Elsewhere Today 483
Aljazeera:
Myanmar cyclone toll tops 77,000
FRIDAY, MAY 16, 2008
3:46 MECCA TIME, 0:46 GMT
The official death toll from Cyclone Nargis, which swept through Myanmar's Irrawaddy delta, has reached 77,738, state television has said.
It also reported on Friday that another 55,917 people are missing and 19,359 are injured.
The news comes as Myanmar faces increased pressure to allow international aid into the country.
The previous official death toll was 43,328, but independent experts say the actual number could be much higher.
British officials say the total number of people dead and missing could be more than 200,000.
Rulers under pressure
Myanmar's military rulers appear to be digging in their heels in the face of mounting international pressure to allow more aid into the country.
John Holmes, the leading UN humanitarian affairs official, is waiting for visa approval to visit Myanmar so he can urge the military government to open up to a full-scale international relief effort.
But one state-run newspaper says Myanmar can rebuild without outside help, even though there is little evidence of that on the ground.
Figures collected from various UN agencies by the International Federation of the Red Cross indicate that between 68,833 and 127,990 people were killed by Cyclone Nargis that swept Myanmar early this month.
And the UN is now warning that 2.5 million people are facing hunger and disease.
But instead of giving out aid, the government is dishing out eviction orders.
Hundreds of displaced villagers taking refuge at a sports hall in Yangon have been told they must go, an Al Jazeera correspondent on the ground reported.
Army officers told them they had 24 hours to leave, without explaining why or telling them where they could go.
The villagers of Shu Li Man say they have nowhere to go and say they will not leave.
"I know the soldiers will come but we will stay here, whatever happens. There's nothing else we can do," Thain So, the village chief, told Al Jazeera.
Even at the sports hall, food is scarce and medicine even more scarce.
Disease is the most immediate threat.
More than 16,000 thousand cases of diarrhoea and fever have been reported in Yangon alone.
And with a government quarantine imposed on the entire delta region, the number there must be many times that.
Referendum 'success'
Myanmar's ruling generals announced on Thursday that last weekend's referendum on a new constitution was a resounding success.
The government had gone ahead with the vote in all but the worst cyclone-affected areas of the country, ignoring criticism at home and abroad.
Many blame the generals' sensitivity over the vote for their reluctance to admit foreign aid in the days after the cyclone hit.
Few are surprised that they claimed a 92.4 per cent vote in their favour and a 99 per cent turnout.
The numbers will give little comfort to the villagers of Shu Li Man as they face eviction from the only home they have left.
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/
2F8A1689-7524-4618-9343-0A59CBEE3F07.htm
AllAfrica:
100 Die in Lagos Explosion
By Adesoji Oyinlola
Leadership (Abuja) NEWS
16 May 2008
No fewer than 100 people, including two school children, were in the early hours of yesterday killed by a fire incident which erupted from a pipeline at Ijagun, Alimosho Local Government Area of Lagos, razing down several houses, including a secondary school.
LEADERSHIP gathered that the pipeline, which had been vandalised by some suspected criminals, caught fire and exploded around Pako bus-stop area of Ijegun at about 11am.
Some eyewitness told our correspondents that the fire razed many houses, including Ijegun Comprehensive High School.
Policemen were immediately drafted to the area to ensure security.
As at the time of this report, no official of the National Emergency Agency (NEMA), Lagos State officials or any other government official was on hand to salvage the situation.
LEADERSHIP gathered from residents of the area that the pipeline burst was occasioned by activities of construction workers on the Ikotun - Ijedun Road where the pipelines passed through. The high level of casualty was attributed to the closeness of the buildings to the pipelines.
Efforts by the Lagos State fire service men to put out the inferno had yielded no result as the fire spread afar while survivors scampered for their lives.
Meanwhile, Lagos State government has permanently stationed some buses in the area to rescue victims of the incident to the Lagos State Teaching Hospital, where many people seriously wounded by the inferno are placed in the emergency wards.
Police public relations officer Frank Uba confirmed the incident but refused to make further comment.
Incidents of fire are on the increase in Lagos State. It would be recalled that no fewer than 25 vehicles and four houses were lost to fire last week when a tanker carrying a substance suspected to be combustible chemical caught fire in Fadeyi axis of the city.
Last year, a similar incident happened in the area, leading to killing of thousands of people.
Red Cross officials said many injured people had been taken to hospital and they were still trying to rescue more.
Among the dead is a two-year-old baby, emergency relief workers said.
"The fire is still going on, a lot of people are dead. Houses are burned. People are running for their lives," the AFP news agency quoted a Red Cross volunteer as saying.
At least 36 people have been taken to a nearby military hospital, National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) spokesman Abdulsalam Mohammed said.
Nigeria is one of the world's major oil producers and pipelines cut through many residential areas, both in cities such as Lagos and oil-producing areas.
Several of these have exploded, often when local people cut holes in them to steal oil.
The Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) says there are at least 400 acts of vandalism on its pipelines each year, reports the AP news agency.
At least 40 people were killed in a pipeline explosion in December in Lagos last year.
In 2006, some 400 people were killed in two blasts in Lagos.
Meanwhile, the Lagos State government has expressed its sympathy with victims of the incident yesterday and appealled to the public to refrain from making inflamatory comment on the issue.
Previous Pipeline Disasters
December 2007: At least 40 people killed in Lagos
December 2006: At least 250 killed in Lagos
May 2006: At least 150 killed in Lagos
Dec 2004: At least 20 killed in Lagos
Sept 2004: At least 60 killed in Lagos
June 2003: At least 105 killed in Abia State
Jul 2000: At least 300 killed in Warri
Mar 2000: At least 50 killed in Abia State
Oct 1998: At least 1,000 killed in Jesse
Copyright © 2008 Leadership. All rights reserved.
http://allafrica.com/stories/200805160027.html
AlterNet:
America's Frightening Alzheimer's Epidemic
By Rebecca Hyman, AlterNet
Posted on May 16, 2008
When I was about 11 years old, I saw an advertisement on TV that stayed with me. A beautiful woman in her 40s faces an elderly woman across a coffee table. The older woman beams at the younger and says, "You seem like such a nice girl." The camera shifts its focus to the face of the younger woman, who has tears welling up in her eyes. "Thanks, Mom," she says. The elder woman gives her daughter a quizzical look, and then stares vacantly into the distance.
In 2000, when I first learned my mother had been diagnosed with Alzheimer's, the only thing I knew about the disease was that one day I'd be starring in my own version of that commercial. At that point, my mother was just a bit forgetful. We'd make plans to cook an elaborate meal and, a few hours later, she wouldn't recognize the shopping list. A few months ago, however, I was visiting my parents, and it finally happened. "Who is your mother?" she asked, in a friendly voice, as I helped her dress. "You are," I said, laughing. "Really?" she asked, her English accent magnifying her astonishment. "How old are you?"
One in eight Americans who are 65 years old or older has Alzheimer's disease, according to the Alzheimer's Association's 2008 Facts and Figures Report (www.alz.org). By 2030, due to the aging of our population, that number will have doubled to one in four. There's no cure, and no certain evidence that the current medications - Aricept, Exelon, Razadyne and Namenda - which are said to slow the course of the disease, really work. Recent studies pitting Aricept, in combination with vitamin E, against a placebo have had disappointing results.
The costs, financial and emotional, of treating and caring for an Alzheimer's patient are astronomical. Today, the amount of time lost to American businesses by workers being forced to become caregivers of those with Alzheimer's is estimated at 8.4 billion hours a year. The monetary value of this unpaid labor - often taking place in the caregiver's home - varies by state, from the lowest, Alaska, at a little above $100,000 a year, to the highest, California, at about $10 billion.
Part of the reason it's difficult for states, and individuals, to estimate the medical costs of caring for someone with Alzheimer's is that the disease doesn't have a clear, predictable trajectory. Unlike, say, cancer, whose stages roughly correlate to a patient's estimated years of survival, Alzheimer's disease varies by patient. The average course of Alzheimer's disease is eight years, but some can have it for 20 years. Those with the early onset form of the disease - people in their 30s, 40s, and 50s - tend to decline rapidly, becoming ravaged in a few years. Others, who are older, may already be suffering from ailments like diabetes and heart disease when they receive the diagnosis of Alzheimer's. In these cases, Alzheimer's slowly drones on in the background of the other disorders, until its "side effects" - the polite term for brain damage - become so pronounced that the disease takes center stage. Because Alzheimer's takes such a varied and prolonged path, and is often a co-occurring condition, it's hard to parse medical statistics to isolate the costs of Alzheimer's alone. In 2000, for example, Medicare paid an average of $4,207 to treat a person with diabetes; if that same person had diabetes and Alzheimer's, however, the cost increased to $10,943.
For most families, the stress of coping with the disease in real time is compounded by the terror of budgeting for the future. Because patients with Alzheimer's can be ill for a long time and can require elaborate care in skilled and nursing home facilities, health insurance companies are loathe to cover individuals with the disease. Translation - if your mom, like mine, didn't have long-term health insurance before she received her diagnosis, you can forget it. You can get nailed by home owner's insurance, too, if you decide to move your parent into your home before you put theirs on the market. If the company discovers that your parent's house is vacant, they can cancel the policy.
In the seven years I've been attending a free support group, sponsored by the Alzheimer's Association, I've heard about every variation of the disorder and learned about others forms of dementia, too. There's vascular dementia, caused by imperceptible strokes; Lewy Body dementia, the symptoms of which are a hybrid of Parkinson's and Alzheimer's; and Frontotemporal dementia, which destroys logical reasoning long before it attacks memory, leaving its sufferers especially prone to scam artists, the kind who promise they'll marry you as soon as you change your will.
I'll never forget the first time I went to my group, one just for adult children of parents with the disease. Each member introduced herself, gave a brief history of her parent's illness and asked for practical advice: Anyone heard of a good tranquilizer for agitation? A way to take the car keys away from mom without risking a riot? A kind of food to give a parent who can no longer swallow? By the end of the meeting I felt like Odysseus, granted the privilege and horror of visiting Hades and being allowed to come back. Afterwards, I went directly to a bar to meet friends. I found I had no words to explain where I'd been.
There's little incentive for anyone not directly touched by the disease to want to think about it. Movies like Iris and Away from Her have tried to raise awareness of Alzheimer's among members of the general public, but the films tend to sentimentalize dementia by wrapping it in the soft folds of late-life love. The first scene in Meet the Savages comes closer. But Alzheimer's is more like the movie Groundhog Day. As the patient's short-term memory becomes obliterated, he says the same thing, over and over. But you're in the movie, too. You think there was a yesterday, but you're not so sure anymore. I've watched people in my support group wrestle with an existential conundrum: What's worse, to tell your mother that she has Alzheimer's, knowing that you will have to do it, again and again, causing her tremendous grief and surprise, or to lie to her face, when she asks you what's wrong?
People often say to me, in the moment of thought-defying panic that occurs when they find out my mother has the disease, "Well, at least she doesn't know she's suffering." But that's not how Alzheimer's works. Even though my mother can't tell me what day it is and doesn't remember that our house has three floors and she's on the second one, she knows that something's wrong. She knows that she can't find our house by herself and consequently, she's terrified of being left alone. I spend most of my time, now, when I visit, reassuring her that my father is still alive, he's just downstairs and hasn't abandoned her.
At the same time, there's some essential truth to what these people are saying. I can tell my mother that I'm terribly sad about my life, cry, hold her hand, and know that in five or ten minutes she won't remember I'm upset. My grief - and I imagine the grief of one's own child stings like no other - can no longer become hers. Those who love a person with Alzheimer's are caught in a state of perpetual hesitation: How can we grieve, when the person is sitting there before us, calmly drinking a cup of tea? Social workers have a theory for this condition; they call it "ambiguous loss."
Pauline Boss, one of the first scholars to investigate the concept, talks about the particular difficulty that families and caregivers face when a person is either psychologically absent but physically present, such as with addiction or Alzheimer's, or the reverse condition, such as when a wife learns that her husband is missing in action. "Spouses of dementia patients or brain injury survivors are often told by well-meaning professionals or friends that they are lucky because a mate is still alive and with them," she writes. "This does not help, because they feel they no longer know the person. Labeling their loss ambiguous allows them to recognize the real source of their distress and begin the process of coping and grieving that will permit them to move on with their lives."
Right now, those of us struggling with Alzheimer's are a tight community - I hear, often, from others that they don't even try to talk about their situation with those who haven't experienced it. You have to be there, they say. But if I could paint an accurate picture of what America is going to look like when 25 percent of our elderly population has this disease, I would. I have some hunches. Even now, I have a kind of radar for dementia; I can spot it in a person even before they open their mouth. People with dementia have a kind of gingerly attitude toward the world - they walk carefully, as if they fear they'll fall; they're watchful, as if anticipating a threat; and they betray themselves with small errors - their pants are a little too high on their ankles, or their blouse isn't quite right for the season.
"It's crucial that families get a professional diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease as soon as they suspect their loved one may be suffering from dementia," urges Jane Tilly, the Alzheimer's Association's director of quality care advocacy. "The sooner a person receives a diagnosis, the more time he has to make important decisions about the rest of his life, when he is still able to do so. Whom will he choose to serve as his proxy when he can no longer make decisions about the kind of medical care he requires? Who will take care of his finances? And as the disease progresses, will he choose palliative care or heroic measures to preserve his life?"
Alzheimer's demands gentleness from others. The disorder, most of the time, is terribly boring and frustrating, for patient and caregiver alike. It's slow, and cruel, and inexorable. In short, it's antithetical to our cultural values - it's anti-productive, it's nonrational, and it doesn't have a happy ending. It scares me to think that we are going to continue to ignore this disease, and the threat it poses to our culture, because it isn't pretty, and we don't know what to do. When I think about where we are now, in terms of our understanding of the disease, and our limited caretaking infrastructure, and about the coming tsunami of Alzheimer's patients, I think about Bill McKibbon, writing The End of Nature, his clarion call to halt global warming, 19 years before this year's photograph on the front page of the New York Times of that lone polar bear, on the tiniest of icebergs, drifting in the midst of a melted sea.
Right now, a number of prestigious medical institutes are investigating the "Amyloid Hypothesis," a theory that damage to the brain's nerve cells in Alzheimer's is, in part, an effect of a malfunction in the processing of a protein fragment called beta-amyloid. Dr. Constantine Lyketsos, chairman of Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center's Department of Psychiatry, and his team of researchers are working to understand the pathology of Alzheimer's disease by tracing the location and aggregation of beta-amyloid plaques in the brain. "By using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to scan the brain of a person who has been injected with a temporarily radioactive stain," he explains, "we can create a map of the disease and, in time, begin to trace the various ways in which the diseases progresses in different patients' brains."
Lyketsos hopes that in the near future medical institutes will create an infrastructure similar to that of contemporary cancer research, with research labs and treatment centers in the same building, allowing for greater cross-pollination between research scientists and clinicians. "We want Congress to recognize the necessity of increasing our research funding now, before the wave of new patients is upon us," Lyketsos says, "but we just haven't reached the tipping point yet."
When I go and visit my mother, now, there's not very much that we can do. Large crowds increase her disorientation and heighten her anxiety. She can no longer read or follow the narrative of a movie. But the disease has also softened her. My mother was intensely bright - this made her sharp, both in wit and in judgment. Now, she and I have slowed down. We take pleasure in the color of a flower's petal or the way the light hits the branches of the trees outside the window on the second floor of the house. She can't say much, but now that she has been sanded away by Alzheimer's, she asks me the only question that is really important: Are you happy? She tells me I'm a marvelous person and that people are lucky to know me. I squeeze her hand and tell her that it's she who made me.
