Month: January 2010

by George Okojie

Lagos — Strong indications emerged yesterday that the government of India plans to invest a whooping sum of $1.5 trillion on infrastructural development in Nigeria and other parts of Africa in the next 10 years.

India’s Minister of Commerce and Industry, Mr. Anand Sharma, who made the revelation at an exhibition and India-West Africa Business Forum in Lagos, pointed out that bilateral trade between Nigeria and India has for several years been in excess of $10 billion in favour of Nigeria.

He remarked that five out of the 12 fastest growing economies in the world are domiciled in Africa; a continent which he said is richly endowed with natural resources.

Commending the conveners of the forum, the President of ECOWAS Commission, Dr. Mohammed Ibn Chambers, noted that the event could not have come at a better time, when most nations are emerging from economic failures arising from the global economic recession.

According to him, the 15 countries in the West African sub-region with a combined population of well over 280million people, Africa remains a major economy that must be taken seriously, noting that the continent is blessed with skilled manpower, favourable climate that can be harnessed as an alternative to power and good forest reserves suitable for the pharmaceutical industry.

All Africa for more

Poet: Jawed Akhtar; singer: Jagjit Singh

(Submitted by reader)

The last journey of Jyoti Basu

by MANINI CHATTERJEE

Calcutta, Jan. 19: There was no hysterical outpouring of raw grief, no unruly outburst of manufactured emotion, no orchestrated display of organisational might.

Today’s moving and fitting tribute to Jyoti Basu — Bengal’s most enduring icon and among the foremost national leaders of post-Independence India — came not from the three-volley rifle salute nor the galaxy of leaders and VVIPs who thronged the bedecked stage in the Assembly before a huge battery of television cameras.

It came, instead, from lakhs and lakhs of ordinary people — men and women from the city and its suburbs, from distant villages and far-flung districts — who stood patiently in serpentine queues and lined every inch of the roads his last journey meandered through, having gathered in silent clusters along the entire route.

Most of them had come on their own, not shepherded by local party bosses as to a Maidan rally; some of them had never voted for the CPM in their lives, and many had ceased to vote Red in recent years. Yet they came, in an unceasing flow from early morning till journey’s end at 4.40 in the evening, to pay a homage that was spontaneous yet sombre, heartfelt but restrained and entirely in keeping with the persona of the man they had come to say goodbye to.

An era had come to an end, they knew, and they had come to make their tryst with history.

For the CPM, Basu was the last of the nine-member politburo that formed the party back in 1964 and who, more than any other, became the best known communist in the annals of the movement in this country. The party, therefore, pulled out all the stops in giving him a befitting send-off — the entire extant politburo and several central committee members gathering at the party’s state headquarters at Alimuddin Street early this morning to offer Basu their Red salute.

For the Left Front government and alliance, Basu was their longest-serving chief minister who gave the state an enviable stability for decades (before it turned into the now vilified stagnation) and made Bengal the byword for land reforms and decentralisation of power. So the cortege made a brief but obligatory stop outside Writers’ Buildings where chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee placed a wreath on Basu’s body.

But long before he assumed the office of chief minister, Basu had been a central figure in the politics of Bengal — among the handful of political activists who combined mass work, trade unionism and legislative responsibilities with equal ease, entering the Assembly as far back as 1946.

Much more than being India’s longest-serving chief minister, Basu was the only Indian leader who spanned seven decades of active politics — starting before Jawaharlal Nehru became Prime Minister and living to see his great-grandson enter the arena. That long and rich innings ensured that Basu would never be just a communist leader confined to just one state of the country but a towering personality with an appeal that transcended both party lines and provincial boundaries. His party may have blundered in not letting him be Prime Minister in 1996.

But today the CPM brass could not stop basking in Basu’s reflected national glory as leaders from across the political spectrum — Sonia Gandhi and L.K. Advani, Deve Gowda and Sharad Pawar, Lalu Prasad and Chandrababu Naidu and others big and small — flew down to Calcutta to personally pay their respects.

The presence of Sheikh Hasina from Bangladesh, and many Bangladesh Opposition leaders too confirmed that the Basu magic seeped beyond borders.

