Month: June 2009

By Danny Burridge

On June 1, 2009, Mauricio Funes of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) was sworn in as the first leftist president of El Salvador. Funes rode a wave of popular will for change after 20 years of devastating neoliberal policies implemented by successive Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA) governments. His victorious candidacy was also helped along by its novelty: Funes is a widely respected former journalist and a progressive political outsider.

Funes overcame both a ruthless smear campaign engineered by the right wing and the institutionalized fraud endemic to the Salvadoran elections that favor ARENA. Massive voter turnout prevailed over both obstacles, handing him a slight majority at the ballot box – though recent opinion polls show he enjoys the support of around 80 percent of the public.

In his inauguration speech, Funes promised the social and economic reconstruction of El Salvador under a “government of national unity.” He twice invoked the legacy of the martyred bishop Óscar Romero, assuring that the only sector privileged by his government would be the poor. Funes promised to fight corruption and tax evasion, to streamline government institutions, and to maintain an independent foreign policy. In fact, one of his first acts as president was to re-establish diplomatic and commercial relations with Cuba, leaving the United States as the only country in the hemisphere with out formal ties to Havana.
ALAI for more

Anguish in Australia

P.S. SURYANARAYANA in Singapore (REUTERS)

Sravan Kumar Theerthala, a student from Andhra Pradesh, in the intensive care unit of a Melbourne hospital. He was attacked in a suburb of the city.

INDIAN students in Australia have made their anguished voice heard as never before. They have also succeeded in placing their plight on the bilateral agenda of the governments of Australia and India.

The crisis, which erupted in the last week of May, centres on a heightened sense of insecurity among the Indians enrolled at Australian campuses. A new wave of anxiety was whipped up by a brutal attack on Sravan Kumar Theerthala in a Melbourne suburb. As this is written, he still remains hospitalised. The hospital itself became a starting point for a rally against alleged racist attacks.

At the other end of the spectrum, it is easy to recognise that multicultural Australia has no state policy of racism. In fact, the very presence of an estimated number of 96,000 Indian students in that country should testify to this. A more conservative estimate is between 70,000 and 80,000. In addition, Indian-origin citizens of Australia number nearly 200,000. And, as some independent observers recount, it is a long time now since Australia gave up its “whites only” policy as an article of political faith.

Within the framework of this indisputable big picture, a number of attacks followed the one on Sravan Kumar. Unofficial estimates placed the total at a minimum of 10 in the course of a month before June 10. According to some long-time observers, the “problem” is nothing new. It has been snowballing during the past few years. Only, the savagery of the assault on Sravan Kumar, whatever the provocation if any at all, outraged Indian students.

Front Line for more

by Michael Parenti

Nations that chart a self-defining course, seeking to use their land, labor, natural resources, and markets as they see fit, free from the smothering embrace of the US corporate global order, frequently become a target of defamation. Their leaders often have their moral sanity called into question by US officials and US media, as has been the case at one time or another with Castro, Noriega, Ortega, Qaddafi, Aristide, Milosevic, Saddam Hussein, Hugo Chavez, and others.

So it comes as no surprise that the rulers of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK or North Korea) have been routinely described as mentally unbalanced by our policymakers and pundits. Senior Defense Department officials refer to the DPRK as a country “not of this planet,” led by “dysfunctional” autocrats. One government official, quoted in the New York Times, wondered aloud “if they are really totally crazy.” The New Yorker magazine called them “balmy,” and late-night TV host David Letterman got into the act by labeling Kim Jong-il a “madman maniac.”

To be sure, there are things about the DPRK that one might wonder about, including its dynastic leadership system, its highly dictatorial one-party rule, and the chaos that seems implanted in the heart of its “planned” economy.

But in its much advertised effort to become a nuclear power, North Korea is actually displaying more sanity than first meets the eye. The Pyongyang leadership seems to know something about US global policy that our own policymakers and pundits have overlooked. In a word, the United States has never attacked or invaded any nation that has a nuclear arsenal.

MRZine for more

By B. R. Gowani

Many years have passed
Since you bade farewell
With an unwritten/unspoken promise
To never come back …
Even if you wanted to
Nature would not let you

Painful, the separation was
And it will it seems
Persist to the end
Other pains have cropped up too
As if the heart is not
A life spewing instrument any more
But has instead turned into
a collection of sorrowful parts
With varying degrees of anguish and woe

You were the creator …

The creator vanished
The creation survives!

