International news – Bladsy 4

EU sponsors anti-white NGOs

The first preparatory meeting leading to the 2009 UN World Conference against Racism will take place at the UN’s offices in Geneva next week and is already being deemed a "second Durban."

The 2009 conference, whose venue has yet to be decided, will be a follow-up to the 2001 UN anti-racism conference held in Durban, South Africa, which focused on Israel and culminated in resolutions calling Israel an "apartheid state" and equating Zionism with racism. The US and Israel pulled their delegations from the conference; Australia and Canada accused it of "hypocrisy."

"The anti-racism meeting in Geneva is shaping up to be a wolf in sheep’s clothing," said Hillel Neuer, executive director of UN Watch, a watchdog NGO based in the city. "Every indicator is that the sequel to Durban will mimic both the format and script of the 2001 conference, using the noble language of anti-racism as a cover to promote hatred of the West and anti-Semitic, anti-Israel propaganda.

With the Islamic states also planning to add new accusations against the West under the claim of ‘religious defamation,’ this is a fiasco in the making."

The preparatory meeting, which runs from August 27-31, will be chaired by Libya and include representatives of Argentina, Armenia, Belgium, Brazil, Cameroon, Chile, Croatia, Cuba, Estonia, Greece, India, Indonesia, Iran, Libya, Pakistan, Norway, Russia, Senegal, South Africa and Turkey. Those countries make up the bureau, the committee that will decide on the modalities and objectives of the 2009 conference.

Brasilia and New York are rumored as possible venues, although Libya and South Africa, whose Foreign Ministry is a major player in the process, are also seeking to host the conference.

"The composition of the preparatory committee including Iran and Libya, meeting for the reenactment of the infamous Durban conference, suggests that nothing has been learned since 2001," said Prof. Gerald Steinberg, executive director of NGO Monitor. "Once again, the NGO network that hijacked Durban 2001 – funded by the Ford Foundation and European government aid programs – is preparing to play a key role in using this conference for the demonization of democracies and deligitimization of Israel."

"The designated chair is Libya, a racist regime that gave its highest award in 2002 to convicted French Holocaust-denier Roger Garaudy, brutalizes black African migrants, and tortures Bulgarian and Palestinian medics for the crime of being foreigners," Neuer added.

Following the active role nongovernmental organizations played in Durban in 2001, NGO Monitor has expressed concerns about politicized groups taking part in the 2009 conference. The Jerusalem based organization has submitted to the Preparatory Committee a detailed analysis of the impact that would result from these groups’ involvement. It has urged the committee to carefully examine the credibility and biases resulting from NGO participation in order to avoid a repeat of Durban.

"Although these NGOs claim to promote universal human rights, the record shows that in reality, they advance biased agendas based on a highly distorted narrative that exploits and undermines international law," NGO Monitor said. "Several of these NGOs, including Human Rights Watch and Amnesty, played an active role in the NGO Forum in 2001. Rather than provide objective information to address the crucial issue of eliminating discrimination in all its forms, and through universal standards, many statements of these NGOs and their activities during the 2001 NGO Forum included highly inflammatory rhetoric and even anti-Semitic material, such as comparing Israel to Nazi Germany.

"The Final Declaration of the Forum endorsed the singling-out of Israel through a campaign that called for sanctions and boycotts against Israel through the abuse of the principles of human rights and international law," NGO Monitor said.

"The question is whether UN Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour and others who claim to be committed to human rights will take the action that [then-UN high commissioner for human rights] Mary Robinson failed to in 2001 and prevent this farce," Steinberg said. "Furthermore, will the major NGO superpowers, such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, which added their weight to the 2001 Durban travesty, repeat this role?

"In contrast, the Israeli Foreign Ministry, in cooperation with the US and perhaps other democratic governments, have heeded NGO Monitor’s analysis, and are actively raising these dangers with NGO funders, including the EU and its member governments, who fund these radical NGOs," Steinberg said.

The Preparatory Committee will meet again in Geneva on April 21-30 and November 17-28, 2008.

media branding Александр Фильчаков

China is running on empty

China is running out of fuel. Police are guarding petrol stations in several inland provinces to prevent fights, as shortages of petrol and diesel are causing huge queues of trucks, buses and cars.

In Kunming, capital of the southwestern province of Yunnan, 1000 trucks are stranded.

A truck driver named Li told the Chuncheng Evening News he had been stranded at the Stone Tiger Gate petrol station for three days after searching for fuel in other places, but failing. He said his delivery date was way overdue.

Another driver, at Geiju city, said a job that would have taken one day in the past, now took three: one on the road, two queuing for fuel.

Nine days ago, a truck driver was reported to have been stabbed to death in central Anhui province after a row about queuing.

A few days earlier, at Ezhou in Hubei province, 100,000 people were stranded, unable to get to work, because city buses had run out of fuel.

Beijing has been insulated from the headache, and the wealthy coastal provinces are mostly better stocked, because the refineries are nearby.

The problem would intensify as winter approached, and was starting to affect exports, warned the Commerce Ministry, since diesel was crucial for shifting products to ports.

