Good morning/evening, here is my
World Roundup for
December 12, 2003
Legend:
fr = French language
it = Italian language
ro = Romanian/Moldovan language
es = Spanish language
de = German language
pt = Portuguese language
is = Icelandic language
su = Suomi language (Finnish)
nl = Dutch language
Everything else in English language
Note: That which you can see on your evening news will (usually) not be covered here.
There's an odd story out of Antarctica as an Australian amateur pilot's plane ran out of gas somewhere on the icy continent. The pilot wants to borrow gasoline from the American or New Zealand scientific bases there, but they won't give him any. It sounded like a pretty hard-hearted story until you read a little further and see that the Americans are willing to fly him back to Australia on one of their planes. They've told him that he can come pick up his plane whenever he wants - at his expense. After all, it was his crazy decision to fly down there (he is not on a scientific mission) and the Antarctic bases have only a limited supply of gasoline.
Whoopsie! Looks like the dictatorship in Uzbekistan isn't going to renew the lease on the American military base located in Khanabad. Uzbekistan said that the use of the base was a temporary affair to aid in the campaign in Afghanistan. More realistically, Uzbekistan is now courting Russia because the US (a new ally) has not done enough for Uzbekistan (bribes were not big enough I guess) and having imperial troops on their soil isn't cutting it any more:
"Don't give us weapons, give us economic help," [Dictator Islam] Karimov said. "We should protect ourselves not with bases, not with the military, but with economic and humanitarian development."
Looks like the military has been acting up again in Ghana as Navy personnel have been putting the beat down on ethnic Sekondi teenagers. Ghana has had a troubled past with many military-backed dictatorships.
Thousands and thousands of people are rioting and protesting in Haiti as the people are demanding that US-installed dictator Jean-Bertrand Aristide remove himself from office. Police have been firing on the crowd using live bullets. For a picture of the protests, click here.
More trouble in Mexico as those gangs (reported in yesterday's World Update) hacked three human beings to death with machetes and threw them off a train.
The future oil supplier of the west, Azerbaijan, in a move to appeal to its future customers, Europe and America, has freed 612 political prisoners from its jail. US Secretary of Defense Rumsefeld was in Azerbaijan last week.
Thousands and thousnads of people are rioting and protesting in the oil-rich South American country of Ecuador, upset with the government for not giving teacher's a 10-dollar-a-month raise. Hello! Much better local article here(es). Police have cordoned off the President and have fired tear gas at the protestors.
Famous Russian author (and long-time resident of Vermont), Alexander Solzhenitsyn, turned 85 years old today. In an ironic move, Russian President (and former KGB chief) Vladimir Putin praised Solzhenitsyn for his "uncomprimising stance".
Solzhenitsyn wrote a huge, 3-part book about the concentration/work camps that millions and millions of Russians were forced to endure, including Solzhenitsyn himself, who spent 10 years at hard labor in them. When I say hard labor, I mean hard labor. I've read the first two of these books and they are utterly shocking as they display the total depravity of Stalin and those in power in Russia towards their own people(s). Some estimates say that 20 million human beings died in the concentration/work camps. If you haven't read these books, I highly recommend them.
Taxi drivers are going on strike nationwide in Greece today. The cabbies are upset because the government is cracking down on them for not using the meters (this is a big issue worldwide as a matter of fact).
Elsewhere, small-scale protests have broken out about the hokey trial of the members of November 17, an elusive Greek terrorist organization.
I hate to even report about Iraq, primarily because it is usually front-page news and covered better elsewhere, but also because I'm so ashamed of America's mistakes in this country. A perfect example of this is the United States' plan to house their embassy in one of Saddam's really nice palaces. How on earth do you think it is going to look to the average Iraqi to see their current occupiers operating out of the same house as the old occupiers?
Also, there is a good article from an Egyptian newspaper, a sort of a man-on-the-street kind of piece, written by reporters who actually speak the language and can get a better feel for conditions on the ground over there. Unlike 1991, Egypt has no forces in the "Coalition".
The war-torn country of Colombia's Senate has just signed a "Patriot Act" style piece of legislation against terrorism.
Colombia's Senate approved a divisive anti-terrorism bill Thursday giving the military sweeping powers to search homes, detain suspects without warrants and tap phones.
