Month: February 2009

From The Times (Stringer/Reuters)

Tamil refugees wait in the town of Vishvamadu to be sent to government camps
By Jeremy Page, South Asia Correspondent
Sri Lanka was accused yesterday of planning concentration camps to hold 200,000 ethnic Tamil refugees from its northeastern conflict zone for up to three years – and seeking funding for the project from Britain.
The Sri Lankan Government says that it will open five “welfare villages” to house Tamils fleeing the 67 sq mile patch of jungle where the army has pinned down the Tamil Tiger rebels.
The ministry in charge says that the camps, in Vavuniya and Mannar districts, will have schools, banks, parks and vocational centres to help to rehabilitate up to 200,000 displaced Tamils after a 25-year civil war.
It also says that it will be compulsory for people fleeing the area to live in the camps until the army – which will guard them – has screened them, hunted down the Tigers and demined the area. The camps will be ringed with barbed wire fencing and, while those with relatives inside will be allowed to come and go after initial screening, young and/or single people will not be allowed to leave, it says.
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By Victoria Stern

If your mother told you raw oysters had turned your stomach a few years back, you might think twice about partaking in them again. But what if she was lying? And what if she told the same tale but replaced oysters with a fattening treat like ice cream? Evidence from two studies shows that generating false memories might be one way to diet.
Researchers at the University of St. Andrews in the United Kingdom and at the University of Windsor in Canada each found that subjects who were told that a particular food had made them sick years earlier not only believed the made-up events but also stopped craving the food. Researchers already knew that generating false memories can alter a person’s beliefs, but these studies are the first to show that the practice can change behavior as well.
“Although it’s not ethical to create false memories in people, making an association between eating a fattening food and getting ill may be beneficial,” says Elke Geraerts, a psychologist from St. Andrews and lead author on one of the studies. “People may avoid those foods in the future.”
It may sound implausible that a mere suggestion could alter recollections or create a new (untrue) memory, but it’s not so far-fetched. “False memories are a well-established phenomenon. This is because all memories are re-creations, not recordings,” says Douglas Fields, a neurobiologist at the National Institutes of Health not involved in the studies.
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Rwanda Genocide appeals court has upheld life imprisonment sentence given to Francois Karera for his involvement in the country’s most infamous 1994 genocide. The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) convicted Mr karera in December 2007 on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity.
The Tribunal had found that Mr Karera, who served as the chief administrator of Kigali-Rural Prefecture between April and July 1994, ordered and encouraged attacks by Hutu militiamen and soldiers against Tutsis in his prefecture.

The Tribunal communiqué said Mr Karera will remain in the UN Detention Facility in Arusha Tanzania until he is transferred to the country in which he will serve his sentence.

The Appeals Chamber reversed Mr Karera’s conviction for aiding and abetting genocide and extermination as a crime against humanity, for ordering genocide and extermination and murder as crimes against humanity and for ordering genocide and extermination as a crime against humanity. It however maintained charges of genocide and against humanity.

The Appeals Chamber composed of Judges Fausto Pocar, presiding, Mohamed Shahabuddeen, Mehmet Güney, Liu Daqun, and Theodor Meron allowed Karera’s appeal in part.

More than 800,000 people were killed by machete, for being ethnic Tutsis or Hutu moderates during a period of less than 100 days starting in April 1994 in Rwanda.
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By Philip Slater

I can understand that after centuries of persecution it’s satisfying for a Jewish state to be the aggressor for a change, but there’s a codicil that goes with that role. You don’t get to act like a victim any more. “Poor little Israel” just sounds silly when you’re the dominant power in the Middle East. When you’ve invaded several of your neighbors, bombed and defeated them in combat, occupied their land, and taken their homes away from them, it’s time to stop acting oppressed. Yes, Arab states deny your right to exist, threaten to drive you into the sea, and all the rest of their futile, helpless rhetoric. The fact is, you have the upper hand and they don’t. You have sophisticated arms and they don’t. You have nuclear weapons and they don’t. So stop pretending to be pathetic. It doesn’t play well in Peoria.
(Yes, I know, we Americans should talk–always trembling in our boots about terrorists and ‘rogue states’ and ‘evil empires’ when we have enough nukes to blow up entire continents, and spend more on arms in an hour than most of the world’s nations spend in a year. But just because we’re hypocrites and Nervous Nellies doesn’t mean you have to be).
Calling Hamas the ‘aggressor’ is undignified. The Gaza strip is little more than a large Israeli concentration camp, in which Palestinians are attacked at will, starved of food, fuel, energy–even deprived of hospital supplies. They cannot come and go freely, and have to build tunnels to smuggle in the necessities of life. It would be difficult to have any respect for them if they didn’t fire a few rockets back.
The Israel lobby has a hissy fit when anyone points out that Israel has been borrowing liberally from the Nazi playbook, but to punish a whole nation for the attacks of a few–which Israel has been doing consistently in Gaza–is a violation of international law–a law enacted in response to the Nazi practice. And please, spare us the hypocrisy–borrowed, I’m ashamed to admit, from my own government–of saying ‘every effort is made to avoid civilian casualties’. When you drop bombs on a crowded city you’re bombing civilians. Bombs don’t ask for ID cards. Bombs are civilian killers. That’s what they do. They’re designed to break the spirit of a nation by slaughtering families. They were used all through World War II by all sides for that very purpose. And that’s what they’re intended for in Gaza.
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(Submitted by a reader)

