Darfur rebel leader just doesn’t get it
This rebel leader in Darfur, who is a wee bit p-d off that his people are still being massacred, says he’s not inclined to go to Tripoli for UN sponsored “talks” until something is done about the bloodshed on the ground.
But the SLA leader that first “a guarantee of security” for his people would be needed.
“I will not participate in the negotiations until all the Janjaweed have been disarmed, security is guaranteed and the international troops are deployed in Darfur,” al-Nur told AKI.
The guy obviously doesn’t understand the beauty and function of the UN. He’s giving up a rare opportunity for a Mediterranean vacation with excellent cuisine, convivial company and ample future opportunities for kickbacks. What a loser.
Rorschach test
Here’s a quick inkblot test. I give you two phrases, you tell me what comes to mind: “give a village challenge” and “rich donors.” Don’t know about you, but I immediately thought “Hillary Clinton,” combining “takes a village” and “Norman Hsu/Mark Rich.” Here’s the headline:
‘Give a village’ challenge to rich donors
Turns out it wasn’t some new way of combining Hillary’s faux social activism with her genuine campaign cash drive. It’s actually a project that gives specific badly needed things to poor communities in India and Africa.
UN in Darfur: “Good progress” but “no successes”
The UN is shocked, shocked! to find genocide going on in Darfur:
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has expressed deep concern at the Sudanese government’s “brutal aerial and ground attack” on a South Darfur town that has left at least 25 civilians dead and took place just days after the United Nations chief visited the war-torn region.
Ban told the Security Council on Wednesday that the attack indicated that “we must all renew our strong appeals to the parties to show restraint in the lead-up to political negotiations in October” that are being held to try to resolve the conflict that has engulfed Darfur since 2003.
Yeah, and if you launch any more of them brutal ground and air attacks, I’ll have to show even more restraint, you bunch of SOBs.
Ban said that although his trip to the region had brought “good progress,” particularly the announcement that political negotiations between the Government and rebels will take place in Libya on 27 October, “I will not say that we have had any successes yet.”
Ah, there is nothing quite like watching the UN inaction.
They’re not guidelines, Bob
First, it’s not funny. It’s tragic. But one can’t help but be a little perversely amused Robert Mugabe & Co. in Zimbabwe can be so clueless about the laws of supply and demand. They’re not guidelines, Bob.
Mugabe has now finally allowed a token devaluation of the currency, but
The black market exchange rate surged ahead to eight times the new official rate of Z$30,000 to the dollar. “It’s too little, too late,” Mr Davies said. “It is irrelevant.”
Their answer till now had been to stiffly enforced requirements that retailers slash prices below production cost. Supply plummeted. [Doh!]
Then, there’s the predictable West-bashing that makes him sound like part of the U.S. media-academic complex:
He blamed the West for Zimbabwe’s economic woes. Zimbabwe’s rampant inflation was the result of an attempt “to affect regime change by former colonial powers through the use of price increases,” he said.
Always worth a try. Then there is this:
The police and the army are regarded as among the worst black market dealers, confiscating goods from street traders and then selling them at a higher price.
But my favorite line comes from a reader comment:
Shouldn’t the United Nations be able to step in and do something in a situation of such gravity?
Ya think?
Are these guys for real?
Once you get past the emotionally wrenching images of Kenyan poverty in this African relief video, you realize that maybe there are subtexts here. On a subtle and deeper level, I am led to question the whole industry of celebrity causes. I mean, are these guys really sincere? Or are they just doing it to enhance their image? And what of Laurie David, Sheryl Crow and the whole global warming celebrity industry. Any different? I don’t want to be cynical, but sometimes you really have to wonder. Take a look, and decide for yourself.
Order when ready
Muammar Gaddafi’s son has proposed significant constitutional reforms for Libya, including a free media, an independent central bank, and a diversified civil society:
“Society needs to have independent media to highlight corruption, cheating and falsification,” he said. “Libya must have an independent civic society and independent bodies.”
But then there is this oddly mixed message:
Mr Gaddafi ruled out any ambition to succeed his father. He said: “Libya will not turn into a dynasty or monarchy. We want to strengthen our current system.”
And just what is that “current system”? The article does not leave us hanging:
At present, Libya has no formal constitution. Instead, Col Gaddafi runs the country according to principles laid down in his “green book“, serving as a guide to his brand of Arab socialism. …
In practice, public criticism of Col Gaddafi is a criminal offence and opposition parties are prohibited.
His son said that any reforms should not question Col Gaddafi’s continued rule nor the role of Islamic Sharia law in Libya’s justice system.
The man wants to raise crops without soil, water or sunlight. He seems oblivious to the organic character of the whole civil society shtick. Like you can just pull up at the drive-thru and order a combo meal of free media and independent institutions.
What’s a little genocide among friends?
