Month: May 2009

By Yves Engler

On Sunday, April 26th military forces trained by the Canadian Special Operational Regiment subdued a hijacker who took command of a Halifax-based CanJet plane at an airport partly run by Vancouver Airport Services. While Canadian companies and institutions played a major role in these events this drama did not take place in Canada. It happened in Montego Bay.

Canada has long been influential in Jamaica and across the English-speaking Caribbean. Some prominent Canadians once wanted to add Britain’s Caribbean colonies to Canada’s expanding territory. In the late 1870s the Canada First Movement sought “a closer political connection” with the British West Indies. By the early 1900s official Canadian policy supported annexing the British Empire’s Caribbean possessions (the various islands as well as British Honduras [Belize] and Guyana).

The West Indies Union movement reached its apex in the early 1900s, but the idea continued to find support after World War One. At the end of the conflict the other British Dominions (South Africa, Australia and New Zealand) that fought alongside London were compensated with German properties. With no German colonies nearby Ottawa asked the Imperial War Cabinet if it could take possession of the British West Indies as compensation for Canada’s defence of the Empire. London balked
Ottawa’s push to wrest control of the British Caribbean was spurred by insurance and banking companies, which entered the region when the Halifax Banking Company signed an agreement in 1837 with the Colonial Bank, a London headquartered operation that had a preeminent place in the British Caribbean. Prior to opening a branch in Montr, in 1882, the Merchants Bank of Halifax (later the Royal Bank) established itself in Bermuda. Most of the other major Canadian banks quickly followed suit. According to The Economist, by April 2008 Canadian banks controlled “the English-speaking Caribbean’s three largest banks, with $42 billion in assets, four times those commanded by its forty-odd remaining locally owned banks.”
Z Magazine for more

By Jayati Ghosh

It is beyond doubt the general elections of 2009 have delivered a severe blow to the Left parties. Of course, it was always likely that the Left would come down from its historically high tally of 61 seats in the previous Lok Sabha elections, especially as these came overwhelmingly from only two states. But the extent of the decline in Left seats, to less than half the previous figure, nevertheless comes as a shock.

What is particularly disturbing is the performance in the two previous Left strongholds of West Bengal and Kerala. What explains this sharp deterioration?

This is a crucial question, since if the Left is to recover and grow again, as well as spread its message to other parts of the country, it is important to draw the right lessons from this defeat and to change strategy accordingly.

The lessons are likely to be different in the two states. Most people would agree that the Kerala state government is reasonably popular, and chief minister V.S. Achuthanandan certainly continues to command very high approval ratings. But the margins of victory and defeat have always been relatively small and the state has a history of consecutively shifting both Lok Sabha and Assembly victories across the two major fronts.

So even a small shift in vote percentage can cause very large shifts in the seats won or lost, and this is likely to have been the case in this election.

Having said that, it is also likely that the widespread perceptions of factionalism within the main party in the Left Front, the Communist Party of India (Marxist), made people uneasy and harmed the front electorally.

The rather rigid attitude towards alliances with some smaller parties in Kerala before this particular election also did not help.

In West Bengal the picture is more disturbing. There is clear evidence of vote shifts against the ruling Left Front, and this message from the electorate cannot be ignored but must be addressed. The Left Front has ruled the state for more than three decades, providing not only stability but also many extremely positive measures for the improvement of conditions of life of ordinary people: not just the crucial land reforms that were the most extensive of any state government in the last 30 years, but the pioneering moves towards decentralisation and providing more powers to locally elected bodies.

Deccan Chronicle

By Ahmad Rashid

To get to President Asif Ali Zardari’s presidential palace in the heart of Islamabad for dinner is like running an obstacle course. Pakistan’s once sleepy capital, full of restaurant-going bureaucrats and diplomats, is now littered with concrete barriers, blast walls, checkpoints, armed police, and soldiers; as a result of recent suicide bombings the city now resembles Baghdad or Kabul. At the first checkpoint, two miles from the palace, they have my name and my car’s license number. There are seven more checkpoints to negotiate along the way.