Yet, all the pomp and show, the rituals and honours bestowed on a frail old man who epitomised the cliché of being a legend in his lifetime faded before the humbling spectacle offered by the crowds — from jeans-clad youngsters to rural women in crumpled cotton saris, middle-class professionals to elderly peasants — who came out in their lakhs today.

It only deepened the inexplicable mystery of what made Basu the most formidable leader of the masses, though he resolutely refused to be a mass leader in the usual sense of the term. Basu never played to the gallery, he did not indulge in rhetorical flourishes or make fiery promises — in or out of power. He never lost his upper-class bearing and acquired some quintessentially English traits — spry and dapper in demeanour, wry and laconic in speech — that he did not shed long after he returned from London on New Year’s Day in 1940.

Despite this seeming lack of “mass leader” characteristics, or more likely because of it, he evoked a sense of awe and admiration among generations of Bengalis (and many non-Bengalis, too) who may not have supported his party or ideology.

Standing far behind in the queue outside the Assembly gates, Naren Chandra from Madhyamgram finds it difficult to articulate quite why he is here. He finally says: “Jyoti Basu was a good man. He was a straight man. He had no duplicity, no hypocrisy.”

Sadek Ali, a policeman from Howrah who has bunked work, says: “Jyoti Basu made us feel proud — everyone knows Bengal because of him.”

For others like Samir Ghatak of Serampore and Basudeb Maiti from a South 24-Parganas village, who hail from Left families and have gradually got disillusioned with the “rot” that has set in within the CPM, Basu brings back memories of the Left’s heyday — and they are paying homage not just to him but to their own erstwhile idealism and youth too.

Just as for Mira Banerjee from Jadavpur, bidding goodbye to Basu is to reaffirm her shaky faith in the future of the CPM. And 40-year-old Anindya, speaking for a generation that had little sympathy with the Left Front’s record of governance, says wistfully: “We grew up with the legend of Jyoti Basu long before we knew who he was. When I was a little kid, I believed that two entities would never die —Phantom and Jyoti Basu….”

Basu’s body was handed over to SSKM Hospital at the end of the day’s journey. Neuroscientists are keen to scan his brain. But neither medical science nor political analysis can quite explain the peculiar alchemy that enabled the no-nonsense pragmatist exercise such a mesmerising hold over his people — that came out in all its splendour today in the course of the patriarch’s last journey.

Telegraph

by VINAY LAL

The US has been awash this year with celebrations of Abraham Lincoln’s bicentennial. The feeling is widespread that Lincoln, more than anyone else, represents the idea – and thus the dream and hope – of America better than any other figure in American history. He has been lionized as the savior of the Union, the emancipator of the slaves; he is also, perhaps, the most eminently quotable American. At his death, as I recall from my American history textbook from over three decades ago, his Secretary of War Edwin Stanton declared that he ‘now belongs to the ages’. Lincoln has topped most American polls as the most widely admired person in American history. Tolstoy was unequivocal in his pronouncement that Lincoln “overshadows all other national heroes.” The great storyteller that he was, Tolstoy has mesmerized Lincoln’s acolytes with his account of the conversation that transpired between him and a tribal chief in the Caucasus who was his host. Tolstoy told the tribal chief about great military rulers and leaders, but his host remained unsatisfied. “You have not told us a syllable about the greatest general and greatest ruler of the world”, he told Tolstoy, adding the following: “He was a hero. He spoke with a voice of thunder; he laughed like the sunrise and his deeds were strong as a rock . . . His name was Lincoln and the country in which he lived is called America, which is so far away that if a youth should journey to reach it he would be an old man when he arrived. Tell us of that man.”

