Month: January 2010

by Ingrid B. Mork

by Tom Hussain

GUJRANWALA, PAKISTAN // A small-framed, bearded man in his thirties named Zubair walked into a computer repair shop in the Civil Lines suburb of Gujranwala, his eyes widening quizzically as he registered the playful taunts of his elder brother.

“He’s got better things to do nowadays. Since he got married, it’s been hard to prise him away from his wife. The business is in trouble,” said Badr, directing his banter at the newlywed.

Zubair smiled shyly and joined the small group of people huddled in conversation between stacks of ageing PCs.

Assured by the right social introductions and the promise that his full identity would not be revealed, he introduced himself as the sole survivor of a squad of eight militants who had in October 1993 been besieged by Indian forces at the Muslim shrine of Hazratbal in the disputed territory of Kashmir.

Over cups of overly sweet milky tea, Zubair described how he had sneaked past a cordon of Indian troops and made it across the Line of Control, the heavily fortified de facto Kashmir border, back into Pakistani-administered territory.

“I was so close I could see the expressions on their faces. It’s a miracle that they didn’t see me. It was as if I was invisible to them,” he said.

However, his return was viewed with suspicion by the Pakistani military’s intelligence agencies, which from 1988 to 2002 deployed militants such as Zubair as strategic pawns in a barely covert guerrilla war against their conventionally more powerful neighbour.

“They couldn’t believe he had survived unless he had been captured and turned by the Indians,” said Salman, a school friend. “They detained and interrogated him for weeks before being convinced his return was a twist of fate.”

“Frankly, it was a dishonourable display of behaviour, and we have lost all respect for them.”

National for more
(Submitted by reader)

In the busy Pakistani city, groups battle in the streets, gunning down rivals and usurping lucrative real estate. A cease-fire brings a respite after more than 40 people are slain in five days.

Karachi residents demonstrate against recent politically motivated violence in the city. (Rehan Khan / European Pressphoto Agency)

by Mark Magnier

Reporting from Karachi, Pakistan – In most places, newspaper headlines about a cease-fire between rival political parties tend to be about policy squabbles. In Karachi, such references are more often literal.

More than 40 people have died here in the last five days in so-called targeted killings, most of the victims slain because of their political affiliations. Some were executed with shocking brutality — three of the bodies found Sunday had been decapitated.

“Think of Chicago or New York a century ago,” said Ikram Sehgal, a political analyst and longtime Karachi resident.

The violence has gotten so bad in this seething metropolis already known for gang warfare and rough ways that the government has called in paramilitary forces to restore order. This appeared to work, at least temporarily, as Monday passed with no additional casualties.

Many welcomed the calm but said they didn’t expect it to last.

“This is a feudal system with lords and peasants,” said Farhan Khan, director of a civic group that helps the disabled. “The lords have private armies, intimidate anyone who speaks out and get away with everything.”

Including murder.

“Quite simply, investigations get squashed on political grounds,” said Mohammed Hanif, a Karachi-based novelist. “It’s a cycle. One gang gets hit, it can’t go to the police for help so when it gets the opportunity, it hits back.”

Political killings nearly doubled in 2009, to 152 from 86 in 2008, according to the Interior Ministry, although some say the actual toll is higher.

Behind the killings, analysts said, is the rich allure of real estate. Rival gangs aligned with political parties are at war in part because a large number of long-term land leases are about to expire, some dating back nearly a century to the days of British rule, with ownership reverting back to the local government.

“This is all about land. It’s incredibly valuable and it’s up for grabs,” Sehgal said. “Whoever becomes the city boss will control this. Then they can route it to their brother-in-law, uncle, whomever.”

Even without sweetheart lease deals, the combination of political power and gun-toting muscle often spells heady profits.

One method reportedly used by well-connected gangs involves having two groups work in cahoots. Wielding forged ownership documents for a piece of property actually owned by a third party, the two fake claimants take their “dispute” to court. This leaves the owner excluded from litigation because by law, the fake case must be resolved first.

Going up against a mob with political clout can also weaken the owner’s will to fight. Cases drag on for years, giving the mobsters effective control, until the owner eventually sells out to the gangsters at a deep discount.