For information about the disease, to receive medical referrals and to find a support group, call the Alzheimer's Association help line at 1-800-272-3900, or on the Web at www.alz.org. To advocate for greater research funding for Alzheimer's disease, write to your congressional representative, or to members of the House Budget Committee, which allocates funding for the disease.
Rebecca Hyman is a writer and professor living in Atlanta, Ga.
© 2008 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at:
http://www.alternet.org/story/85532/
Asia Times:
Tehran ponders the spoils of victory
By Sami Moubayed
May 17, 2008
DAMASCUS - We were watching the news coming in from Beirut, as armed Hezbollah troopers stormed entire neighborhoods of Beirut, loyal to parliamentary majority leader Saad al-Hariri. The anchor for al-Manar, Hezbollah's TV station, was roaming the streets of Hamra, Ain Mraiseh and Quraytem, reporting on events from his party's perspective.
He was basically saying that this was not a coup launched by Hezbollah against Prime Minister Fouad al-Siniora. Rather than take power, Hezbollah restored authority to the Lebanese army after overpowering March 14 in more than six hours of fighting. Rumor had it that in a show of muscle, they were going to cross off Rafik Hariri's name and rename the international airport after Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. At one point, the al-Manar TV anchor stood by Starbucks Coffee on Hamra Street and a friend watching the report muttered, "What are they going to next? Rename it Shah-bucks?"
The joke is not exactly correct, since supporters of the Islamic regime in Tehran would never name anything after the shah they deposed in the Islamic revolution of 1979. But the joke shows how deep-rooted Iran-o-phobia has become in the Arab world. Many onlookers saw what happened as a battle between the Iran-backed Hezbollah, and the Saudi-backed March 14 Coalition that is headed by Hariri. Clearly from results, the Iranians won in Beirut. The Saudis lost.
Shortly after relative calm had been restored, Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal came out with an exceptionally harsh statement against Hezbollah. He drew parallels between Nasrallah and former Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon, who invaded Beirut when serving as minister of defense in 1982.
What Hezbollah did was an invasion, said the Saudi minister, who has long feared Iranian power in the Muslim world, adding, "Iran is backing what happened in Lebanon, a coup, and supports it." He then added, "This will affect Iran's relations with all Arab countries, if not Islamic states as well." These hard words were echoed in different fashion by US President George W Bush, who was visiting Israel on the 60th anniversary of its creation, saying, "A lot of my trip is to get people to focus not only on Lebanon, to remember Lebanon, but also to remember that Iran causes a lot of the problems. I view Iran as a serious threat to peace."
His National Security Advisor, Stephen Hadley, added, "Iran and Syria ... are what is behind this." Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad snapped back on the same day, "Iran is the only country not interfering in Lebanon. Who are those that call, support, encourage [what is happening in Beirut]? Whose ambassador is running away?" That was in reference to the Saudi ambassador who reportedly fled Beirut when fighting broke out on May 7. The Iranian daily Kayhan, a mouthpiece for Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, trumpeted, "In the power struggle in the Middle East, there are only two sides: Iran and the United States."
That probably is true. The Israelis have a long-term vision for the Middle East. So do the Turks. So do the Americans, and the Iranians. The only ones who have no clue where they are heading, and who are being shoved around as pawns, are the Arabs.
Just as during the Cold War, some cuddled up to the United States, others cuddled up to the other superpower, the Soviet Union. In the 1960s, it was the Syrians, Iraqis and Egyptians in the Eastern bloc with the Soviets, and Jordan, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Lebanon working with the US. With regard to the Saudis, they have always been reliable allies for the Americans. The two sides have worked together since the 1940s to contain communism, Nasserism, Khomeinism, and since September 11, terrorism. They now find themselves in the same boat - for completely different reasons - combating what can safely be described as Nasrallahism.
Is it an independent subfield, or does it fall under the broad battle against Khomeinism - the legacy of the leader of the Iranian revolution in 1979, ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini?
Nasrallah, the charismatic leader of Hezbollah, does not hide his loyalty to the Islamic republic and its Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Contrary to what many people would like to believe, however, he does not want to create a theocracy in Beirut. When Hezbollah was founded in 1982, it was the product of the Iranian regime and it did call for an Iran-style republic in Beirut. It grew out of the secular movement Amal (to which it is still allied) and using Iranian arms and money, became one of the strongest armed groups in the waning years of the civil war.
But that is now history. Parties develop with time and experience; they change programs according to surrounding circumstances. The Ba'ath Party of neighboring Syria started out in 1947 calling for a classless, socialist government, yet today, 45 years after coming to power, it is very far from a socialist state.
Nasrallah, who came to power in the early 1990s with the full support of then-Iranian president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, is someone who knows the Lebanese system well. He realizes that even if he wished, he could not assume power in Lebanon. The confessional system, with all its faults, prevents him from harboring such an ambition. At best he can rule by proxy, through or with a Christian heavyweight. At present, this proxy is former army commander and Christian heavyweight in the Lebanese opposition, General Michel Aoun.
While observing Hezbollah's behavior last week, many claimed it was seconds away from doing just that; marching on the Grand Sarrail, toppling the Siniora cabinet and setting up a Shi'ite president. One must not forget, however, that Iran would never allow it. Not because Iran is Mr Nice Guy, but because Iranian leaders are seasoned statesmen who know what it takes to live in a heated and hostile Sunni Arab environment.
Last year, when hostilities erupted between the March 14 Coalition and Hezbollah, Iran applied full pressure on its Lebanese proxies to avoid engaging in confrontation that would anger Saudi Arabia. They can wrestle with the Saudis in Lebanon - and Iraq - and flirt with them on a variety of regional issues, but they would never go into full out war, or even on the verge of it, that would spell out destruction of both countries' economies and prestige.
Thinking they could turn Lebanon into another Iran by exporting the Iranian revolution is madness and nobody knows that better than the Iranians. What they did was flex their muscle in Beirut, give their opponents a bloody nose, and then backed down, waving their fists, "If you do this [provoke us], we can do it again and again."
The Saudis received the message loud and clear. They realized their intelligence and logistical support were no match to those of the Iranians in Lebanon. And their current proxies are simply no match for those of Iran.
The Saudis need to find new allies - stronger allies - or else the imbalance in power politics of Beirut will remain as it is, in Iran's favor. While Sunni Muslim leader Saad al-Hariri was clearly trembling at what happened, Nasrallah was calm and confident. Proxy wars need calm leaders - strong leaders who do not break under pressure. This equally applies to other March 14 heavyweights like Walid Jumblatt, whose tone changed 24 hours into the battle, and they only resumed their hard talk against Iran after big words started coming from Washington.
Hariri's original speech was so confused that the Saudi channel al-Arabiyya stopped broadcasting it and only read excerpts from what he said, without showing his recorded speech. When American criticism resumed, and Hezbollah fighters withdrew from the alleys surrounding his house, Hariri was urged to stand up and speak again, this time with a stronger tone, saying, "This has been decided by the Iranian and Syrian regimes that wanted to play a political game in Lebanon's streets. For us nothing has changed. We will not negotiate with someone having a pistol pointed to our heads."
Nadim Shehadi, a Lebanese associate fellow at Chatham House in London, best described the situation, saying, "It is equivalent to an Iranian attack on Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia."
Now that order has been restored, Beirut airport has been reopened (without being renamed) and Hezbollah troops have departed the streets of Beirut, what comes next?
The March 14 Coalition gulped its pride and withdrew the two orders that had sparked the entire crisis, regarding Hezbollah's surveillance and communication system and the discharge of their man, Wadih Shuqayr, from his post as director of airport security. The Iranians were pleased. The Americans and the Saudis were not. All parties have agreed to return to the negotiating table, and were scheduled to meet in Qatar on Friday to find a solution to the vacant presidential seat at Baabda Palace.
Nothing is being said of the arms of Hezbollah, which were used internally for the first time since 1982, or of the current program of the Lebanese government, signed off by none other than Siniora. It pledges to support and protect Hezbollah. Siniora heads a cabinet that wants to implement United Nations Security Council resolution 1559 (calling for the disarmament of Hezbollah) and yet has pledged to provide it with free movement, protection and security on Lebanese territory. Nasrallah claims the political process is a creation of the Americans, yet he had ministers in the Siniora cabinet, and still has a large bloc in parliament.
How can the scars of what happened last week in Beirut be healed so easily, when day and night the media outlets of both Hariri and Nasrallah spread venom against each other? And if either side is a traitor, as their media sources are saying, then how can they sit together in Doha to talk about a common future and nation-building? And finally, what about Iran? Now that it has made its point loud and clear in Beirut, how does it plan on ending the crisis?
One way would be to negotiate a deal with the Americans, pertaining to its nuclear file, and to avoid the imposition of more sanctions through the Security Council. Another way would be to bring peace to Iraq, for the price of getting to keep its victory in Beirut. It still pulls many strings in Iraqi affairs and can use its strong influence within the Iraqi Shi'ite community (with heavyweights like Muqtada al-Sadr) to bring law and order to war-torn districts such as the southern city of Basra and Sadr City in Baghdad.
Or it could do the exact opposite; trade off Hezbollah in exchange for a greater piece of the Iraqi cake. Autonomy for the Shi'ite districts in southern Iraq, with a greater share of oil revenue for example, as its Iraqi proxy, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, has been calling for since 2004. When one feels stronger, one often is in a stronger position to bargain, and more able to grant concessions in exchange for trophies. The trophy coming out of Lebanon is still undecided for the leaders of Tehran.
Sami Moubayed is a Syrian political analyst.
Copyright 2008 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/JE17Ak04.html
Clarín: "No creo que encuentres
a uno que diga que Woody Allen lo ha influenciado"
En una entrevista con un diario británico, el genial actor, director y guionista aseguró que nunca lee las críticas de sus películas, que no presta atención a la recaudación y que no cree haber influenciado a la nueva camada de realizadores.
15.05.2008 | Cine
"No tengo ni idea de la consideración que merecen (los filmes). Y si alguno no funciona en la taquilla, tampoco me entero puesto que el dinero va a mis contadores y no tengo contacto con ellos", afirma Allen en declaraciones al diario "The Times".
Woody Allen reconoce, por otro lado, que, a diferencia de otros grandes cineastas estadounidenses de los años setenta, como Martin Scorsese, Robert Altman o Steven Spielberg, él no parece haber inspirado a otros creadores.
"No creo que encuentres a uno en cien que te diga: Woody Allen ha tenido una gran influencia sobre mí. No creo que encuentres a ninguno", afirma el creador de Annie Hall.
A propósito de ésta última, con la que ganó dos estatuillas de Hollywood, una de ellas al mejor director, Allen dice que no es una película que le disguste. "Me lo pasé muy bien haciéndola, pero no es una de las películas de las que más me acuerde", explica.
Preguntado si cree que hace mejor cine ahora que en los años setenta u ochenta, Allen dice que no hay razón para que sea así: "Creo que soy el mismo. Lo que no quiere decir que si tengo una buena idea para una película ésta no vaya a ser mejor que la anterior. Pero lo inverso es también verdad".
Allen reconoce que le gusta la rutina: "Me gusta hacer lo mismo todos los días. Me levanto, llevo a mis hijos a la escuela, trabajo, practico con el clarinete y voy a comer a los mismos restaurantes".
Las mejores críticas que ha recibido últimamente no han sido por sus películas sino por su cuarta colección de relatos breves, titulada Mere Anarchy. "La vida de un escritor es una buena vida", afirma.
Sobre la propuesta del tenor español Plácido Domingo para que se encargue de la dirección escénica de Gianni Schicchi, de Puccini, en la Ópera de Los Ángeles, dice que casi hubo que forzarlo para que aceptara. "Estoy seguro de que van a lamentarlo aunque haré todo lo que pueda", asegura.
Fuente: EFE
Copyright 1996-2008 Clarín.com - All rights reserved
http://www.clarin.com/notas/2008/05/15/01672586.html
Guardian:
'We have to kill Tutsis wherever they are'
Hundreds of thousands of people were massacred during the genocide of 1994 in Rwanda. Now, in the crucible of the ensuing war in neighbouring Congo, the fugitive killers are training their children to carry on the Hutu mission of extermination, and awaiting their opportunity to return to the mother country.
Chris McGreal
Friday May 16 2008
The boy with the shaved head and Kalashnikov slung across his legs is uncertain about a lot of things, even his age. He pulls at the long, dry grass around him and in a quiet voice says he thinks that he might be 13 years old because he was a baby when his mother wrapped him with the last of her possessions and made her escape across the border. Asked where he is from, he gestures toward the lush hills rippling to the east. Somewhere among them is an unmarked frontier with a country the boy calls home, although he has no memory of the last time he was there.
What's over the hills? Rwanda, he says. Where are his parents? He doesn't know. Dead, he thinks. He doesn't remember them, only what some people told him.
And what was he told? He was very small when everyone ran away from those they called the inyenzi - the cockroaches. His mother carried him across the border, out of Rwanda. But then something happened to her. Perhaps she was among the multitudes who died then or in the ensuing years; he was left alone and the other people in the refugee camp looked after him. His father was a soldier. He just disappeared. No one said anything about him.
That was in 1994 and the boy has been on the move ever since, tramping from one part of the Democratic Republic of Congo to another, growing up as part of a caravan of killers and their families who, for a long time, dared not stay still if they wanted to survive, until he came full circle to the place where he was separated from his mother.
He falls silent again for a while, watching Congolese villagers who live in fear of children such as him. Then he begins to speak about what he does know. It is the Tutsis, those inyenzi, who are to blame for his predicament, he says, and he must kill them. He hates them all. They stole his country, Rwanda - a Hutu country, he calls it - and he wants them dead.
There is an innocence to the boy's face for all the hardships he has endured, but there is something in his voice with that word, inyenzi. A sharpness, perhaps out of contempt or perhaps knowing its power to conjure up the horror of the murder of hundreds of thousands of Tutsis in the Rwandan genocide of 1994 by men who branded them "cockroaches". Soon afterwards, when Tutsi rebels defeated the killers and took over Rwanda's government, the Hutu exodus began and the boy's life changed irrevocably.
Child soldiers can be found across Africa. Sometimes they are responsible for appalling atrocities; sometimes it is because their minds have been twisted by powerful drugs. But nowhere on the continent are they as driven by hate and ideology as among the Rwandan Hutu refugees in eastern Congo. Here, after more than a decade of invasion, civil war and slaughter - rooted in the genocide - a second generation of killers is being imbued with the mind-altering ideology of extermination and reared to hate and murder Tutsis.
Some of the children learn it from fathers who were responsible for the mass killings the first time around, back in Rwanda. Others, like the boy, are raised by the extremist Hutu rebels who control large areas of eastern Congo and are among the most important causes of the conflict there that has claimed an estimated five million lives or more over the past decade and continues to kill about 45,000 people each month in Congo through the effects of war - principally starvation and disease.
These children are led by men with multimillion-dollar rewards on their heads offered by the United States for their capture to stand trial accused of the murder of thousands in the 1994 Rwandan genocide. America has listed their armed group, the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), as a terrorist organisation, but some of its political leaders have found safe haven in Europe. And while their army is fighting, the leadership is raking in millions through the smuggling of gold and diamonds, and extortion.
The boy is sitting alone, guarding the perimeter of an FDLR camp that is a bone-shaking six-hour drive into the mountains south of the Congolese city of Bukavu on unmade roads that wind along the border with Rwanda and then veer in country. The Congolese government has almost no influence in these parts. Its forces rarely venture into the surrounding hills and the FDLR lives off the local people - plundering and sometimes raping and killing.
The camp is little more than a dozen or so mud brick and wood huts with grass roofs.