The hagiographic portrait of Lincoln that has circulated since his death has, to be sure, also been punctured with criticisms. While the ‘Great Emancipator’ to some, to others his commitment to equality between blacks and whites is profoundly questionable. For the present, though, one might profitably turn one’s attention to another, not unrelated, question: to what extent can Lincoln reasonably be viewed as a ‘world historical’ or universal figure? As I have elsewhere argued, in an “interchange” among scholars of Lincoln published in the Journal of American History (September 2009), Lincoln had many constituencies, to take one country as an illustration, in India. Gandhi and Ambedkar, however opposed to each other, nevertheless shared in common an admiration for Lincoln. In 1905, while Gandhi was waging a struggle on behalf of the rights of Indians in South Africa, he penned an article in his journal Indian Opinion which pronounced Lincoln as the greatest figure of the nineteenth century; Ambedkar, on his part, quotes Lincoln in his closing speech as the Constituent Assembly was on the verge of adopting the Constitution of India of which Ambedkar was the principal drafter. In Britain, not unexpectedly, there was much veneration for Lincoln, among, for example, the Welsh and in Liberal Nonconformist working-class communities; and one can, similarly, point to the enthusiastic reception given to him in most countries of Europe and Latin America.

It is wholly understandable that Americans should be unable to minimize representations of Lincoln as the preserver of the Union, the emancipator of slaves, and the self-made man who, moving from a log cabin to the White House, brilliantly exemplified the possibilities of humankind in the relatively unencumbered circumstances of the New World. But once we are beyond this, the question persists: what, if anything, qualifies Lincoln as a world historical figure, in the manner of, to name some highly disparate figures, Marx, Mao, Darwin, and Gandhi? Is there in his writings something that might be called a body of thought that can be viewed as having made a substantial difference to intellectual activity worldwide? Histories of human rights will doubtless always have a place for him as the figure who precipitated the formal end of slavery in the US. But, nevertheless, the fact that he is an inspiration to so many, or that his humanism is immensely appealing, should not be conflated with any estimation we might have to offer of Lincoln’s contributions to the principal questions that have animated those who work and deliberate on such issues as nationalism, anti-racism, anti-colonialism, the creation of postcolonial states, and so on. The invocations over the last few decades have been to the likes of Cesaire and Fanon, not to Lincoln. Once the Lincoln who is forever enshrined in popular memory as the author of the observation that “You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time” has been reckoned with, what is there in the body of his work that would appeal to those especially outside the Anglo-American world? It does not appear to me that Lincoln figured prominently, if at all, in the discussions about human rights that ensued in the 1930s and 1940s and culminated in the creation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the late 1940s; likewise, debates about decolonization, the principal political issue of the 1950s and 1960s, except of course to those who view everything through the prism of the enmity of the US and the Soviet Union, seemed to have bypassed Lincoln.

There is yet another consideration: many American figures have much larger reputations than they might otherwise have had owing to the immense influence wielded by the US in nearly every sphere of life, particularly in the post-World War II period. America’s history has been everyone’s history, and not only because the US has been a distinct immigrant society; just as significantly, America has been part of the national imaginary of every country, foe, friend, or otherwise. When the attacks of September 11 transpired, Le Monde unhesitatingly described it as an attack on the world: “We Are all Americans”, the newspaper declared. Can one even imagine such a response had the attacks been conducted on Chinese soil? When, however, America’s star begins to fade, will it also not lead to a fundamental reassessment of American history and culture. How is Lincoln going to fare in a world where America’s history is no longer perceived to be everyone’s history?

Vinay Lal teaches at UCLA; his blog is Lal Salaam

The Egyptian government can no longer turn a blind eye to tensions between Muslims and Coptic Christians

by NESRINE MALIK

“Long live the cross” chanted a crowd Copts, members of Egypt’s oldest Christian community, as they marched in the funeral processions of six of their number shot after leaving Christmas Eve mass last week in the Egyptian town of Nag Hammadi. The attack, which has shocked the country and the region, was followed by riots, civil unrest and an escalation in the tensions between the two communities.

Believed to have been carried out to avenge the rape of a Muslim girl by a Christian man, it is the latest outbreak of violence in an increasingly tense relationship. In a series of events over the past few years, Christians and Muslims have have clashed over plays, bumper stickers and land. Copts have been asserting their identity in the face of the promotion of an increasingly monolithic national character. While there are some cases where there is obvious discrimination, there are others where the Egyptian government’s characteristically slapdash approach to public health and safety has fuelled a sense of persecution. The entirely unnecessary slaughter of hundreds of thousands of pigs, kept by Christian farmers, did nothing to allay concerns that the minority is being targeted.