The system is suffering from pressure of demand to sustain its economic growth at the current 11.5per cent – with China now the second-biggest consumer of oil after the US.

Diesel imports rose 46.5per cent in the first nine months of the year, compared with the same period last year.

The other cause of the supply-demand mismatch, is the stuttering transition from government-controlled prices to market pricing.

The Government wishes to graduate towards a system that allows prices to move with international markets.

But inflation is at a 10-year high of 6.5per cent and the Government is reluctant to let oil, a key input for distribution of all products, float free as yet.

The two companies that dominate petrol and diesel sales, Sinopec and PetroChina, are state-controlled but also listed on stock markets, highly competitive, and anxious to become even more market-driven. Both pledged this week to boost their imports, especially diesel.

As inflation began to accelerate this year, the Government announced it was capping the prices of key commodities it still controlled, including oil, until the end of the year.

But it relented under strong pressure from Sinopec, PetroChina and other oil refiners and distributors, and conceded a 10per cent rise from this month.

Even after the 10 per cent rise, the price remains well beyond international levels, and China has to import about half its oil, for which it must pay world prices.

Фильчаков

Anglican Leader Blasts U.S.

Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, leader of the world’s Anglicans, has launched an attack on the United States, saying it has lost the high moral ground since the September 11 attacks in 2001.

Williams, a longtime critic of the war in Iraq, said in uncharacteristically blunt language: "We have only one hegemonic power at the moment. It is not accumulating territory, it is trying to accumulate influence and control. That’s not working."

Asked in an interview with the Muslim lifestyle magazine Emel, if he thought the United States had lost the high moral ground since the 9/11 attacks, he replied "Yes."

Drawing comparisons between British imperialism and the 21st Century United States, Williams said: "It is one thing to take over a territory and then pour energy and resources into administering and normalizing it.

"Rightly or wrongly, that is what the British Empire did — in India for example."

"It is another thing to go in on the assumption that a quick burst of violent action will somehow clear the decks and that you can move on and other people will put things back together again — Iraq for example."

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Playboy goes anti-Semitic

Israel Shouldn’t Get a Free Pass

Why can’t American Jews, particularly liberal Jews, think straight about Israel? American Jews can easily condemn the war in and occupation of Iraq, as well as the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians and the violations of civil rights there. Yet the same passion for peace, justice and human rights is muted when it comes to talking about unpleasant activities in the Israeli government. American Jews and many politicians who pander for Jewish votes are hurting Israel and the cause of peace by refusing to have an honest debate about our country’s historically one-sided position vis-a-vis Israel and the Middle East conflict. An honest debate is underway within Israel itself, but in the US it’s impossible to be critical of Israel without being labeled anti-Semitic or worse.

Before I dive further into this, I should establish my bona fides for making this argument, which itself says alot about the terrain. I am a Jew. My father was born in what was then Palestine and fought in Israel’s war of independence. My father’s cousin was killed in that war. I lived in Israel for seven years, including the period of the 1973 Yom Kippur war. A cousin of mine was killed in that war, leaving behind a widow and two children. My step-grandfather, an ikd nab wgi was no threat to anyone was killed by a Palestinian who took an axe to his head while he was sitting quietly on a park bench. His murder was revenge for the massacre of dozens of peaceful Muslims the day before, slaughtered by an ultra-nationalist Israeli soldier as they knelt in prayer.

I care about Israel as I care about our country, but I wish to speak the truth about it. In 2006, when I ran in the New York Democratic primary for Senator because of incumbent Hillary Clinton’s support for the Iraq war, my campaign coincided with Israel’s bombing of Lebanon, a move triggered by the kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers. While campaigning I said that Israel had committed acts that violated the Geneva Conventions and international standards. Within an hour reporters from all four New York daily papers called me, alerted to my comments by my opponent’s operatives. Betraying their bias, the reporters had no idea my position would not be considered novel or radical in Israel where the country’s conduct in the war was a topic of hot debate. Indeed, the reporters need only have consulted Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem.

Referring to last summer’s Lebanon bombing, B Tselem’s website states, “International humanitarian law…requires that the combating sides direct their attacks only against specific military objectives, take cautionary measures to prevent injury to civilians and refrain from disproportionate attacks, ie., attacks directed against legitimate targets but that are likely to cause excessive harm to civilians. Over the past week Israel has killed hundreds of Lebanese civilians in its attacks against targets in Lebanon. There is a concern that at least some of them were disproportionate attacks, which constitute war crimes”.

Here are some other inconvenient truths. Israel is holding 10,000 Palestinians in administrative detention where, according to B’Tselem, they are exposed to “moderate pressure”, a euphuism for torture. And while six Israeli soldiers and 17 civilians died last year, the Israeli military killed 660 Palestinians, roughly half of them innocent bystanders. So why is there such a lack of debate in the US?