A handful of soldiers sit around. Some wear the same uniforms as government troops - plain olive green, with black boots or wellingtons. Others sport brightly coloured T-shirts with slogans promoting various beers. They carry Kalashnikovs and a couple of larger-calibre weapons with belts of bullets slung across shoulders. There is a weak attempt at camouflage with grass stuck into baseball caps, but the camp is isolated on the side of a hill, not visible from the approach road and easy to protect. No one comes after the FDLR here, but there is a rusting rim of an old car wheel dangling from a nearby tree as an alarm. The boy is supposed to beat it as hard as he can if the enemy approaches.
He looks to be the youngest fighter here - most of the others are in their late teens or 20s although one man with a large paunch seems out of place. A couple have weak moustaches, others shaved heads.
They are all members of the FDLR's armed wing, known within the organisation as the "Army of Jesus". The religious undertones run deep. One of the group's operations against Rwanda was codenamed "Oracle of the Lord".
The FDLR boasts about 7,000 fighters, hundreds of them children or youths, and is the largest of the militias in eastern Congo.
It controls about one-fifth of the two vast provinces that border Rwanda - North and South Kivu - but its influence ranges considerably further as it hunts down Tutsis who live in Congo, and continues to threaten nearby Rwanda.
The boy, with his straightforward beliefs, sees no reason not to say aloud that the path to a better life lies over the graves of Tutsis. It is a philosophy based on the "Hutu 10 Commandments" that underpinned the genocide. The commandments call any Hutu who marries a Tutsi a traitor, and say that the Tutsis' "only goal is ethnic superiority".
"Hutu must stop taking pity on the Tutsi," says the eighth commandment.
"Hutu must stand firm and vigilant against their common enemy: the Tutsi," says the ninth.
Jerubaal Kayiranga fought with the FDLR. One of his responsibilities was to recruit children to its ranks, many of them forcibly, before he fled back to Rwanda last year. In a demobilisation camp there he describes how the philosophy of the Hutu 10 Commandments lives on in the hills of eastern Congo and how some of its most enthusiastic adherents are the FDLR's youngest fighters. In the Congo fighting, "many FDLR soldiers died, so that's why these boys are recruited at 10 years old to fight," he says. "They're worse than the older ones because they don't even know how Rwanda is. They don't know any Tutsis. They just hate them as the enemy. It's the same as they [extreme Hutu leaders] were telling us during the genocide. They told us what we should do is kill all the Tutsis in the country."
That is exactly how the boy sees things.
"The Tutsis stole our country and they are killing the Hutus or making them slaves. We have to kill them wherever they are. It is the only way to get our country back. When they are defeated I can go home," he says. "It's not hard to kill. You shoot."
A Hutu rebel commander wants to meet in the market of a Congolese village called Sange near the border with Rwanda. Arriving with a handful of his troops, Colonel Edmond Ngarambe sits on a wooden bench in the shade of a tree. His soldiers scatter to guard his back. I remark on how some look to be in their teens.
"Most of our new recruits came from Rwanda as children," he says. "They are fighting to take their country back."
Ngarambe is in Sange to persuade me that the FDLR is not what it seems. It's true that its website describes the present Tutsi-led government in Rwanda as fascist, bloodthirsty, arrogant and barbaric. It also, in an interesting about-face from reality, says the Tutsis are seeking to exterminate the Hutus.
But Ngarambe, who served as a lieutenant in the army of Rwanda's former Hutu government, which led the genocide, says that is not the full picture. The FDLR is much misunderstood, he argues, and is merely seeking democracy and justice. That, it turns out, means a return to the Hutu domination that underpinned the 1994 genocide and an end to the trials of those indicted for mass murder.
But then, Ngarambe sees himself as a victim in his self-imposed exile.
Countless extremist militiamen and soldiers joined the million Hutu refugees - the boy and his mother among them - who, in July 1994, struggled from Rwanda into what was then Zaire (the country changed its name to the Democratic Republic of Congo in 1997) fleeing the consequences of genocide. Their arrival set in motion a cycle of civil war and invasions that engulfed eastern Congo, as foreign armies, rebel groups, warlords and militias rooted in mystical tradition carved up the region.
No one knows how many died here but the most widely accepted estimate is of more than five million, mostly from disease and starvation, although massacres were commonplace enough that mass graves are still being unearthed. The living suffered too, enduring the rape of entire towns and villages. Through it all, the broken, defeated but unrepentant murderers from Rwanda carried their ideology of hate. The old organisations that led the genocide - the notorious interahamwe militia and Hutu army - gave way to new groups that then emerged as the FDLR.
But the boys in the hills are mostly too young to remember all that. They are sullen and avoid eye contact. There are no smiles and few hints of a child under the skin. It is hard to say what kind of killing these children have seen or are responsible for, but for many it is probably their most formative experience.
They are like the boys with guns coerced into fighting in other parts of Africa, battle-hardened by acting as porters, carrying weapons and food to get them used to the sound of gunfire and death. In time they are drawn into the killing, perhaps made to perform some atrocity not only to harden them but to implicate them so that there is no turning back.
With it they learn a terrible lesson: that a gun will get them what they want - food, money, sex. They also believe it will get them back to Rwanda. But if they ever do get there, they will discover, like the former child soldiers of Liberia, Sierra Leone and Uganda, that it is not easy to return to what passes for a normal life.
Ngarambe sees none of that. He says children are drawn into the FDLR's ranks because of a burning sense of injustice. "Schoolboys are coming to us. They are fighting to be free. We do not have to indoctrinate them. They come to us because they know who the enemy is. They do not want to be slaves," he says.
But they are so young.
"It doesn't matter how young they are if they don't have their freedom. They will not be free so long as the Tutsis control Rwanda."
Fourteen-year-old Bahati Mugisha doesn't put it that way. He is a young FDLR fighter who was captured by the group's principal enemy inside Congo - a renegade Tutsi general, Laurent Nkunda, who broke from the Congolese government army to battle the Hutu rebels who were killing and ethnically cleansing Congo's own Tutsi population of several hundred thousand.
"They gave me a gun and said we were going to fight the Tutsis," says the teenager. "They said these were our enemy and we must kill as many as possible." Asked who told him these things, the teenager says his commander - men such as Aloize Mbanza, a 53-year-old former Rwandan army corporal who found himself indoctrinating a new Hutu generation in Congo. Mbanza fled back to his homeland last year. "Most of the FDLR who are young came from Rwanda when they were very small, so they grew up in Congo," he says. "Now the FDLR is also recruiting Rwandan boys who were born in Congo, in the refugee camps. They are 12 or 13 years old. They are the ones who don't have fear. They are fighting with guns. There are many of them. The only school they know is the army."
They are also dying.
"There were other boys fighting with me," says Mugisha. "I know some of them died. I saw two who died, killed there in the battles. But there were others, too. Some of the other boys were younger than me."
Others have been killed trying to escape the FDLR's clutches. Former rebels such as Mbanza and Kayiranga are lucky to have got away. "If our chiefs thought we were going back to Rwanda, they would take you and kill you," says Kayiranga. "I saw Colonel Haguma killed because he wanted to come back. They beat him and he died. I know a sergeant who was hanged from a tree because he had the idea to come back. They call a meeting and they point at you and say you want to go back to the Tutsi government and then they kill you. Sometimes they kill you by hitting your head with a hammer. They have many ways."
A number of the FDLR's leadership were heavily involved in the Rwandan genocide. They include some who are wanted by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, which was set up by the UN Security Council to try those responsible for the massacres in Rwanda, and two men who are also on the US government's "most wanted" list of those it wants to see captured and handed over to the tribunal.
Among the wanted FDLR leaders is Callixte Nzabonimana, the Rwandan minister of youth and sport during the genocide who, according to an international tribunal indictment, "played a major role in the massacres of the Tutsis in Gitarama. He visited the bourgmestres [mayors] frequently to organise the massacres in their communes with them. Further, he personally travelled through the hills along with peasant farmers to be certain the farmers were carrying out properly their orders to kill the Tutsis". The US has offered a $5m (£2.5m) reward for his capture to be put on trial by the tribunal.
The tribunal has named another FDLR leader, Ildephonse Nizeyimana, as among its six most wanted. He headed military intelligence operations in southern Rwanda and set up special units of soldiers that led massacres at the country's main university. He also gave the order for soldiers to surround a school as the interahamwe murdered 1,300 children and adults. The US is also offering a reward for Nizeyimana's capture.
The FDLR's overall military commander, Major General Sylvestre Mudacumura, is wanted by the Rwandan government to face trial for his role as deputy commander of the presidential guard which flew across the country to begin the mass murder in April 1994. Today he is a primary mover behind the killing of Congo's Tutsis. He is also under investigation by the international tribunal.
Among others listed as "most wanted" by the Rwandan government is an FDLR colonel, Faustin Sebuhura, who, as a captain in the Hutu army, oversaw the massacre of about 50,000 Tutsis, and Déogratias Hategekimana, who, as a mayor, coordinated the killing of 65,000 people.
The FDLR's political leadership is less directly implicated in the genocide but is wanted in the Rwandan capital, Kigali, for atrocities against civilians by the rebel group. While their organisation is also officially listed as a terrorist group by the US government, the rebels' political chief, Ignace Murwanashyaka, lives largely untroubled in Bonn, Germany. His deputy, Musoni Straton, is in Brussels. The FDLR also maintains some presence through representatives in other parts of Europe - France, Switzerland, Holland - and in South Africa, Canada and the US.
Talking now under the tree in Sange market, Ngarambe is evasive about his own part in the tragedy of 1994. He was a Hutu army officer at the time. He denies the genocide was planned, even though the international tribunal for Rwanda has established that there was an extensive conspiracy at the highest political and military levels of the Hutu regime to exterminate the entire Tutsi population.
"If they say the genocide was organised, it's not true. It was civil war. It was something that happened suddenly. It wasn't planned," he says. "Ever since I was young, I didn't know how to hate a Tutsi. I lived in a place with many Tutsis. My friends were Tutsis. Even in the army there was not teaching of hatred of Tutsis."
But most of those Tutsi friends and neighbours are dead. It takes a while for Ngarambe to reveal that his own father is blamed for some of their killings. He is 75 years old and in a Rwandan prison awaiting trial for genocide.
His mother and sister were locked up for a while, too, by Rwanda's present Tutsi-led government. "They said they took part in the genocide. My father's only an old guy. My sister was killed by the army when she tried to escape in 1997. The army killed my other sister when they came looking for my father to arrest him," he says.
In Sange market, the Congolese traders eye Ngarambe and his men warily. It is only after the FDLR officer has left that one or two will talk. "We fear those men," says a small woman in a yellow wrap selling vegetables from a basket. "They use their guns to take our food and money. They do not leave us enough food for our own families but we cannot say anything because they will kill us. There is no law here." Others in the market decide it is wiser not to speak.
Ngarambe concedes that his men take from the local people. "When there's a war, that's when there's difficulties. We are obliged to take food from the population when there's fighting. But when we stay somewhere for six months, we try to farm," he says. "Our relations with the local population are extremely good. They understand our problems. They understand we will one day go back to Rwanda."
In some places, Hutu refugees have built their own villages, including schools and health centres staffed by Rwandan teachers, doctors and nurses. In others, they have moved into Congolese villages, sometimes usurping the authority of traditional chiefs and taking over administrative positions in local government. Often they plunder crops - Congolese villagers have a saying about the FDLR: "We cultivate and they harvest" - and by extorting "taxes" from just about anyone, from market stall holders and farmers to transport companies and butcheries, and "tolls" to cross rivers and bridges. The FDLR also grows and sells significant amounts of marijuana.
Much of the FDLR'S money goes to buy weapons and to run the training camps, which include infantry and artillery schools, and one for the rebels' commando unit that goes by the acronym CRAP. But there is worse than plunder. Systematic rape of hundreds of thousands of women has been a hallmark of the conflict in eastern Congo, and the FDLR is not the only group involved. In South Kivu alone, tens of thousands of women have been treated in health clinics after being raped, and many more will have gone untreated.
Ngarambe admits that some of his men are responsible but says everyone is at it, including a group known as the Rastas, made up of deserters from the notorious Mai-Mai militia, the Congolese army and the FDLR. "This thing of rape - I can't deny that happens. We are human beings. But it's not just us," he says.
While the rank and file of the FDLR survives by plundering, their leaders are involved in altogether more lucrative ventures. A 2007 World Bank-funded study estimates that the FDLR leadership makes millions of dollars a
year from taking over mines in parts of North Kivu, such as Masisi and Walikale, or from those doing the hard labour through levying "taxes" of gold, coltan, diamonds and other minerals on mine owners.
The study estimates that the FDLR controls half of the mineral trade in the Kivus outside of the main towns, and oversees the smuggling of gold and diamonds for sale in neighbouring countries such as Uganda and Burundi. It is not alone in this. The Rwandan, Ugandan and Burundi armies, as well as warlords and militias, have also carved up the mineral plunder and smuggling rackets.
The poison against Tutsis has spread beyond the Hutu exile population and infected many ordinary Congolese, largely driven by anger at the invasions of Congo by Rwanda's Tutsi-led government and at the actions of the renegade general Nkunda, who says he is fighting to protect Congo's Tutsis from the FDLR. Many Congolese believe that Nkunda, aged 40 and a former intelligence officer in the Rwandan army, is still secretly serving the Rwandan government. Hundreds of thousands of Congolese have been driven from their homes in Nkunda's attacks; his forces are guilty of mass rape and he too has forcibly recruited children to fight.
From his headquarters in a colonial-era house in the hills around Masisi in North Kivu, Nkunda says he is an effect, not a cause, of Congo's continued upheaval: "It's as if you can kill Tutsis and no one cares," he says. "I am here to protect them and I won't stop until the FDLR is gone, finished. We cannot allow it to take over North and South Kivu or all the Tutsis will be finished.
"They say I'm the problem. But who is killing who? I am defending the Tutsis who live here from the people who committed genocide in Rwanda ... Remove the FDLR and you remove the need for me to fight."
Many Tutsis see Nkunda as their only means of protection. Many Congolese see the Tutsis as the problem. Anti-Tutsi vitriol can be heard from Congo's leaders down to the residents of eastern towns such as Goma. Congolese politicians have called on people to "exterminate the vermin", meaning Tutsis. Amid such entrenched hatred, the future for the boy in the oversize uniform is bleak. Colonel Ngarambe has three children of his own now, the eldest just eight years old, all born in exile. He would like to see them settled in Rwanda but only on the terms he has in mind - a Rwanda where politics is defined by ethnic domination and the Tutsis recognise the rule of the Hutu majority. If not, Ngarambe says his children will carry on the fight.
"The children born here are FDLR," he says. "The children born in Rwanda will be FDLR. My children will be FDLR.
"The conflict between Hutu and Tutsi is based on power. It's not that we have to develop an ideology of hatred against the Tutsis. It's just that people should see what's happening. Just because the Tutsis were victim of a genocide doesn't give them the right to take power."
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2008
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/may/16/congo.rwanda
Jeune Afrique: Rejet de la demande
d'asile du colonel Bacar en France
COMORES - 15 mai 2008 - par AFP
Le secrétaire d'Etat à l'Outre-mer Yves Jégo a annoncé jeudi à la Réunion que le gouvernement français agirait "en concertation avec les Comores pour que le droit s'applique" concernant le colonel Bacar dont la demande d'asile en France a été rejetée.
"L'Etat français a pris acte du refus de droit d'asile au colonel Bacar qui ne peut pas être renvoyé aux Comores", a déclaré Yves Jégo au cours d'un point presse à l'aéroport de Gillot, en transit pour Mayotte et les Comores.
L'Ofpra (Office français de protection des réfugiés et apatrides) a rejeté la demande d'asile déposée par l'ex-président déchu d'Anjouan, tout en excluant qu'il puisse être expulsé vers les Comores en raison des risques de persécution, a-t-on appris jeudi auprès de la préfecture de la Réunion.