Human rights groups warned the new law will likely lead government forces -- already accused of numerous rights violations -- to commit new abuses.
Amnesty International has accused the armed forces of working with right-wing paramilitary forces responsbile for gruesome attacks on civilians. The advocacy group has also claimed that troops under Gen. Carlos Alberto Ospina, who was recently appointed head of the armed forces, "committed a series of massacres, executions and torture" in 1997.
"This decision will have disastrous impact on human rights by further contributing to the military's campaign to intimidate and discredit human rights defenders and social organizations," Amnesty said in a statement Thursday.
The United States spends millions and millions and millions of American taxpayer in this country as well as training, equipping and supplying the government forces. Good local article about the bill here(es).
Two years after the American invasion, things are still pretty wild in Afghanistan as a local warlord has been taunting the US for being unable to kill him or capture him. This guy isn't even Mullah Omar or OBL and yet the US can't find him either.
"There were occasions when I stayed in a place that was hardly 500 yards from a US firebase," Mr Hekmatyar says.
"The US helicopters virtually flew over my head and we could hit them with a Kalashnikov rifle. But the Americans were unable to locate my hideout."
Good news as the dictators from Armenia and Azerbaijan met in Geneva, Switzerland to talk about the disputed area of Nagorno-Karabakh:
According to special correspondents of the Baku media accompanying the Azeri president on his visit to Switzerland, the meeting of Ilham Aliyev and Robert Kocharyan lasted for an hour and a half. The Russian, American and French co-chairmen of the Minsk group of the OSCE for Nagorno-Karabakh were present at the beginning and the end of the meeting.
The two countries have fought numerous bloody wars over this area.
Authorities in the rebellious province of TransDniestr in Moldova are hopping mad as Russia keeps withdrawing military equipment and personnel. Russia can be completely withdrawn from the region in 6 months, although why Russia is doing this right now is beyond my ken. Most of Russia's attachment to the region is out of historical pride - it has almost no strategic value and the region is completely encircled by the Ukraine, not Russia.
If you've been reading my blog, you'll know about the hellhole Kosovo has become since the 1999 US/NATO bombing. Now it seems several soldiers from Albania are facing charges for raping a teenage girl and selling her in the sex-trade market in Kosovo. Sadly, what's unusual about this story is that the soldiers are facing charges, not that teenage girls are sold to sex-slave markets in Kosovo.
I don't know about you, but just about every time I call a 1-800 customer service number (I know this happened the last time I called Dell computing), I speak with some Indian guy with an incredibly thick accent. Oddly enough, it seems those calls are actually being answered in the country of India as US and British companies are taking advantage of the subcontinent once again. Call center employees make less than 200 dollars a month and work more than 40 hours per week.
Seems that things are going ever further downhill in the nation called the Central African Republic as the dictator President, General Bozize, fired the Prime Minister. No explanation was given. 3.6 million human beings live in the CAR.
The west African "Arab" nation of Mauritania is prosecuting the former dictator Ould Haidalla for "treason" because of an alleged coup (it's always an alleged coup with these tinhorn generals). The current dictator, Ould Taya, ousted Ould Haidallah in 1984. Frankly, the entire human rights situation in Mauritania is getting "ould". Much better in-depth article here(fr).
Tragedy: 7 people dead and 100 sickened in the east African nation of Tanzania after eating spoiled cassava flour.
Old-fashioned raping and pillaging still ongoing in the eastern zone of the Dem. Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire). The eastern half of the country is one of the most lawless and war-torn areas on the face of the planet.
The island nation of Comoros has just signed a peace deal with opposition leaders, ending a 3 year secessionist movement. The country has had about 20 coups since independence from France in 1975.
The nightmarish Lord's Resistance Army is on the warpath again in Uganda and killed 9 human beings traveling to a cattle market.
I don't know if this is the place to discuss it, but the United States has its political hand deep within the internal affairs of Uganda. The US has been trying desperately to sign a peace deal with the Sudan, Uganda's northern neighbors. The main rebel group in the Sudan, the SPLA, have been training and supplying arms to the LRA for over a decade. The US has invested a lot of political capital lately trying to get everyone to stop talking bad about the SPLA so that it will sign the peace deal with the north. Uganda, however, was promised a lot of US military assistance to stop the LRA atrocities. It also seems that the US wants to put dictator President Museveni in its pocket and its got a lot of people upset.