Alternately, politically backed gangs seize and sell off public parks or forcibly evict squatters — killing them if necessary — from land they’ve occupied for decades. Another reported method is to install squatters on land owned by someone else, making it extremely difficult to evict them or use the property. Eventually, the owners are persuaded to sell it for a relative song, at which point the squatters leave, or are forced out at the barrel of a gun, and the criminals collect their windfall profits.

“The political parties use the gangs for all sorts of purposes,” said Murtaza Razvi, editor of Dawn magazine. “It’s all about money, and right now they’re fighting over the spoils.”

With 18 million people, Karachi is not only Pakistan’s financial center but the world’s largest Muslim-majority city. There are hundreds of rival gangs and factions, analysts said, but the two main parties are the Muttahida Qaumi Movement, or MQM, which controls Karachi, and the Pakistan People’s Party, or PPP, which controls the provincial government of Sindh, of which Karachi is the capital.

To further complicate the picture, the two parties are members of the fragile national coalition government, despite their extended history of violence and mistrust. When India was split in 1947, large numbers of relatively well-educated Muslims migrated to the newly formed Pakistan.

Los Angeles Times for more
(Submitted by Asghar Vasanwala)

Scott Ritter, the former chief U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq who harshly criticized the Bush administration’s case for war, has been arrested in an online sex sting for allegedly masturbating on webcam while talking dirty to a Pennsylvania police officer posing as a 15- year-old girl.

In 2001, Ritter faced similar charges after an online sting by New York police that he blamed on his criticism of the war. Charges were later dropped.

Ritter, 44, declined to comment to reporters gathered outside his home in Delmar, N.Y., near Albany, the Associated Press reports, noting a welcome mat that reads “U.S. Marine Corps, The Ritters.”

Ritter and his wife, Marina, have “twin daughters who are about 16,” the AP writes, citing published interviews.

He is charged with unlawful sexual conduct with a minor and is free on $25,000 bail. A court hearing is set for Feb. 23.

The Pocono Record offers a link to the police affidavit but warns in red that it contains “Extremely Graphic Content.”

(Posted by Michael Winter)

(Submitted by reader)

Turkey has been pre-occupied with violence after seemingly innocuous disagreements resulted in ethnic clashes. Last week, a Turkish mob attacked a Roma neighborhood in Manisa’s Selendi district in response to an argument over smoking indoors. While Roma who have been resettled condemn the racism in Seslendi, local Turks argue they are not guilty of any discrimination

As local Roma were “exiled” in Manisa on Saturday in the aftermath of ethnic clashes, other locals claimed some Roma families were “as dangerous as gangs” and rejected claims the violence was connected to discrimination.

A patron at the teahouse in Manisa’s Seslendi district where the conflict began blamed the media for “showing Roma people as victims and other locals of Selendi as violent,” daily Radikal reported Sunday.

Teahouse owner Musa Y?ld?z said he warned Burhan Uçkun, a local Roma man, on New Year’s Eve not to smoke inside because of the recent ban on indoor smoking.

“He swore at me and hit me. I took a blow to my ear and my brother was also wounded in the head. His father swore at everyone, to our mothers, wives and mosques. That is why people reacted,” Radikal quoted Y?ld?z as saying. After the fight over smoking, the group went to the police department.

Meanwhile, Uçkun’s father, Nejdet Uçkun, died of cardiac arrest the same day.

Uçkun previously denied the quarrel over smoking and said the fight started when the owner of the teahouse refused to serve him tea.

Murat Y?ld?z, another local, told Radikal that Roma attacked them first. The teahouses’ patrons all agreed Seslendi’s Roma were pawn brokers, involved in petty crime, swore at people and drank lots of alcohol.

“The man who died, Nejdet Uçkun, swore at God all the time and God gave him what he deserved,” said ?brahim Dönmez, a retired imam in Selendi. Dönmez said the deceased was not ostracized by locals of the district despite having killed a man 25 years ago. “If we were racists, why did we let him live here then?” he asked.

Ethem Demirci, a retired teacher, said Roma women were carrying guns, claiming locals had left town because of pressure from the local Roma.

