtadi told me. "It was a step forward." Most other Iranian opposition leaders I spoke to were critical of U.S. policy toward Tehran and said the administration's allocation of $85 million to "promote democracy" in Iran had backfired by making the population rally around the embattled Islamist government. The Kurdish Iranian parties, on the other hand, told me they were looking forward to getting U.S. funding. "We're pragmatists," Mohtadi told me. The United States "can't make democracy by force, but it can topple dictators."
Reese Erlich's book, "The Iran Agenda: The Real Story of US Policy and the Middle East Crisis," will be published in September 2007. See his interviews with Nobel Laureate Shirin Ebadi and other Iranian opposition leaders at: motherjones.com/iran_dissidents.
This article has been made possible by the Foundation for National Progress, the Investigative Fund of Mother Jones, and gifts from generous readers like you.
© 2007 The Foundation for National Progress
http://www.motherjones.com/news/outfront/2007/03/brad_pitt_and_the_girl_guerrillas.html
New Statesman:
A country at war
Musharraf's attempts to control his country are just paper over cracks. The very unity of Pakistan is under threat, writes Ziauddin Sardar. Plus Rageh Omaar reports on the wild borderlands of Waziristan where allegiances are to the ultra-conservative, rigid tribal system and not to Kabul
Ziauddin Sardar
Published 25 October 2007
Pakistan is about to descend even deeper into violence and chaos, as the front-line state in the war on terror prepares for an all-out offensive on the jihadi militants entrenched in Waziristan, the country's lawless northern province. In what amounts to total war on the Taliban and al-Qaeda, President Musharraf is planning to bring the whole region under military control. This is a high-risk strategy, as the consequences of failure could be devastating for Pakistan. They could even lead to the break-up of the country.
Behind the headlines, the state's contradictions and tensions are being tested to the limit. The arrival of Benazir Bhutto, supposed to help marshal the forces of moderation and reform, has increased political instability. Supporters of the other former prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, who plans a second attempt to return from exile to Pakistan in the first week of November, are preparing a mass campaign against Musharraf that could lead to political gridlock. And the president himself has given a general amnesty to corrupt politicians - an act seen as handing a tabula rasa to plunderers and murderers.
Bhutto returned to Pakistan on the basis of a "power-sharing deal" brokered by Washington and vaunted in the international media as a po sitive move towards democracy. But it is little more than a conjunction of self-interests. Mush arraf describes the proposed arrangement as a "troika", involving the president, the prime min ister and the army chief of staff. The powers of the president, including being able to sack the prime minister at will, are to remain untouched for the next five-year term. Any premier would thus have little real power and would be forced to do the bidding of the other two members of the troika. A pliant prime minister with selected political parties on board means Musharraf remains in charge. The status quo is preserved.
In return for joining the arrangement, Bhutto's two main demands are met: her Swiss bank accounts have been unfrozen and she gets to keep her skyscraper in Dubai and properties in England and the US; and the rule against her serving a third term as prime minister is waived.
Musharraf's plans for the immediate future have two components. First, now that Bhutto has returned, he is determined to hold elections before mid-January. They will be "managed", just as he managed the 2002 elections, by "seat adjustment" - this time to the advantage of her party. He expects Bhutto to deliver her "blind" followers from Sind and Punjab, largely poor peasants at the mercy of feudal landlords. The intelligence agencies and the army will do the rest and ensure the desired results.
However, after the bloodbath in Karachi at Bhutto's return on 19 October, it is difficult to see how in the current atmosphere elections can be held. "Political rallies will be open to both militant attacks and sabotage by rogue intelligence elements," says Rashed Rahman, managing editor of the Post, the Lahore daily. "With intel ligence apparatus as prime candidate for the attack, all previous assumptions of Bhutto riding back to power are scuppered."
Fear of suicide bombings will be a potent inhibition to voters from venturing into the polling booths. And given that large parts of the northern provinces are virtually no-go areas, it will be next to impossible to hold elections in that region. "A limited voter turnout at around 20 per cent will hardly constitute a credible election," says Rahman - no matter how the elections are "managed".
Second, a fully fledged assault on Waziristan is due within days. "This has now become inevi table," a high-ranking military officer told the NS. "We are taking daily casualties. If we don't take the militants on with our full might, the morale of the army will sink even further." Unlike previous operations, which target ed specific militant bases or tried to block guer rilla movement between Pakistan and Afghan is tan, "the aim now is to pacify the entire province".
Forces would be deployed in all major cities, such as Mir Ali, Angor Ada and Magaroti, with the aim of establishing permanent army bases manned by thousands of military and paramilitary troops. The entire region will come under Pakistani military control, administered under the direct command of the newly appointed vice-chief of the army staff, General Ashfaq Pervez Kiani. (When and if Musharraf removes his uniform, General Kiani will take over as chief of the army staff.) "We estimate the all-out assault will destroy the centralised command structure of al-Qaeda and the Taliban, making their operations sporadic and largely ineffective," says the military officer.
Language of liberation
However, given the Pakistani army's poor record in Waziristan, this seems rather optimistic. The militants will almost certainly stand and fight to the bloody end. Pakistan has already lost more than a thousand soldiers; 300 more are being held hostage. The Pashtun fighters, including the Pakistani Taliban, know the region well. They are used to guerrilla warfare and see death in battle as a great honour and a direct route to paradise. Most of the local population supports them. The chances of the Pakistani army "pacifying" the region are therefore slim.
At issue is more than terrorism. The fiercely proud and independent Pashtun people see the American and British forces in neighbouring Afghanistan as invaders. Pakistani troops marching into Waziristan will also be seen as a foreign invasion. A civil war will turn into a war of "national liberation". Many tribal leaders are already speaking the language of liberating themselves from the "Pakistani administration". The end result could be a new wave of suicide attacks and acts of sabotage throughout Pakistan.
Musharraf began putting his strategy in place two weeks ago. He secured the passage of the national reconciliation ordinance (NRO), as it is called, on 5 October. This dropped all corruption charges against politicians from "all parties". "We decided to wind up those cases that were pending for the past 15 years," Musharraf said, claiming that it would bring to an end the politics of vendetta and victimisation in the country. The NRO cleared the way for Bhutto's return and wiped out the last remaining charges against her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, who was released on bail in 2004 after spending eight years in prison. The next day, Musharraf had himself re-elected as president for another term by the current hand-selected parliament.
But the amnesty granted in the NRO does not include Nawaz Sharif, leader of the Muslim League, Pakistan's second-largest party. A conservative, staunchly anti-American politician, Sharif believes democracy and military dictators do not go together. He commands huge support among both the middle classes and religious groups and is more likely to win a fair election than Bhutto. Sharif, deposed in a bloodless coup in 1999, is determined to engineer Musharraf's downfall. On his first attempt to return to Pakistan on 10 September, he was arrested at Kar achi Airport and given two choices: prison, or return to exile in Saudi Arabia. The cases against Sharif are still pending before the Supreme Court. Yet, despite Musharraf's efforts, the courts have refused to issue new arrest warrants against him. If Sharif succeeds in returning, the Bhutto/Mush arraf deal will be in serious trouble.
"The chances of that alliance holding are also slim," says Rahman. To begin with, the two despise each other. The Pakistan People's Party is not so much a party as a feudal institution that Bhutto runs as her fiefdom. But even she may find it difficult to suppress dissent in the senior ranks. Many PPP stalwarts believe that the power-sharing pact with Musharraf is damaging the party's reputation and electoral chances. A number of Bhutto family members have openly stated their criticisms. The poet and newspaper columnist Fatima Bhutto, Benazir's niece, holds her aunt responsible for the deaths in Karachi because of her insistence on "political theatre".
Her ratings in opinion polls conducted after the NRO have fallen sharply. Some senior PPP members hoped she would give a new lease of life to the party by behaving like a senior states woman and allowing younger politicians to lead. But not many are willing to defend an indefensible deal. There is thus a real chance that the PPP may split, as it did at the previous elections. And if Bhutto fails to deliver at these elections, even after seat manipulations, Musharraf will drop her as easily as he has abandoned other parties.
So far, Musharraf has had it all his way. His only remaining obstacle is a case currently at the Supreme Court over whether he can continue as president in uniform. It is not much of an obstacle, however, as everything is now in place for him to retain his power even if he has to dispense with his military position.