Egypt has the largest Coptic minority in the Middle East. Khartoum in neighbouring Sudan also had a significant Coptic population, but this has gradually been eroded since the National Islamic Front came to power in 1989. Before then, several of my classmates were Coptic, the head of the community’s Christmas and Easter messages were broadcast on national television, and several private schools in the city had been established or were run by nuns. It was in Khartoum where, as a child, I attended my first church ceremony, a close family friend’s Greek Orthodox wedding. It’s hard to imagine that kind of relaxed entente between a Muslim and Christian family now, so straitjacketed has the city’s identity become. Slowly, the exclusive brand of nationalistic Islam that the government spread like a blanket over the country’s media and popular culture alienated non-Muslims and the majority of Copts emigrated, primarily to Egypt, which most considered to be their natural refuge.

As a student in Cairo, I felt that Egypt had in fact travelled even further down this road. I was taken aside by Muslim girls in my dorm and told off for being too relaxed with other Coptic housemates who had “the devil in them”. Ironically, the hostel, generously adorned with Christian themed imagery and artwork, was run by Catholic nuns. The agitators clearly had no problem with Christianity, it was more a suspicion of Copts as a sub-culture that are out to get Muslims.

Arab governments rarely admit and tackle such splits head on. Whenever there is an outbreak of sectarian violence, authorities resort to fire-fighting, dismissing the event as a one off, attributing it to unhinged rogue elements or conspiratorial external forces – everything but a sober admission and confrontation of the issues. Either that or there is official state silence, which is less a tacit endorsement of discrimination and more an indication that the state is not in the business of admitting culpability or failure. It was no surprise when the official Egyptian news agency quoted Shenouda, the head of Egypt’s Coptic church, and Mohammed Sayyed Tantawi, imam of al-Azhar university, as saying the attack was “unlikely to harm what they called the strong bonds between Egypt’s Muslims and Christians”.

Legitimising criticism might open the floodgates and bring down the whole structure. Demonstrating against Israel, the Muhammad cartoons, the murder of Marwa el-Sherbiny and against the Algerian football team is positively encouraged as it diverts frustration, but as Mona Eltahawy railed on Twitter, there’s not much point in holding one’s breath in anticipation of popular marches against the Coptic shootings.

The Egyptian government is in a difficult position of its own making; it cannot afford actively to advocate on behalf of Copts for fear of offending the majority Muslim population. In addition, it has to pay lip service to a religious mandate which it has fostered in order to buttress its legitimacy.

Guardian for more

by SAILENDRA NATH GHOSH

Recently the DRDO’s former senior scientist, Dr K. Santhanam, raised a controversy that the Pokhran-II test for thermonuclear device was unsuccessful and that fresh nuclear tests were necessary to face the threat from China. Two former Chairmen of the Atomic Energy Commission, Dr P.K. Iyenger and Dr Homi Sethna, supported his contention. Whether Pokhran-II was successful or not is a question of science and technology. But whether fresh nuclear tests are necessary to meet the defence needs is basically a question of policy, which should be informed by science and technology but not wholly determined by it. Even if Dr Santhanam’s assessment is accepted—despite strong evidences to the contrary—there is no warrant for fresh nuclear tests in the context of (i) the carefully and very correctly formulated India’s Nuclear Doctrine, (ii) the changed global political situation, and (iii) some consideration basic to survival of life on Earth.

India’s Nuclear Doctrine

The Nuclear Doctrine drafted in 1999, was subse-quently formalised, with some modification, in 2008. It decided not to embark on a nuclear arms race as is done by countries ready for a massive first strike on the adversary country’s offensive weapons in strength (in kiloton yield) or number, but just develop arms as the instrument of minimal nuclear deterrence. What is enough for effective deterrence is a matter for judgment. In response to some other country’s first—even if massive—attack on us, our capacity to inflict an order of damage which the attacking country will find unacceptable, cannot be precisely quantified. But a realistic calculation is possible. The simple uranium-based 15-kiloton atomic device which was dropped on Hiroshima killed about one lakh people.1 The plutonium-based 20-kiloton atom bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki killed a somewhat lesser number (about 80,000) because of the latter’s hilly terrain. Those bombs were “mere firecrackers” compared to today’s—including India’s—smallest atom bombs; and the cities—ours as well as theirs—are also more populous than in those days. Therefore, in case of a nuclear attack by an adversary country, India’s capacity to inflict “unacceptable damage” need not be in doubt. What is more important is the capacity of our early warning system and the efficiency of our delivery system. Fresh tests are irrelevant for both purposes.