Due to the Selendi clashes, 13 Roma families were moved to the nearby district of Gördes, while seven families were sent to the Salihli district Saturday.

Those resettled in Salihli were greeted by local Roma with drums and dancing. Manisa’s Governorate rented houses for 28 people from the seven families, paying a year’s worth of rent. While entering Salihli, people shouted, “Down with Selendi.”

Selendi Mayor Nurullah Sava?, however, called on Roma people to return to Selendi. “We can live together as we have lived in peace until this point,” he said. “We never wanted them to go. There may be provocateurs in all communities; we are sorry about that,” daily Milliyet quoted him as saying Sunday. Sava? said he believed the residents of Selendi would agree with him.

Meanwhile, on a visit Sunday to Selendi, Mehmet Ekici, vice president of the Nationalist Movement Party, or MHP, and the deputy chairman of Parliament’s Human Rights Commission, said the events “have to be patched up. The state, politics and the society will carry out such a patching up,” Anatolia news agency quoted Ekici as saying.

Hurriyet for more

by Khadija Sharife

It has been called the ‘new Great Trek’ by South Africans who remember their history.

Presently, over 30 million hectares in almost 30 African countries have been auctioned to a host of corporations and governments, from China – housing one fifth of the world’s population on 8 per cent of the world’s arable land – to oil-rich, water-poor Gulf nations. The deals involving these concessions are often cloaked in secrecy but African Business has learnt that they are usually characterised by allowing free access to water, repatriation of profits, tax exemptions and the ability for investors to acquire land at no cost whatsoever, with little or no restriction on the volume of food exported or its intended use, in return for a loose promise to develop infrastructure and markets. However, the terms of the concessions vary from country to country and deal from deal. In some instances, the host country drives a hard bargain and in other cases, the investors call the shots.

As the debate over the whole question continues to rage on, the much-discussed Congo land-lease, granting 200,000 hectares to South African farmers with a further 10 million hectares in the balance, appears to mark a departure from the usual terms underpinning foreign acquisition of fertile land by multinationals. Not only has commercial agriculture on these concessions chiefly been earmarked for domestic use, thus generating food security, but good crop yields possess the potential to reduce outstanding debt in the Republic of the Congo from 70 per cent to 40 per cent of GDP within a year.

Describing the South African farmers, an official from ABSA AgriBusiness, a leader in the financing of the agricultural sector, stated, ‘They are capable of farming without government support, can compete against the best in the world and even with our scarce resources, they produce profitably.’

‘There are three main reasons we are in the Congo,’ stated Andre Botha, president of Agri Gauteng, a division of Agri SA. ‘The first is, of course, to diversify our businesses; the second is to assist local farmers to commercially develop their own land; the third reason is to assist the government of South Africa to fulfil the expectations of the world in stabilising the African continent through the exchange of skills and technology.’

Agri SA, a commercial farmers’ association, was initially contacted by the Congolese government in January 2009, with the latter seeking a strategic non-governmental organisation in the form of a professional farmers’ union, rather than a political state controlled entity.

The union, a federal organisation formed in 1904, is composed of 70,000 large and smallscale commercial farmers in South Africa. It actively assists members in farm development, corporate liaison, information technology development and transfer, trade, industry, water, land, economic and environmental affairs, as well as labour and training.

All Africa for more

by Mark Weisbrot

For at least a month now in Ecuador there has been a battle over regulation of the media. It has been in the front pages of the newspapers most of the time, and a leading daily, El Comercio, referred to the fight as one for “defense of human rights and the free practice of journalism.” This was in response to the government’s closing down of a major TV station, Teleamazonas, for three days beginning December 22.

International organizations such as the Washington-based Human Rights Watch and the Committee to Protect Journalists joined the Ecuadorian media in denouncing the government’s actions, with the latter calling it “nothing but an attempt to intimidate the media into silence.”

But as is generally the case when private media monopolies are challenged by progressive governments, the view presented by these powerful corporations and their allies in the United States is one-sided and over-simplified. Ecuador, with a democratic left government, is facing the same challenge faced by all of the left-of-center governments in the region: the private media is dominated by heavily monopolized, often politically partisan, right-wing forces opposed to the progressive economic and social reforms that the electorate voted for. All of these governments have responded to that challenge.