The power-sharing arrangement was conceived as a ploy to paper over the gaping cracks in the country. After Karachi, it looks more like another contributory factor in a more turbulent and dangerous era for Pakistan. The intelligence services, elements of which may be responsible for the attack on Bhutto's motorcade, are out of control. Suicide bombings have become an integral part of the militants' strategy in Waziristan, both to undermine the political process and to demoralise the army. Whether one player, or even power-sharing players, ultimately subservient to Washington can retain control of this explosive situation is a moot point.
http://www.newstatesman.com/200710250025
Página/12:
Sin apoyos, Bush sancionó a Irán
DEJO AFUERA DEL SISTEMA FINANCIERO A VEINTE EMPRESAS DE ESE PAIS
Después de meses de infructuosos intentos para lograr un consenso para sanciones multilaterales, EE.UU. actuó solo con un duro programa contra firmas vinculadas a la Guardia Revolucionaria, declarada organización terrorista. Enojo en Moscú y silencio en Europa.
Por Leonard Doyle *
Desde Washington, Viernes, 26 de Octubre de 2007
La administración Bush dio un paso adelante hacia un conflicto militar con Irán, imponiendo medidas punitivas a su Guardia Revolucionaria y llamando a la unidad de elite Quds una organización terrorista. Vladimir Putin inmediatamente dijo que las nuevas sanciones de Estados Unidos eran el trabajo de un “insano con una navaja en su mano”. El presidente ruso dijo: “¿Por qué empeorar la situación al amenazar con sanciones y llevar las cosas a un callejón sin salida?” El jefe de la Guardia, general Mohammad Ali Jafari, dijo: “Hoy el enemigo ha concentrado sus ataques sobre los guardias. Como siempre, y más que nunca, el cuerpo está listo para defender los ideales de la revolución”.
Las sanciones son las medidas más duras contra Teherán desde la toma de la embajada de Estados Unidos en 1979, bajo la presidencia de Jimmy Carter. Nunca antes en su historia Estados Unidos tomó semejantes medidas contra las fuerzas armadas de un gobierno independiente. La secretaria de Estado de Estados Unidos, Condoleezza Rice, anunció las nuevas medidas, diciendo que eran para “confrontar la conducta amenazadora de los iraníes”. Estados Unidos se vio obligado a actuar solo, con Gran Bretaña ofreciendo apoyo retórico para acciones unilaterales fuera del Consejo de Seguridad de las Naciones Unidas. Un plan para aumentar gradualmente las sanciones de la ONU está zozobrando por la oposición de Rusia y China.
La Unión Europea sigue muy dividida con Alemania oponiéndose a más sanciones en esta etapa. Tiene enormes intereses económicas en Irán con el que realizó exportaciones por valor de 5700 millones de dólares el año pasado. Existe una gran crítica también en Estados Unidos. El comentarista sobre asuntos exteriores, Anthony Cordesman, dijo: “La administración Bush ya le hizo un daño inmenso a la credibilidad de Estados Unidos en toda la región y en gran parte del mundo. La administración es vista como amenazando con arrastrar al golfo a otra guerra –esta vez con Irán–, sin consultar y sin explicar, e indiferente a las opiniones de sus amigos y aliados”.
La administración Bush está haciendo su mayor apuesta para tildar a Irán de régimen malvado en pie de guerra, causando problemas en Irak, el Líbano, Afganistán así como en los territorios palestinos con una burocracia controlada militarmente que está difundiendo el terrorismo y adquiriendo armas de destrucción masiva. Pero los críticos dicen que una vez más está distorsionando los hechos mientras prepara a Estados Unidos y a la opinión pública internacional para atacar militarmente a Irán, ya sea con fuerzas estadounidenses o por Israel.
Washington justificó las nuevas sanciones al acusar a la división de elite Quds de los guardias revolucionarios de la devastadora campaña de bombas a los lados de los caminos por las milicias chiítas contra sus tropas en Irak. Los intentos de declarar a toda la Guardia Revolucionaria, una rama de las fuerzas de defensa iraníes, una organización terrorista extranjera, fueron pospuestos debido a la oposición europea. Pero la administración acusa a la Guardia de estar en el centro de la propuesta de la compra de armas de destrucción masiva.
Rice dice que mientras Washington está todavía abierto a una solución diplomática, “lamentablemente el gobierno iraní sigue con su rechazo a nuestra oferta de abrir negociaciones y en cambio amenaza la paz y la seguridad al continuar con las tecnologías nucleares que pueden conducir a las armas nucleares, y a desarrollar peligrosos misiles balísticos, apoyando a los militantes chiítas en Irak y terroristas en Irak, Afganistán, el Líbano y los territorios palestinos y negando la existencia de un miembro de las Naciones Unidas, al amenazar con borrar a Israel del mapa”. Las sanciones pueden representar un último intento por parte de la administración de detener el impulso de Irán de desarrollar energía nuclear y la habilidad de crear armas y de reflejar la creciente frustración ante el fracaso del Consejo de Seguridad de la ONU para controlar a Irán.
Las nuevas sanciones de Estados Unidos afectan a los bancos iraníes, las empresas, agencias gubernamentales y oficiales que la Casa Blanca dice que son parte del impulso del país por adquirir armas de destrucción masiva o apoyar actos de terrorismo en el exterior. Las sanciones están dirigidas específicamente a las finanzas de los guardias revolucionarios y a ocho empresas afiliadas. También nombra a cinco oficiales de la Guardia Revolucionaria así como a las fuerzas Quds. Washington dice que esta unidad de elite de los guardias apoya al talibán y está tratando ilegalmente de adquirir armas de destrucción masiva y tecnología misilística. Estados Unidos también atacó al Ministerio de Defensa de Irán y a dos bancos manejados por el gobierno.
* De The Independent de Gran Bretaña. Especial para Página/12.
Traducción: Celita Doyhambéhére.
© 2000-2007 www.pagina12.com.ar|Todos los Derechos Reservados
http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/elmundo/4-93528-2007-10-26.html
The Independent:
Not an environment scare story
By Steve Connor, Science Editor
Published: 26 October 2007
A landmark assessment by the UN of the state of the world's environment paints the bleakest picture yet of our planet's well-being. The warning is stark: humanity's future is at risk unless urgent action is taken. Over the past 20 years, almost every index of the planet's health has worsened. At the same time, personal wealth in the richest countries has grown by a third.
The report, by the United Nations Environment Programme (Unep), warns that the vital natural resources which support life on Earth have suffered significantly since the first such report, published in 1987. However, this gradual depletion of the world's natural "capital" has coincided with unprecedented economic gains for developed nations, which, for many people, have masked the growing crisis.
Nearly 400 experts from around the world contributed to the report, which warns that humanity itself could be at risk if nothing is done to address the three major environmental problems of a growing human population, climate change and the mass extinction of animals and plants.
The report is the fruit of five years' work by leading scientists and is the fourth in a series since the publication in 1987 of Our Common Future by an international commission into the state of the global environment chaired by the former Norwegian prime minister Gro Harlem Brundtland.
Achim Steiner, the executive director of Unep, said that the objective of the latest report was not to present a "dark and gloomy scenario" but to make the case for an urgent call to action. However, the dire state of almost every aspect of the planet's wellbeing points to 20 years of missed opportunities.
Mr Steiner said yesterday at the launch of the report that it was illuminating how over the past 20 years the financial wealth of the planet has soared by around a third. "But at the same time it is sobering: much of the 'natural' capital upon which so much of human well-being and economic activity depends – water, land, the air and atmosphere, biodiversity and marine resources – continue their seemingly inexorable decline," he said.
Meanwhile, the political response to the growing emergency has been limited. "Without an accelerated effort to reform the way we collectively do business on planet Earth, we will shortly be in trouble if indeed we are not already," Mr Steiner said.
"There have been enough wake-up calls. I sincerely hope this is the final one. The systematic destruction of the Earth's natural and nature-based resources has reached a point where the economic viability of economies is being challenged – and the bill we hand on to our children may prove impossible to pay," he said.
The fourth Unep report since the seminal 1987 report of the Brundtland Commission reveals a stark continuation in the environment's decline. The environmental "footprint" of humanity has increased dramatically in 20 years, with a rising population and increased use of energy, land and other natural resources.
Unep's Global Environment Outlook (GEO-4) states that the human demand on the planet now means we are living beyond our means. The present footprint is equivalent to 22 hectares per person, whereas the natural carrying capacity of the Earth is less than 16 hectares per person, the report says.
The world economy has at the same time boomed, with the global GDP per capita rising from about $6,000 (£2,920) to just over $8,000. But this increased wealth has been geared towards the developed world and has come at an enormous cost to the environment. Available freshwater stocks have declined dramatically since the 1980s, in west Asia, for instance, from 1,700 cubic metres per person per year, to 907 cubic metres today. By the middle of the century, this is likely to fall still further to 420 cubic metres per person per year. Over the past 20 years, the proportion of fish stocks in the world that have collapsed has doubled from 15 per cent to 30 per cent. At the same time the proportion of fish stocks that are deemed to be overexploited has risen from 20 per cent to 40 per cent.