Jews and non-Jews who can easily tell foreigners that being American is not the same as supporting the American government are incapable of making the same argument in Israel’s case. Elected officials won’t say anything because of the political cost or at least the perceived threat from Jewish voters. And there is residue from the Cold War, when Israel was seen as the region’s bulwark against the Soviet Union. Among Jews there is a reflexive “Israel right or wrong” attitude that is deeply rooted in the memory of the Holocaust. My own family lost people in the Holocaust. But the Holocaust should not be used as a moral shield to suppress honest criticism of Israel.

It’s also important to acknowledge that some critics of Israel undercut their own positions by painting a caricature of the country. Israel is a democracy, and like all democracies it has its flaws Nut the open debate heard in Israel is rarely heard in the regions’s other countries, most of which are ruled by dictators or generals. Israel has a very free rambunctious press” can the same be said about Egypt or Syria? Israel’s attorney general recently went after the country’s president for sexual harassment. We can’t even get Congress, not to mention the attorney general, to investigate the president for lying about a war.

These facts make Israel’s conduct even more troubling. The country’s democratic principles and societal fabric are being undermined by its role as an occupier. People who refuse to criticize Israel because of friendship are no friends to Israel. A true friend would not have stood by and remained silent as Israel dropped thousands of cluster bombs in Lebanon, leaving a million unexploded bomblets-small devices the size of a light socket that are still killing and injuring civilians-littered throughout the southern part of the country. A true friend would have taken Israel’s leaders to the woodshed and said, “Responding to Hezbollah is one thing, but turning Lebanon into rubble and embittering a new generation toward the existence of your country is madness”. Instead, politicians like Joe Lieberman and Clinton actually encouraged the bombing by uttering vigorous endorsements of Israel’s right to defend itself. A friend of Israel would not try to fan fears y tarring as anti-Semitic people who are critical of U.S. Middle East policy. Criticism of Israel may be painful to American Jews, but it is high time anyone, Jew or non-Jew, were able to raise questions about our one-sided policy without fear of a McCarthy like smear. A friend would argue strenuously that Israel’s moral fiber and security are weakened every moment it allows the so-called separation barrier in the West Bank to stand, in violation of international law. Whether Jews like the comparison or not, Jimmy Carter is correct in his book “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid when he describes the control over Palestinian’s movements as similar to South Africa’s apartheid system.

As a Jew, I have always been proud of the Jewish concept of tikkun olam, which means roughly,”repairing the world.” I like to think it is hat brought so many Jews into the civil rights and labor movements in the 60’s and 70’s and in to the current antiwar movement. I feel great sorrow that Israel is an occupier of another people, and I believe Israel can never be whole or at peace until that occupation is ended in a just way. I also believe tikkun olam means we must never be silent.

Лобановский

Ally of Bush defeated

Australia’s prime minister, John Howard, one of President Bush’s staunchest allies in Asia, suffered a comprehensive defeat at the hands of the electorate on Saturday, as his Liberal Party-led coalition lost its majority in Parliament.

He will be replaced by Kevin Rudd, the Labor Party leader and a former diplomat. “Today Australia looks to the future,” Mr. Rudd told a cheering crowd in his home state, Queensland. “Today the Australian people have decided that we as a nation will move forward.”

Mr. Howard’s defeat, after 11 years in power, follows that of José María Aznar of Spain, who also backed the United States-led invasion of Iraq, and political setbacks for Tony Blair, who stepped down as Britain’s prime minister in June.

Mr. Howard conceded nearly two hours after the last polling booths closed in the west of the country.

“A few moments ago I telephoned Mr. Kevin Rudd and I congratulated him and the Australian Labor Party on a very emphatic victory,” Mr. Howard told a room of emotional supporters.

“I leave the office of prime minister with our country prouder, stronger and more prosperous than ever,” he said.

Returns for a small number of seats are yet to be compiled, but analysts estimate that over all the Labor Party gained 28 seats to win a comfortable 22-seat majority in the 150-seat lower house of Parliament, where governments are formed. Official results are expected within the next day or two.

Mr. Howard may suffer the indignity of losing his own seat, representing a district on Sydney’s north shore, which he has held for 33 years, to a former television anchor and rookie politician. He would be the first sitting prime minister to lose his seat since 1929.

It was a bruising campaign, and the Liberal Party has said it will challenge some results on the grounds that the Labor candidates had broken electoral law by failing to resign from government jobs before running for office. The Labor Party said it had broken no laws.

Mr. Rudd, 50, campaigned on a platform of new leadership to address broad concerns about the environment, health and education. He has said his first acts as prime minister would include pushing for the ratification of the Kyoto agreement on reducing greenhouse gas emissions and negotiating the withdrawal of Australia’s 500 troops from Iraq.

Analysts said the leadership change was unlikely to bring a radically new foreign policy, although they expected a shift in emphasis in the relationship with the United States, Australia’s closest ally. “Australia will remain a close ally of the United States, and Rudd remains committed to the alliance,” said Michael Fullilove, of the Lowy Institute for International Policy in Sydney. But he noted that “if there is a Democratic administration elected next year, to some extent they would become closer.”

Mr. Howard has a strong personal relationship with Mr. Bush that is based on a similar socially conservative philosophy and a shared outlook on terrorism.