In Argentina, a new media law seeks to break up the media monopoly held by the Clarín Group, which according to press reports controls 60 percent of the media. The Brazilian government created, for the first time in 2007, a federally-launched public TV station. The Bolivian government, which faces perhaps the most hostile media in the hemisphere, has also expanded public media. What all of these governments are doing — although they would not put it that way — is trying to move their media more in the direction of what we have in the United States. That is, a media which is heavily biased toward the interests of the wealthy and the upper classes, but nonetheless adheres to certain journalistic norms that limit the degree to which the media is a direct, partisan, political actor.

In the case of Ecuador, it is worth looking at the details of why Teleamazonas’ broadcasting was suspended for three days. The government found that it had, for the second time in a year, violated a rule that prohibits the broadcast of false information that can lead to social disturbances. In the first offense of this type, for which the station was fined $40, it had broadcast a false report indicating that the government’s electoral commission had a “clandestine center” where voting results were manipulated. The second offense, committed in May, was a false report stating that, as a result of proposed exploration for natural gas on the island of Puná, the people there would not be able to fish for six months. Since most of the labor force on the island makes their living from fishing, the false report actually did lead to social disturbances. Both of these reports were found to have no basis in fact. It is also worth noting that social disturbances in Ecuador are often more serious than in the United States: eight of the last ten presidents did not serve out their terms of office.

MRZine for more

by Bruce A. Dixon

The day before being sworn in, Atlanta’s new mayor Kasim Reed pledged to the Chamber of Commerce he’d deal with downtown panhandlers in what he called a more “muscular” fashion. The hopes and predictions of white pundits that black political life would come to look like the rest of America have come true. But not because the inequalities in health, wealth, incarceration rates and other indices of disparity have narrowed. Black politics are looking a lot more like white politics because the black political elite no longer believes its mission is to fight for peace and justice. The newer, more cynical black elite are unmoored from their peace-and-justice-loving base. They are focused on their own careers, and the corporate largesse that makes those careers possible. Make no mistake about it, the black politics of a previous generation, in which black candidates and public officials were expected to stand for something beside their own careers, is over.

There was a time not so long ago, when black politics, both in the minds of black voters, and in the public aims of black politicians, differed from the politics of white America.

Black politics were different because black unemployment was chronically twice as high as white unemployment, because black infant mortalities were much greater and life expectancies shorter than in white America. Black politics were different because African Americans were more likely to live in segregated, inferior housing, attend segregated, inferior schools, and due to the enormous gap in family wealth between white and black America. Black politics were different too because even though many African Americans were in the military, black communities were far less supportive of America’s imperial wars around the world than their white neighbors. And most of all, black politics were different because black voters expected black politicians to use their political careers to advance social and economic justice. Dr. King’s last projects hadn’t been about affirmative action. They were about a strike of sanitation workers for decent wages and benefits, and a Poor Peoples Campaign.

It was an expectation that a generation of black politicians felt obliged to fulfill, or at least pretend to. Every year for a generation in the seventies, eighties, nineties, and into the first years of the new century the Congressional Black Caucus,put forward its own alternative version of a national budget always with billions for job creation in urban and rural America. White mainstream pundits bemoaned and decried the differences between black and white politics, accepting it for a while as the inevitable relic of centuries of exclusion of black faces and black voices from the halls of power. They devoutly hoped that soon, the difference would disappear. And now it has.

Black Agenda Report for more

Translated by Asghar Vasanwala

Here is one more thought provoking verse of Ghalib and its explanation.