The intensity with which agricultural land is farmed has also increased, and with it the burden of soil erosion, water scarcity, nutrient depletion and pollution. In 1987, a hectare of cropland yielded 1.8 tons of produce, but due to intensification this has now risen to 2.5 tons.
Energy consumption in developed nations has risen significantly. In Canada and the US, for instance, the demand for energy has grown by 19 per cent since 1987. Concentrations of carbon dioxide, a principal greenhouse gas, are about a third higher than they were 20 years ago.
Species of animals and plants are estimated to be going extinct at a rate that is about 100 times faster than the historical record, largely as a result of human activities. Biologists have now classified 30 per cent of amphibians, 23 per cent of mammals and 12 per cent of birds as threatened.
A growing human population, which is expected to reach nine billion by the mid-century, will place increasing pressure on land, water and biodiversity. Land will have to be more intensively farmed, or more land will have be cultivated. "Either way, biodiversity suffers," the report says.
Against a background of continued degradation of the land and oceans, of population increases and of species extinctions, lies the spectre of climate change – one the biggest threats facing humanity in the 21st century. There is now "visible and unequivocal" evidence that global warming is causing further impacts on the global environment, the GEO-4 report says.
Mike Childs, the campaigns director at Friends of the Earth, said the report made it clear we need concerted international political action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and halt the loss of wildlife and ecosystems. "This report clearly demonstrates that we also need a step change in understanding that the steady degradation of the world's environment threatens the well-being of everybody on the planet," he said.
"Our response to this planetary emergency must be to harness humankind's amazing ingenuity to make the next two decades a time of innovation and determination to create a fairer and greener world."
Twenty years of environmental failure
Since 1987, when the landmark UN report Our Common Future (overseen by Gro Harlem Brundtland, right) warned of the need for concerted action to secure humanity's future, the state of the global environment has declined in numerous ways.
* The availability of fresh water had declined dramatically. In west Asia, for instance, available fresh water has fallen from 1,700 cubic metres per person per year to 907 cubic metres, largely due to pollution and demand.
* Levels of carbon dioxide have risen by a third and energy demands of countries such as the United States and Canada are nearly a fifth higher than in 1987.
* In 1987, about 15 per cent of global fish stocks were classified as collapsed, and 20 per cent were overexploited. Now 30 per cent have collapsed and a further 40 per cent are overexploited.
* The number of species which is threatened with extinction has increased. Since 1987, there has been a 50 per cent decline in the populations of some freshwater animals and a 30 per cent fall among terrestrial and marine species.
* The agricultural intensification of cultivated land has risen, with greater impact on pollution, nutrient depletion and water use. A hectare of farmland in 1987 produced an average yield of 1.8 tons, but now it produces 2.5 tons.
* Human population has increased by a third since 1987. At the same time there has been a threefold increase in global trade and average income per head has increased by a third, with global GDP per capita rising from $6,000 in 1987 to a total of $8,000 today.
http://environment.independent.co.uk/climate_change/article3098852.ece
Utne Reader:
Africa’s Brain Gain
By Matthew Shaer
November / December Issue
In dry, dusty Dakar, the computer is more than a token convenience. It is a window to the outside world. Since the turn of the 21st century, local web access has increased at a startling rate, reaching thousands of the city’s residents. Internet cafés filled with chattering businesspeople and students line the wide boulevards. The telecom industry is booming.
But even as Senegal’s capital transforms itself into the hub of West Africa’s cyberrevolution, the country is struggling to keep its brightest minds at home. It’s a dilemma that is familiar across the continent. According to the International Organization for Migration, approximately 20,000 professionals leave Africa each year, seeking more prestigious posts in Europe and the United States. Educational institutions, home to many of those up-and-coming professionals, are the major casualties.
To stem this brain drain, a number of innovative e-learning ventures are trying to connect students to classes from abroad while keeping their feet firmly rooted on African soil.
Since 1997, the Nairobi, Kenya–based African Virtual University has worked to improve access to web-based learning in sub-Saharan Africa. As connection rates improve, the group has expanded its reach, launching satellite campuses in war-torn countries like Rwanda and Somalia.
In such countries the situation is infinitely more challenging than in relatively prosperous Senegal and Kenya. Consider the case of a small organization called Sierra Visions, which was founded in 2003, just one year after Sierra Leone’s long and bloody civil war ended. The country is still mired in reconstruction efforts. Poverty and economic stagnation loom large; the country is listed as number 176 on the United Nations’ Human Development Index of 177 nations.
Despite the daunting obstacles, Sierra Visions plans to launch a series of programs this fall aimed at teaching professional skills in areas like accounting, customer service, health, and education. The catch: Roughly half of the 50 Sierra Leonean instructors teach from their homes in Canada, Europe, and the United States.
The courses use a model called the “webinar,” which allows student and teacher to interact through video and audio. Yeniva Sisay, communications director at Sierra Visions, says the format offers the next best thing to face-to-face discussion. The classes are intimate and closely managed; a premium is placed on dialogue between teachers and students.
“It made me feel like I was a part of something, part of the global village,” says Emmanuel M. Sandi, a student at a Sierra Visions program last spring. Sandi isn’t alone. Students of programs like Sierra Visions stress that the feeling of belonging to a larger whole is vital to the learning process. It provides them with a context, a support system, and instructors who understand local issues.
The virtual platform also gives those Sierra Leonean teachers who decamped during the war a way to help from afar. “There is no way the healing process is going to come from anyone but ourselves,” Sisay says. “Outsiders will help, but this is our best chance, and this is the most important time.”
If Sierra Visions’ programs are successful, they could have implications for Africa at large, including the potential to lay the technological groundwork for what Stanford Mukasa, an associate professor of journalism at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, calls “cyberunification.” Improved technology, Mukasa says, has the potential to bridge gaps between families in ways that were impossible to conceive of just a few years ago. A little contact—even a fuzzy voice, a shaky, pixellated image—can go a long way.
Some argue, however, that web contact is a poor substitute for the widespread and very physical investment that poor countries so desperately need. “I don’t see enough lobbying for the basic stuff—electricity, the roads,” says Conrad Coyanda-Parkzes, CEO of a telecom company called AccessPoint, which is assisting the Sierra Visions team in Freetown.
That basic stuff allows the more complex stuff, like fiber-optic cable systems and cell towers, to be built. Right now, says Coyanda-Parkzes, who moved to the United States from Sierra Leone in 1986 and visits the capital regularly, access costs are prohibitive, and technological progress is slow going.
There are signs, though, that some leaders are coming around, encouraging more telecom investments from abroad and focusing on wired infrastructure. Senagalese president Abdoulaye Wade, for example, has pressed for “virtual campuses” in downtown Dakar.
“They’re realizing,” says Sidiki Traore, director of the African Virtual University’s West African regional office, “that ‘the Internet is the solution for my country. Let me open up.’ ”
http://www.utne.com/2007-11-01/Africas-Brain-Gain.aspx
ZNet | Africa
THREE CHEERS FOR EVE ENSLER?
Propaganda, White Collar Crime and Sexual Atrocities in Eastern Congo
by Keith Harmon Snow; allthingspass; October 24, 2007
A major propaganda front has swept the Western media decrying the unprecedented sexual violence in the Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. As this story goes to press the war in Congo—claiming 1000 lives a day in the East and more than 7 million people since 1996—is escalating yet again. More than 1.2 million were reported displaced in June, with at least 8000 additional displaced persons on October 22 after fighting escalated—as Western-backed forces perpetrate genocide and terrorism to depopulate and secure the land for multinational mining interests. Needing to explain away the failure of the 2006 “elections process” and the “peace” that never was, the propaganda system has embraced the theme of femicide. As always, the white champions of human rights and humanitarian concern in the end blame the black victims for their own suffering. While raising much needed awareness, the propaganda front serves a selective and expedient agenda, a tool used to pressure certain political groups and provide cover for the real terrorists.
On a visit to Eastern Congo in May 2007, Eve Ensler—the playwright and producer of the Vagina Monologues—was witness to the profound human suffering and unprecedented sexual violence.
“I have just returned from hell,” Ensler wrote, in Glamour Magazine in August. “I am trying for the life of me to figure out how to communicate what I have seen and heard in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. How do I convey these stories of atrocities without your shutting down, quickly turning the page or feeling too disturbed?”