Australian opinion polls have shown that although Australians remain strong supporters of the so-called Anzus alliance — the security pact among Australia, New Zealand and the United States — they do not approve of Mr. Bush or the Iraq war.

The attempts by Mr. Howard’s coalition to stress its economic record apparently failed to impress voters. The Australian economy has had 17 years of continuous growth, lately driven by Chinese demand for Australian iron ore and coal. Mr. Howard had warned voters that a Labor victory would endanger the country’s prosperity.

Despite the coalition campaign, there was little distance between the parties on economic policy, and the defining characteristics came down to the personalities of the leaders. Mr. Howard was running for a fifth term, and many voters said they were ready for a change.

“Howard is out of touch,” said George Varvaressos, 52, who voted in eastern Sydney on Saturday morning. “It’s the arrogance of being in power for too long — he hasn’t been listening.”

If Australia’s strongest military and political alliance is with Washington, the fuel for its economy is coming from China. Mr. Fullilove says Mr. Rudd’s ability to manage the relationship among Canberra, Washington and Beijing will be crucial.

Mr. Rudd, 18 years younger than Mr. Howard, has a reputation as a cerebral student of policy, as opposed to the Liberal leader’s image of a hardened and aggressive political animal.

“He seems more personable, approachable. He doesn’t seem arrogant — yet — and I have respect for him,” said Marcelle Freiman, who voted for Mr. Rudd in eastern Sydney on Saturday.

Mr. Rudd’s dry image was altered by the news that he had visited a strip club during a trip to New York in 2003.

He was a diplomat in Beijing and speaks Mandarin. He impressed many with a fluent address to President Hu Jintao of China when Mr. Hu visited Australia in September.

Mr. Fullilove said Mr. Rudd’s experience regarding China was unlikely to make a significant difference to Australia’s relationship with the United States. “I would counsel against people assuming that because Kevin Rudd speaks Mandarin there would be a big rebalancing of the relationship in favor of Beijing,” he said.

прокурор Фильчаков

Commonwealth summit protesters beaten

UGANDAN police yesterday beat protesters during the Commonwealth summit as they tried to demonstrate against human rights abuses.

Some demonstrators were carried away with head wounds, splashed with blood, after more than 100 police blocked a march on Kampala city centre and charged with batons.

Witnesses said one police officer suffered a head injury when the demonstrators threw stones after the march was halted.

"This is nothing new. This is what we have been living through all this time. This is a police force that does not respect the rights of citizens at all," opposition leader Kizza Besigye said.

Police said the protesters knew they were not allowed to march out of a suburb where the demonstration was authorised.

Protesters said the Commonwealth, which began a three-day summit yesterday, had ignored human rights abuses by the government of President Yoweri Museveni, which diplomats say ruthlessly suppresses opposition in Uganda.

Elizabeth Evenson, of US-based Human Rights Watch, condemned the police action.

"Using force to keep opposition supporters out of sight of the Commonwealth summit reflects continuing limitations on political freedoms. Commonwealth leaders should take President Museveni to task," she said.

The demonstrators earlier waved banners criticising Queen Elizabeth, who opened the summit. "Queen, you are the head of our problems," one of them read.

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Pope calls for Western music

The Pope is considering a dramatic overhaul of the Vatican in order to force a return to traditional sacred music.

The Pope wants to widen the use of Gregorian chant and baroque sacred music

After reintroducing the Latin Tridentine Mass, the Pope wants to widen the use of Gregorian chant and baroque sacred music.

In an address to the bishops and priests of St Peter’s Basilica, he said that there needed to be "continuity with tradition" in their prayers and music.

He referred pointedly to "the time of St Gregory the Great", the pope who gave his name to Gregorian chant.

Gregorian chant has been reinstituted as the primary form of singing by the new choir director of St Peter’s, Father Pierre Paul.

He has also broken with the tradition set up by John Paul II of having a rotating choir, drawn from churches all over the world, to sing Mass in St Peter’s.

The Pope has recently replaced the director of pontifical liturgical celebrations, Archbishop Piero Marini, with a man closer to his heart, Mgr Guido Marini. It is now thought he may replace the head of the Sistine Chapel choir, Giuseppe Liberto.

The International Church Music Review recently criticised the choir, saying: "The singers wanted to overshout each other, they were frequently out of tune, the sound uneven, the conducting without any artistic power, the organ and organ playing like in a second-rank country parish church."

Mgr Valentin Miserachs Grau, the director of the Pontifical Institute of Sacred Music, which trains church musicians, said that there had been serious "deviations" in the performance of sacred music.

"How far we are from the true spirit of sacred music. How can we stand it that such a wave of inconsistent, arrogant and ridiculous profanities have so easily gained a stamp of approval in our celebrations?" he said.

He added that a pontifical office could correct the abuses, and would be "opportune". He said: "Due to general ignorance, especially in sectors of the clergy, there exists music which is devoid of sanctity, true art and universality."

Mgr Grau said that Gregorian chant was the "cardinal point" of liturgical music and that traditional music "should become again the living soul of the assembly".