By Shimaila Matri Dawood

Lose the man, climb the ladder… but is the price paid worth it?
A reception is held in honour of the regional chief of a multinational company. A succession of Pakistan’s high-profile corporate kings, minus their socialite wives, are in attendance. As usual, she walks in alone, head held high. Mingling effortlessly with the crowd, she laughs politely, tells a joke, moves on, makes a deal, and renews a few professional contacts. They see her as poised and elegant, and at 40-something, decidedly attractive. The clock strikes nine, she gathers her purse, and walks herself to her car. Flash forward a few hours: she’s curled up on a sofa, being interviewed. There’s the inevitable question: “Why don’t you find a man?” “Do I need one?” she answers, quick-on-the-ball. “Besides,” she adds, in her most private admission, “even if I was interested in marrying again, at my age, every man worth my time is either married or intimidated by my independence. I’m not the sort of person who’ll have an affair with a married man, and I’m not willing to play mother to a grown man’s insecurities.”
Power, they say, is the ultimate aphrodisiac. There certainly are enough examples to prove it. Mustafa Khar’s umpteen wives. Imran Khan and his legions of enamoured socialites – both sides of the colonial/native divide. And more recently, Shahbaz Sharif and the former feudal lord’s wife, Ms. Durrani. After all, ‘it is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.’ Though Austin wrote that 200 years ago, little has changed since.
But what about powerful Pakistani women?
Do they remain in want of a husband?
If a sample survey of executive posts in companies across Pakistan is anything to go by (see chart), many of Pakistan’s women movers and shakers are unmarried. At Glaxo Smith Kline, for example, half or more of the women in senior management positions are single. It’s the same story at Hum TV, Unilever, Novartis, PICIC and Shell. And these figures do not include the number of divorcees.
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By Sarojini Naidu
(Sarojini Naidu, a poet, fought against the British rule in India. She had the honor of being the first woman president of the Congress Party and was the first woman to be a Governor of the UP.)

You flaunt your beauty in the rose, your glory in the dawn,
Your sweetness in the nightingale, your whiteness in the swan.

You haunt my waking like a dream, my slumber like a moon,
Pervade me like a musky scent, possess me like a tune

Yet, when I crave of you, my sweet, one tender moment’s grace,
You cry, “I SIT BEHIND THE VEIL, I CANNOT SHOW MY FACE.”

Shall any foolish veil divide my longing from my bliss?
Shall any fragile curtain hide your beauty from my kiss?
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See also “Sarojini Naidu: Her Life, Work and Poetry” by V. S. Naravane

In his latest column for the New Statesman, John Pilger borrows from Lord West of Spithead to deconstruct current mythology, such as the ‘impartiality’ of the BBC and the ‘radical changes’ implemented by President Obama.

Growing up in an Antipodean society proud of its rich variety of expletives, I never heard the word bollocks. It was only on arrival in England that I understood its majesterial power. All classes used it. Judges grunted it; an editor of the Daily Mirror used it as noun, adjective and verb. Certainly, the resonance of a double vowel saw off its closest American contender. It had authority.

A high official with the Gilbertian title of Lord West of Spithead used it to great effect on 27 January. The former admiral, who is security adviser to Gordon Brown, was referring to Tony Blair’s famous assertion that invading countries and killing innocent people did not increase the threat of terrorism at home.

“That was clearly bollocks,” said his lordship, who warned of the perceived “linkage between the US, Israel and the UK” in the horrors inflicted on Gaza and the effect on the recruitment of terrorists in Britain. In other words, he was stating the obvious: that state terrorism begets individual or group terrorism at source. Just as Blair was the prime mover of the London bombings of 7 July 2005, so Brown, having pursued the same cynical crusades in Muslim countries and having armed and disported himself before the criminal regime in Tel Aviv, will share responsibility for related atrocities at home.