Yves Jégo, qui doit rencontrer les autorités comoriennes jeudi à Moroni, s'est félicité de la "gestion exemplaire" du dossier Bacar entre la France et les Comores. Il a rappelé que "la France a été aux côtés des Comores pour que le colonel Bacar soit mis hors d'état de gérer Anjouan". "Nous continuerons à agir en concertation avec les Comores pour que le droit s'applique et que le colonel Bacar puisse être jugé", a-t-il dit.
Le secrétaire d'Etat à l'Outre-mer a souligné que la justice française devait examiner courant mai une demande d'extradition du colonel Bacar déposée par les Comores mais qu'il ne peut pas "préjuger de la décision qu'elle rendra".
http://www.jeuneafrique.com/jeune_afrique/
article_depeche.asp?art_cle=AFP02248rejetecnarf0
La Repubblica:
Con la scusa del popolo
di Gad Lerner
16 maggio 2008
La caccia ai rom scatenata in tutta Italia sta cominciando a suscitare disagio, ma non ancora la necessaria rivolta morale.
Difficile, soprattutto per dei politici, mettersi contro il popolo. Col rischio di passare per difensori della delinquenza, dei violentatori, dei ladri di bambini. E' questa, infatti, la percezione passivamente registrata dai mass media: un popolo esasperato, l'ira dei giusti che finalmente anticipa le forze dell'ordine nel necessario repulisti.
Ma siamo sicuri che "il popolo" siano quei giovanotti in motorino che incendiano con le molotov gli effetti personali degli zingari fuggiaschi, le donne del quartiere che sputano su bambini impauriti e davanti a una telecamera concedono: "Bruciarli magari no, ma almeno cacciarli via"? Che importa se parlano a nome del popolo i fautori della "derattizzazione" e della "pulizia etnica", i politici che in campagna elettorale auspicarono "espulsioni di massa", i ministri che brandiscono perfino la tradizione cattolica per accusare di tradimento parroci e vescovi troppo caritatevoli?
La vergogna di Napoli, ma anche di Genova, Pavia e tante altre periferie urbane, non ha atteso l'incitamento dei titoloni di prima pagina, cui ci stiamo purtroppo abituando. "Obiettivo: zero campi rom" (salvo scatenarsi se qualche sindaco trova alloggi per loro). "I rom sono la nuova mafia" (contro ogni senso delle proporzioni). "Quei rom ladri di bambini" (la generalizzazione di un grave episodio da chiarire). Dal dire al fare, il passo dell'inciviltà è compiuto. Perfino l'operazione di polizia effettuata ieri con 400 arresti e decine di espulsioni sembra giungere a rimorchio. La legge preceduta in sequenza dalla furia mediatica e popolare, come se si trattasse di una riparazione tardiva.
Chi si oppone è fuori dal popolo. Più precisamente, appartiene alla casta dei privilegiati che ignorano il disagio delle periferie. Ti senti buono, superiore? Allora ospitali nel tuo attico! L'accusa, e l'irrisione, risuonano ormai fin dentro al Partito democratico. Proclama Filippo Penati, presidente di centrosinistra della Provincia di Milano: "I rom non devono essere 'ripartiti', bisogna farli semplicemente ripartire". E accusa Prodi di non aver capito l'andazzo, di non aver fatto lui quel che promettono i suoi successori. Nel 2006 fu Penati, insieme al sindaco Moratti, a chiedere al comune di Opera di ospitare provvisoriamente 73 rom (di cui 35 bambini). Dopo l'assedio e l'incendio di quel piccolo campo, adesso è stato eletto sindaco di Opera il leghista rinviato a giudizio per la spedizione punitiva. Mentre si è provveduto al trasferimento del parroco solidale con quegli estranei pericolosi.
La formula lapalissiana secondo cui "la sicurezza non è né di destra né di sinistra" appassisce, si rivela inadeguata nel tumulto delle emozioni che travolge la cultura della convivenza civile. Perfino la politica sembra derogare dal principio giuridico della responsabilità individuale di fronte alla legge. Perché un conto è riconoscere le alte percentuali di devianza riscontrabili all'interno delle comunità rom, che siano di recente immigrazione dalla Romania, oppure residenti da secoli in Italia, o ancora profughe dalla pulizia etnica dei Balcani. Un conto è contrastare gli abusi sull'infanzia, la piaga della misoginia e delle maternità precoci, i clan che boicottano l'inserimento scolastico e lavorativo, la pessima consuetudine degli allacciamenti abusivi alla rete elettrica e idrica.
Altra cosa è riproporre lo stereotipo della colpa collettiva di un popolo, giustificandola sulla base di una presunta indole genetica, etnica. Quando gli speaker dei telegiornali annunciano la nomina di "Commissari per i rom", sarebbe obbligatorio ricordare che simili denominazioni sono bandite nella democrazia italiana dal 1945. Il precetto biblico dell'immedesimazione - "In ogni generazione ciascuno deve considerare se stesso come se fosse uscito dall'Egitto" - dovrebbe suggerirci un esercizio: sostituire mentalmente, nei titoli di giornale, la parola "rom" con la parola "ebrei", o "italiani". Ne deriverebbe una cautela salutare, senza che ciò limiti la necessaria azione preventiva e repressiva.
La categoria "sicurezza" non è neutrale. Ne sa qualcosa il centrosinistra sconfitto alle elezioni, e solo degli ingenui possono credere che se Prodi, Amato o Veltroni avessero cavalcato l'allarme sociale con gli stessi argomenti della destra il risultato sarebbe stato diverso. Qualora il nuovo governo applichi con coerenza la politica di sicurezza annunciata, è prevedibile che nel giro di pochi anni il numero dei detenuti raddoppi, o triplichi in Italia. Scelta legittima, anche se la sua efficacia è discutibile. Quel che resta inaccettabile è il degrado civile, autorizzato o tollerato con l'alibi della volontà popolare. Insopportabili restano in una democrazia provvedimenti contrari al Codice di navigazione - l'obbligo di soccorso alle carrette del mare - o che puniscano la clandestinità sulla base di criteri aleatori di pericolosità sociale.
Da più parti si spiega l'inadeguatezza della sinistra a governare le società occidentali con la sua penitenziale vocazione "buonista". E' un argomento usato di recente da Raffaele Simone nel suo "Mostro Mite" (Garzanti), salvo poi trarne una previsione imbarazzante: la cultura di sinistra col tempo sarebbe destinata a essere inclusa, digerita dalla destra. Discutere un futuro lontano può essere ozioso, ma è utile invece riscontrare l'approdo a scelte comuni là dove meno te l'aspetteresti: per esempio sulla pratica delle ronde a presidio del territorio.
Naturalmente gli assalti di matrice camorristica ai campi rom di Ponticelli non sono la stessa cosa della Guardia nazionale padana. Che a sua volta non va confusa con i volontari di quartiere proposti dai sindaci di sinistra a Bologna e a Savona. Nel capoluogo ligure, per giustificare la proposta, è stata addirittura evocata l'esperienza del 1974, quando squadre antifasciste pattugliarono la città dopo una serie di bombe "nere". Il richiamo ai servizi d'ordine sindacali o di partito è suggestivo, quasi si potesse favorire così un ritorno di partecipazione e militanza che la politica non sa più offrire. Ma è dubbio che nell'Italia del 2008 - afflitta da nuove forme di emarginazione come i lavoratori immigrati senza casa, le bidonvilles fucine di criminalità ma spesso impossibili da cancellare - le ronde possano considerarsi uno strumento di democrazia popolare.
Dobbiamo sperare in una reazione civile agli avvenimenti di questi giorni, prima che i guasti diventino irrimediabili. Già si levano voci critiche ispirate a saggezza, anche nella compagine dei vincitori (Giuseppe Pisanu). Il silenzio, al contrario, confermerebbe solo l'irresponsabilità di una classe dirigente che ha già cavalcato gli stupri in chiave etnica durante la campagna elettorale.
http://www.repubblica.it/2008/05/
sezioni/cronaca/sicurezza-politica-3/lerner-rom/lerner-rom.html
La Repubblica:
Il Pogrom moderno
Adriano Prosperi
16 maggio 2008
"Voi che vivete sicuri nelle vostre tiepide case": proprio voi, telespettatori, lettori di giornali, guardate e chiedetevi se sono esseri umani questa donna, quest´uomo e questo bambino che una fotografia terribile ci ha mostrato caricati coi loro stracci sul pianale di un´Ape, in fuga davanti a popoli ebbri di sangue.
Così, con le parole di Primo Levi, avrebbe potuto e dovuto cominciare qualunque reportage sugli eventi di Ponticelli se il giornalismo riuscisse sempre ad avere una memoria lunga e una funzione civile, se non si riducesse talvolta a essere la registrazione muta di orrori quotidiani o la feroce amplificazione di pregiudizi e razzismi diffusi. Là dove si alzano ancora cumuli di immondizia le fiamme consumano ora baracche, materassi e stracci nelle tane dove altri esseri umani hanno trovato un rifugio meno che bestiale.
La parola pogrom è uscita dalle rievocazioni storiche della Shoah per diventare realtà. Non è nemmeno escluso che si possa alla fine scoprire che stavolta – per la prima volta – gli zingari hanno cominciato a rubare bambini, come voleva il pregiudizio di quell´Italia contadina che aveva tanti figli e non conosceva altra ricchezza che la sua prole. Ma c´è un´altra prima volta, questa certa e indiscutibile, che riguarda noi, gli italiani. Da oggi la parola «pogrom» ha cessato di indicare solo tragedie di altri tempi e di altri popoli per diventare la definizione di atti compiuti da folle di italiani.
Dobbiamo capire perché: e non ci aiutano le grida di incoraggiamento alle folle inferocite che giungono quasi da ogni parte politica. Bisognerebbe che qualcuno facesse un esame pacato di quel che è accaduto nelle nostre città e in quella vasta, informe e desolata periferia in cui è stata trasformata tanta parte del suolo della penisola. Come tutti sanno, la mercificazione dei suoli edificabili è stata una fonte essenziale per risolvere i problemi di bilancio delle amministrazioni pubbliche. Chi doveva pensare a provvedere di luoghi vivibili gli emarginati, gli immigrati, i residui gruppi umani non stanziali, ha fatto tutt´altro.
Una frazione crescente di umanità abita oggi in Italia sotto i ponti dei fiumi e delle autostrade, vicino alle discariche, in contesti di discarica obbligata, senza acqua corrente, con stufe di fortuna. Qualcuno forse ricorda ancora altri bambini oltre a quelli «rubati» dai rom – i figli di famiglie rom morti nei roghi provocati da stufe occasionali. E ci sono altre storie che hanno un sapore tristemente familiare: quella del bambino rom che non vuole più andare a scuola perché i compagni lo escludono dal gruppo e dicono che è sporco, che puzza. Anche per gli ebrei dei secoli scorsi si diceva che fossero sporchi e riconoscibili dall´odore: ma lo dicevano coloro che prima li avevano chiusi negli spazi stretti e senza acqua dei ghetti.
Ma il problema in assoluto più grave è un altro: come e perché gli italiani sono diventati razzisti? Come e quando le autorità di governo prenderanno iniziative serie per l´integrazione civile e per la tutela giuridica di tutti gli abitanti del paese? Per ora, si assiste solo a una gara a chi grida di più, a chi trova le parole più minacciose contro gli sventurati, contro i dannati della terra. E´ una raffica di provvedimenti di polizia, veri o ventilati, una gara in cui sono impegnati amministratori locali e poteri centrali di ogni colore e che sarebbe ridicola se non fosse tragica per gli effetti di insicurezza e di violenza che provoca. Siamo già alle ronde. Aspettiamo l´arrivo degli squadroni della morte e delle polizie fai-da-te.
Certo, se lo sguardo si ferma non su quella fotografia ma sulle altre che le fanno dissonante compagnia sulle prime pagine – quelle scattate nelle aule del Parlamento – ci sarebbe di che rallegrarsi. Non più risse nel Palazzo: anzi un venticello dolce di mutuo rispetto tra maggioranza e opposizione, un gusto della correttezza, uno scimmiottamento del perfetto stile anglosassone che fanno pensare a quelle caricature dei nostri vezzi provinciali in cui eccelleva Alberto Sordi.
Di fatto nel Palazzo circola un´aria di intesa e di pace che riscalda il cuore: il governo e la sua ombra camminano lungo la stessa linea di luce, come si conviene a un paese che ha una coscienza non più divisa. E tuttavia, è spontaneo per chi ha una memoria lunga riflettere sulla opposizione speculare tra l´Italia nuova, quella della pace nei palazzi del potere e della guerra tra poveri, e l´Italia antica, quella della durissima lotta tra partiti inconciliabili e dello spirito di solidarietà diffuso in una società memore della sua storia e delle sue radici popolari.
Oggi il Palazzo e la Piazza appaiono ancora una volta divisi, ma la loro divisione è di tipo insolito e inquietante. Diceva Francesco Guicciardini della Firenze del ´500 che «spesso tra il palazzo e la piazza c´è una nebbia sì folta o uno muro sì grosso che...tanto sa el popolo di quello che fa chi governa o della ragione perché lo fa, quanto delle cose che si fanno in India».
Oggi ancora una volta la scena italiana è divisa tra il palazzo e la piazza.
Ma se allora era il popolo che non vedeva ciò che facevano i potenti nel palazzo, oggi sono i potenti che sembrano non vedere quel che accade nelle piazze e nelle periferie di questo nostro paese. O forse lo vedono: forse il pensiero nascosto dietro tutto quel fair play è che conviene a chi sta sul ponte di comando lasciare che la violenza scatenata dal malgoverno sia incanalata contro i soliti capri espiatori.
http://www.partitodemocratico.it/gw/producer/dettaglio.aspx?id_doc=51154
Mail & Guardian:
The roots of war in eastern Congo
Chris McGreal
16 May 2008
To the outside world it has become as known as Africa's First World War with its foreign armies and invasions, and ceaseless killing and dying that seems to achieve nothing. The battleground is the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo, where to some of those who have fought it is a matter of the very survival of nations, while to others it is the prospect of immense wealth that drives them. But what are the true roots of this conflict, and what keeps it alive?
Little more than a decade ago, the long-suffering citizens of the Democratic Republic of Congo could not have imagined their situation could get much worse.
Their brief flirtation with hope and rebirth after independence from Belgium in 1960 soon gave way to decades of decline under the derelict rule of Mobutu Sese Seko. He renamed the sprawling central African state Zaire, cloaked himself in leopard skins and African nationalism, and set about filling his bank accounts while most of those he ruled saw their country crumble around them.
Through the 1970s and 1980s, Zaire fractured into a series of city states increasingly distant from each other as roads were worn away by neglect, telephone systems collapsed and postal services ceased.
In major cities such as Kisangani, in the north, conventional administration largely fell away. The justice system disappeared and traditional courts re-emerged out of necessity. Border towns, such as Goma in the east and Lubumbashi in the south, effectively became economic appendages of neighbouring countries. Across Zaire, hospitals, lacking in medicines and trained staff, were places merely to go and die.
The elderly can describe a time when cars travelling the length of the continent, from South Africa or the Rhodesias to Cairo or Lagos, passed through Lubumbashi and Goma, their passengers stopping at the best hotels on Lake Kivu.
A couple of decades later, it was impossible for any ordinary car to make it more than a short distance out of either city and the hotels had long since fallen apart, their swimming pools dry and rooms infested with cockroaches.