Ensler came to see what those whose eyes are open cannot deny: the sexual violence and predation in Central Africa is unacceptable, unfathomable, and stoppable. And she has the courage and audacity to write and speak about it.
Three cheers for Eve Ensler!!
Or not?
Through her global campaign to end violence against women, called “V-Day,” and with a nine-page feature article in Glamour magazine in August, Ensler launched a campaign calling for an end to rape and sexual torture against women and girls in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. One of the voices she uses to tell the story is that of Christine Schuler Deschryver, described as a human rights activist in Congo. Ensler, Deschryver and the campaign have received a lot of press, with stories in Glamour, interviews on the BBC, PBS and Al Jezeera. The New York Times picked up the issue of rape in Eastern Congo in early October, and the Times story was followed the next day with a Democracy Now! interview with Christine Schuler Deschryver.
“Stop Raping Our Greatest Resource, Power To The Women And Girls Of The Democratic Republic Of Congo,” Ensler’s web site explains, “is being initiated by the women of Eastern DRC, V-Day and UNICEF on behalf of United Nations Action Against Sexual Violence in Conflict. The campaign calls for an end to the violence and to impunity for those who commit these atrocities.” [1]
An end to impunity for those who commit these atrocities?
Ensler’s Glamour article is an apt documentary of human suffering and courage. The doctors working to save and heal the survivors of sexual brutality are heroes. The women and girls who have survived are themselves portraits of courage and human dignity. The issue demands international condemnation and action. However, in her nine-page portrait of heroism and suffering, there is a single half paragraph that ostensibly addresses the roots of the problem.
“The perpetrators include the Interahamwe,” Ensler writes, “the Hutu fighters who fled neighboring Rwanda in 1994 after committing genocide there; the Congolese army; a loose assortment of armed civilians; even U.N. peacekeepers.” [2]
THE GLAMOUROUS GENOCIDE
Who is responsible for the brutality?
According to Glamour and Vanity Fair, it is always those rag-tag Rwandan genocidaires who fled justice in Rwanda, or those ruthless Congolese soldiers from the heart of darkness, and the loose assortments of obviously “loose” civilians, and even the U.N. peacekeepers who, in the United Nations Observers Mission in Congo (MONUC), are men from India, Uruguay, Nepal, Pakistan… and in Darfur, Sudan, it is those damned Janjaweed—Arabs on horseback, you know, the usual dark-skinned subjects.
And there is no mention whatsoever of the deeper realities and responsibilities of white people and predatory capitalism. Where is the discussion of the backers behind this warfare? Who sells the weaponry? Who produces it? Who photographs the UNICEF poster children and peddles the images of suffering in the Western press for billion dollar profit-driven campaigns that do not in the end uplift the people who they claim to care about?
Why are there gala UNICEF “fundraising” benefits—the Annual Snowflake Ball—in New York hotels with white-tie U.S. Presidents as honorary ambassadors and state department officials from the National Security Council—and $10,000 tickets—held by and for officials who remain silent about genocide in Ethiopia or northern Uganda or the U.S.-backed coup d’etat that occurred in Rwanda in 1994 or Zaire (Congo) in 1996? [3]
What we know to be true is that Eve Ensler was lucky to get this article in Glamour at all. The magazine is a travesty of violence against women—cosmetics, luxury aids, “health” and “beauty” products, liposuction, breast implants and sexually seductive advertising peddling the “perfect” female body and great American culture of sexual violence—and yet Glamour offers a platform for Ensler’s message about sexual brutality of unprecedented human proportions.
What’s going on here? There is a reason these stories proliferate and it is not about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Glamour’s publishers do not care about the suffering of black people. It is pure Western white supremacist propaganda serving to underscore the accepted narratives of Central Africa and assist in the consolidation of power over the region, but this is neither seen nor appreciated by white “news” consumers.
What Eve Ensler and Glamour have not addressed are the warlords behind the warlords, the corporations and white collar crime which is never—or selectively, now and then expeditiously, if ever—reported on the pages of Glamour, Vanity Fair, the New Yorker, or the other promoters of popular propaganda brought to us by the Conde Naste corporate empire.
Behind the warfare always blamed on Africans, behind the warlords’ deadly battles, are other warlords and corporations from Western countries. The reason people—U.S. and Canadian citizens—are unaware of the issues involved is because of publications like Glamour and the corporations that control them. Ensler’s article begins to look like an advertisement for UNICEF and the so-called “humanitarian” AID industry, which is itself part of the problem, because it remains silent about corporate plunder, “humanitarian” organizations partnering with the corporate exploiters, shared directors hips with mining, defense, petroleum and other multinational interests. UNICEF and “not-for-profit” organizations like it are in the business of perpetuating their own survival, the vanguard of transnational capital.
Asked what to do, Ensler points to UNICEF: “Right now, [the best thing to do is] to give to the V-Day UNICEF campaign at vday.org/congo.”
In the end Ensler’s article—like the few racialized articles about rape in Rwanda, Congo and Darfur that have appeared in Ms. Magazine [4]—is a compelling portrait that serves a narrow political agenda of which Ensler appears not to be conscious. Such articles—appearing in gendered white spaces of privilege like Glamour or Ms. or Cosmopolitan—blame the very (African) victims of an international system of oppression that revolves around permanent warfare economies—U.S., Canada, Britain, Belgium, Israel, France, Canada, Australia—and they serve to promote the interests of these by never challenging the perpetrators of chaos and terrorism that are directly aligned with the predominant military-intelligence establishment. When reporting on rape in Central Africa, articles in Conde Naste group publications—as with almost all publications—have never challenged the governments of either Rwanda or Uganda, soldiers of which have committed massive sexual atrocities, crimes against humanity and other war crimes. [5]
How does it happen that a notorious “dictator” and “cannibal” like Uganda’s legendary dictator Idi Amin could live out his life in splendor in Saudi Arabia? Far more people have suffered terrorism under President Yoweri Museveni in Uganda, than under Idi Amin, yet Museveni remains the West’s golden boy in the old Pearl of Africa. It was Paul Kagame—“the Butcher of Kigali”—who in the early years—circa 1981 to 1988—wielded the iron fist of terror in Uganda. Kagame was Museveni’s director of Military Intelligence and is now President of Rwanda. Taban Amin, Idi Amin’s eldest son, is today in charge of the Uganda’s dreaded Internal Security Organization, the private terror instrument of President Yoweri Museveni. While Ugandan troops are perpetrating atrocities in Eastern Congo at this writing, no one says anything about them. Uganda remains near the top of the list for AID to ARMS scandals, even as Museveni visits with George W. Bush at the White House (October 30). Similarly, the Kagame government always gets away with murder because Kagame has friends in high places.
An end to impunity for those who commit these atrocities?
Indeed, it turns out that Eve Ensler is collaborating with certain powerful interests whose involvement in Central Africa has never come under scrutiny. In a September 17, 2007 interview with Ms. Magazine journalist Michele Kort, broadcast by PBS, Ensler was joined in a dialog about sexual violence in Eastern Congo by Christine Schuler Deschryver, described by PBS as “from Bukavu in the Congo, who is an activist against the sexual violence.” [6] This is the same “human rights activist from Congo” interviewed by Amy Goodman on Democracy Now!
Who is Christine Schuler Deschryver?
THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF RAPE REPORTING
Jumping on the bandwagon, on October 8, 2007, Democracy Now! ran an interview between Amy Goodman and Christine Schuler Deschryver about sexual violence in Congo. [7] Deschryver claimed that studies were done that show that sixty percent of the sexual violence in Eastern Congo is committed by “these people who did the genocide in Rwanda, by Hutu’s who made the genocide in their country.”
Christine Schuler Deschryver describes the process where militias enter a village, kill all the men, and sexually assault and brutalize the women. [8]
This is “femicide” says Deschryver, a charge repeated by Eve Ensler and echoed by Amy Goodman. “People can help me first of all being an Ambassador and talking about the problem going on in Congo because it’s a silent war. They are killing, they are raping babies… It’s like Darfur: Darfur started four years ago. But Congo started almost eleven years ago and nobody’s talking about this femicide, this holocaust. It’s a femicide because they are just destroying the female species…”
Femicide? Congolese women sexually traumatized, Congolese men killed? It is a process of depopulation and ethnic cleansing.
Speaking from the Democracy Now! studios in New York City, Christine Schuler Deschryver describes a war involving African countries outside Congo, but she does not name Western interests involved.
Christine Schuler Deschryver describes her personal sacrifice to help the victims of Congo’s wars. She states that she works in “administration, in her office…” Until 2002, at least, Christine Schuler Deschryver was known for gorilla conservation, not human rights, in Congo.