Vastly Changed Global Context

The world has been changing fast. The world’s foremost nuclear hawks of yesteryears are now campaigning for a nuclear-free world. Henry Kissinger, George Shultz (two former US Secretaries of State), William Perry (former US Secretary of Defence), and Sam Nunn (former Chairman of the USA’s Senate Armed Services Committee) have been playing leading roles in this campaign. They have found a large number of prominent public figures in their country as fellow-participants. Twenty of them held positions of policy-makers in the US Adminis-tration. As many as 79 religious organisations representing Catholics, Protestants, Jews and Muslims in the USA registered their protests against George Bush’s plan to reactivate the US nuclear weapons manufacturing plants.

The above-mentioned “gang of four” (Kissinger et al.), in an article in the Wall Street Journal, dated January 4, 2007, said that nuclear weapons, far from promoting security, are bringing more insecurity. With the cessation of the Cold War between the USA and Russia, that is, between the two largest possessors of nuclear arsenals, these weapons have become obsolete for deterrence for them. However, “deterrence continues to be a relevant consideration for many states with regard to threats from other states”. But in their case, too, “reliance on nuclear weapons for this purpose is becoming increasingly hazardous and decreasingly effective”. Increasingly hazardous because the new nuclear nations do not have the benefit of years of step-by-step safeguards to prevent nuclear accidents, misjudgments, and unauthorised launches. Decreasingly effective as deterrence because the plethora of weapon states, harbouring various sources of conflicting interests, will always tend to push headlong into war. “The need today is to take the world to the next stage—to reversing the reliance on nuclear weapons globally, and preventing proliferation into potentially dangerous hands.” (’Potentially dangerous hands’ mean fanatical states and non-state terrorists.)

In the UK, another “gang of four” – Lord Douglas Hurd, Sir Malcom Rifkind, Lord George Robertson, Lord David Owen, who were earlier among the staunchest supporters of British nuclear deterrence—started campaigning since 2007 for “ditching the nuclear bomb”. They noted that “there is a powerful case for dramatic reduction in the stockpile of nuclear weapons” and called upon Britain and France to join in renewed multilateral efforts to reduce the number of nuclear weapons in existence and to consider what further contribution they might make to “achieve a non-nuclear weapons world”. “Nuclear weapons are security problems—not a solution.”

Mainstream for more

By NIKOLAUS VON TWICKEL

President Dmitry Medvedev’s ­­­anti-drinking campaign got another boost Thursday when it emerged that the government has set itself the ambitious goal of reducing the ­country’s rampant alcohol consumption by more than half over the next decade.

National alcohol demand will be slashed in two phases, by 15 percent between 2010 and 2012 and by another 55 percent between 2013 and 2020, according to the government’s anti-alcohol strategy.

The 12-page document was signed by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin on Dec. 30 and published on the government’s web site the same day, yet it went largely unnoticed until being picked up by the national media this week.

Health advocates voiced doubt on whether the goal was realistic and if there was enough political will to solve the country’s drinking problem, pointing to the alcohol industry’s vested interests and widespread illegal vodka production and distribution.

While the strategy is in many respects vague, it does explicitly target the black market, saying the main hurtle to achieve its goal was to eliminate illegal alcohol during the second phase.

The document says per capita consumption of pure alcohol has almost doubled from 5.4 liters in the early 1990s to 10 liters in 2008. The authors say that if black market production is included, today’s per capita consumption of pure alcohol would be about 18 liters, more than double the 8.5 liters that are consumed in the United States.