With up to four million Africans starving in Zimbabwe in a fully man made crisis [that’s man in the singular, as in Robert Mugabe] one would think that all those who cared for humanity would rise up to overthrow the bastard.
An opposition leader described the situation:
To use a legal term, I would say this amounts to genocide with constructive intent. In terms of a complete disregard for the plight of people, not caring whether there is wholesale loss of life, it amounts to genocide.”
So how does Mugabe hang on?
There are several reasons Mr Mugabe has survived for so long. Few African leaders are prepared to openly condemn him despite the fact that, as Mr Coltart pointed out, “the overwhelming majority of the people who are dying as a result of the regime’s policies are black Africans”.
Scotter Libby has to think this is pretty funny
Just to set the stage, this is the South African Health Minister who gained infamy for promoting vitamins and garlic as alternatives to AIDS drugs. Now, she’s been unveiled as an alcoholic who cheated her way to a liver transplant and more:
The opposition called on the president, Thabo Mbeki, to sack his health minister, calling her a “moral and legal liability” after Johannesburg’s Sunday Times reported that Dr Tshabalala-Msimang and her doctors hid her drinking problem so she could receive a donor liver in March from a teenage suicide victim, even though she had not given up alcohol - normally a prerequisite for the operation.The paper reported that the minister needed the transplant because alcohol had destroyed her liver and that usually a woman of her age - 66 - who had failed to give up drinking before the operation would not have qualified for an organ. The article claims that doctors and staff knew Dr Tshabalala-Msimang was drinking immediately before the transplant.
The paper also revealed that Dr Tshabalala-Msimang had been convicted of stealing from patients and banned from Botswana as an undesirable alien for 10 years when she worked as a hospital superintendent there in 1976. She was caught after taking a watch from an anaesthetised patient and wearing it to work. The police searched her home and found other stolen items, including hospital property.
What, exactly, do you have to do to get fired from a government ministry post in South Africa?
Not that there is anything wrong with that
When I read the news, I expect to be amused as well as informed. I was not disappointed in reading this report on Gaddafi:
Maummar Gaddafi is no ordinary dictator. He is known as the Brother Leader of Libya but has no constitutional power or governmental position. He conducts himself like a philosopher-king yet replicates the spartan habits of traditional desert life, sleeping in a Bedouin tent inside the Army barracks and supplementing his diet with camel’s milk. He leads a deeply conservative Islamic society yet his personal security detail is a 40-woman strong, heavily armed combat unit called the Amazonian Guard.
That’s hysterical. I have no problem with women being in a guard, but forming an all female guard is so intriguingly affected–especially in, as the article notes, an Islamic society. It’s one of those priceless little snapshots that tells you more about the guy than the rest of the article put together.
You can learn more about this Amazonian Guard here.
Dumping piles of fish on a man’s head
Give a man a fish, and he’ll eat for a day. Teach a man to fish, and he’ll die young from heavy metal poisoning. But dump piles and piles of fish on the man’s head year after year, and you’ll totally distort his economy.
That seems to be the message of CARE’s recent decision to phase out U.S. farm aid. They say the aid is hurting those it supposed to help. But this is nonsense. It is supposed to help the American farmer, and I don’t see them complaining.
The program works like this: the U.S. buys food products from U.S. agribusiness, ships them on U.S. flagged ships, and gives them to charities, which sell them and use the profits for their charitable projects. The steady infusion of cheap food products reduces the market for domestic food production, which reduces the supply. And the cycle starts again.
The nongovernmental organizations “have been ignoring this evidence for years that there’s a negative impact on the prices farmers receive,” Mr. Matlon said.. He is involved in an effort by the Rockefeller Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, financed with an initial $150 million, to increase the productivity of Africa’s farmers.
The Government Accountability Office, the nonpartisan, investigative arm of Congress, also concluded this year that the system was “inherently inefficient.” CARE and Catholic Relief Services — who rank first and second in money raised through the current system — say they recover only 70 to 80 percent of what the United States paid for the commodities and shipping.
I find this issue hard to parse from the outside. Jimmy Carter is critical of the program, which of course speaks strongly in its favor. But even a stopped clock is right twice a day, eh? And agribusiness and the congressional pork caucus is heavily in favor of it.
I’m putting my money with CARE’s assessment that the program sucks.
South Africa doesn’t blame Bush or global warming
In a departure from established precedent, South Africa is circulating a document blaming Zimbabwe’s problems neither on George Bush or global warming, a move which left Western media stunned and scrambling to write fresh copy.
Not that they place the blame on Mugabe himself, though.
“The most worrisome thing is that the UK continues to deny its role as the principal protagonist [sic. I think they mean antagonist?] in the Zimbabwean issue and is persisting with its activities to isolate Zimbabwe,” the report says.