There is a lot of bollocks about at the moment.

The BBC’s explanation for banning an appeal on behalf of the stricken people of Gaza is a vivid example. Mark Thompson, the director general, cited the BBC’s legal requirement to be “impartial… because Gaza is a major ongoing news story in which humanitarian issues… are both at the heart of the story and contentious.”

In a letter to Thompson, David Bracewell, illuminated the deceit behind this. He pointed to previous BBC appeals for the Disasters Emergency Committee that were not only made in the midst of “an ongoing news story” in which humanitarian issues were “contentious”, but demonstrated how the BBC took sides. In 1999, at the height of the illegal Nato bombing of Serbia and Kosovo, the TV presenter Jill Dando made an appeal on behalf of Kosovar refugees. The BBC web page for that appeal was linked to numerous articles meant to support the gravity of the humanitarian issue. These included quotations from Blair himself, such as “This will be a daily pounding until [Slobodan Milosevic] comes into line with the terms that Nato has laid down.” There was no significant balance of view from the Yugoslav side, and not a single mention that the flight of Kosovar refugees began only after Nato had started bombing. Similarly, in an appeal for the victims of the civil war in the Congo, the BBC favoured the regime of Joseph Kabila without referring to the Amnesty, Human Rights Watch and other reports accusing his forces of atrocities. In contrast, the rebel leader Nkunda was “accused of committing atrocities” and was ordained the BBC’s bad guy. Kabila, who represented western interests, was clearly the good guy – just like Nato in the Balkans and Israel in the Middle East.

While Mark Thompson and his satraps richly deserve the Lord West of Spithead Bollocks Blue Ribbon, that honour goes to the cheer squad of President Barack Obama, whose cult-like obeisance goes on and on.

On 23 January, the Guardian’s front page declared, “Obama shuts network of CIA ‘ghost prisons’ ”. The “wholesale deconstruction [sic] of George Bush’s war on terror”, said the report, had been ordered by the new president who would be “shutting down the CIA’s secret prison network, banning torture and rendition…”.

The bollocks quotient on this was so high that it read like the press release it was, citing “officials briefing reporters at the White House yesterday”. Obama’s orders, according to a group of 16 retired generals and admirals who attended a presidential signing ceremony, “would restore America’s moral standing in the world”. What moral standing? It never ceases to astonish that experienced reporters can transmit PR stunts like this, bearing in mind the moving belt of lies from the same source under only nominally different management.

Far from “deconstructing [sic] the war on terror”, Obama is clearly pursuing it with the same vigour, ideological backing and deception as the previous administration. George W. Bush’s first war, in Afghanistan, and last war, in Pakistan, are now Obama’s wars – with thousands more US troops to be deployed, more bombing and more slaughter of civilians. On 22 January, the day he described Afghanistan and Pakistan as “the central front in our enduring struggle against terrorism and extremism”, 22 Afghan civilians died beneath Obama’s bombs in a hamlet populated mainly by shepherds and which, by all accounts, had not laid eyes on the Taliban. Women and children were among the dead, which is normal.

Far from “shutting down the CIA’s secret prison network”, Obama’s executive orders actually give the CIA authority to carry out renditions, abductions and transfers of prisoners in secret without the threat of legal obstruction. As the Los Angeles Times disclosed, “current and former intelligence officials said the rendition program might be poised to play an expanded role.” A semantic sleight of hand is that “long term prisons” are changed to “short term prisons”; and while Americans are now banned from directly torturing people, foreigners working for the US are not. This means that America’s numerous “covert actions” will operate as they did under previous presidents, with proxy regimes, such as Augusto Pinochet’s in Chile, doing the dirtiest work.
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More Articles by Pilger
(Submitted by a reader)

By Desson Thomson

IN “MOOLAADE,” six African girls refuse to undergo ritual circumcision and unwittingly cause a revolution in their village. In Senegalese director Ousmane Sembene’s hands, what could have been merely exotic spectacle becomes something astonishing, timely and deeply moving.
Like a set of talking drums, the film’s polyrhythms capture an abundance of themes: the emancipation of women, the perennial divisions between generations, the tumult between the old, spiritual world and the new, secular one. “Moolaade,” in short, is a movie to rock the soul.
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Africa/France/“Moolaade” by Ousmane Sembene