Christine Schuler Deschryver is married to Carlos Schuler, a Swiss German working for decades in the Kahuzi-Biega National Park in South Kivu. Carlos Schuler and Christine Schuler Deschryver both work for GTZ— Deutsche Gesellschaft für technische Zusammenarbeit—a “German technological cooperation agency.” Carlos negotiates with warlords for “conservation.” Because of his gorilla conservation interests, Schuler has been described as “Dian Fossey’s successor.” Schuler has maintained very private relations with all military forces in the region, and there are questions about mineral plunder and military collaboration and GTZ’s role in structural violence and warfare in Congo.
GTZ is a German government institution with a corporate structure. The GTZ Supervisory Board has representatives of four Federal [German] Ministries: the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), Federal Foreign Office, Federal Ministry of Finance, and Federal Ministry of Economics and Labour. Since 1998 the Supervisory Board Chairman has been State Secretary Erich Stather from the BMZ.
GTZ’s involvement in Eastern Congo is notable, given the German links to the Lueshe mine in North Kivu, and the German embassy’s role in exploitation, depopulation and genocide in Congo. One top GTZ executive appears to be linked to German corporate interests seeking to control the Lueshe mine, now controlled by their U.S./German competitors (see below). The German government has been understandably mute about plunder in Congo, and the presentation of Christine Schuler Deschryver’s—a GTZ agent in Bukavu—as a champion of human rights is a perfect example of the twisted “charity” and “philanthropy” dumped on the Congolese people.
Like the rest of Congo, Kahuzi-Biega is rich in minerals coveted by corporations and governments that include German multinationals like Bayer—subsidiary H.C. Starck—involved in coltan in Congo.
But the interests of Carlos Schuler and Christine Deschryver run much deeper than “gorilla conservation” and “human rights” activism in Eastern Congo. The Deschryver family is one of the elite families in Belgium. Christine’s father, Adrian Deschryver, was one of the first “rangers” of the Kahuzi-Biega National Park. [9] The Deschryver family worked with the Mobutu dictatorship. The great patriarch was August Deschryver, Belgium’s Minister to the Congo at transition, in 1960, a likely candidate involved in undermining and destroying the Patrice Lumumba government, and assassinating the man, in the twilight of Congo’s Independence.
The Kahuzi-Biega National Park began as a Zoological and Forest Reserve gazetted in 1937 after over-hunting threatened to wipe Congo’s big game off the map. Adrien Deschryver helped found the Kahuzi-Biega Park in 1970. [10] One of the first actions was to forcibly displace the huge pygmy population from the park. The pygmies were consulted only to find locations of elephants and gorillas, and then they were removed: they were lured, tricked, forcibly driven out, and some died refusing to leave. This is exactly what is happening in other parts of Congo today, involving USAID, GTZ, and big “conservation” and “humanitarian” interests like CARE International. [11] Five pygmy groupements—groups of villages spread over large geographical areas—were destroyed. GTZ and UNESCO, the United Nations Scientific and Cultural Organization, got involved in the 1980s, after UNESCO designated Kahuzi-Biega a “World Heritage Site”—clearly another mechanism designed by Western interests to establish cultural and geographic control over people and landscapes. When the GTZ sought to implement “community development” they did not consult with the pygmies to determine their true needs, or wants. The result was armed violence and death. There was no compensation, and the pygmies—forced out of their universe of knowing, the forest—were left homeless and destitute in a world they did not understand. In 2000 era discussions involving some “440 stakeholders” under the new mantra of participatory involvement, there were only two people of pygmy origin, but these were lauded as representation of all the pygmy peoples.
As one Congolese consultant wrote, “Over the two-month period of research into the situation of the Bambuti Pygmies and the protected areas in North and South Kivu—the Kahuzi-Biega National Park—none of the indigenous Bambuti, Barwa, Batwa and Babuluko [people] displayed any enthusiasm for or awareness of the Kahuzi-Biega National Park conservation project. This project has left them worse off than before it was introduced and implemented. The Pygmies have been expelled and driven out with neither indemnity nor other compensation. They have been cast aside. They belong nowhere.” [12]
This is genocide.
Genocide is the congregation of femicide and homocide, the destruction of an entire people, and that is what is happening to people in Central Africa, regardless of their ethnicity.
The human rights of the pygmies in Eastern Congo are the most violated of the most violated on earth, thanks to the Belgian family Deschryver, UNESCO and the GTZ.
The Amy Goodman report ends with a plea by Christine Schuler Deschryver for funds to put a roof on a house for survivors of sexual violence. How to help? Give to UNICEF, she says, or to Eve Ensler’s international organization “V-Day”.
The Democracy Now! report about rape in Congo followed in rather interesting coincidence with a New York Times feature. Goodman opens her report noting that she interviewed Deschryver “last month” [September] in New York. But the Democracy Now! report appeared on October 8, 2007.
On October 7, 2007, in “Rape Epidemic Raises Trauma of Congo War,” Jeffrey Gettleman reported on rape in Congo for the New York Times.
If Amy Goodman was shocked and horrified about Christine Schuler Deschryver’s descriptions of the scale and nature of sexual violence in Congo, why did she wait so long to run the interview? Why did the Democracy Now! report follow one day after the New York Times feature? Coincidence? Or is the Democracy Now! report just another expedient piece of a coordinated propaganda strategy?
The Gettleman report was a travesty of deception in classic New York Times form. “Eastern Congo is going through another one of its convulsions of violence,” Gettleman writes, “and this time it seems that women are being systematically attacked on a scale never before seen here.”
In fact, the situation in Central Africa has been one steady “convulsion of violence” since, at least, the Rwandan Patriotic Front invasion of Rwanda from Uganda in 1990. Zaire exploded in 1996, and the killing and raping has never stopped. This author has consistently and repeatedly reported on massive rape, sexual mutilation, and slavery as weapons of war and depopulation in Central Africa since at least 2001, and these were widely reported by others before that. Now, barely a year after the “historic national elections” that brought President Joseph Kabila to power in October 2006, The New York Times is doing damage control.
“The days of chaos in Congo were supposed to be over,” wrote Gettleman. “Last year, this country of 66 million people held a historic election that cost $500 million and was intended to end Congo’s various wars and rebellions and its tradition of epically bad government.”
Things don’t just fall apart in Congo. “Epically bad government” and “chaos” are typically manufactured to serve powerful interests—the “shock doctrine” defined by Naomi Klein [13]—and are the result of epically bad reporting and the impunity that is insured by Western disinformation and propaganda campaigns. Hundreds of millions of dollars pumped into the 2006 electoral process, and much was stolen. But the elections exercise was not even a band-aid on the festering war in Congo. To describe the ongoing warfare in Eastern DRC as the most recent convulsion of violence is to feed the Western stereotype of the hopeless African condition and run cover for multinational plunder and depopulation, backing warlords, on and on.
Gettleman’s choice of sources and experts is very interesting. One of these, also referenced by Amy Goodman, is Sir John Holmes, a British diplomat with a long history of support for predatory imperialism.
“The sexual violence in Congo is the worst in the world,” said John Holmes, the United Nations under secretary general for humanitarian affairs, to the New York Times.
Holmes provides a tidy commentary about African savagery. What we don’t learn from the New York Times is that Holmes previously worked for the British security firm Thomas De La Rue, one of the top companies in the world that prints money, security documents (e.g. passports) and postage stamps for 150 countries; currency instruments are used to entrench and maintain structural violence. Thomas De La Rue prints money for the Isle of Man, an offshore tax haven connected to money laundering and mercenaries Tony Buckingham and Simon Mann, and they have printed special currency notes for war-torn Sierra Leone. More significantly perhaps, Holmes was the British Ambassador in Lisbon, Portugal from 1999 to 2001, the period of war in Congo where Congolese warlord Jean-Pierre Bemba, partnered with Uganda, a close British ally, launched the Movement for the Liberation of Congo (MLC) rebellion. Bemba has a villa in Portugal, and his criminal syndicate involves his brother-in-law, blood diamonds and mercenary partner Antony Teixeira, a Portuguese tycoon living in South Africa. Bemba’s troops committed massive rape and sexual violence in DRC, and the Effacer Le Tableau campaign was a genocide campaign against pygmies, but Bemba has never been held to account.[14] U.N. Under Secretary General John Holmes is selectively used by the New York Times to legitimize their propaganda, but Holmes himself should be deposed about his role as an economic hit-man supporting plunder and money laundering.
“The sheer numbers, the wholesale brutality, the culture of impunity — it’s appalling,” says John Holmes, in empty platitudes.