Apart from traveling to the airport by helicopter to take trips abroad, the President stays inside the palace; he fears threats to his life by the Pakistani Taliban and al-Qaeda, who in December 2007 killed his wife, the charismatic Benazir Bhutto, then perhaps the country’s only genuine national leader. Zardari’s isolation has only added to his growing unpopularity, his indecisiveness, and the public feeling that he is out of touch. Even as most Pakistanis have concluded that the Taliban now pose the greatest threat to the Pakistani state since its cre- ation, the president, the prime minister, and the army chief have, until recently, been in a state of denial of reality.

“We are not a failed state yet but we may become one in ten years if we don’t receive international support to combat the Taliban threat,” Zardari indignantly says, pointing out that in contrast to the more than $11 billion former president Pervez Musharraf received from the US in the years after the September 11 attacks, his own administration has received only between “$10 and $15 million,” despite all the new American promises of aid. He objects to the charge that his government has no plan to counter the Taliban-led insurgency that since the middle of April has spread to within sixty miles of the capital. “We have many plans including dealing with the 18,000 madrasas”—i.e., the Muslim religious schools—”that are brainwashing our youth, but we have no money to arm the police or fund development, give jobs or revive the economy. What are we supposed to do?” Zardari’s complaints are true, but he does acknowledge that additional foreign money would have to be linked to a plan of action, which does not exist.
New York Review of Books

By Chuck Todaro

April 8th marked the Twentieth International Roma Day since the Gypsies of Eastern Europe broke free of the communist’s amalgamated “national minority” status and began openly acknowledging their heritage. However, according to the US State Department 2007 Country Report on Human Rights, Romania, home to Europe’s largest Roma population, is the setting for some of the most pervasive societal violence and discrimination against Roma. “This day offers the press the chance to reverse the usual negative stereotypes,” says Roma journalist Rudolf Moca during the ceremonies at the Apalina Public School in the Eastern Transylvania town of Reghin.
The day long celebration at Apalina begins in the school courtyard with speeches, the singing of the Roma National anthem Djelem Djelem, followed by a barefoot Roma dance performance, concluding with a skit portraying a confrontation between young Romani men being settled with a dance competition: the fastest dancer possessing the more complicated moves and greatest stamina exits the showdown with his head up and a woman under his arm.

Roma day has a special significance for the 4,000 Gypsies living along the two parallel roads at Apalina that bears the reputation as a den of thieves. “Whatever goes missing in town, I can guarantee you can find it at Apalina,” comments Maria, a downtown barmaid.

“When I go on my jobs, my boss reminds me not to tell them that I am from Apalina, he says to say I’m from somewhere else, or else they wont have any work for me,” says Dani Racz, who like many at the Roma of Apalina works the traditional trade of laying paving stones, a skill he learned from his father who learned from his father before him.

In September of 2006 the simmering discontent coming from both sides of the debate exploded during a police raid into the community that left 22 people shot, some of them numerous times like Denis Biga who claims to have been fired upon while shielding his infant nephew and pregnant daughter; seventeen rubber bullets were surgically extracted from his backside including another seven that could not be removed.

“They beat the children! Women washing clothes in the street – shot! Men working on their home – shot! [To them] all Gypsies are guilty… they do to the Gypsies like the Nazis,” Mr. Biga cries out while lifting up the back of his shirt bearing the riddled scars; his daughter and wife in the background look on with sullen faces.
…
Social workers in the field contend that the education of Gypsy children faces a three front battle between parent apathy, poverty and disinterested educators. These factors are present in the experiences of Valentina, a thirteen-year-old Roma girl from Satu Mare in northern Romania:
Everyday my parents work from morning till night. At home we don’t have water, gas or electricity. Many times it is very cold. I do my homework only when I can. In the evening when Mommy and Daddy come home we hug. We are very tired and say ‘goodnight’. If I can’t do my studies I don’t go to school because I am too ashamed… Two years ago the school nurse came to our classroom and she found lice in my hair. She began to yell at me and it made me feel so bad. Everyone began to laugh at me and I was put to sit alone at my desk because no one wanted to stay near me or speak with me. My teacher said that I couldn’t come to school anymore if I didn’t clean myself because I threaten to contaminate others. I felt very bad and began to cry and I promised myself that I will never go to school again. Mommy and Daddy are not able to help me because they don’t have time for me.
Toward Freedom for more