The Pope favoured the idea of a watchdog for church music when he was the cardinal in charge of safeguarding Catholic doctrine.

He is known to be a strong supporter of Mgr Grau, who is also in charge of the Cappella Liberiana of the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome.

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No More Holocaust Reparations

Finance Minister Peer Steinbrück said in Jerusalem Thursday that Germany had no plans to renegotiate a Holocaust reparations deal signed with Israel in 1952.

"The existing deal is signed and final and there is no need to change it," said Steinbrück after meeting with the chairman of the Center of Organizations of Holocaust Survivors in Israel, Noah Flug.

Flug said that although the reparation agreement with Germany would not be amended, if there were "specific problems" Germany would try to solve them.

"We didn’t ask for money, we spoke of the responsibility of the German government," added Flug.

Complaints that Germany’s reparations fail to compensate in any reasonable way for the trauma of the Holocaust are ongoing. But the Israeli Holocaust survivors who met with Steinbrück on Thursday, Nov. 23, to request improvements to the reparations arrangement specifically argued that the original agreement failed to take into account today’s longer life expectancy or the tens of thousands of survivors who immigrated to Israel after the fall of the Soviet Union.

According to news agency DPA, Steinbrück did agree that Germany would try to help needy survivors via the Claims Committee, the international organization that coordinates compensation payments to survivors.

Earlier this month, an Israeli paper published comments by Israel’s Pensioners Affairs Minister Rafael Eytan saying Israel was keen to reopen the deal, but he later said he was misquoted and only wished to examine with Germany ways to support survivors given the ‘holes’ in the original agreement.

On Thursday, a spokeswomen for the Israeli finance ministry confirmed that Israel has never officially requested Germany revise the reparations deal.

The Luxembourg agreement between the two countries stipulated that Germany would pay Israel reparations, and Israel would look after the survivors, who would not be permitted to sue Germany directly.

Since the 1950s, Germany has paid 26 billion euros ($38 billion) in compensation. Around 1.7 billion of this went to Israel, the rest to German claimants.

Others say that Israel’s reliance on Germany is unreasonable and that the country should look after its elderly Holocaust survivors itself.

After a recent storm of protest by Holocaust survivors who accused the government of abandoning them, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert announced that for the first time in its history, the Israeli government would pay monthly allowances from its own budget to Holocaust survivors and refugees.

The state agreed to give Israelis who survived Nazi ghettos and concentration camps a monthly stipend of nearly $300 ($200), in addition to tax discounts and other breaks. It also approved monthly payments ranging from $40 to $125 for 80,000 Israelis, most from the former Soviet Union, who became refugees as the Nazis conquered Europe but never lived under Nazi occupation.

One-third of pensioners in Israel are Holocaust survivors. Nearly a third of them live below the poverty line, recent welfare reports have shown.

[There are 240,000 Holocaust survivors in Israel]

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‘Pentagon preparing for nuclear Iran’

Officials in both the US and Israel reportedly told the Telegraph that Iran has hidden and scattered its nuclear facilities more effectively than previous intelligence has indicated.

Pentagon adviser Dan Goure told the paper that while "military strikes [against Iran’s nuclear facilities] might set the program back a couple of years… current thinking is that it is just not worth the risks."

Meanwhile, the paper continued, some believe that Israel is preparing to counter nuclear aggression by Iran by fitting out a fleet of submarines with atomic weapons.

The Telegraph report comes three days after another report was released, according to which, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has instructed his cabinet ministers to draft proposals on how to cope with a nuclear Iran.

The report was later denied by a senior Prime Minister’s Office official, Israel Radio reported.

The agency quoted a source close to Olmert as saying there were "long-term ramifications to be addressed, like how to maintain our deterrent and military response capabilities, or how to offset the attrition on Israeli society that would be generated by fear of Iranian nukes."

Why China beats competitors

Low costs give Chinese investors in Africa a competitive advantage over their counterparts from other countries, a Chinese analyst told the U.S.-Africa Business Summit in Cape Town.

Professor Yang Guang, director-general of the Institute of West-Asian and African Studies of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, was addressing an audience of mostly American and African business leaders.

"They [China] possess low-cost technology for resource development," he said. "They enjoy a low cost of labour – not only unskilled labour but also… engineers and managers; they employ cheap ‘Made in China’ electrical machinery, and they earn the support of the government."

Yang was speaking at a plenary session of the summit focussing on Chinese and American perspectives on investing in Africa.

Ambassador Princeton Lyman of the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations told the same session that the U.S. could not compete with China’s offerings:

"China is able to package their government programmes, their state-owned enterprises, their aid programmes in ways that the United States can’t," Lyman said.

"We can’t assist an oil company in making a deal by saying if they win [a contract with an African country] we’ll build a road [for that country], and it’s a challenge for those of us who do things differently."

China’s rapidly growing economic presence on the continent has been taking up more and more space on the agendas of a range of entities interested in African business, including governments, local industries, and foreign companies operating on African soil.

The Council on Foreign Relations, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, the Leon H. Sullivan Foundation of the U.S. and the Brenthurst Foundation of South Africa have been running a trilateral dialogue on how China-United States relations can benefit African economies.