Others tell of the self-delusions of the early 1970s when Mobutu's rule really did seem to offer the promise of Zaire as the country of tomorrow. A new elite of educated professionals - economists, businessmen, even nuclear scientists - gave up good jobs in Europe and America to return home to build the dream, and came to regret it.
By the 1990s, and the last years of Mobutu's dictatorship, there were no such illusions. People said the sooner the old kleptocrat went the better because whatever followed could not be any worse.
But then came the Rwandans and a decade of war, mass death and, in large parts of Congo, the destruction of what remained of functioning government. This turmoil has changed the face of Central Africa, shifting the balance of power to the tiny country of Rwanda, once scorned as backward and irrelevant but now feared and loathed by its larger Congolese neighbour - and sometimes compared with Israel for its actions and purpose as an entire region has been plunged in to conflict.
Exodus from Rwanda
The roots of Congo's grief and central Africa's upheaval lie in the assassination of Rwanda's President, Juvenal Habyarimana, in April 1994. With Habyarimana out of the way, a Hutu extremist regime seized power and set about murdering 800 000 Tutsis in the last genocide of the 20th century.
But while the regime was good at killing unarmed civilians it proved less efficient against a Tutsi rebel group, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) under Paul Kagame, which drove the extremists from power and with it sent more than a million Hutu refugees fleeing into Zaire fearing revenge for the genocide.
There they met what some deemed to be a fitting punishment, dying in their tens of thousands of cholera on the desolate volcanic rock around Goma under a sky darkened by ash spewing from the rumbling volcano. Mass graves were filled with women, children and the elderly.
That might have been the end of a great tragedy but with the civilians pouring into Zaire had come their political leaders, defeated soldiers and Hutu militiamen - the interahamwe - who had led the genocide back in Rwanda. Their presence, and Mobutu's continuing support for his old Hutu allies, sowed the seeds of much of the upheaval that was to come and the Zairean leader's own downfall as the new Tutsi-led government in Rwanda vowed not to stand idly by while another genocide was prepared next door. The United Nations played an important part in this. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) took the fateful decision to recognise the Hutu extremists as leaders of the refugee camps and gave them control of food distribution. That ensured that the military men remained well fed and fit, and gave them considerable control over the sprawling camps which were soon transformed into armed bases to continue the war against the new government in the Rwandan capital, Kigali.
The extremists infiltrated Rwanda, planting mines and massacring civilians. They hauled people off buses, separating the Tutsis and then shooting them, and forcibly recruited young Hutu men into their ranks.
Two years later, in 1996, Rwanda decided it could no longer tolerate the camps keeping the threat of genocide alive on its border and it invaded Zaire. The Tutsi-dominated army surrounded the refugees and drove hundreds of thousands of people back across the border.
Those who went home were largely unmolested but those remaining in Zaire, who included the former soldiers and militiamen and their wives and families, were remorselessly perused and slaughtered. The bodies of women and children were dumped in the mass graves left by the Rwandan army and its Congolese rebel front led by Laurent Kabila.
One of those who stayed in Zaire was Edmond Ngarambe, a lieutenant in the defeated Rwandan Hutu government's army. His journey over the following years was typical of the wandering, fighting existence of the Hutu exiles. He was in a refugee camp in Bukavu when the new Rwandan army - what had been the Tutsi rebel force that defeated his own - invaded.
Ngarambe fled east, deeper in to Zaire, with his wife and siblings. "I walked with my family to Tingi Tingi. I saw a lot of people die on the way. My brother was one of them. We started walking on 28 October 1996 and we arrived on the 25 December," he said.
But even Tingi Tingi, deep inside Zaire and hundreds of kilometres from the Rwandan border, proved no refuge. His enemies were still approaching. Mobutu organised an airlift of the defeated Hutu Rwandan army soldiers there to Kisangani on the banks of the Congo river.
"I was wounded in the war and tried to leave the army but my commanding officer wouldn't let me," said Ngarambe.
It wasn't long before Kisangani, too, fell to the Rwandan army and Kabila. Ngarambe fled just ahead of them, taking a boat down the river and then walking into the Central African Republic, where he was to stay for eight months.
"Our enemies were chasing us everywhere. I had to chose the path to resist because I didn't have anywhere to go. Congo was in the hands of Rwanda, it was at the mercy of Rwanda," he said. The Rwandan invaders reached their neighbour's capital city, Kinshasa in May 1997. Right to the end Mobutu could not fathom how it was that tiny Rwanda had toppled his once monolithic regime. He failed to understand the drive of the Tutsis in their determination to pursue the murderers of their people, and to protect the power they now wielded.
Mobutu also failed to grasp just how much the world had changed with the end of the Cold War, and how France and America would no longer protect his regime. He was forced to flee, and the Rwandans installed Laurent Kabila in his place in Kinshasa. Kabila promptly changed his country's name from Zaire back to the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Paul Kagame, then Rwanda's Tutsi vice-president but the real power in the land as the head of the army that had overthrown his country's Hutu regime, saw Kabila as his man in Kinshasa who would help crush the Hutu extremists and protect Rwanda's borders. But Kabila proved to be less of a puppet than the Rwandans hoped, and certainly less interested in dealing with the problem of the Hutu genocidaires than they expected. The two soon fell out. So Rwanda invaded again in 1998 intent on creating a buffer zone extending hundreds of kilometres from its border into Congo, and installing a client regime to administer it.
Ngarambe found himself inducted into the Congolese army, fighting for the man he had previously fought against, Kabila.
"Even though Kabila and his army of Tutsis came and killed us, we were obliged to forget that and join the Congo army. I fought in Katanga and Equateur [provinces]. That's how we liberated Congo," he said.
Kabila's recruitment of Rwandan Hutu forces and the genocidaires further infuriated Kagame in Rwanda, and opened the way to a prolonged war that drew in the Angolans and Zimbabweans on Congo's side while Uganda and Burundi lined up alongside Rwanda.
Plundering the DRC's diamonds
The conflict also evolved into a matter of conquest and plunder as foreign armies ran lucrative sidelines in eastern DRC's diamonds, gold and coltan, a valuable component of cellphones found in few other places in the world.
But for the Congolese the wars meant only more misery. That five years of slaughter after the second Rwandan invasion in 1998 cost so many lives that it has been called Africa's First World War. Millions died, mostly from disease and hunger, which means a high proportion of women and children. It was also a conflict marked by mass rape.
A shaky peace agreement in 2002 saw the withdrawal of foreign armies from the DRC, although local rebel groups tied to the Rwandan government continued to control much of the east of the country.
It also brought Ngarambe and his men back to Rwanda's border where they began years earlier. But it did little to reassure Rwanda over its security as the Hutu extremists in eastern DRC launched a new armed group, the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR) led by men who had overseen the genocide in Rwanda. Ngarambe was among them, and they vowed to drive the Tutsis from power and "liberate" Rwanda.
In 2006, the UN Security Council declared the Hutu rebels "a serious threat to stability". Their menacing control of swaths of eastern DRC is also arguably the single most important factor in the continuing conflict in the region despite numerous peace deals.
The Hutu extremists on Rwanda's border unnerve the Tutsi-led government in Kigali which fears that they may one day gain enough strength to do what they threaten and finish off the genocide.
From the DRC, Rwanda is seen as a belligerent power plundering its wealth. But Rwanda sees itself as besieged and fighting for the continued existence of the Tutsi people.
Which is why General Laurent Nkunda exists.
The renegade general
Nkunda is a former intelligence officer in the Rwandan army who went on to lead a rebel faction, now about 8 000 strong, in eastern DRC. His mission, he says, is to protect the local Tutsi population from the FDLR and other groups such as the Mai Mai.
But the Congolese government and the United Nations view Nkunda as a tool used by Rwanda to continue to destabilise eastern DRC.
The general is the walking stereotype of how Hutus portray Tutsis; tall and thin with a pinched face and pointed nose - all the attributes that led the Belgians to conclude that Tutsis were genetically superior because they more resembled white people physically than the shorter more rounded Hutus. Nkunda's hands are hardly spotless. In his campaign against the FDLR he has driven the Hutu population out of parts of the Congolese border province of North Kivu around Rutshuru and Masisi.
After a surge in rebel fighting in late 2007 against the DRC's government troops, several mass graves were uncovered that were almost certainly the responsibility of Nkunda's fighters.
Nkunda has also been accused of war crimes and is the subject of an investigation by the international criminal court over the massacre of 160 people in Kisangani, prompting Mary Robinson, then UN Human Rights Commissioner, to call for his arrest in 2002 following the abduction and beating of two UN investigators by his troops.
In 2004, soldiers under Nkunda's command attacked the town of Bukavu. A Human Rights Watch report said they "went house to house raping and looting". Among the victims were teenagers and three girls of three years old.
Nkunda denies doing Rwanda's bidding. "I am Rwandaphone and I was in the Rwandan army and I have friends there. But that doesn't mean they tell me what to do or they give me any help at all," he said in a Guardian interview at his headquarters near Masisi. But there are tell-tale signs of the links. Some of his troops speak English, suggesting that they are Rwandan Tutsis who grew up in exile in Uganda. Nkunda's forces control villages and towns, and run courts, collect taxes and appoint priests in the local churches. Nkunda has won some influential friends abroad, including the support of Christian evangelists from the United States. He has taken to wearing a badge: "Rebels for Christ".
Rwanda's former foreign minister, Charles Murigande, concedes that the renegade general serves his country's interests as his forces are the only ones combating the FDLR. "Yes but we should also tell people that we are ready to fight the FDLR. We do not need anybody to do it for us. If somebody is doing it for us, well and good. But if that somebody is not there, the FDLR should know and everybody should know that we are ready to fight FDLR if that's what they want," he told the Guardian.
In 2006, the FDLR planned "Operation Amizero", an infiltration of Rwanda to forcibly recruit school-age Hutu children as fighters and to lay the ground for a military assault by hiding weapons caches and scouting out targets for sabotage. The operation collapsed after FDLR defectors warned the Rwandan government.
The failure of the rebels to launch a successful cross-border raid over several years has been taken as evidence that they are weakening. Certainly the FDLR is facing increasing numbers of defectors despite its policy of killing any it catches.
But the Tutsi leadership in Rwanda remembers its own history, and is worried about a longer game. Many of them were driven into exile as children, escaping with their families the massacres of Tutsis as the Belgians oversaw a "Hutu revolution" in the run-up to independence in 1962.
Three decades later, they were back in Rwanda as rebels fighting to overthrow the Hutu government. It took them just four years to seize power, a lesson not lost the Tutsi leadership.
Charles Murigande, who was two years old when his family fled Rwanda, was his country's foreign minister for five years of the conflict in the DRC and remains in Paul Kagame's Cabinet.
"There are people who say that Rwanda has a very strong army, while FDLR are numbered somewhere between 6 000 and 10 000. They say that is not a very grave threat to one of the best armies on the African continent. But I really get shocked when brilliant minds espouse that flawed reasoning," he said.
"I have never heard people using the same reasoning to discount the threat of al-Qaeda. I have never heard them saying that because America is such a powerful country, having the most powerful and sophisticated army in the world, therefore al-Qaeda is not a threat. It is as if killing Rwandans is OK, and that is very painful."
guardian.co.uk © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2008
http://www.mg.co.za/articlepage.aspx?
area=/breaking_news/breaking_news__africa/&articleid=339340
Mother Jones:
Interrogating Errol Morris
The Oscar-winning filmmaker talks about turning his camera on Abu Ghraib for Standard Operating Procedure. Plus, the best political ads you never saw and why
Dave Gilson
May 01, 2008
In his new film, Standard Operating Procedure, Errol Morris turns his camera on Abu Ghraib. Employing the investigative and cinematic techniques he's honed in The Thin Blue Line and The Fog of War, the Oscar-winning filmmaker introduces new layers of visual and moral complexity to the scandal. The result, even four years after the prisoner abuse was uncovered, is revelatory. (The film is accompanied by a book of the same title coauthored by Philip Gourevitch.) Morris landed interviews with most of what he calls the "perverse band of brothers"—the soldiers who snapped and appeared in the iconic images, including Lynndie England. Yet the biggest surprise is Sabrina Harman, best known for flashing a thumbs-up while posing with the corpse of Manadel al-Jamadi, a prisoner killed in cia custody. She emerges as an all-American girl who got caught up in horribly un-American activities. "Sabrina is not a monster," says Morris. This refusal to pigeonhole his subjects has already earned him some controversy. The 60-year-old director took a break from his busy career, which includes blogging for the New York Times and directing TV ads, to talk.
Mother Jones: You've written on your blog that "It is easy to confuse photographs with reality." What reality surrounding the Abu Ghraib photos did you want to challenge?
Errol Morris: The photographs served as both an exposé and cover-up. They're probably some of the best-known photographs of all time. And people framed views of these photographs without knowing anything more than what they just saw in the photographs themselves, as if the photographs were self-explanatory. I just don't believe it works that way.
MJ: Are there specific interpretations of the photos that you see as misguided?
EM: Both the left and the right failed to look further than the photographs. For the left, the photos are the unmistakable fingerprints of Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Bush. For the right, it's these bad actors who acted on their own. Both interpretations fail to look beyond the photographs themselves to the reality of that place.
MJ: Do you ever consider the guards, considering that they were living in cells, being shelled daily, and bored out of their minds, prisoners of this situation as well?
EM: They themselves saw themselves as prisoners of this situation. They weren't prisoners in the same way, but yes, they were prisoners. Everybody was in fact trapped there. Trapped in different ways, different degrees of being trapped, but trapped. Trapped by a war that made very little sense that was prosecuted in a way that was confused and out of control, and devolved into nightmare.
MJ: Seeing the photos, do you ever think, "Thank God for digital cameras"?
EM: Yes, I do. Sabrina Harman, under another set of circumstances, would be given a Pulitzer. Our knowledge of the murder of al-Jamadi derives from the photographs she took of his corpse. She remarks in the movie that the only reason she wasn't prosecuted for the photographs was that they didn't want to draw additional attention to the fact that a murder had occurred.
MJ: Harman's pictures were clearly taken by someone who felt comfortable—they have this college-dorm feel to them. And yet, she says she was motivated by a sense of revulsion. Do you think these two impulses existed at the same time?
EM: Yes. I think there's this desire to explain human behavior in terms of the one reason why it happened, when in fact there may be multiple reasons, and it may be incredibly complex.
MJ: Does that complexity diminish the moral clarity of the situation?
EM: I think it goes so much deeper than that, and into the nature of this war. I think sexual humiliation is at the center of this war. Here's one of the really perverse oddities: You have a war that's based on sexual humiliation and someone takes a picture of an Iraqi male being humiliated by an American female. The picture is released and humiliates the government, so they seek to humiliate the people who took the picture by putting them in jail and blaming the failure of the entire war effort on them. If some evil genie on high were to concoct an utterly perverse, depraved world, he could do no better.
MJ: Lynndie England talks about the photos of her with the guy on the leash. Most people saw her dragging him across the floor; she says that's not what really happened. Do you believe her?
EM: Yes. She's five feet tall. She probably weighed 95 pounds at the time. I just don't see her dragging Iraqis around on leashes. There is something about the photographs that is endlessly disturbing. The fact that we like to think of them as torture actually hides what is really deeply offensive about them.
MJ: So do you think questions like whether she's pulling him are distractions from the larger issue?
EM: No, I don't. I think they're the essence of the larger issue, oddly enough. When I look at that photograph, there is something deeply mysterious about it to me. Is this a picture of torture? If it's a picture of something else, what is it? What Lynndie is telling you is that scene of "Gus" on the leash was something created so someone could take a picture of it. And in taking a picture of it they were illustrating something about this war involving an American male soldier and his female American soldier girlfriend humiliating, dominating an Iraqi male. We could talk about this endlessly.