The paper argues that the rise was possible because of a lack of a coherent ­government policy. They point to the fact that between 1914 and 1917 Russians consumed only 0.83 liters per capita.

During those years, a ban on alcohol introduced by Tsar Nicholas II was in force.

Russians’ infamous vodka-drinking habits are widely blamed for the country’s dismal health statistics. The average life expectancy for men at birth has only recently climbed over the 60-year threshold, and is still among the lowest in industrialized countries. Official data show that at least 2 million Russians are alcoholics and some 100,000 deaths annually are blamed on alcohol consumption.

Health advocates also say the effects of alcohol are all the more devastating in Russia because most of it is consumed as spirits and not as wine and beer like in Western countries.

Since taking office in 2008, Medvedev has vowed to improve the situation. Last summer, he described alcoholism as a “national disaster” that undermines public health and hampers the economy, urging the public to unite in fighting against it.

The government’s anti-alcohol strategy comes after Medvedev set a three-month deadline in September to get tough on alcohol abuse.

The government announced in December that new labels on beer, wine and liquor would warn buyers in large print about the dangers of drinking. On Jan. 1, it raised the minimum price for vodka to 89 rubles ($3) per 0.5 liter.

Officials are also weighing the pros and cons of creating a state-run monopoly on the country’s $52 billion alcohol market.

The latest plans won praise from state-sanctioned vodka producers. Dmitry Dobrov, a spokesman for the state-owned Rosspirtprom holding, which oversees about 40 percent of that market and more than 100 distilleries, said the measures were positive and the achievement of its goals realistic.

“It is first and foremost illegal production that we want to get rid of,” he told The Moscow Times.

Dobrov said the black market’s size could partly be guessed by measuring the gap between official vodka production, which was 1.2 billion liters in 2008, and official sales, which amounted to 1.77 billion liters the same year.

He also argued that bootlegged vodka poised greater health risks because of the use of surrogates not meant for human consumption.

But Kirill Danishevsky, a lead consultant at the Open Health Institute, said reducing alcohol consumption would be extremely difficult because of huge profits gained by producing spirits. To produce a bottle of vodka usually costs 10 rubles, he explained.

A first step, he said, would be to curb the production of drinking alcohol. “There are about 500 factories that make ethanol, and there is no way to control them,” he said.

Danishevsky said about half of that ethanol output is sold to people or organizations producing vodka illegally.

Another step, he said, would be to raise the price for alcohol sold as vodka to the same level as alcohol sold as beer.

“Today it is seven to 10 times more expensive to get drunk on beer than on vodka,” he explained.

Moscow Times for more

The pressure is on wives when couples cannot conceive, as men find it difficult to believe the cause lies with them.

by JENNIFER CROFT and AINAGUL ABDRAKHMANOVA

When a Kyrgyz couple remains childless, it is generally the wife who is encouraged to seek fertility treatment. Husbands commonly reject suggestions they might be infertile, and some even remarry in the hope of having a child.

The state health information service in Kyrgyzstan says that in 2008, the last period for which comprehensive data are available, 5,000 women were on the records as having fertility problems compared with just 2,000 men. Yet doctors say that statistically speaking, the two figures for the population as a whole should be fairly close to each other.

There is some hope of change, however, as the 2008 figure for men was at least a dramatic rise on the 1,300 recorded in 2005, suggesting that more of them are actively seeking medical help.

Nurbek Sadyrbekov, head of the Urology Department at Kyrgyzstan’s National Hospital, told IWPR that the overall statistics for both sexes were understated as they only captured people seeking treatment in the state health system, not those who went private.

The discrepancy between male and female readiness to seek fertility treatment reflects deep-seated attitudes, experts say. Wives are under pressure to conceive and blamed if they do not, while men prefer to avoid the potentially embarrassing disclosure that they have problems fathering a child.

In an interview for IWPR, Professor Natalya Kerimova, head of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology at the Kyrgyzstan State Medical Academy, said women conventionally get the blame when a couple is unable to conceive.

“The man sees himself as the stronger sex and believes he can’t be infertile,” she said.