The only difference
That divides you and me
Is intense grief
I feel it; you don’t

B. R. Gowani can be reached at brgowani@hotmail.com

By Pervez Hoodbhoy

A few thousand mountain barbarians, even if trained by Al Qaeda’s best, cannot possibly seize power from a modern, well-armed state with 600,000 soldiers. The spectre of Pakistan collapsing in six months — a fear expressed by a senior US military adviser in March — has evaporated.

But there is little cause for elation. Daily terror attacks across the country give abundant proof that religious extremism has streamed down the mountains into the plains. Through abductions, beheadings and suicide bombings, Taliban insurgents are destabilising Pakistan, damaging its economy and spreading despondency.

Look at Islamabad, a city of fear. Machine-gun bunkers are ubiquitous while traffic barely trickles past concrete blocks placed across its super-wide roads. Upscale restaurants, fearing suicide bombers, have removed their signs although they still hope clients will remember. Who will be the next target? Girls’ schools, Internet cafes, bookshops, or western clothing stores with mannequins? Or perhaps shops selling toilet paper, underwear, and other un-Islamic goods?

The impact on Pakistan’s women is enormous. Throwing acid, or threatening to do so, has been spectacularly successful in making women embrace modesty. Today there is scarcely a female face visible anywhere in the Frontier province. Men are also changing dress — anxious private employers, government departments and NGOs have advised their male employees in Peshawar and other cities to wear shalwar-kameez rather than trousers. Video shops are being bombed out of business, and many barbers have put ‘no-shave’ notices outside their shops.
WorldAnalysis for more

Singer Mohd Rafi, music director Sachn Dev Burman, lyrics Shailendra

June, 19 2009By Daniels, Ron Ron Daniels’s ZSpace Page

When rabid right wing radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh and conservative guru Newt Gingrich initially attacked Supreme Court nominee Judge Sonia Sotomayor as a “racist,” they were using a time-tested strategy to appeal to Whites who believe their “rights” are being threatened by Blacks and people of color.

Historically, racism has frequently been used by elements of the White power structure as a wedge to persuade working class and poor Whites to disassociate with or fight against Blacks who should have been seen as their class allies. Deeply ingrained attitudes of White superiority and Black inferiority which underpin structural/institutional racism in this society have made White working class and poor people particularly susceptible to this strategy of confuse and exploit. Thus the slogan “Black and White Unite and Fight” has generally failed to bear fruit because too often Whites have been convinced that people of African descent are their enemies.

Z Space for more

No reprieve for gay community living with 30 years of sharia law

Living in fear: a gay transvestite in Iran. JeROeN OeRLeMANS / PANOS

On 1 April Iran marked the 30th anniversary of becoming an Islamic Republic and adopting sharia law. For the country’s gay community, the occasion was a stark reminder of their decades-long persecution. Homosexuality was already taboo under the Shah, but the birth of the Republic in 1979 led to its criminalization. In 2007, despite a penal code stipulating homosexuality as a crime, President Ahmadinejad declared that ‘in Iran we do not have homosexuals’. Following international pressure and derision, he later conceded that there ‘might be a few gay people in Iran’ but denied that they faced execution.
New Internationalist for more

By Phuntsho Choden & Rinzin Wangchuk (Kuensel)
The four main perpetrators of the chilling crime were all minors below 18 years old

20 June, 2009 – The Dorokha dungkhag court in Samtse dzongkhag has sentenced 15 people, involved in the beating up of a 46-year-old mother to death, after local Christian pastors said she was possessed with “evil”, to 1-18 years in prison.

On March 13 this year, victim Kal Maya Rai and her husband had gathered with a group of Christian converts for prayers at Jasbir and Tula Maya Rai’s house in Dumtoe village in Dorokha.

Court officials said that two pastors – Sangeeta Rai and Dil Maya Rai – had asked the gathering to confess their sins. When none did so, the two pastors accused Kal Maya Rai (the victim) of murdering their god in her past life and concluded that she should be killed.

Sangeeta, Dil Maya and two others – Bijay Kumar and Subhash Rai – (all minors, below 18 years) then caught the victim by her hair and started to kick and slap her. They assaulted her first with brooms and then with the handle of a spade, while others, including her husband, watched. Subhash Rai, then, trampled her chest and she started bleeding profusely from her mouth, court officials said.

Four of them then tied the victim’s hands and dragged her outside the house with a rope around her waist, while the victim’s two 13-year-old daughters pleaded with them to spare their mother. The unconscious victim was then tied to an orange tree 15 m away from the house. A mother of five, Kal Maya, was discovered dead by the Dumtoe gup.

The court found the four people to be the main perpetrators and so they should have been sentenced to life imprisonment for their crime, say court officials, but since they were all minors the group was sentenced to 18 years in prison, added the official.

Kuensel for more