MJ: You rebuilt part of Abu Ghraib for the movie. What was it like to work inside a recreation of the prison?
EM: Weird. I wanted to enter the world of the photographs. The movie is an investigation into the photographs properly considered. We had literally thousands of photographs from Abu Ghraib. There's between 200 and 300 photographs in this movie. It's a little bit like The Thin Blue Line. I wanted to put people in a situation where they would think about the details of the photographs, what actually they're looking at.
MJ: And filling in some of the gaps?
EM: I don't think it's filling in gaps. Filling in gaps means I know how to fill in gaps, which I don't necessarily know how to do. But I can lay out the story in a way where people are forced to think about it in a different way.
MJ: How did you get Lynndie England to talk to you?
EM: With enormous difficulty. It's true of everybody. I would say the hardest interview to get was [CACI contractor/interrogator] Tim Dugan. The fact that Tim ever did talk to me is utterly amazing. But that's part of what I do; I get people to talk to me.
MJ: Do you see a common thread running between the guards and Robert McNamara in The Fog of War?
EM: On one hand, you have this guy at the absolute top of the pyramid, and on the other hand you have people at the very bottom of the pyramid, put in this very strange, morally compromised setting. I hear these criticisms [of the film]: "You were supposed to address the chain of command; you were supposed to find the link to Rumsfeld and Cheney!" In Heart of Darkness, you don't hear a phone call between King Leopold and Kurtz where King Leopold says, "You have to treat the natives like dogs."
MJ: I read that you ran into Karl Rove and he told you The Fog of War is one of his favorite films. Do you think that just confirms what you've said about people seeing what they want to believe?
EM: I do. We're so used to thinking of the people who involved us in this war as beyond the pale that we can't even imagine their motivation. Karl Rove liked the movie, clearly. He said he gave it to his friends.
MJ: Do you think Interrotron [the unique on-camera interview technology Morris invented] makes people seem more human?
EM: I think it's in combination with me as an interviewer. I do think that the whole technique of creating a situation where people are talking to another person instead of talking to a camera and at the same time looking directly into the lens is valuable.
MJ: Has anyone else used the device?
EM: I know that people are starting to use it more and more. It's weird to me that it hasn't happened more quickly. I lost the opportunity to patent it. I never even thought I should patent it; I'm just stupid, I suppose.
MJ: As someone who spends so much time thinking about how to get people to talk to you, do you ever think about how so much of what happened at Abu Ghraib was under the guise of getting people to talk?
EM: It's really funny. When I first met Tim Dugan, he asked me, "How many people have you interrogated?" And I said, "I've never really interrogated anybody; I interview people. I try to create a situation where people will talk to me, but I've never looked at myself as an interrogator." And he said, "Well, how many people have you broken?" [Laughs.] If you thought rationally about what I do, you would say it's impossible. If you said, "You'll put people in a studio and interview them with a film crew present and expect to hear stuff that you've never heard before—could such a thing work?" The answer is, Yes! Is it self-evident? No.
DAMNED SPOTS
The best political ads you never saw
In 2004, Errol Morris made dozens of brilliantly simple pro-Kerry, anti-Bush TV spots for MoveOn.org. What happened next was a lesson in why political consultants suck. As Morris explains, "I make my money doing branding, marketing, and advertising. That's my bread and butter. The one intuition that I had was that ads that preach to the choir are not going to achieve anything. The only chance anyone had was appealing to people in the middle. I had done all these 'Switch' ads for Apple. And I said, 'Let's just do "Switch" ads! Let's interview people who voted for Bush in 2000 but can't bring themselves to vote for him in 2004.' I did about 50 ads." MoveOn aired only a few. Morris also approached the big boys: "I wanted to work for the dnc, the Kerry campaign—nothing worked. I really wanted to put Kerry on. I thought, 'Here you have a person who seems robotic and wooden; I could make him less so. In fact, I think I could turn him back into a person. Give him to me for a couple of hours.' But it never happened. That experience was so horrible."
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.
© 2008 The Foundation for National Progress
http://www.motherjones.com/interview/2008/05/interrogating-errol-morris.html
Página/12:
El “Test Tyson”
Por Mariana Carbajal
Viernes, 16 de Mayo de 2008
Cuántas veces nos hemos reído de los “bolu-tests” de algunas revistas que nos proponen un examen multiple choice para que descubramos si nuestra vida sexual es ardiente, nuestro novio nos dejó de amar o somos buenas esposas. Cuántas veces los hemos contestado a escondidas, a veces sin siquiera marcar la revista con crucecitas –memorizando nuestras elecciones– para que no quedaran pruebas de que nos habíamos enganchado con esa clase de propuesta banal. ¿Quién no lo hizo alguna vez? ¿Quién no se vio tentada por completar los cuadritos y sumar los puntos para ver al final en qué categoría encajaba? Lo tomamos como lo que son: un juego, un recreo, un pasatiempo divertido para compartir con amigas en la playa, en una tarde de chicas, mate de por medio o a solas en la sala de espera del dentista o la ginecóloga.
La edición digital de la revista Hombre, de la editorial Perfil, tiene colgado en su sección “Happy Hour” uno de esos tests. Lo llaman el “Test Tyson”, en alusión al famoso boxeador. Pero, lejos de ser un bolu-test más, es lisa y llanamente una apología de la violencia contra las mujeres. “¿Madura el KO?”, provoca desde el título y a continuación el sitio web le advierte al lector: “Si ves a una mina golpeada y pensás ‘algo habrá hecho’, esto es para vos”. Leerlo me produjo incomodidad, violencia: rompe con todas las reglas de los consensos tácitos sobre lo que se puede escribir o los chistes que se pueden hacer en un medio de comunicación. Voy a mencionar algunas de sus preguntas. La primera dice así: ¿Qué excusa usás para golpear a tu mujer? Las opciones son: a) Los fideos estaban fríos; b) Te miró “con esa cara”; c) Tuviste un mal día de trabajo; d) No hace falta una excusa. Todo es textual, no hay exageración. La segunda pregunta se refiere a “los métodos” de golpiza: a) Un puño envuelto en un repasador no deja marcas. b) El famoso cachetazo de proxeneta; con la cara externa de la mano derecha yendo en sentido diagonal de abajo hacia arriba y de izquierda a derecha. c) Tirás el plato (el de los fideos fríos, por ejemplo) al suelo y cuando se agacha a limpiar el enchastre la aleccionás con un puntapié en las costillas. d) Te gusta improvisar.
Insisto, no estoy exagerando: El “Test Tyson” dice eso y mucho más. Por ejemplo, la sexta pregunta es: ¿Cada cuánto la aleccionás?. Y la séptima se refiere a la duración de la “sesión adoctrinante” y entre las respuestas posibles figuran “le das hasta que quede morado” o “aflojás cuando se te acalambra la mano”.
Descuento que no fue hecho en serio, que es una “jodita”, un juego cómplice con los lectores. Pero con este tema no se juega ni se embroma. Lo dije hace algunas semanas cuando me indigné por un spot publicitario que se emitió antes de cada película en el último Festival de Cine Independiente organizado por el gobierno de la ciudad en Buenos Aires, el Bafici, donde se daba una bofetada en la cara a una señora mayor, haciéndole saltar los anteojos y a continuación se escuchaba una voz en off que decía: “Despertate que viene lo nuevo”. Con este tema no se juega. Es evidente que es necesario insistir.
La violencia contra las mujeres denigra, humilla, desfigura, destruye la autoestima y muchas veces mata. En apenas un mes, enero de 2008, al menos doce mujeres –con nombre y apellido, proyectos, historias, familias– fueron asesinadas en el país por sus parejas, novios u otro hombre cercano, o alguno de ellos está entre los principales sospechosos de matarlas. Angelina Pomito, en Córdoba; María Martínez, en La Plata; Mariana Aylén Viva, en Bahía Blanca; María Gomba, en Chubut, y la lista continúa. Y continuará.
¿Qué pasaría si la revista propusiera un test para medir cuán xenófobo o racista es el lector, y la víctima fuera entonces una persona judía, de raza negra o de origen chino? Dudo que alguna editorial se atreviera a publicarlo. Y si lo hiciera, de inmediato le caerían denuncias por discriminación racial o xenofobia. Pero la violencia contra las mujeres está tan naturalizada aún en la sociedad argentina que un “Test Tyson” se difunde y pocos se horrorizan. El Movimiento de Mujeres de Córdoba acaba de presentar una denuncia ante el Inadi contra la revista. Por ellas conocí esta pieza imperdonable.
Michael Foucault escribió que “todo poder es un poder de vida o muerte”. El poder de un medio no puede convalidar la violencia de género. Con algunos temas no se hacen chistes ni se juega. La violencia contra las mujeres mata.
© 2000-2008 www.pagina12.com.ar|Todos los Derechos Reservados
http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/sociedad/3-104255-2008-05-16.html
Página/12:
Un hambre infame
Por Boaventura de Sousa Santos *
Viernes, 16 de Mayo de 2008
Conocido hace tiempo por los que estudian la cuestión alimentaria, el escándalo finalmente estalló en la opinión pública: la sustitución de la agricultura familiar, campesina, orientada a la autosuficiencia alimentaria y a los mercados locales, por la gran agroindustria, orientada al monocultivo de productos de exportación (flores, soja, etc.), lejos de resolver el problema de la alimentación mundial, lo agrava. Habiendo prometido erradicar el hambre del mundo en veinte años, hoy nos enfrentamos con una situación peor de la que existía hace cuatro décadas. Cerca de un sexto de la humanidad pasa hambre: según el Banco Mundial, 33 países están al borde de una crisis alimentaria grave; aun en los países más desarrollados los bancos de alimentos están por perder sus reservas; y volvieron las revueltas del hambre, que en algunos países ya causaron muertes. Mientras tanto, la ayuda alimentaria de la ONU hoy está comprando a 780 dólares la tonelada de alimentos que en marzo pasado compraba a 460 dólares.
La opinión pública está siendo sistemáticamente desinformada sobre este tema para que no se dé cuenta de lo que está pasando. Es que lo que está pasando es explosivo y puede ser resumido del siguiente modo: el hambre del mundo es la nueva gran fuente de lucro del gran capital financiero, y sus ganancias aumentan en la misma proporción que el hambre.
El hambre en el mundo no es un fenómeno nuevo. Desde la Edad Media hasta el siglo XIX fueron famosas en Europa las revueltas del hambre (con el saqueo de comerciantes y la imposición de la distribución gratuita del pan). Lo que es nuevo en el hambre del siglo XXI son sus causas y el modo en que las principales son ocultadas. A la opinión pública se le ha informado que el hambre está ligado a la escasez de productos agrícolas, y que ésta se debe a las malas cosechas provocadas por el calentamiento global y las alteraciones climáticas; al aumento del consumo de cereales en la India y en China; al incremento de los costos de los transportes debido a la suba del petróleo; a la creciente reserva de tierras agrícolas para producir agrocombustibles. Todas estas causas han contribuido al problema, pero no son suficientes para explicar que el precio de la tonelada de arroz se haya triplicado desde el inicio de 2007.
Estos aumentos especulativos, como los del precio del petróleo, son el resultado de que el capital financiero (bancos, fondos de pensiones, fondos hedge de alto riesgo y rendimiento) ha comenzado a invertir fuertemente en los mercados internacionales de productos agrícolas, tras la crisis de la inversión en el sector inmobiliario. En articulación con las grandes empresas que controlan el mercado de semillas y la distribución mundial de cereales, el capital financiero invierte en el mercado de futuros con la expectativa de que los precios continuarán subiendo y, al hacerlo, se refuerza esa expectativa. Cuanto más altos sean los precios, más hambre habrá en el mundo, mayores serán las ganancias de las empresas y los retornos de las inversiones financieras. En los últimos meses, los meses en que aumentó el hambre, las ganancias de la mayor empresa de semillas y cereales aumentaron un 83 por ciento. O sea, el hambre de lucro de Cargill se alimenta del hambre de millones de seres humanos.
El escándalo del enriquecimiento de algunos a costa del hambre y la subnutrición de millones ya no puede ser disfrazado con “generosas” ayudas alimentarias. Tales ayudas son un fraude que encubre otro mayor: las políticas económicas neoliberales que hace treinta años vienen forzando a los países del Tercer Mundo a dejar de elaborar los productos agrícolas necesarios para alimentar a sus propias poblaciones y a concentrarse en productos de exportación, con los cuales ganarán divisas que les permitirán importar productos agrícolas... de los países más desarrollados. Quien tenga dudas sobre este fraude, que compare la reciente “generosidad” de los Estados Unidos en la ayuda alimentaria con su consistente voto en la ONU contra el derecho a la alimentación reconocido por todos los demás países.
El terrorismo fue el primer gran aviso de que no se puede continuar impunemente con la destrucción o el robo de la riqueza de algunos países para beneficio exclusivo de un pequeño grupo de países más poderosos. El hambre y la revuelta que acarrea parecen ser el segundo aviso. Para responder eficazmente será necesario poner fin a la globalización neoliberal tal como la conocemos. El capitalismo global debe volver a sujetarse a reglas que no sean las que él mismo establece para su beneficio. Debe exigirse una moratoria inmediata en las negociaciones sobre productos agrícolas en curso en la Organización Mundial del Comercio. Los ciudadanos tienen que comenzar a privilegiar los mercados locales, a rechazar en los supermercados los productos que vienen de lejos, a exigir del Estado y de los municipios la creación de incentivos a la producción agrícola local, a exigir que las agencias nacionales de seguridad alimentaria, donde las haya, entiendan que la agricultura y la alimentación industriales no son el remedio contra la inseguridad alimentaria. Bien por el contrario, son su causa.
* Doctor en Sociología, catedrático de las universidades de Coimbra (Portugal) y de Wisconsin (EE.UU.).
Traducción: Javier Lorca.
© 2000-2008 www.pagina12.com.ar|Todos los Derechos Reservados
http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/contratapa/13-104239-2008-05-16.html
The Independent:
Beichuan: a vision of hell
Beichuan was a town of 160,000 nestling in one of the world's most beautiful valleys. When rescuers arrived yesterday, they found a scene of unimaginable devastation and despair
By Clifford Coonan in Beichuan
Friday, 16 May 2008
Reaching Beichuan is a long march into hell. When you finally emerge scrabbling through the dirt into the town, what lies before you is a breathtaking vision of horror. Official estimates say China's worst natural disaster in 30 years has claimed 50,000 lives so far, but looking at the devastation here, it is hard not to imagine the final toll will be much, much higher.
Beichuan county in Sichuan province used to be home to 160,000 people, and most of them lived in the now-forsaken town of the same name, nestling in one of the world's most beautiful valleys. But everyone is gone, either dead or having abandoned their flattened home.
Beichuan was too close to the epicentre of this week's earthquake to stand a chance. At least 80 per cent of it is destroyed, with many thousands of bodies still buried in the rubble. It's hard to imagine this place ever functioning as a town again.
There is still no access by road. People's Liberation Army soldiers rally behind red flags at a rescue station three kilometres away, before starting the trek into the heart of this shattered place.
Our journey to reach Beichuan, which has been almost completely cut off since last Monday's quake, began at a good pace but we were soon forced to slow to a solemn, single-file column as we negotiated the side of the mountain. We stopped to allow soldiers carrying bodies, and occasional survivors to pass, their faces straining with the exertion of carrying their heavy burdens up these steep slopes and across the wreckage of roads and fields.
The narrow access track up to the town is also full of villagers bringing whatever little items they can as they scramble back to the refugee camps in neighbouring towns spared the worst of the quake. These are often old people, who move slowly but steadily, in a way that clearly irritates the fit young teenage troops itching to get past. But who is going to tell a grandmother carrying her life on her back to speed up?