Giving feedback on the dialogue to the summit, Lyman described China’s recent activities in Africa as "almost breathtaking. They’ve come with such vigour and such energy and resources."

Yang backed Lyman’s observations with evidence. China now has more than 800 companies operating in Africa in a wide variety of sectors, he said. About 100 are state-owned and the rest are private but still supported by the Chinese government.

In monetary terms, Yang added, the cumulative value of Chinese investment in Africa totalled 11.7 billion U.S. dollars by the end of 2006.

"We began by investing heavily in the resource development industries," he said, "but nowadays Chinese investment is widespread in industries such as textiles, agro-industries, electricity, road construction, tourism, and telecommunications…"

Africa has had a mixed response to China’s increased presence on the continent.

Sindiso Ngwenya, assistant secretary-general of the Common Market of Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA), told the summit Africa should focus on its own interests at the same time as trying to meet China’s needs.

"There’s nothing wrong with them [China] being after resources – everybody is after resources," he said, "but the issue is… what is it that they bring to the table?"

He cautioned that China was "awash with cash, and they are looking for investment opportunities," adding that "we need to engage them with open eyes [and] ensure that it is a win-win situation."

South African trade minister Mandisi Mpahlwa agreed: "Africa, your problem is not the self-interest of the Chinese. Your problem is… how do you leverage this growth, this demand, for maximum benefit?"

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China leads weather race

Not content to push the edge in cloning, architecture and geological engineering, China’s also leaving the rest of the world behind when it comes to controlling the weather.

A few years ago, Australian journalist John Taylor reported,

It’s uncanny living in Beijing how it rains on the eve of major events. Be it a big domestic event, or a visiting foreign politician, the rain has usually fallen the day before, making for temporary blue skies free of the normal haze.

Chinese officials say cloud seeding has helped to relieve severe droughts and water shortages in cities. In Shanghai officials are considering the measure to cool the daytime temperature, easing demand for electricity.

When next summer’s Olympics roll around, the Beijing Weather Modification Office will be poised to intercept incoming clouds, draining them before they get to the festivities. No fewer than 32,000 people nationwide are employed by the Weather Modification Office — "some of them farmers, who are paid $100 a month to handle anti-aircraft guns and rocket launchers" loaded with cloud-seeding compounds. Some estimate that up to 50 billion tons of artificial rain will be produced by 2010. But Taylor noted that this has resulted in competition between cities to seed clouds first, and bitter acrimony when when region receives water claimed by another.

During my cloud seeding reportage, a few weather modification scientists praised China’s initiative. My gut instinct was to focus on China’s less-than-stellar human rights record and just say, "Well, it’s easy to mess with the weather when there’s no paperwork to fill out or reparations to pay if you flood a village or turn a county into desert." But that’s reductionist. At some level, it’s about vision and will — and China’s got it.

Said Bill Woodley, a weather modification researcher who spent several decades running cloud seeding experiments for NOAA,

"There’s much we don’t know, as compared to China, where investment is 100 million a year. They’re training young scientists and pilots; they’ve just gone crazy there. It’s the epicenter of all weather modification activity. They’re pushing hard. Whereas in the United States, the amount of money invested by any government is probably in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, if that. For a country our size, not much is being invested.

Interestingly, when I opined that this was a shame, because with all the billions of federal dollars spent uselessly elsewhere, the government ought to shake a few million weather modification dollars out of the White House sofa, Woodley seemed a bit chagrined. You can’t just throw money at it, he said — there needs to be strong oversight, someone to make sure the research is first-rate, and so on.

He mentioned a couple of weather modification research bills now creeping through Congress — one introduced by Mark Udall (D-Colorado), the other pushed by Kay Bailey Hutchinson (R-Texas). If you think weather modification research is a good idea, go get your democratic participation on.

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Russia abandons arms treaty

The Russian senate voted Friday to suspend compliance with a key Cold War treaty limiting conventional military forces across Europe, drawing renewed Western criticism.

The unanimous vote in the upper house Federation Council followed last week’s decision in the lower house of parliament, the State Duma, to freeze Moscow’s participation in the Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) treaty from December 12.

The 1990 CFE treaty places strict limitations on the deployment of tanks and other military hardware across Europe.

President Vladimir Putin ordered the moratorium on July 13 amid a row over US plans to install an anti-missile shield in eastern Europe.

In a statement, the Federation Council said Russia had been forced to look at suspending the treaty "for as long as all the countries of NATO have not ratified" an adapted version of the accord.

General Yury Baluyevsky, Russia’s chief of the general staff, said the move was "the correct, logical step from the political and military point of view," ITAR-TASS news agency reported.

Responding to Friday’s vote the Western military alliance NATO reiterated earlier criticism it had made.

"Any measure which takes forward the process by which Russia would unilaterally withdraw from the treaty is regrettable," said NATO spokesman James Appathurai.

The state-run RIA Novosti news agency said Russia could still return to the CFE if Putin reversed parliament’s decision.