Photo: HAND IN HAND: Fine Gael Taoiseach Garret FitzGerald with Margaret Thatcher at the signing of the Anglo-Irish Agreement in 1985

By Sean Floinn (An Phoblacht,)

WITH the possible exception of the genocidal Oliver Cromwell – whose men butchered thousands of Catholics in Ireland in the mid-17th century – nobody provokes such vitriol and anger from Irish republicans as Margaret Thatcher. Just over 30 years ago, on 4 May 1979, Thatcher became Britain’s first female prime minister. She continued at the helm of British politics for over 11 years, leaving in her wake deep social unrest, mass unemployment, poverty and death. She had the audacity to paraphrase St Francis of Assisi as she first arrived at 10 Downing Street, stating: “Where there is despair, may we bring hope.”

Thatcher became notorious for her obduracy and inhumanity with her refusal to negotiate with the 1981 Hunger Strikers, which culminated in the deaths of 10 republican prisoners. These men were fighting for their five demands. Thatcher was adamant that she would not negotiate with “the men of violence”, rather hypocritical in that she befriended and supported US war-monger Ronald Reagan and Chile’s murderous dictator, General Augusto Pinochet.

Even after Bobby Sands secured 30,493 votes and became MP for Fermanagh/South Tyrone, making a mockery of the British Government’s attempts to criminalise the republican struggle, and her insistence that the ‘terrorists have no mandate’, Thatcher remained intransigent, insisting:

“We are not prepared to consider special category status for certain groups of people serving sentences for crime. Crime is crime is crime. It is not political.”
It must be noted that Special Category Status (POW status) was removed in 1976 by a Labour Government but Thatcher was insistent on carrying on. When Bobby Sands MP died on 5 May 1981, after 66 days of a tortuous and selfless brave hunger strike, Thatcher remarked:

“Sands was a convicted criminal. He chose to take his own life.”
Always first to claim that she was protecting democracy against evil, Thatcher’s government hurriedly ratified the Representation of the People Act, which prevented other IRA prisoners from contesting elections. The British criminalisation policy was shown up, with fellow Hunger Striker Kieran Doherty TD for Cavan/Monaghan, blind and on his deathbed, defiantly declaring:

“Thatcher can’t break us; I’m not a criminal.”

An Phoblacht for more

Our dearest readers,

‘The Green Kaleidoscope (TGK)’ is out with its 9th issue!

In this issue, you will find:

– A feature article/photo-essay on the recent anti-Talibanization meeting (and mass mailing) event which took place in Lahore, at GPO Chowk

– Two glorious photo-essays (one of which features the ‘Festival of Lights’ held near the suburbs of Lahore)

– A sardonic piece which questions the threat of Talibanization and why the government has let it get this far (by Faisal Kapadia)

– An in-depth article which raises a few questions that many Pakistani youngsters seem to be asking today (by Gauher Aftab)

-…and many more!