The first sighting of what used to be the town happens about two kilometres away. It now looks like a model railway village that a nasty child has melted and covered with sand. The town was built on the sides of the valley and when the earthquake struck, the buildings slid down on top of others in a sickening concertina, leaving most of the settlement collapsed at the base of the valley. One or two large, newer buildings survived but the other big buildings folded on houses and apartment blocks, leaving mountains of rubble dozens of feet high.
Every day I have reported the story of the Sichuan earthquake it has seemed impossible to imagine things getting worse. Hanwang, with its bodies lying everywhere, was grotesque. Dujiangyan, where hundreds of teenagers were dragged out dead from the mud, was nightmarish. But every day is worse than the next. No one knows what horrors await after Wenchuan, directly above the epicentre, is opened up. At this stage, there can be precious few survivors there. But Beichuan is a truly horrendous sight. The prospect of the death toll reaching beyond 50,000 looks increasingly likely.
Driving up along the valley, along the Chang Jiang, or Long River, which we call the Yangtze, a JCB carrying a mound of corpses wrapped in tarpaulin was an early sign that the scene in Beichuan was going to be harrowing. But it was worse, much worse, than I'd expected.
Shutters are pulled three-quarters of the way down on some shop fronts, and feet are visible beneath them, but the grocer's and fruit shops they are meant to protect are just giant mounds of debris.
At the Middle School, hundreds were buried alive, just as they had been in other schools around Sichuan. The town's prison collapsed, and who knows how many inmates died.
Negotiating the rubble is torturous; finding survivors even worse. Outside a kindergarten, parents went around calling the names of their children. A pile of small bodies had already been recovered and lay on the ground. This earthquake happened during school time, at 2.30pm.
One man found his son's body in the pile, wrapped it carefully in a plastic sheet and carried him away. His wife is a migrant worker who lives elsewhere in China and he tried to call her on his mobile to tell her their child was dead, but there was no signal yet.
"There are people alive in there, and over there, and over there," said one rescuer, outside the ruins of a hairdressing salon. "But we can't get them out; what are we supposed to do."
It's impossible not to get swept up in the relief effort; anyone who is in this town has to help, journalist or not. A crying woman said she could hear cries from beneath the rubble, and I was sent to find a stretcher and workers, but by the time we got back with assistance, the rubble had shifted and there was only a body. People hear things in earthquake zones, mistaking the wailing of the bereaved for the cries of help from their loved ones. Rescuers clamber around the debris shouting "hello" and "anyone there" but only an eerie silence answers.
The rescue effort is centred on one very small section on the edge of town, and only a tiny part of Beichuan has been explored so far. Premier Wen Jiabao, who has flown around from disaster area to disaster area in a helicopter, has visited the town twice so far, but he has been able only to voice words of encouragement to the rescue workers.
China has, cautiously, welcomed some foreign input. When Mr Wen first visited the town he spotted an American doctor, Brian Robinson of the Heart to Heart aid outfit, walking with other volunteers along the road and he ordered the car to stop. He embraced the doctor, thanked him and told him to go to Beichuan and help. An unprecedented action.
It is still impossible to get through to Beichuan with meaningful assistance and aid: most of the cranes, medical supplies and military personnel are all still back down the valley at the disaster relief headquarters.
Rescuers struggle across a bridge lying on the river bed in large chunks, a smashed car on what was the roadside the only evidence that this was ever a bridge. In the streets, the smell of corpses is accentuated by the searing heat that has replaced the heavy rain of days ago. The dry weather makes rescue work easier, but you cannot help worrying about disease being the next problem here.
At one point yesterday there was a small aftershock, causing brief panic. People are also angry that it has taken so long for the relief effort to make it to Beichuan, saying there were hundreds of people crying and shouting in the rubble even on Wednesday, but that it was too late now. There was little evidence of sniffer dogs, hi-tech equipment, and not too many helicopters around either; you would expect to see choppers ferrying supplies and people.
What they have is primitive relief work: manpower and womanpower. Thousands of soldiers and volunteers have arrived in the area, some from as far away as the provincial capital and other parts of China.
Anger, too, is growing about the poor quality of buildings. In Mianzhu, an apartment block collapsed on itself. The flats had been built using contributions from a local work unit, a group of workers organised by the Communist Party at a factory or office. Residents searching for survivors said it was because corrupt officials had demanded so much in kickbacks that the building fell. The neighbouring buildings had not collapsed, including one which housed cadres from the Communist Party. "Show me the structural steel in that building," said one woman, whose mother is missing in the rubble. "It all went into some official's pocket," she spat.
The foreign media have a poor image in China because most people now believe the international community does not want China to host the Olympics and is planning a boycott. This makes reporting the disaster difficult; before the anti-Chinese riots in Tibet, and the sympathetic view of Tibetans in the Western media, foreign journalists were popular. Now we are seen as a threat. But the soldiers are still helpful, even offering to lift us over the worst of the holes.
All privately owned cars are stopped at a roadblock 20 kilometres from the town to give better access to emergency vehicles. We leave our car and start to walk, but we are picked up by a trio of relief workers in a blue CDW truck, laden with baskets for carrying debris. For the first time in four days of reporting the Sichuan earthquake, I see the classic quake image, the fissure stretching the length of a road, made by tectonic plates shifting and tearing the Tarmac apart.
Later even this truck is stopped and we walk the remaining three kilometres with volunteers from nearby Mianyang, bringing money, clothes, food and water. "We are all one family and one nation and when our friend suffers, it's our duty to help," says Lu Fushan, 49, a farmer. His truck was stopped, as were many of the volunteers, because there is not enough room for the material to get through.
Dotted along the narrow mountainside road are smashed cars and rocks the size of lorries, which limit traffic to one lane. There are hundreds of military vehicles along the roadside.
Back along the valley, a couple sit clinging to each other on a bench, looking at the wreckage of their house. "Our house is smashed, broken," says Fu Youjun, 34, a farmer. "My father is in the hospital. We felt the quake, we were terribly scared and we rushed out. When we came out we just saw white smoke and dust.
"My brother is in town, but I can't reach him. Lots of friends and relatives. We can't get in touch with them, we tried to get through to them but there's no road. And the water is rising, there could be flooding too. I don't know what we'll do next,"
His wife, Wang Hongmei, 30, says: "The house is slipped, subsided. My nephew is in there, over there in Beichuan. What are we going go do? We just got married this year."
But even amid the heartbreak of Beichuan there is an occasional story of hope. "Don't help me, help the others, they need it more," one woman said, as soldiers bore her on a stretcher into a makeshift first-aid centre, seconds after pulling her from the wreckage. She had lived through 72 almost unbelievable hours under the rubble.
At the first-aid station, there is no time for medics to find the woman's name. She looks a youthful 40, wearing a pale blue top and smart trousers. She is weak and delirious, but so far she is alive. The woman is carried on a stretcher back across the mountains by eight strong, sure-footed young PLA soldiers.
Back at the rescue station, rescuers form a cordon for the returning stretchers. When a survivor is brought through, the soldiers cheer, and when yet another stretcher comes through with a corpse there are disappointed murmurs and sad comments.
The woman is brought through on the stretcher, a scarf covering her face, and the response is at first muted, depressed. Then, she raises her hand and waves; the scarf is there to protect her from the hot sun. Some of the PLA's most hardened troops laugh and cheer like schoolboys. This one is alive.
©independent.co.uk
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/beichuan-a-vision-of-hell-829301.html
The Nation:
Regime-Quakes in Burma and China
lookout
By Naomi Klein
May 15, 2008
When news arrived of the catastrophic earthquake in Sichuan, my mind turned to Zheng Sun Man, an up-and-coming security executive I met on a recent trip to China. Zheng heads Aebell Electrical Technology, a Guangzhou-based company that makes surveillance cameras and public address systems and sells them to the government.
Zheng, a 28-year-old MBA with a text-messaging addiction, was determined to persuade me that his cameras and speakers are not being used against pro-democracy activists or factory organizers. They are for managing natural disasters, Zheng explained, pointing to the freak snowstorms before Lunar New Year. During the crisis, the government "was able to use the feed from the railway cameras to communicate how to deal with the situation and organize an evacuation. We saw how the central government can command from the north emergencies in the south."
Of course, surveillance cameras have other uses too-like helping to make "Most Wanted" posters of Tibetan activists. But Zheng did have a point: nothing terrifies a repressive regime quite like a natural disaster. Authoritarian states rule by fear and by projecting an aura of total control. When they suddenly seem short-staffed, absent or disorganized, their subjects can become dangerously emboldened. It's something to keep in mind as two of the most repressive regimes on the planet-China and Burma-struggle to respond to devastating disasters: the Sichuan earthquake and Cyclone Nargis. In both cases, the disasters have exposed grave political weaknesses within the regimes-and both crises have the potential to ignite levels of public rage that would be difficult to control.
When China is busily building itself up, residents tend to stay quiet about what they all know: developers regularly flout safety codes, while local officials are bribed not to notice. But when China comes tumbling down-including at least eight schools-the truth has a way of escaping. "Look at all the buildings around. They were the same height, but why did the school fall down?" demanded a distraught relative in Juyuan. A mother in Dujiangyan told the Guardian, "Chinese officials are too corrupt and bad.... They have money for prostitutes and second wives but they don't have money for our children."
That the Olympic stadiums were built to withstand powerful quakes is suddenly of little comfort. When I was in China, it was hard to find anyone willing to criticize the Olympic spending spree. Now posts on mainstream web portals are calling the torch relay "wasteful" and its continuation in the midst of so much suffering "inhuman."
None of this compares with the rage boiling over in Burma, where cyclone survivors have badly beaten at least one local official, furious at his failure to distribute aid. There have been dozens of reports of the Burmese junta taking credit for supplies sent by foreign countries. It turns out that they have been taking more than credit-in some cases they have been taking the aid. According to a report in Asia Times, the regime has been hijacking food shipments and distributing them among its 400,000 soldiers. The reason speaks to the threat the disaster poses to the very existence of the regime. The generals, it seems, are "haunted by an almost pathological fear of a split inside their own ranks...if soldiers are not given priority in aid distribution and are unable to feed themselves, the possibility of mutiny rises." Mark Farmaner, director of Burma Campaign UK, confirms that before the cyclone, the military was already coping with a wave of desertions.
This relatively small-scale theft of food is fortifying the junta for its much larger heist-the one taking place via the constitutional referendum the generals have insisted on holding, come hell and high water. Enticed by high commodity prices, Burma's generals have been gorging off the country's natural abundance, stripping it of gems, timber, rice and oil. As profitable as this arrangement is, junta leader Gen. Than Shwe knows he cannot resist the calls for democracy indefinitely.
Taking a page out of the playbook of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, the generals have drafted a Constitution that allows for elections but guarantees that no future government will ever have the power to prosecute them for their crimes or take back their ill-gotten wealth. As Farmaner puts it, after elections the junta leaders "are going to be wearing suits instead of boots." The cyclone, meanwhile, has presented them with one last, vast business opportunity: by blocking aid from reaching the highly fertile Irrawaddy delta, hundreds of thousands of mostly ethnic Karen rice farmers are being sentenced to death. According to Farmaner, "that land can be handed over to the generals' business cronies" (shades of the beachfront land grabs in Sri Lanka and Thailand after the Asian tsunami). This isn't incompetence, or even madness. It's laissez-faire ethnic cleansing.
If the Burmese junta avoids mutiny and achieves these goals, it will be thanks largely to China, which has vigorously blocked all attempts at the United Nations for humanitarian intervention in Burma. Inside China, where the central government is going to great lengths to show itself as compassionate, news of this complicity could prove explosive. Will China's citizens receive this news? They just might. Beijing has, up to now, displayed an awesome determination to censor and monitor all forms of communication. But in the wake of the quake, the notorious "Great Firewall" censoring the Internet is failing badly. Blogs are going wild, and even state reporters are insisting on reporting the news.
This may be the greatest threat that natural disasters pose to repressive regimes. For China's rulers, nothing has been more crucial to maintaining power than the ability to control what people see and hear. If they lose that, neither surveillance cameras nor loudspeakers will be able to help them.
About Naomi Klein
Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist and syndicated columnist and the author of the international and New York Times bestseller The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (September 2007); an earlier international best-seller, No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies; and the collection Fences and Windows: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate (2002).
Copyright © 2008 The Nation
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080602/klein
ZNet:
Welcome to the Age of Homeland Insecurity
By Tom Englehardt
Source: TomDispatch
May, 16 2008
Once upon a time, I studied the Chinese martial art of Tai Chi - until, that is, I realized I would never locate my "chi." At that point, I threw in the towel and took up Western exercise. Still, the principle behind Tai Chi stayed with me - that you could multiply the force of an act by giving way before the force of others; that a smaller person could use the strength of a bigger one against him.
Now, jump to September 11, 2001 and its aftermath - and you know the Tai Chi version of history from there. Think of it as a grim cosmic joke - that the 9/11 attacks, as apocalyptic as they looked, were anything but. The true disasters followed and the wounds were largely self-inflicted, as the most militarily powerful nation on the planet used its own force to disable itself.
Before that fateful day, the Bush administration had considered terrorism, Osama bin Laden, and al-Qaeda subjects for suckers and wusses. What they were intent on was pouring money into developing an elaborate boondoggle of a missile defense system against future nuclear attacks by rogue states. Those Cold War high frontiersmen (and women) couldn't get enough of the idea of missiling up. That, after all, was where the money and the fun seemed to be. Nuclear was where the big boys - the nation states - played. "Bin Laden determined to strike in U.S....," the CIA told the President that August. Yawn.
After 9/11, of course, George W. Bush and his top advisors almost instantly launched their crusade against Islam and then their various wars, all under the rubric of the Global War on Terror. (As Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld pungently put the matter that September, "We have a choice - either to change the way we live, which is unacceptable, or to change the way that they live; and we chose the latter.") By then, they were already heading out to "drain the swamp" of evil doers, 60 countries worth of them, if necessary. Meanwhile, they moved quickly to fight the last battle at home, the one just over, by squandering vast sums on an American Maginot Line of security. The porous new Department of Homeland Security, the NSA, the FBI, and other acronymic agencies were to lock down, surveil, and listen in on America. All this to prevent "the next 9/11."
In the process, they would treat bin Laden's scattered al-Qaeda network as if it were the Nazi or Soviet war machine (even comically dubbing his followers "Islamofascists"). In the blinking of an eye, and in the rubble of two enormous buildings in downtown Manhattan, bin Laden and his cronies had morphed from nobodies into supermen, a veritable Legion of Doom. (There was a curious parallel to this transformation in World War II. Before Pearl Harbor, American experts had considered the Japanese - as historian John Dower so vividly documented in his book War Without Mercy - bucktoothed, near-sighted military incompetents whose war planes were barely capable of flight. On December 8, 1941, they suddenly became a race of invincible supermen without, in the American imagination, ever passing through a human incarnation.)
When, in October 2001, Congress passed the Patriot Act, and an Office of Homeland Security (which, in 2002, became a "department") was established, it was welcome to the era of homeland insecurity. From then on, every major building, landmark, amusement park, petting zoo, flea market, popcorn stand, and toll booth anywhere in the country would be touted as a potential target for terrorists and in need of protection. Every police department from Arkansas to Ohio would be in desperate need of anti-terror funding. And why not, when the terrorists loomed so monstrously large, were so apocalyptically capable, and wanted so very badly to destroy our way of life? No wonder that, in the 2006 National Asset Database, compiled by the Department of Homeland Security, the state of Indiana, "with 8,591 potential terrorist targets, had 50 percent more listed sites than New York (5,687) and more than twice as many as California (3,212), ranking the state the most target-rich place in the nation."