But a NATO diplomat, requesting anonymity, questioned what Russia meant by suspending the treaty, saying it contained no provision for suspension and that Moscow was intentionally muddying the waters.

"Russia’s decision to use the term ‘suspension’ only adds an element of doubt," he said.

"Does this mean the CFE treaty is dead? Nothing is clear. It’s an ambiguous situation that could satisfy both parties," he said.

The treaty’s demise highlights deteriorating relations between Moscow and countries of the Atlantic alliance as Putin’s administration pushes to reassert Russia on the international stage.

"This will be an indicator of Russia’s seriousness in its uncompromising stand on ensuring its defensive capabilities, including in answer to US plans to put anti-missile defences in eastern Europe," State Duma deputy Leonid Slutsky told ITAR-TASS.

Last week Deputy Defence Minister Alexander Kolmakov said that plans were being considered for boosting troop deployments on the western flank, something impossible under the CFE.

This is not the first indication of a return to Cold War-style tensions.

Russia has also this year renewed long-distance strategic bomber patrols, threatened to retarget nuclear missiles at European cities, and to withdraw from other bedrock disarmament treaties.

Moscow says the CFE is not working because an updated version agreed on in 1999 has been ratified by Russia, but not by NATO countries.

NATO members, led by the United States, say they cannot ratify the pact because of Russia’s military presence in ex-Soviet Georgia and Moldova.

But for NATO, Appathurai stressed: "NATO countries want to see the adapted treaty enter into force as soon as possible."

Although Russia this week handed over a third Soviet-era base to the pro-Western Georgian authorities, there is controversy over a fourth.

Although Russia says that the base has been decommissioned, Georgian officials are unable to inspect the facility because it is in the Russian-backed separatist Abkhazia region.

Adding to the tension is the growing unease in the West with wide-ranging limitations imposed by Putin on democratic reforms and what critics call Russia’s aggressive use of massive energy resources.

Moscow accuses Washington of interfering in Russia’s backyard and attempting to rule the world as the sole superpower.

Speaking about the decision to quit the CFE, Baluyevsky said: "The US and NATO political leadership hoped that Russia would flinch at the last moment and not take the decision about introducing a moratorium," RIA Novosti reported.

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‘Rape happens’

"This thing of rape," said Colonel Edmond Ngarambe, shifting uneasily on his wooden bench high in the mountains of the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, "I can’t deny that happens. We are human beings. But it’s not just us. The Mai Mai, the government soldiers who are not paid, the Rastas do the same thing. And some people sent by our enemies do it to cause anger against us."

The colonel’s words lay bare a brutal reality about the wretched use of rape as an instrument of war in the eastern DRC.

The growing numbers of women who arrive daily at hospitals as a fresh bout of fighting engulfs the region often have no idea whether their attackers were from the Mai Mai traditional militia, renegade Tutsi soldiers or a group of deserters from an array of armed groups who wear dreadlocks, call themselves the Rastas and specialise in particularly brutal treatment of their victims.

Ngarambe’s own men in the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), which evolved out of the army and militia that fled into the DRC after leading the 1994 genocide of Rwanda’s Tutsis, have been named by human rights groups as among the worst offenders in the onslaught against women, hundreds of thousands of whom have been raped over the past decade of conflict.

Rape has been used to terrorise and punish civilians in the DRC who support the "wrong side", and it is perhaps no coincidence that it was also a tool of genocide in the mass murder of the Tutsis. Sexual violence is now so widespread that the medical aid charity Médecins sans Frontières (MSF) says that 75% of all the rape cases it deals with worldwide are in the eastern DRC. Darfur is a distant second.

"The two places don’t compare," said Augustin Augier, the MSF administrator at Rutshuru hospital, who was previously posted to Darfur. "There you have a lot of people in camps but here the insecurity is so much worse."

‘Barbaric’
The numbers of women seeking treatment for rape at the hospital has risen as a conflict that has already left four million dead over the past decade has reignited.

Human rights groups describe gang rapes as commonplace and often accompanied by "barbaric" acts of torture, with victims beaten with clubs, cut with knives or sexually assaulted with guns. Many young women have been abducted into sexual slavery.

The largest United Nations peacekeeping force in the world of more than 17 000 troops has done little to stop it. Instead, the primary attempt to discourage sexual violence appears on hand-painted murals on walls across the region telling men that it is not manly to rape.

Some of the victims make their way to Rutshuru hospital where they are met by Esparance Kiakimwa (29), a nurse in its sexual violence unit.

"We treat women and children from many places, sometimes very far. Many others can’t get the courage to walk, so far so those who arrive often tell us that all the women in the village were raped but they are the only ones to make it to the hospital. The numbers that make it are only a small part of the total," she said.

"They arrive on the back of motorbikes and in cars but sometimes on foot, walking for days because they don’t have any money for transport. They have all kinds of injuries like knife cuts and damage to the vagina. It’s worse for the young girls. We have to take them immediately to surgery."

Many of the women do not make it to hospital within the 72 hours after the rape in which antiretroviral drugs to reduce the possibility of contracting HIV are most effective. Four percent of those who seek treatment are men.