Bishkek-based psychologist Venera Junusova agreed, sayting “Men think that going to see a doctor means losing their masculinity.”

There is strong social pressure on couples to produce children – traditionally as many as possible, including male heirs to continue the family line. A common toast to newlyweds is to wish them “lots of pairs of slippers” in their home.

In some cases, the man’s relatives urge him to divorce his wife if she does not conceive.

Rather than seek help, Junusova said, men “refuse to believe it to the very end, and start having affairs to prove the opposite”, adding that this was the cause of many marriage break-ups.

Sadyrbekov described a familiar pattern of events that follows when newlyweds have failed to conceive after a year or two, “He dumps his wife and marries someone else. He lives with his second wife but there are no children. Only then does he start wondering what’s going on.”

Esen, a businessman from Bishkek, told IWPR of his experience.

“My wife and I have been trying unsuccessfully to conceive since 2005. We underwent check-ups and were told it was down to me that we couldn’t conceive. Frankly, I think everything’s fine with me,” he said. “I’ve had a lot of women but none of them got pregnant, so I think it’s just matter of time.”

Esen said he had donated money to build a mosque, and believed God would help him and his wife to conceive.

By contrast, Janybek, a taxi driver in Bishkek, is undergoing treatment after putting it off for a long time.

His first marriage broke up because he and his wife did not have children. By this time he had already discovered he had a low sperm count.

Deterred by the cost of treatment, Janybek consulted a urologist only after he married for the third time.

The cost of medical help for either partner is high – IVF treatment can reach 4,000 US dollars, well beyond the reach of many couples, given that the average wage in Kyrgyzstan is about120 dollars a month.

Institute for War and Peace Reporting for more

by PEDRO FUENTES

January 11, 2010 — At the meeting of left-wing political parties and socialists held in Caracas on the eve of the congress of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez called for the formation the Fifth Socialist International. In a strong speech in which he summarised the history of international socialist organisations, Chavez said, Confronting the capitalist crisis and the threat of war that threatens the future of humanity, it is time to convene the Fifth International, towards the unity of the left parties and revolutionaries willing to fight for socialism … of the parties and socialist currents and social movements in the world to create a common strategy for the fight against imperialism, the overthrow of capitalism by socialism.

At that meeting, which had a clearly anti-imperialist tone, there were many parties that were out of place; including, the Mexican Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), the Chinese Communist Party and even the Brazilian Workers Party (PT). Others were missing, for example, the Brazilian Party of Socialism and Liberty (PSOL), the French New Anti-Capitalist Party (NPA), the National Resistance Front of Honduras and the Revolutionary Tendency of El Salvador, among others.

The call for a new international was quickly accepted by a section of those attending – the Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) of Bolivia, the New Country Party of Ecuador President Rafael Correa, the militant Patricia Rhodas, representing the legitimate president of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya, and other left wing groups such as the Socialist Alliance of Australia. There was an explicit rejection from the communist parties (except Cuba’s) and the Brazilian PT, because for them the São Paulo Forum is still in effect.

Beyond all the contradictions of Bolivarianism and the critical situation of the Venezuelan process due to the weight of the bureaucracy, Chávez offered a proposal that we consider progressive towards filling the international vacuum that exists today; an advance that may become a leap to create an alternative to the deep capitalist crisis we live in and provide a response to imperialist policy.

Political vacuum

The PSOL’s — and all of those who claim to be anti-imperialist and socialist, as the NPA of France and other socialist forces that have already replied — response to that call must be “We are present”. We are present and we will be there because we want to participate in the construction of this process that has just begun and whose next date is the late April meeting in Caracas.

This proposal, if it materialises, is inclined to address an acute contradiction that exists in today’s world situation. On one hand, the acute crisis of global capitalism has placed a concrete and urgent need for international coordination and international organisation. But at the same time, what we have so far is a political vacuum in the international arena. This vacuum exists today because there is no international organisation that is, or that may be, a real pole for the world vanguard and the most radicalised sectors of mass movement. The World Social Forum meetings, which were once a progressive place to coordinate the actions of the anti-globalisation and antiwar movements, have been losing strength as they have become increasingly controlled by parties like the PT and other international bureaucratic institutions and apparatus.