In the administration's imagination (and the American one), they were now capable of anything. From their camps in the backlands of Afghanistan (or was it the suburbs of Hamburg?), as well as in the murky global underworld of the arms black market, al-Qaeda's minions were toiling feverishly to lay their hands on the most fiendish of plagues and pestilences - smallpox, botulism, anthrax, you name it. They were preparing to fill suitcases with nuclear weapons for deposit in downtown Manhattan. They were gathering nuclear refuse for dirty bombs. Nothing was too mad or destructive for them. Every faint but strange odor - the sweet smell of maple syrup floating across a city - was a potential bio-attack. And everywhere, even in rural areas, politicians were strapping on their armor and preparing to run imminent-danger, anti-terror campaigns, while urging their constituents to run for cover. Meanwhile, that former Sodom of the New World, New York City, had somehow been transformed into an I-heart-NY T-shirt-and-cap combo.
So, thank you, Osama bin Laden for expediting the Department of Homeland Security, glutting an already bloated Pentagon with even more money, ensuring that all those "expeditionary forces" would sally forth to cause havoc and not find victory in two hopeless wars, enabling the establishment of a vast offshore prison network (and the torture techniques to go with it), and creating a whole new global "security" industry to "thwart terrorists" that was, by 2006, generating $60 billion a year in business and whose domestic wing was devoted to locking down America.
When the history of this era is finally written, based on the Tai Chi Principle, Osama bin Laden and his scattering of followers may be credited for goading the fundamentalist leaders of the United States into using the power in their grasp so - not to put a fine point on it - stupidly and profligately as to send the planet's "sole superpower" into decline. Above all, bin Laden and his crew of fanatics will have ensured one thing: that the real security problems of our age were ignored in Washington until far too late in favor of mad dreams and dark phantoms. In this lies a bleak but epic tale of folly worthy of a great American novelist (wherever she is).
In the meantime, consider the following little list - 15 numbers that offer an indication of just what the Tai Chi Principle meant in action these last years; just where American energies did and did not flow; and, in the end, just how much less safe we are now than we were in January 2001, when George W. Bush entered the Oval Office:
536,000,000,000: the number of dollars the Pentagon is requesting for the 2009 military budget. This represents an increase of almost 70% over the Pentagon's 2001 budget of $316 billion - and that's without factoring in "supplementary" requests to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the President's Global War on Terror. Add in those soaring sums and military spending has more than doubled in the Bush era. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, since 2001, funding for "defense and related programs... has jumped at an annual average rate of 8%... - four times faster than the average rate of growth for Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid (2%), and 27 times faster than the average rate for growth for domestic discretionary programs (0.3%)."
1,390,000: the number of subprime foreclosures over the next two years, as estimated by Credit Suisse analysts. They also predict that, by the end of 2012, 12.7% of all residential borrowers may be out of their homes as part of a housing crisis that caught the Bush administration totally off-guard.
1,000,000: the number of "missions" or "sorties" the U.S. Air Force proudly claims to have flown in the Global War on Terror since 9/11, more than one-third of them (about 353,000) in what it still likes to call Operation Iraqi Freedom. This is a good measure of where American energies (and oil purchases) have gone these last years.
509,000: the number of names found in 2007 on a "terrorist watch list" compiled by the FBI. No longer, in George Bush's America, is a 10 Most Wanted list adequate. According to ABC News, "U.S. lawmakers and their spouses have been detained because their names were on the watch list" and Saddam Hussein was on the list even when in U.S. custody. By February 2008, according to the American Civil Liberties Union, the names on the same FBI list had ballooned to 900,000.
300,000: the number of American troops who now suffer from major depression or post-traumatic stress, according to a recent RAND study. This represents almost one out of every five soldiers who served in Iraq or Afghanistan. Even more - approximately 320,000 - "report possible brain injuries from explosions or other head wounds." This, RAND reports, represents a barely dealt with "major health crisis." The depression and PTSD alone will, the study reported, "cost the nation as much as $6.2 billion in the two years following deployment."
51,000: the number of post-surge Iraqi prisoners held in American and Iraqi jails at the end of 2007. In that country, the U.S. now runs "perhaps the world's largest extrajudicial internment camp," Camp Bucca, whose holding capacity is, even now, being expanded from 20,000 to 30,000 prisoners. Then there's Camp Cropper, with at least 4,000 prisoners, including "hundreds of juveniles." Many of these prisoners were simply swept up in surge raids and have been held without charges or access to lawyers or courts ever since. Add in prisoners (in unknown numbers) in our sizeable network of prisons in Afghanistan, at Guantanamo, and in our various offshore and borrowed prisons; add in, as well, the widespread mistreatment of prisoners at American hands; and you have the machinery for the manufacture of vast numbers of angry potential enemies, some undoubtedly willing to commit almost any act of revenge. Though there is no way to tabulate the numbers, hundreds of thousands of prisoners have certainly cycled through the Bush administration's various prisons in these last seven years, many emerging embittered. (And don't forget their embittered families.) Think of all this as an enormous dystopian experiment in "social networking," the Facebook from Hell without the Internet.
5,700: the number of trailers in New Orleans - issued by the Federal Emergency Management Agency as temporary housing after Hurricane Katrina - still occupied by people who lost their homes in the storm almost three years ago. Such trailers have also been found to contain toxic levels of formaldehyde fumes. Katrina ("Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job") was but one of many security disasters for the Bush administration.
658: the number of suicide bombings worldwide last year, including 542 in Afghanistan and Iraq, "more than double the number in any of the past 25 years." Of all the suicide bombings in the past quarter century, more than 86% have occurred since 2001, according to U.S. government experts. At least one of those bombers - who died in a recent coordinated wave of suicide bombings in the Iraqi city of Mosul - was a Kuwaiti, Abdallah Salih al-Ajmi, who had spent years locked up in Guantanamo.
511: the number of applicants convicted of felony crimes, including burglary, grand larceny, and aggravated assault, who were accepted into the U.S. Army in 2007, more than double the 249 accepted in 2006. According to the New York Times, between 2006 and 2007, those enrolled with convictions for wrongful possession of drugs (not including marijuana) almost doubled, for burglaries almost tripled, for grand larceny/larceny more than doubled, for robbery more than tripled, for aggravated assault went up by 30%, and for "terroristic threats including bomb threats" doubled (from one to two). Feel more secure yet?
126: the number of dollars it took to buy a barrel of crude oil on the international market this week. Meanwhile, the average price of a gallon of regular gas at the pump in the U.S. hit $3.72, while the price of gas jumped almost 20 cents in Michigan in a week, 36 cents in Utah in a month, and busted the $4 ceiling in Westchester, New York, a rise of 65 cents in the last year. Just after the 9/11 attacks, a barrel of crude oil was still in the $20 range; at the time of the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, it was at about $30. In other words, since 9/11, a barrel of crude has risen more than $100 without the Bush administration taking any serious steps to promote energy conservation, cut down on the U.S. oil "addiction," or develop alternative energy strategies (beyond a dubious program to produce more ethanol).
82: the percentage of Americans who think "things in this country... have gotten pretty seriously off on the wrong track," according to the most recent Washington Post-ABC News poll. This is the gloomiest Americans have been about the "direction" of the country in the last 15 years of such polling.
40: the percentage loss ("on a trade-weighted basis") in the value of the dollar since 2001. The dollar's share of total world foreign exchange reserves has also dropped from 73% to 64% in that same period. According to the Center for American Progress, "By early May 2008, a dollar bought 42.9% fewer euros, 35.7% fewer Canadian dollars, 37.7% fewer British pounds, and 17.3% fewer Japanese yen than in March 2001."
37: the number of countries that have experienced food protests or riots in recent months due to soaring food prices, a global crisis of insecurity that caught the Bush administration completely unprepared. In the last year, the price of wheat has risen by 130%, of rice by 74%, of soya by 87%, and of corn by 31%.
0: the number of terrorist attacks by al-Qaeda or similar groups inside the United States since September 11, 2001.
So consider "the homeland" secure. Mission accomplished.
And if you doubt that, here's one last figure, representative of the ultimate insecurity that, by conscious omission as well as commission, the Bush administration has left a harried future to deal with: That number is 387: Scientists at the Mauna Loa observatory in Hawaii just released new information on carbon dioxide - the major greenhouse gas - in the atmosphere, and it's at a record high of 387 parts per million, "up almost 40% since the industrial revolution and the highest for at least the last 650,000 years." Its rate of increase is on the rise as well. Behind all these figures lurks a potential world of insecurity with which this country has not yet come to grips.
Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com, is the co-founder of the American Empire Project. His book, The End of Victory Culture (University of Massachusetts Press), has been updated in a newly issued edition that deals with victory culture's crash-and-burn sequel in Iraq.
[This article first appeared on Tomdispatch.com, a weblog of the Nation Institute, which offers a steady flow of alternate sources, news, and opinion from Tom Engelhardt, long time editor in publishing, co-founder of the American Empire Project and author of The End of Victory Culture (University of Massachusetts Press), which has just been thoroughly updated in a newly issued edition that deals with victory culture's crash-and-burn sequel in Iraq.]
From: Z Net - The Spirit Of Resistance Lives
URL: http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/17652
posted by attilav at 20:07
5 Comments:
How can i wipe out windows xp from my laptop and reinstall windows Me -the laptops native software?
I be struck by recently bought a in use accustomed to laptop that is old. The mortal physically I had bought it from had installed windows xp on it, even though it at came with windows Me. I be to oust the windows xp because it runs slows on the laptop because it takes up more honour than the windows Me would. Also I want to unseat windows xp because it is an illegal copy. So when I tried to run updates on it, windows would not initiate updates because the windows xp is not genuine. [URL=http://aoryvuo.hostific.com]aileen aponte[/URL]
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Answers :
It's better to leave [URL=http://xojeucj.hostific.com/mermaid-pendant.html]mermaid pendant[/URL] Windows XP and impartial upgrade your laptop. It's much better. [URL=http://picdemi.hostific.com/katerina-konec.html]katerina konec[/URL] In addition, Windows XP is trail [URL=http://gartomw.justfree.com/hertz-rental-car-malaga-spain.html]hertz rental car malaga spain[/URL] better then Windows Me. Windows Me is out and tons programs that can hustle with XP, can't [URL=http://ltufakb.hostific.com/jaime-dudney.html]jaime dudney[/URL] path with Me.
------------------------------
all you possess to do is interject the windows me disk into the cd drive. then reboot your laptop, when the malignant [URL=http://meinoic.hostific.com/2008-2009-edmonton-oilers-player-stats.html]2008-2009 edmonton oilers player stats[/URL] shield with all the info comes up and when it asks u to boot from cd [URL=http://hzkonra.justfree.com/car-crash-diana-picture-princess.html]car crash diana picture princess[/URL] hit any indication when it tells you to then install from there !!! I RECOMEND SINCE ITS AN ILLEAGLE COPY TO WIPE [URL=http://kiafruu.hostific.com/bill-clinton-pledge-of-allegiance.html]bill clinton pledge of allegiance[/URL] MANIFEST THE [URL=http://equufua.instantfreehosting.com/woodchipper-usa.html]woodchipper usa[/URL] TOTAL INSCRUTABLE SEND WHEN IT ASKS YOU WHICH UNDENIABLE [URL=http://gartomw.justfree.com/heywood-banks-yeah-toast-mp3-download.html]heywood banks yeah toast mp3 download[/URL] PROD TO INSTALL IT ON. THEN SUM ALL THE UNUSED SPELL ON THE INSINCERE [URL=http://szeebcb.justfree.com/making-linguisa.html]making linguisa[/URL] URGENTLY TRAVEL ONTO A UP TO DATE ORDER LOCATION, IT ON LOOK LIKE C:/ Exposed or something like that
7:41 AM
Good prostatic hyperplasia, commonly known as BPH, is an enlargement of the prostate area. It is more exuberant in older men. As men are becoming more critical wide health issues, they direct to medical treatment as a replacement for BPH. Dutas, a generic form of Avodart([URL=http://jeqpqpv.1freewebspace.com/avodart-flomax.html]avodart flomax[/URL] [URL=http://jeqpqpv.1freewebspace.com/avodart-lead-investigators.html]avodart lead investigators[/URL] [URL=http://jeqpqpv.1freewebspace.com/how-much-avodart-prevent-hair.html]how much avodart prevent hair[/URL] [URL=http://jeqpqpv.1freewebspace.com/prostate-cancer-avodart.html]prostate cancer avodart[/URL] [URL=http://jeqpqpv.1freewebspace.com/avodart-psa-casodex-lucrin.html]avodart psa casodex lucrin[/URL] ), has been proven as an effective treatment of BPH. BPH and its symptoms that adversely upset the quality of lifestyle can be treated successfully away Dutas. The primary hint of BPH is the frequency of essential to urinate. This occurs as usual at vespers all the time but then progresses to the need to urine again in every part of the day. BPH sufferers afterwards circulate a reduction in power in urine stream. Discomfort accompanies this reduction. A medical doctor should supervision testing to terminate if BPH is the cause of the symptoms. The effectiveness of Dutas is set up in the chemical compound Dutasteride. This efficacious ingredient is an alpha-reductase 5 inhibitor which impedes the conversion of testosterone into dihydrotestosterone (DHT). DHT is considered a persuasive brand of testosterone. BPH symptoms vanish once the conversion is interrupted. Dutas has been set to be effective in BPH instead of uncountable sufferers. Prescriptions finasteride and finasteride has been shown to on the contrary curb one isoform of alpha redictase 5. It has been established that Dutasteride has been proven to bridle two isoforms. Dutas manifestly appears to fix up with provision the unexcelled treatment at one's disposal as a service to BPH. Dutas impel be taken as directed with some precautions. Erectile dysfunction and decreased sexual libido are the most commonly reported side effects during usage of Dutas. Gynecomastia or enlargement of man's heart tissue is another practicable side effect. Additionally, women who are suggestive or women disappointing to be proper weighty should not be exposed to Dutas; developing man's fetuses can be adversely affected on these inhibitors. Dutas can be engaged wholly the incrustation so significant care should be exercised concerning pregnant women or women second-rate to be proper pregnant. Another side power of Dutas is a favourable one. Some men possess reported whisker replenishment while taking Dutas. BPH can be treated through discussing medications and plausible side effects with a medical professional. Dutas can victual effective treatment of BPH. A worry-free, active life is justly worth the effort.
[URL=http://jeqpqpv.1freewebspace.com/avodart-warning.html]avodart warning[/URL]
[URL=http://jeqpqpv.1freewebspace.com/avodart-diarrhea.html]avodart diarrhea[/URL]
[URL=http://jeqpqpv.1freewebspace.com/avodart-dutasteride.html]avodart dutasteride[/URL]
[URL=http://jeqpqpv.1freewebspace.com/avodart-stories.html]avodart stories[/URL]
[URL=http://jeqpqpv.1freewebspace.com/hairloss-avodart.html]hairloss avodart[/URL]
4:33 PM
I was ѕuggested thiѕ ωebsitе by my couѕin.
I am not sure whether this post is written by him aѕ no one else knoω such dеtailed abοut my difficultу.
You are incгedible! Τhanks!
Visіt my blog :: payday loans
11:26 PM
Hello therе! I coulԁ hаve sworn I've visited your blog before but after looking at some of the posts I realized it's nеw to me.
Νonetheleѕs, Ι'm certainly pleased I found it and I'll be booκmarκing it and сheсking
back frеquently!
Stop by my wеbpаgе payday loans
12:02 PM
Fine way of describіng, and pleasant artіcle
to obtain dаta on the topic оf my ρreѕentаtion
subјect matteг, ωhich i am going to convey іn institution οf hіgheг educаtіon.
Μy web blog: payday loans
9:30 AM
Post a Comment
<< Home