Hiding
One woman who sought treatment at the hospital tells how she hasn’t dared sleep in her own home for months. "Every woman in the village leaves at night to sleep in the bush because of the raping. They still loot, but if they can’t find us they can’t rape us," she said.

Augier said that women in many villages dare not sleep in their own homes. Others are too afraid even to go to the outskirts of their communities to tend to crops because so many women have been seized in the fields, contributing to the rise in malnutrition and disease that has claimed so many lives.

"People live in fear, so they live in the bush. They expose themselves to diseases: malaria, gastro-enteritis. It’s cold at night. All of this claims lives," he said.

Human Rights Watch said in a recent report that some armed groups appear to regard rape as a battle tactic aimed at breaking civilian support for rivals or as a means of punishing other ethnic groups.

"In some cases soldiers or combatants raped women and girls as young as five years old as part of a more general attack in which they killed and injured civilians and looted and destroyed property. Their intent was to terrorise communities into accepting their control or to punish them for real or supposed links to opposing forces," it said.

The FDLR is among the primary culprits. But the forces of Laurent Nkunda, a renegade Tutsi general who broke away from the Congolese army to fight the FDLR, have also been accused of systematic rape of Hutu women. So too have the Mai Mai.

Immaculee Birhaheka, head of a women’s rights group in Goma, Paif, said those women who make it to hospital are just a fraction of those attacked. She gave as an example what happened in villages along the road south from Goma toward Bukavu.

"The women who come from there tell us that every woman in every village has been raped over the years. There is not one who was not attacked they told us," she said. "Some of them were captured and taken into the forest for months, even two years. When they are released some are in such bad condition that they die."

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‘Riddled with corruption’

Widespread corruption and mismanagement are revealed in a confidential presidential audit in Sierra Leone exclusively obtained by the BBC.

Newly-elected President Ernest Bai Koroma commissioned the report.

It catalogues grave inadequacies in key areas such as health care, tax collection and the security services.

And it provides a unique and searingly frank insight into the sometimes opaque business of running a poor African nation through years of war and chaos.

One arm of government, for example, is alleged to have lent more than $1m (£480,000) to an unspecified recipient in the few months before the recent handover of power.

"We would advise," the report says coldly, "an investigation into the reasons for the loan".

At one ministry, the report seen by the BBC says, a project worth almost $500,000 was apparently financed by an international donor – but the money never reached the intended recipients.

The Sierra Leonean Ministry of Agriculture is described as having "almost zero productivity" at the lower levels of employment.

Financial accounts are reported to have gone missing from many ministries and the culture of record-keeping is generally said to be "in a miserable state".

These findings might not be surprising to anyone who lives in Sierra Leone or any number of poor nations that have been through such chaotic times.

But what is unusual about this report is to have the problems set out so clearly – and in a way that may ultimately put the credibility of the presidency at stake.

In the 10 years I have been visiting this beautiful, friendly, but exasperating country, I have lost count of the number of times decent and honest Sierra Leoneans have told me corruption was their greatest problem.

The confidential presidential report obtained by the BBC acknowledges corruption as "the greatest impediment to the country’s development".

Newly-elected President Koroma has said dealing with corruption is his mantra; Sierra Leoneans may now take him, and judge him, at his word.

Sierra Leone, one of the poorest countries in the world, is very slowly recovering from a decade of brutal war that ended in 2001.

But it still faces huge challenges.

The war started in 1991 when rebels crossed from Liberia and took Sierra Leone’s diamond fields.

The rebels initially benefited from widespread dissatisfaction with corrupt government in Freetown – which they successfully used as a rallying call to unemployed, frustrated youth.

After years of widespread atrocities, the rebels were eventually defeated by a United Nations peacekeeping force and a separate intervention by the British army.

This year the country held elections that were seen as fair and were won by the opposition.

There has been a peaceful handover of power to President Koroma.

The transition was, by Sierra Leonean standards, a model of tolerance and fair play.

APC supporters celebrate victory in Sierra Leone’s presidential election
The recent polls won by the opposition were seen to be fair

But President Koroma has inherited a bankrupt nation which is riddled with corruption.

This report shows what a mountain he has to climb.

It is common for African politicians to accuse governments of corruption when they are in opposition.

But they often fall into the same habits when they take power.

President Koroma’s toughest test will be to show Sierra Leoneans not only that he is different, but that he can change the decades-old habits of almost everyone in government.

The confidential audit obtained by the BBC must make sobering reading for President Koroma. It is a picture of an economy in crisis.

But the report also raises more questions than it answers.

These questions include:

# Will those responsible for past corruption be prosecuted?

# Will any prosecutions be seen as a "witch hunt" – and potentially backfire?

# What safeguards could stop future corruption?

# What was the role of donors, especially the largest donor, Britain, while corruption flourished?

# How will the new government address the twin problems of an impoverished countryside and a corrupt capital city – which was one of the original causes of the war?

A frank report on corruption is one thing, Sierra Leoneans may say; solving the problems it highlights is another.

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