Likewise, for us, the São Paulo Forum, under the hegemony of the Brazilian PT, has followed the bourgeois direction of that party so it is not a viable reference. The fronts or coalitions of the communist parties that exist in Europe are primarily interested in recovering parliamentary or governmental positions, so they are not a viable reference either. Neither are the Trotskyist organisations, even though they do have an international practice. The self-called Fourth International, that [originated from] the division of the United Secretariat, has developed some work with the masses and encouraged the France’s Revolutionary Communist League (LCR) to participate in the creation of the NPA, is also not viable. And neither are the various international organisations to reclaim the Fourth International. Trotskyism is no more than small groups exclusively proud of their international positions.

Surely there will be those who, in name of “purity of program”, will reject the call from Caracas, or will require that this meeting provide a definite program for the international socialist revolution as it existed in the Third and Fourth internationals. For us, still valid is Marx’s sentence criticising the long but ambiguous Gotha Program which would unite the two German socialist currents: “Better a joint action than half dozen programs.”

LINKS for more

by World Science staff

In adult fe­male mice, switch­ing off one gene seems to start turn­ing the ovaries in­to tes­ti­cles and trig­gers the pro­duct­ion of male hor­mones at nor­mal male levels, sci­en­tists say.

The cu­ri­ous find­ings have led two re­search­ers to re­mark in a pub­lished pa­per that, bi­o­log­ic­ally speak­ing, fe­males may be en­gaged in a life­long “bat­tle to sup­press their in­ner ma­le.”

Both pa­pers ap­pear in the Dec. 11 is­sue of the re­search jour­nal Cell.

The new results echo a pre­vious study that found that fe­male ovar­ian tissues in mice start to con­vert to male-like tis­sues in the ab­sence of sig­nals from es­tro­gen, a fe­male sex hor­mone. That stu­dy ap­peared in the Dec. 17, 1999 is­sue of the jour­nal Science.

In the newer re­search, N. Hen­ri­ette Uh­len­haut of the Eu­ro­pe­an Mo­lec­u­lar Bi­ol­o­gy Lab­o­r­a­to­ry in Hei­del­berg, Ger­ma­ny, and col­leagues were stu­dy­ing genes that dur­ing de­vel­op­ment are re­spon­si­ble for con­vert­ing glands called go­nads in­to ei­ther ovaries or tes­ti­cles, de­pend­ing on the sex.

Ovaries produce eggs, the fe­male sex cells, while tes­ti­cles produce sperm.

Uh­len­haut and col­leagues ge­net­ic­ally en­gi­neered mice in which the ac­ti­vity of a called Fox2L could be chem­ic­ally sup­pressed in the ovaries.

Fox2L, in turn, is a reg­u­la­tor gene that in­flu­ences the lev­el of ac­ti­vity of an ar­ray of oth­er genes. Among oth­er things, it keeps in check genes that tend to pro­mote tes­ti­cle de­vel­op­ment, ac­cord­ing to Uh­len­haut’s group.

Switch­ing off Fox2L had the im­me­di­ate ef­fect of in­creas­ing the lev­el of ac­ti­vity of some of these “tes­tis-specific” genes, the sci­en­tists re­ported. Crit­i­cal among these, they iden­ti­fied one called Sox9.

Con­com­i­tant with the boost in Sox9 ac­ti­vity was a “re­pro­gram­ming” of cer­tain ovar­i­an cell lin­eages in­to what ap­peared to be tes­tis cell lin­eages, Uh­len­haut and col­leagues found. Mean­while, the mod­i­fied ovaries be­gan pro­duc­ing nor­mal ma­le-like lev­els of the hor­mone tes­tos­ter­one.

“Our re­sults show that main­te­nance of the ovar­i­an phe­no­type [form] is an ac­tive pro­cess through­out life,” the sci­en­tists wrote.

It’s un­clear wheth­er the find­ings would trans­late to hu­mans, but be­cause mice share over 90 per­cent of their genes with hu­mans, it very of­ten hap­pens that mouse pro­cesses have par­al­lels in hu­mans.

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