As opposed to this:
The wholesale printing of money helped fuel inflation now estimated to be running at about 20,000%. Shops are virtually empty of basic foodstuffs.
Now, if we could just persuade the Brits to stop printing Zimbabwean money, we might just pull out of this nosedive, eh?
[Sidenote on the mustache: What do you get when you cross Charlie Chaplin and Adolph Hitler? Apparently a clumsy, slapstick, Jew-hating Jewish dictator, who takes a once-properous country and drives it off the economic cliff.]
“The French understood the requirements”
Yes, it was blackmail. And the French, bless their hearts, were “very flexible.” Just because Sarkozy likes America doesn’t mean he’s not another cheese eating surrender monkey.
The son of Libya’s dictator, Saif al-Islam al-Qadhafi, gives a surprisingly frank interview to Newsweek about the release of the Bulgarian medic hostages, and Newsweek’s Christopher Dickey is admirably blunt in expressing his disgust. Read the whole thing.
“Blackmail? Maybe,” he says, considering the word. “It is blackmail, but the Europeans also blackmailed us. Yeah, it’s an immoral game by the way, but—I mean they set the rules of the game, the Europeans, and now they are paying the price.” They, and the Americans, too, for that matter, are merely serving their own political and economic interests, as far as Saif al-Islam is concerned. While the medics suffered, governments and multinationals were cutting deals. French President Nicolas Sarkozy even finagled an image-enhancing jaunt for his whimsical wife, Cécilia, as ostensible liberator of the prisoners. “She is the last person to come interfere in that issue and she is the person who took the medics with her back home,” said Saif al-Islam. “She’s very lucky. Lots of people tried in the past and they failed.” The reason: “The French [understood] the requirements and they were very flexible.”
[HT: Emanuelle Ottelenghi at Contentions]
Will this be graded on a curve?
France and this rock star wannabe who runs Libya have just inked a huge arms deal, following the 2004 lifting of sanctions against the now and again rogue regime:
Libyan leader Moamer Kadhafi’s son, Saif ul-Islam, told Le Monde newspaper in comments published on Wednesday that Tripoli’s release of six foreign medics last week had paved the way for the signing of major arms deals with France.
Seif al-Islam said at the time that Libya was looking to purchase Milan missiles as part of a wide-ranging defence deal.
But French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who travelled to Tripoli a day after the medics’ release, denied any quid pro quo for the release of the five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor convicted in an AIDS case.
Libya holds these guys for eight years on laughable charges, tortures them–and I mean really tortures them–and then releases them on the eve of their execution date. And we’re all supposed to be OK with that?
I guess for that part of the world, that’s an above average performance. Kudos all around.
When life is cheap
Africa has much more on its mind than air safety. Hence, stories like this one, about an air safety bureaucrat who refused to bend, are more the exception than the rule.
Only one other region of the world had a rising crash rate, the Middle East, but even it was safer than Africa, rising from 0.5 to 1.8 fatal crashes per million departures. The United States, with the best safety record on earth, declined from 0.7 to a record low 0.4 in that period, and Europe dropped from 0.8 to 0.6. Latin America, with the second-worst safety record, dropped from 2.4 to 1.7 fatal crashes per million departures.
Using a more common measurement - destroyed aircraft per million departures, even if there is no fatality - Africa is much worse. For the 1996-2005 decade, Africa had 9.7 “hull losses” - the total loss of an airplane - per million departures, while the United States had 0.4 and Europe 0.6.
It’s a key measure of progress when random death becomes so rare that we can begin to focus on things like air safety:
Charles Schlumberger, principal air transport specialist with the World Bank, said that there were other dedicated people like Taal throughout Africa, but that many African politicians had difficulty understanding why they should worry about aviation safety when millions of citizens die every year from diseases like malaria and only a few hundred die in plane crashes. Others readily accept bribes.
This is one of those vignettes that bring into focus African skepticism about things like global warming, and why they remain aghast at our preoccupation with DDT. Only a wealthy society can move to such second, third and fourth order risks.
Reality check
It must be very trying for a dictator like Mugabe in Zimbabwe, who has become accustomed to bending humans to his will, to see that economic realities cannot be coerced. It does make you wonder: whether people like this read books or articles. Or if they have advisers. Or how could they not know what would happen here. Is the man just dumb?
Robert Mugabe has ruled over this benighted country, his every wish endorsed by Parliament and implemented by the police and military, for more than 27 years. It appears, however, that not even an unchallenged autocrat can repeal the laws of supply and demand. One month after Mugabe decreed just that, commanding merchants nationwide to counter 10,000-percent-a-year hyperinflation by slashing prices by half and more, Zimbabwe’s economy is at a halt.
Essentials like bread, sugar and cornmeal, staples of every Zimbabwean’s diet, have vanished, seized by mobs of bargain-hunters who denuded stores like locusts in wheat fields. Meat is nonexistent. Gasoline is nearly unobtainable. Hospital patients are dying for lack of basic medical supplies. Power blackouts and water cutoffs are endemic.