A PORNOGRAPHY OF VIOLENCE
Jeffrey Gettleman goes on to attribute violence to “one of the newest groups to emerge” called “the Rastas, a mysterious gang of dreadlocked fugitives who live deep in the forest, wear shiny tracksuits and Los Angeles Lakers jerseys and are notorious for burning babies, kidnapping women and literally chopping up anybody who gets in their way.” In fact, the Rastas have been operating in Eastern Congo for at least three years, have previously committed atrocities, and are not a “new group to emerge.” Gettleman has to explain away the violence in African terms, never the white multinational corporations, arms dealers, criminal Western syndicates or “conservation” organizations (they fund) occupying the soils of North or South Kivu provinces on vast tracts of land.
Further, these feature articles express some very white supremacist thinking about rape in Congo. “Because there has been no justice,” Eve Ensler states, “because so few perpetrators have been held accountable for the crimes that they're committing, it's becoming as Christine [Schuler Deschryver] said to me when we were there, like a country sport: rape.”
So, according to this description, Congolese men are universally castigated for “rape as sport,” no matter that this is committed by armed forces backed, armed, and licensed by the West to commit massive sexual atrocities, or that Congolese men are killed outright when militias enter villages. As shown below, the Congolese militias and National Army serve a deeper, hidden, Western corporate agenda: organized white-collar crime. They are paid in kind for services provided to maintain and insure natural resource plunder and the acquisition and control of vast tracts of Congolese territory.
Eve Ensler’s privilege and white supremacy here is illuminated by her feminist perspective, her feminist crusade, and it becomes acceptable for Eve Ensler—and Ms., Glamour, PBS, The Washington Post, Newsweek, etc.—to label all Congolese men as sexual predators. This, of course, is the chorus of the Western media to begin with—Africans are sexually licentious, they copulate like monkeys—only it transcends boundaries and becomes an African condition. Isn’t that why they [those savages] are all HIV/AIDS positive?
Jeffrey Gentleman took it a step further with a direct quote by a Congolese doctor that describes men in Congo as primates. “There used to be a lot of gorillas in there,” he said. “But now they’ve been replaced by much more savage beasts.” Such language would not be tolerated by the New York Times to describe rape elsewhere. Rape as a weapon of war is happening in Afghanistan and Iraq, committed by US soldiers, but the depiction of savagery would never be applied. But here the propaganda system knowingly reduces the issue to sub-human animal behavior by black savages.
There are extensive case studies analyzing and exploring the systematization of sexual violence and the wounds it inflicts in warfare in Eastern Congo. [15] Institutions like Columbia and University of Denver have studied rape and war in eastern Congo for years—funded by private foundations and the euphemistically named United States Institute for Peace.
The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, UNIFEM and other UN agencies have huge budgets dedicated to “humanitarian” reporting and research. The Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), alone, has a 2007 budget of $US 686,591,107, “roughly the same level as in 2006,” with an additional $40,000,000 infusion announced by MONUC on October 22, 2007. OCHA merely coordinates 126 organizations, including 10 United Nations agencies and 50 international agencies.
The “humanitarian” misery industry is part of a system perpetuating, supporting, and facilitating a permanent state of emergency in Eastern Congo.
People know about sexual atrocities in Congo and they have known about it at the highest levels for years. The New York Times shares culpability in the proliferation of war in Central Africa; the Western media merely generates war propaganda.
WHERE IS ANDERSON COOPER (360)?
It is well known that orders come from military officers. The orders given call for mass rape and sexual violence as a means of terrorizing and destroying communities, with permanent psychological and physical effects on survivors. The chain of command determines what soldiers do and don’t do. There are hierarchies, and soldiers include young boys and men conscripted into terror networks. To disobey orders is certain death in these militias, and escape is a deadly proposition. For thousands of men and boys in Central Africa the “least dangerous place to be” is in the military—be it a militia or national army. For thousands of women and girls in Central Africa the “least dangerous place to be” is wedded to a soldier or taken “captive” by him. Becoming a soldier, or “marrying” one, is a necessary and positive choice for many people. [16] The agency of Congolese men and boys and women and girls is therefore rendered invisible and neutralized by such generalizations and stereotypes pronounced by western elites both in and out of the “humanitarian” business sector. Further, by castigating all Congolese men, or all soldiers, the blame and responsibility are shifted away from officers and civil authorities who run these criminal networks, and who give orders to rape and plunder as policy. All of the rape stories in the recent propaganda front characterize rape as wanton sexual chaos, rather than weapons and instruments of warfare and social disintegration.
It is the standard message: African chaos, savagery, sexual licentiousness, and primitive, sub-human brutalization. This is the heart of darkness, after all, a place in the “middle of nowhere, a primeval jungle landscape where it is every man for himself, every woman for any man.
Eve Ensler further demonstrates the arrogance of whiteness and ignorance of events by effectively stating that the United States has said nothing about rape in Congo, because we are allies with Rwanda and Uganda, who suffered genocide and saw the so-called genocidaires flood into Congo, who graciously accepted them. In fact, the U.S. overthrew the government of Rwanda in 1994, and the when Rwandan and Ugandan forces shelled refugee camps in Eastern Congo (1996) they followed this with a campaign of extermination where hundreds of thousands of women and children were hunted, raped, and massacred. This genocide has not been named. Howard French, New York Times bureau chief in Nairobi in the 1990’s, tried to name it, and he comes close in his lukewarm treatise on Western plunder—Africa: A Continent for the Taking—but his efforts were too little. French moved on to become bureau chief in China, leaving Africa behind, with no commitment to act on what he learned. Everyone has tried to bury the truth with the skeletons. The recent thrusts by the Clinton Foundation in Rwanda—dumping millions of dollars into “humanitarian” programs—are a perfect example.
The U.S. factions—the Rwanda Patriotic Front and Uganda People’s Defense Forces that backed their invasion of Rwanda—committed massive rapes in Rwanda as well. From 1990 to 1994 the Ugandan/RPF invaders in Rwanda raped as policy, and Human Rights Watch covered it with their reports of mass rape attributed, universally and solely, to the Hutu genocidiares. This is the political economy of rape and genocide.
Eve Ensler and Christine Schuler Deschryver regurgitate the accepted narratives and blame the victims of corporate and military plunder aligned with Anglo-American-Israeli interests. To her credit, Eve Ensler mentions SONY Playstation and cellphones as culprits, and she suggests action should be taken against corporations, but she blames the illegal mineral trade on the genocidal murderers from Rwanda, the Interahamwe (just as all violence in Darfur is blamed on Janjaweed, and all violence in Afghanistan is blamed on Taliban). But she states that “we don’t know who” is involved behind or beside these. This cultural reductionism feeds the mainstream media discourses that perpetuate oppressions and consolidate Western power.
Many of the criminals involved were named in the United Nations Panel of Experts reports on illegal extraction of natural resources from Congo. Countless others have been named by numerous independent journalists, including this author, over, and over and over.
John Bredenkamp. Billy Rautenbach. George Forrest. Louis Michel. Paul Kagame. Yoweri Museveni. Salim Saleh. James Kabarebe. Walter Kansteiner. Maurice Tempelsman. Philippe de Moerloose. Dan Gertler. Étienne Viscount Davignon. Bill Clinton. Simon Village. Ramnik Kotecha. Jean-Pierre Bemba. Romeo Dallaire.
Nothing is ever done. After the production of the United Nations Panel of Experts reports on the plunder of Congo’s natural resources, nothing was done. Criminal syndicates lobbied to have their names cleared and the United Nations bucked under. Emboldened by toothless international legal instruments and spineless international leaders, the corporations and their criminal syndicates stepped up their operations. Plunder, depopulation, rape, sexual slavery—anything goes.
And the media provided its smokescreens: Anderson Cooper “360”.
Eve Ensler has no idea what she is talking about and, on a certain level, like all the rest of us, Eve Ensler is another Mazungu whitey who has no business being in Central Africa at all, because she has no idea what has happened, or is happening, or why. Her white skin and feminist crusade act as a badge of credibility and insures her privileged access to Western media corporations that benefit from “chaos” and depopulation. When “peace” is discussed it revolves around Western “charity” and “goodwill,” yet more than 100 years of Western involvement in Africa have culminated in permanent slaughter and depopulation across the continent. The raw materials continue to leave.
Christine Schuler Deschryver represents another face of privilege. When times got hard in 1996 she packed her suitcase and left with her two children for Belgium. She flies to New York and is interviewed on Democracy Now! Listeners in the U.S. believe she is a Congolese native, but she is a Belgian expatriate whose family is a mainstay of colonialism and neocolonialism in Congo. And the Congolese women are never allowed to fly to New York or to tell the deeper story of deracination in “the middle of nowhere,” in Congo. What is the Deschryver family relationship to Philippe De Moerloose or Louis Michel or Étienne Viscount Davignon or the other principal interlocutors in the Belgian money and power syndicates involved behind the scenes in Congo today?