The peace talks in Sudan should in fact be seen as a good opportunity to encourage similar peace initiatives in Uganda.
But to be effective, the US must stop playing a duplicitous role of talking peace in the morning while fuelling war in the evening.
This approach is evident in the tough talk that we hear from President Yoweri Museveni.
This tough talk is inflamed by the military assistance being extended by the George W. Bush administration to wage war in northern Uganda as part of their "fight against terrorism."
On the occasion of the celebration of the 227th US independence anniversary on July 4 in Kampala, the US Ambassador to Uganda, Jimmy Kolker, declared in the presence of diplomats, ministers, parliamentarians, senior army officers, religious leaders and other dignitaries that the US government was going to "reciprocate" Uganda's support to the US during the war against Iraq by "re-starting a modest military training programme and assistance to improve the UPDF's capacity to protect and defend the civilian population".
He revealed that this programme, which had been suspended earlier, would amount to about 200 million dollars for military education and training of the UPDF. This was later confirmed by the US State Department.
By the way, that's 200 million American taxpayer dollars. Read the full article, it's worth your time (if you're an American taxpayer anyway!).
Excuse my language, but the UN is now really fucking things up in Liberia as blue-helmeted troops gunned down rioting militias, upset for not receiving the money that the UN had promised them. The young boy in this picture is not just posing with that gun, he's a regular soldier in one of the rebel militias.
An amazing story as an 11 year old boy was finally released after being a hostage for 3 years in the Russian autonomy of Dagestan. Dagestan borders Chechnya and similar problems have plagued Russian control of the region as well.
Unidentified persons kidnapped Dzhamal from the yard of his grandmother's house on June 15, 2000. Dzhamal's father, the former Dagestani Finance Minister Gamid Gamidov, was killed in a blast on the staircase leading to his Ministry on August 17, 1996. Several of his bodyguards were killed and dozens of people were wounded.
And a nice article here from one of my favorite writers, Chloe Adams, about how differently the political situations have gone in Georgia as opposed to Azerbaijan. What's not mentioned in the article is that the United States funded and supported the "velvet" ouster of Shevardnadze, while at the same time it seeks to protect its dictator in Baku.
Couple of important developments in Georgia:
Someone set off a bomb in Sukhumi, the capital of the breakway region of Abkhazia. The bomb was detonated at a famous war memorial to commemorate the Abkhaz soldiers who died during the Abkhazia-Georgia war of 1992-1993, which ended when the Russian military stepped in (and has stayed ever since).
In an oddly harmonic move, Georgian police conducted a raid into the other breakaway region of South Ossetia, ostensibly to seize some "contraband wheat". My analysis of this situation is that Georgia is flexing its muscles as a way of warning Abkhazia and S. Ossetia not to get overly bold in their desires to secede and align themselves with Russia (as they both tried to do in 1992).
Citizens are preparing for a crucial vote in the Turkish northern half of the island of Cyprus next Sunday. As usual, the BBC has a reporter there:
The elections could determine whether Turkish Cypriots re-unite with their Greek Cypriot compatriots and join the EU in May next year.
Only Turkey will trade with the unrecognised Republic of Northern Cyprus, and as a result the economy is contracting and the shortage of jobs is driving more and more young people to emigrate.
However, the Turkish Cypriot leader, Rauf Denktash, says he has no plans to unite the divided island (the southern half is Greek).
Denktash said he will go down in history as the man who did "not allow Cyprus to become a Greek island." He called on Turkey, which maintains troops on the island, to guarantee the north's security "forever."
Turkish Cypriots go to the polls Sunday for crucial parliamentary elections in which they will be asked to choose between parties that support Denktash's hardline stance and parties that back quick negotiations according to a U.N. plan.
The vote comes before a May deadline after which the European Union will admit Cyprus as a member, either as a divided or reunified island.
If the island enters divided, EU laws and benefits will only apply in the Greek Cypriot south.
This isn't some advertising photo, it's a monkey enjoying a banquet thrown in his honor in Thailand.
More updates on my blog.
Peace on Earth!