If you’d like to write for us, or if you have a bone to pick with us, write in at:

editors.tgk@gmail.com

Happy reading 😀

– Your editors at TGK.

www.thegreenkaleidoscope.com

By Andrew Grossman

We have all been washed too well in Christian moralism’s filthy legacy — even decades of belligerent atheism cannot fully exfoliate those layers of shame acculturated and inculcated during the months we spend as toddlers twiddling with our bizarre appendages and groping through fantastical stages of Freudian anality. Following the terrific yearnings of adolescence and brazen awakenings of young adulthood, we at last cast aside every folk neurosis and totemic inheritance with which our irrational upbringings smothered us. We soon become overconfident in our sophistications, as complexly layered in their denials as our toddling naivetés once were in their credulities. We watch Pasolini during tea, page through Civilization and Its Discontents in the tub, and employ Erwartung as the soundtrack for our weekly nosehair tweezings, so what possible meanings can New Testament shame, ruler of the unlettered and beguiled, still portend for us, who’ve endured and absorbed every cultural revolution?

…

Twain’s famous remark that “Man is the only animal that blushes . . . or needs to,” is trenchant in its misanthropy but perhaps too easily equates human folly with post-Christian habits of socialization. In The Unfashionable Human Body, an amusing tour through history’s garment neuroses, Bernard Rudofsky describes “an unauthorized easterly version of the Fall [in which] the first man and woman are described as sexless; only after having sinned ‘were the halves of the forbidden apple grafted unto them in the shape of breasts and testicles.'”3 This “unauthorized” Eastern Orthodox incarnation of Eden, wherein developmentally arrested Adam and Eve are instantly socialized through some fruity magic, makes abundantly clear Christianity’s equation between abstract, totalized knowledge and bodily knowledge per se — an equation both neurotic in its reductions and logical in its identification of the body as the source of primal knowledge, a Platonic notion that reaches its apogee in Rousseau’s Emile. Our familiar Western version of Eden is coy to the point of discomfiture: the fruit, once digested, becomes an internalized desire (shame) to cloak the sex organs in leaves, rather than becoming an externalized manifestation of the organs themselves. Though more blatant in its associations, this Eastern version refuses to equate sexual knowledge with knowledge totalized, or the procreative act with all productiveness. Had this been the version on which we were socially weaned, perhaps our nudity neuroses might be at once more intensified and more limited, compartmentalized in a special place in our collective conscious as a unique category of sexual-bodily knowledge distinct from the illimitable sensory investigations of every innocent, autodidactic Emile.

Bright Lights Film Journal for more

(Brazzil Magazine)
In an effort to improve relations of their countries with Rio de Janeiro in the Brazilian southeast, 12 Arab ambassadors to Brazil are meeting with local authorities and businessmen. The trip is organized by the Council of Arab Ambassadors and the Arab Brazilian Chamber of Commerce, to be represented by president Salim Taufic Schahin and secretary-general Michel Alaby.

On the agenda of the ambassadors are meetings with the mayor of Rio de Janeiro, Eduardo Paes, and with state governor Sérgio Cabral Filho. The agenda also includes a meeting with the director of the Federation of Industries of the State of Rio de Janeiro (Firjan) and a visit to the Projac, a Globo TV production center.

The trip is part of the official visit agenda of the Arab ambassadors to Brazilian states. They normally promote one or two visits each semester to different capitals in the country.

According to Alaby, the visit to Rio should serve to learn about the potential of the state, to talk to authorities and businessmen, to learn about cooperation possibilities, investment opportunities and trade.
“Rio de Janeiro is one of the important capitals in Brazil and has one of the main and busiest oil import terminals,” said the secretary general. He believes that there are many possibilities for closer ties between Arabs and citizens of Rio de Janeiro in the area of tourism. “Attraction of Arab tourists and investment in the area in Rio de Janeiro,” he explained.

The trade balance of the Arab countries with Rio de Janeiro is very favorable for the Arabs due to Brazilian imports of oil. According to figures supplied by the Ministry of Development, Industry and Foreign Trade, from January to April this year, the Arab countries sold to Rio de Janeiro a total of US$ 573.5 million and imported from the state a total of US$ 16.9 million. Arab exports were basically oil and exports from Rio de Janeiro included products like iron laminates, glass insulators and rebar.

Brazzil Magazine for more