To get a sense of what Glamour does not report—what the New York Times, Ms., Harper’s, Atlantic Monthly, Newsweek, The Nation, BBC, National Public Radio and CNN’s Anderson Cooper “360” will not tell us—take a look behind the scenes in eastern Congo and juxtapose the unreported realities with the personal stories of trauma and recovery told by Eve Ensler in Glamour magazine. While the mainstream corporate media always reduces these stories to a few simple facts, and a panoply of supposedly unfathomable black-on-black violence, there are always some skeletons to be found lurking in the shadows of white society.
THERE’S GOLD IN THEM (BLOODY) HILLS
The North and South Kivu provinces of the Democratic Republic of Congo remain awash in blood. Over the past decade hundreds of thousands of women have suffered sexual violence in these provinces as a weapon of war meant to terrorize local populations and gain control of natural resources. Sexual violence includes mutilations, rape and other forms of torture.
Rwandan-backed General Laurent Nkunda has occupied eastern DRC for several years, and was involved in atrocities, war crimes and crimes against humanity in Congo during the first (1996-1997) and second (1998-2004) Congo occupations by Uganda and Rwanda.
The United Nations Observers Mission in DRC (MONUC) makes possible the occupation of Congo by General Laurent Nkunda today. Nkunda is backed by the military regime of President Paul Kagame in Rwanda and by the baby-faced Jean-Pierre Bemba, the rebel warlord from DRC’s Equateur province whose interests and ties in DRC go back to his dark alliance with the dictator Joseph Mobutu and his Western backers.
The U.S. and European interests backing General Laurent Nkunda run deeper than the blood in the fields and rivers of eastern Congo. The German Embassy in the Democratic Republic of Congo is involved in shady business deals, backing militias and plundering raw materials from Congo, and behind them is U.S. involvement. This has partially occurred through the military control of a mine called Lueshe, located in a village called Lueshe, in North Kivu, some 170 kilometers northwest of Goma. But it also involves coltan, cassiterite, diamonds and gold, and the economic benefits that accrue to those who control land and taxes.
One gold mining firm with vast landholdings in South Kivu province is Canada’s Banro Corporation. Banro has control of four major properties, 27 exploration permits and 5730 square kilometers of gold mining concessions. [17] Banro operates only in the Democratic Republic of Congo, in the blood-drenched South Kivu province. Look at the size of their landholdings:
What has changed since King Leopold’s era?
NIOBIUM & THE POLITICS OF SCARCITY
In North Kivu province the Lueshe mine provides a well-documented example of the kinds of nefarious activities that all Western governments are involved with in Congo, and in Africa more generally, and these activities certainly apply to Banro and other corporations—this is how the system works, and who works it. The Lueshe Niobium mining scandal merely provides an excellent case study where the thief has been caught red-handed with his hands in the illegal minerals pot.
The Lueshe Niobium mine has been under the control of pro-Rwandan forces for the past eight to ten years, first under the Congolese Rally for Democracy (RCD) rebels allied with Rwanda and Uganda and Jean-Pierre Bemba, and now under the “protection” of General Laurent Nkunda. But Lueshe’s history is deeply rooted in the controlling interests of the German government and its U.S. and European partners.
The rare earth metal, niobium or “niob” for short, formerly also known as Columbium, is found there, together with tantalum, in the mineral Pyrochlore. Niobium became extremely important within the last twenty years because of its enlarged range of application for aerospace and defense purposes. Niobium is mainly used as an alloying addition in the production of high quality steel used in the aircraft and space industries, as well as in medicine. It is also widely used in basic applications of machinery and construction and in quite large quantities in the production of stainless steel. Niob, like tantalum and columbium-tantalite or “coltan,” is also coveted for the emerging and secretive “nanotechnology” sector—also pivotal to state-of-the-art and futuristic aerospace, defense, communications and biotechnology applications.
There are three principal niobium deposits in the world, all controlled by a company named Arraxa: one in Brazil, one in Canada and the Lueshe mine in DRC. The owner of Arraxa is the U.S. based company Metallurg Inc., N.Y. Mettalurg Inc. is itself a subsidiary of Mettalurg Holdings of Wayne, Pennsylvania, and Mettalurg Holdings is one of many companies in the investment portfolio of Safegaurd International Investment Fund of (Philadelphia) Pennsylvania, Frankfurt and Paris. [19]
In 1982 Metallurg signed a mining convention with the Republic of Zaire, enabling them to exclusively extract all Pyrochlore at the Lueshe niobium deposit for the next twenty years. A company named SOMIKIVU (Societè Miniere du Kivu) was established. Metallurg ´s 100% subsidiary, the German company GfE Nuremberg (Gesellschaft fuer Elektrometallurgie GmbH), became a 70 % shareholder.
By 1990, SOMIKIVU stopped all production, which was never much at all, because it was apparently insured by HERMES AG, backed by the German Government, to prevent production from the Lueshe mine in order to drive up and control the price of niobium mined and processed at the other sites outside of Congo/Zaire. It was also important to prevent any competitive venture from acquiring the mining rights and subsequently from actually operating the Lueshe mine.
According to available documents, employees of the German Embassy have personally benefiting from, and are involved in, the business of GfE/Metallurg. This involvement has included complicity in extortion, assault, murder, war crimes and crimes against humanity. This involvement includes complicity in sexual atrocities committed by the paid agents of white, Western corporations.
In 1999, after years of inactivity and lost incomes to the Congolese state—a very minority partner manipulated into a position of exploitation as usual—the Lueshe niobium mine was expropriated from its owners by Congo’s new president Laurent Kabila and turned over to the firm E. Krall Investment Uganda (Edith Krall), under a Congolese subsidiary company E. Krall Metal Congo. Nonetheless, with the military backing of Rwanda, RCD rebels operated the mine from 1999-2005 with the help of German Embassy (Kinshasa) affiliate Karl Heinz Albers, also a close business partner of the Rwandan Patriotic Front Government of Paul Kagame. It is also alleged that mercenaries have been involved in securing the mine.
The new owners of E. Krall Metal Congo reportedly tried to visit their new mine in 2000, amidst some of the most serious and brutal fighting in the entire war. The officials were arrested by RCD military who immediately called Karl Heinz Albers, then a permanent resident in Kigali, Rwanda. According to documents provided by Krall, Albers explained that the RCD should not ask questions but “eliminate” the Krall group—kill them on the spot. The RCD Goma secret service chief apparently refused to execute this order and released the people of the Krall group. This action helped the Krall delegation to escape to Uganda but made the RCD secret service chief in Congo subject to assassination attempts by killers from Kigali. The RCD chief only saved his life by immediate emigration to Uganda, where he was nonetheless also subject to several assassination attempts reportedly ordered by Karl Heinz Albers.
Albers was reportedly selling coltan from the Krall concessions to the German firm H.G. Starck. From August 2000 to October 2001 Somikivu shipped some 669 tons of Pyrochlore concentrate to Rotterdam harbor in Amsterdam. After October 2001 shipments went to A&M Minerals in London, a company on the U.N. Panel of Experts blacklist who are alleged to have purchased illegally some 2,246 tons of Pyrochlore concentrate before 2004.
Dr. Johannes Wontka, German citizen and technical director of SOMIKIVU, informed the members of Krall Métal that while Krall may have the legal titles from Kinshasa to operate Lueshe, the SOMIKIVU (Karl Heintz Albers) gang had the power to do so, therefore they should in their own physical interest “disappear”. Dr. Wontka reportedly requested a Major of the RCD army to kill the chief of the “Syndicate Global” the labor union leader of the workers in Lueshe who were on strike due to months of non-payment of salaries. Dr. Wontka reportedly requested that the RCD Major shoot the “whites” that would come soon to Lueshe—the technical delegation of Krall Métal who were on their way—and promised money for the job. By chance the RCD Major was the brother-in-law of the trade union leader whom he was tasked to shoot and therefore he neither shot him nor the ”whites” he was meant to kill, but reported the case to the police.
The general prosecutor of North Kivu eventually confiscated the passport of Dr. Wontka, and Wontka, who tried to flee Congo with his family, was arrested at the border and brought to Goma, DRC. And then the German Embassy in Kinshasa cranked into gear.
THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF AMBASSADORSHIPS
The German Ambassador to Kinshasa, Mrs. Doretta Loschelder, informed the public by giving press statements that German investors will not invest in Congo projects and that economic support by Germany will not be transferred to Congo if the authorities in the Democratic Republic of Congo are going to treat investors in the way authorities in Goma were treating the SOMIKIVU agent Dr. Wontka. Under this pressure, Dr. Wontka was released from prison and within 30 minutes fled Congo against orders of the police and immigration officials.
Mrs. Johanna König, employed at the ministry of foreign affairs of Germany until 2001, and serving at the German embassy in Kigali as Ambassador of Germany in Kigali, was until February 2004 a member of the board of KHA International AG, the holding parent company of the Karl Heinz Albers companies. Konig apparently visited the Lueshe mine with Rwandan military protection. The RCD were also operating the Lueshe mine under forced labor conditions, at one time reportedly involving prisoners from Rwanda accused of genocide by the Kagame regime.
The Krall complaints—well documented—have been brought to officials in Holland, Germany, Switzerland, England and the U.S., all of which have some financial interest or some link in the chain of exploitation. No action has been taken anywhere, and officials of the German Embassy in Kinshasa reportedly continue to benefit from the illegal exploitation of the Lueshe mine. The multinational firm PricewaterhouseCoopers is also invested in the companies exploiting Lueshe and profiting from war, slavery and depopulation in Congo.
At this time, the Karl Heinz Albers may have transferred his “rights” to Lueshe to one Julien Boilloit, a businessman in Kigali who has a big office in Goma and operates behind militias in the Kivus. Julien Boillot’s partners reportedly include Mode Makabuza—a Congolese businessman with multiple interests in Goma. The governor of North Kivu has certainly been paid off.
The recent spate of “news” reports and broadcasts on sexual violence in Eastern Congo are part of a coordinated campaign. It is interesting that sexual violence became an issue when it did. Sexual violence is off the charts, but the appearance, slant, framing and timing of reportage suggests is being used to manipulate public sentiment to serve the interests of certain powerful actors at the expense of others. It is certainly a lever used against the Congolese government of President Joseph Kabila, and it may be that it is coordinated in response to Kabila’s recent deals with China. After all, it has now been reported by the BBC that the Kabila government is working with the Hutu genocidaires, the FDLR—Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda—the ultimate evildoers. It doesn’t matter that the Paul Kagame government’s military and corporate machine has dealt with FDLR all along, when it serves their interests, to import terror and export raw materials. This is all very well-documented.
The Western public is unaware of these greater readings, and merely gobble up the news reports as examples of an equitable and humane Western media system that is attuned to tragedies, even if they were late to decry and report them. Western feminists are all over the rape story, but where should the outrage be directed?
Rape was off the agenda at the International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda (ICTR) until Hillary Clinton showed up in Arusha, Tanzania—the city that became the economic beneficiary of the lucrative ICTR boondoggle—and pledged $600,000 to be paid after the first ICTR rape conviction. And that’s when they decided to pin rape on Georges Rutaganda, the evil businessman portrayed as the devil in Hotel Rwanda. It was Bill and Hillary’s blood money, and another financial incentive used to whitewash the Clinton’s role in genocide and covert operations in Central Africa. The Rwandan Patriotic Front led by Paul Kagame committed massive sexual atrocities from 1990 to 1994 in Rwanda, and throughout the RPF campaign in Congo, but these were covered up by Western reporters at the time and later blamed, universally, on the Hutus. [20] The establishment narrative on rape in Rwanda was dictated from the start by Human Rights Watch with their pro-RPF treatise Shattered Lives: Sexual Violence During the Rwanda Genocide, published in 1996. [21]
Who should help the victims of sexual violence in Congo? How about the German multinational corporation Bayer AG—whose subsidiary H.C. Starck was directly involved in the coltan plunder by the RPF. How about GTZ, involved in Congo (Zaire) since 1980 and the expropriation and exclusion of the pygmy’s way of life. How about Nokia. Intel. Sony. Barrick Gold Corporation. Anglo-American Corp. Banro. Moto Gold. Belgian Philippe de Moerloose and his Damavia Airlines. Bill and Hillary Clinton and their diamond buddy, Maurice Tempelsman, and De Beers. Tempelsman and DeBeers have plundered Congo for more than fifty years. And how about Royal/Dutch Shell, another backer of the Kagame regime.
Add sexual violence to the list, sure, but Eve Ensler and the Western media propaganda campaign for “an end to sexual violence in Congo” must be placed in its proper context: white supremacy and the shock doctrine of global corporate plunder. In this context rape and depopulation are permanent conditions, the real killers get away with murder, and there is endless, brutal revenge by the victors. The victims get all the blame, and their suffering never ends. ~
NOTES:
[1] <http://www.vday.org/contents/drcongo>.
[2] Eve Ensler, “Women Left For Dead—and the Man Who’s Saving Them,” Glamour, August 2007.
[3] UNICEF’s Snowflake Ball
[4] See Stephanie Nolan, “‘Not Women Anymore…’: The Congo’s rape survivors face pain, shame and AIDS,” Ms. Magazine, Spring 2005; Femke van Zeijl, “The Agony of Darfur: Again, rape surfaces as an international war crime,” Ms. Magazine, Winter 2006.
[5] keith harmon snow worked for UNICEF in Ethiopia in 2006. See addendum pages in Livelihoods and Vulnerabilities Study, Gambella Region Ethiopia, UNICEF Report, December 13, 2006, <http://www.allthingspass.com/journalism.php?catid=13>.
[6] “A Conversation with Eve Ensler: Femicide in Congo,” PBS, <http://www.pbs.org/pov/pov2007/lumo/special_ensler.html>.
[7] The Deschryver family name is of Belgian descent and multiple spellings can be found for the same people: Adrien Deschryver, Adrien De Schryver and Adrien de Schryver.
[8] “ ‘They Are Destroying the Female Species in Congo:’ Congolese Human Rights Activist Christine Schuler Deschryver on Sexual Terrorism and Africa's Forgotten War,” Democracy Now!, October 8, 2007, <http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/10/08/1340255 >.
[9] UNESCO is today deeply connected to “conservation” in Eastern Congo; from 1982-1985, at least, one Hubert Deschryver sat on the executive board. See: <http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0005/000518/051897E.pdf >.
[10] Kapupu Diwa Mutimanwa, The Bambuti-Batwa and the Kahuzi-Biega National Park:
the Case of the Barhwa and Babuluko People, May 2001.
[11] See the series KING KONG: Scoping in on the Curious Activities of the International Money Business in Central Africa, by keith harmon snow and Georgianne Nienaber published in its entirety at <http://www.allthingspass.com/journalism.php?catid=45>.
[12] Kapupu Diwa Mutimanwa, The Bambuti-Batwa and the Kahuzi-Biega National Park:
the Case of the Barhwa and Babuluko People, May 2001.
[13] Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, 2007.
[14] See: keith harmon snow, “A People’s History of Congo’s Jean-Pierre Bemba,” Toward Freedom, September 18, 2007, <http://towardfreedom.com/home/content/view/1123/1/>.
[15] See, for example, Sara Gieseke, Rape as a Tool of War in the Eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, Graduate School of International Studies, University of Denver, April 13, 2007.
[16] See: Carolyn Nordstrom, “Backyard Front,” In The Paths to Domination, Resistance and Terror, Carolyn Nordstrom and JoAnn Martin, eds., 1992: p.271
[17] Banro Corporation, <http://www.banro.com/s/Properties.asp>.
[18] Banro Corporation, <http://www.banro.com/s/Directors.asp>.
[19] See: <http://www.metttalurg.com> & <http://www.safeguardintl.com/portfolio.html>.
[20] See: Donatella Lorch, “Rwanda Rebels: Army of Exiles Fights for a Home,” New York Times, June 9, 1994: 10; “Rwanda Rebels' Victory Attributed To Discipline,” New York Times, July 19, 1994: 6; Raymond Bonner, “How Minority Tutsi Won the War,” New York Times, September 6, 1994: 6; Bonner, “Rwandan Refugees Flood Zaire as Rebel Forces Gain,” New York Times, July 15, 1994: 1; Judith Matloff, “Rwanda Copes With Babies of Mass Rape,” Christian Science Monitor, March 27, 1995: 1; Donatella Lorch, “Wave of Rape Adds New Horror to Rwanda's Trail of Brutality,” New York Times, May 15, 1995; James C. McKinley Jr., “Legacy of Rwanda Violence: The Thousands Born of Rape,” New York Times, September 23, 1996: 1.
[21] See Shattered Lives: Sexual Violence During the Rwandan Genocide, Human Rights Watch, 1996.
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=2&ItemID=14128
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