Shadows on the wall
Cutting carbon emissions in Europe has hit a snag as Eastern countries protest that they need extra consideration in order to be on a level playing field:
Latvia’s decision to join its East European neighbors in mounting legal challenges comes ahead of a broader political argument, due this autumn, over which countries should carry the greatest burden of EU efforts to combat climate change.
So far Poland and Hungary have taken the lead in arguing that the new, ex-Communist, member states from the East have special considerations. They are seeking latitude to pollute more to catch up with their Western counterparts.
On Tuesday, Prime Minister Aigars Kalvitis of Latvia said his country needed to produce more carbon emissions partly because a Communist-era nuclear power plant, Ignalina, which supplies some of the Baltic nation’s electricity, is due to be phased out - at EU insistence.
All of this equity conflict within the EU is just shadows on the wall for the real conflict, which is suppression of economic growth in Africa, Asia and South America, and the resulting suppression of life chances–with attendant disease, infant mortality and poverty–for the world’s most vulnerable.
The global warming jihadists had better hope they are right. There will be a great deal of blood on their hands if the trade offs they pretended not to see prove to have been unnecessary. [More likely, and with any luck, these countries will simply laugh them off.]
But then, they have already done the same with DDT, apparently blithe to the consequences and never called to account.
Good news and bad news
The good news is that British PM Gordon Brown seems to have broken the logjam at the UN for a UN-approved force to contain the Dafur genocide:
Gordon Brown appeared set today to crown his first overseas trip as Prime Minister with a diplomatic triumph after UN Security Council members reached broad agreement on sending a force of up to 26,000 troops and police to the Darfur region of Sudan.
The latest text of a draft resolution sponsored by the UK and France was circulated among council members last night - before a visit by Mr Brown to UN headquarters - and appears to have won the support of both China and Russia.
The bad news is that the civilized world must go cap in hand to a UN run by rogue regimes like Russia and China, who view a little genocide now and then as simply a healthy expression of national sovereignty.
Details emerge on Libyan torture of medics
The Palestinian doctor who was held in Libyan custody along with five Bulgarian nurses on charges they infected hundreds of children with HIV, has described in detail how they were tortured during their eight-year ordeal. Ashraf Alhajouj, 38, said he was beaten, held in cages with police dogs and given electric shocks, including to his private parts. He said that he and the nurses were sometimes put together naked in the same room and tortured.
In a harrowing first-person account, published in the latest edition of the German news magazine Der Spiegel following the release of the six last week, Dr Alhajouj described how following his initial arrest in January 1999, along with the nurses, he was taken to a police dog training centre outside Tripoli.
Again, it is almost gratuitous to note, the fatuous United Nations gave Libya the chair of its ludicrously named Human Rights Commission as recently as 2003. What more do we need to know about the UN?
And will the EU and its member states now follow through on the ridiculous extortion agreements they made to secure the release? Does Libya walk away from this not only unscathed, but materially strengthened?
Nary a word
Africa is in the grip of a continent-wide power shortage, the result of a multitude of factors, including mismanagement, failure to invest in infrastructure and exploding economic growth pressuring power supplies. The solution involves building more capacity, and generating a whole lot more CO2.
But the article breathes not one word about global warming or CO2. The hidden hypocrisy of the whole global warming jihad is that, if really pursued, it would doom billions in India, Africa and Asia to permanent third-world status–including poor medical care, poor education, and high infant mortality.
Wind and solar power are currently–and “foreseeably”–far too expensive to be practical alternatives to carbon-based fuels. Anyone who suggests otherwise may be smoking something, but it’s not helping the power grid.
Ya think?
French President Sarkozy had some strong words about self-help in solving Africa’s problems, as captured in this AFP report:
Sarkozy was speaking on a visit to France’s former colony Senegal, the second stop of his first tour to sub-Saharan Africa since taking office in May.
The French president said it was time Africans rose up to the problems confronting them including dictatorship and poverty and pledged to supporting any efforts to change the continent’s fortunes.
“Do you want to end the arbitrary corruption, violence? Do you want property to be respected, that money is invested instead of being embezzled. Do you want the rule of law?”
“It is up to you to take the decision and if you decide so, France will be by your side like a unwavering friend, but France cannot take the place of African youths,” Sarkozy told students at the University of Cheikh Anta Diop.
He admitted that colonisation was a “great mistake”, but said it was not to blame for all Africa’s difficulties such as the genocide and wars that have ravaged the world’s poorest continent.
“What France wants to do with Africa, is to face realities, to have a policy based on realities and not a policy of myths,” he said.
The speech was generally well received but drew criticism from some who felt the French president was in danger of lecturing to his audience.
Ya think?