For Urdu Explanation, please click the following link

http://lists.elistx.com/archives/blank/201001/gifjIyPHCXu6E.gif

Or

http://tinyurl.com/yk4ac4j

Ta’at meiN ta, rahe  na  mai wa angbiN ki laag Ta’at=prayer mai=wine angbiN=honey

Lest prayer becomes a barter for heavenly wine and honey

DozaKH  meiN  Daldo,  koi  le-kar bahisht  ko Laag= greed Dozakh= hell Bahisht=heaven

Someone please, push heaven into hell

People worship God for reward. Muslims believe if they worship or Ta’at Allah, heaven is reward, where they will be presented with river of unique wine and brooks of honey. However, Ghalib thinks this as barter or greed. Ghalib thinks worshipping or practicing Ta’at of God should be for sake of his love and not for any reward. Therefore, he says it will be better if someone throws heaven into hell and destroys it. If this happens, then worship will not be a quid pro quo for a reward. It will be just for the sake of God’s love. In Sufism Allah is beloved. Lovers love beloved for the sake of her love and not for any reward. The great Sufi Rabia Basri (717-801) once carried fire in one hand a water bucket in other and passed through a market in Basra. Some one asked what the meaning behind her act was. She said with fire I want to burn heaven and with water, I want to silence hell. Then only people will worship God for his love and not for reward of heaven and fear of hell.

These ideas are very different from common practices. Devotees go mausoleum-to-mausoleum, temple to temple, and church to church worshipping and offering gifts/nazranas to idols and tombs. In return, they expect resolution of family problems, fix of money problems, success in business, restoration of health, and receive other rewards. As if, these offerings are going to benefit deity, or saint. It is difficult to understand how can pouring of milk on deity or offering of Chadar (wreath) to saint’s grave, would delight the deity or the saint. As it happens, racketeers, embezzlers, robbers, and thieves give offerings after their successful endeavor, as if deities and saints were partners in their crimes. Instead, people should offer comfort to the poor and the needy. Pouring buckets of water in a brimming lily pond, when rose bushes go dry, is stupidity.

The above Ghalib thought, Iqbal expresses in less dramatic term.

Sodagiri nahiN hai, yeh Ibadat KHuda ki hai

Ae be-KHbar, jaza ki tamanna bhi chhoR de

This is God’s worship, not a business.

Oh unaware person, desire not any reward

by Benedict Carey

That most alarming New Year’s morning question — “Uh-oh, what did I do last night?” — can seem benign compared with those that may come later, like “Uh, what exactly did I do with the last year?”

Or, “Hold on — did a decade just go by?”

It did. Somewhere between trigonometry and colonoscopy, someone must have hit the fast-forward button. Time may march, or ebb, or sift, or creep, but in early January it feels as if it has bolted like an angry dinner guest, leaving conversations unfinished, relationships still stuck, bad habits unbroken, goals unachieved.

“I think for many people, we think about our goals, and if nothing much has happened with those then suddenly it seems like it was just yesterday that we set them,” said Gal Zauberman, an associate professor of marketing at the Wharton School of Business.

Yet the sensation of passing time can be very different, Dr. Zauberman said, “depending on what you think about, and how.”

In fact, scientists are not sure how the brain tracks time. One theory holds that it has a cluster of cells specialized to count off intervals of time; another that a wide array of neural processes act as an internal clock.

Either way, studies find, this biological pacemaker has a poor grasp of longer intervals. Time does seem to slow to a trickle during an empty afternoon and race when the brain is engrossed in challenging work. Stimulants, including caffeine, tend to make people feel as if time is passing faster; complex jobs, like doing taxes, can seem to drag on longer than they actually do.

And emotional events — a breakup, a promotion, a transformative trip abroad — tend to be perceived as more recent than they actually are, by months or even years.

In short, some psychologists say, the findings support the philosopher Martin Heidegger’s observation that time “persists merely as a consequence of the events taking place in it.”

Now researchers are finding that the reverse may also be true: if very few events come to mind, then the perception of time does not persist; the brain telescopes the interval that has passed.

In a study published in the December issue of the journal Psychological Science, Dr. Zauberman led a team of investigators who tested college students’ memory of a variety of news events, including the appointment of Ben S. Bernanke as chairman of the Federal Reserve (33 months before the study) and Britney Spears’s decision to shave her head (20 months). On average, the students underestimated how much time had passed by three months, the study found.

This was not entirely a surprise. In one classic experiment, a French explorer named Michel Siffre lived in a cave for two months, cut off from the rhythms of night and day and manmade clocks. He emerged convinced that he had been isolated for only 25 days. Left to its own devices, the brain tends to condense time.

New York Times for more