International news – Bladsy 15

Global Cooling?

Britain was colder than the Arctic Circle on one of the wettest bank holidays in recent years.

Forecasters said the "unseasonably cold" temperatures generally ranged between 7C and 10C, when they would normally be around 17C at this time of year.

This was colder than Lapland, the traditional home of Santa Claus in Finland and the far north of Norway in the Arctic Circle.

Thousands of homes were left without electricity after high winds brought down power lines in the east of England.

St Catherine’s Point on the Isle of Wight saw the worst of the rain, with 52mm.

Meanwhile, play in the England versus West Indies cricket test match in Leeds was stopped by hail.

Forecasters are warning that the UK is in for an "unsettled" week, but temperatures are expected to pick up and could hit an above-average 22C by the weekend.

In Edinburgh, a Met Office spokesman said temperatures today would remain around 10C or 11C although tomorrow should be the "best day of the week" at 16C with some sunshine.

He added that the rest of the week would be affected by further rain, although it is set to be dry on Saturday.

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Call for an apology for Slavery

Dear Mr. Blair

We are writing to you to request that the British government formally and fully apologise for Britain’s role in the enslavement, brutality and murder of millions of Africans as a result of the slave trade. In addition we are calling for you to announce a national slavery memorial day on the 23rd August every year. This date marks the beginning of the end of slavery as a result of the defeat of the French and then the British armies in Haiti by the great African freedom fighter Toussaint L’Ouverture.

To paraphrase Professor Stuart Hall the apology is not about guilt tripping contemporary Britain, but it is important that people know about what actually happened, its long lasting legacy and can take a cue from singular leadership to demonstrate that saying sorry and meaning it, goes a long way in healing. It must acknowledge the psychological and physical damage to millions of British Caribbean people and commemorate a history of resistance. It is important that this nation acknowledges the fact that the roots of modern day racism and discrimination is firmly located in the religious, philosophical, scientific and economic arguments that were developed to justify the enslavement of, and trade in, Africans

There are British precedents for an apology: the Queen apologised to the Maoris and the Prime Minster apologised to the Irish community in relation to the potato famine. Even George Bush has acknowledged slavery as one of the greatest crimes in history. In Ghana African Ashanti Chiefs have formally apologised for their own role in capturing and selling their fellow Africans. There are precedents in memorial days especially for example the national Holocaust memorial day.

To quote Lord Herman Ouseley, patron of the 1990 Trust:

After the abolition of the slave trade, the Slave Compensation Commission paid the equivalent of £2billion at today’s prices, to compensate planters, slave traders and slave owners for the abolition. NOTHING was ever awarded to a former slave. The effects of hundreds of years of genocide and barbarism are still prevalent today. For us to move on with understanding, dignity, respect and knowledge of what happened, the government should follow the lead given by some others and fully apologise for Britain’s role in the slave trade while positively promoting commemoration, memorial, education and reconciliation.

Yours sincerely

David Weaver on behalf of the 1990 Trust team
Chair

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Human evolution, radically reappraised

Human evolution has been speeding up tremendously, a new study contends—so much, that the latest evolutionary changes seem to largely eclipse earlier ones that accompanied modern man’s “origin.”

The study, alongside other recent research on which it builds, amounts to a sweeping reappraisal of traditional views, which tended to assume that humans have reached an evolutionary endpoint.

The findings suggest that not only is our evolution continuing: in a sense our very “origin” can be seen as ongoing, a geneticist not involved in the study said.

Gregory Cochran of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, Utah, a co-author of the study, said the research may force a radical rethinking of the story of modern human evolution. “It turns it upside-down, pretty much,” he said. But skeptics question some aspects of the work.

The traditional picture of humans as a finished product began to erode in recent years, scientists said, with a crop of studies suggesting our evolution indeed goes on. But the newest investigation goes further. It claims the process has actually accelerated.

It also downplays the importance of a much-scrutinized era around 200,000 years ago, when humans considered “anatomically modern” first appear in the fossil record. In the study, this epoch emerges as just part of a vast arc of accelerating change.

“The origin of modern humans was a minor event compared to more recent evolutionary changes,” wrote the authors of the research, in a presentation slated for Friday in Philadelphia at the annual meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists.

The authors are Cochran and anthropologist John Hawks of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The findings will also be submitted to one or more scientific journals, Cochran said.

The proposal is “truly fascinating,” wrote University of Chicago geneticist Bruce Lahn in an email. He wasn’t involved in the work, though he did conduct earlier research finding that evolution may still be ongoing in the brain.

Even before the Hawks-Cochran study and its immediate forerunners, Lahn wrote, scientists had already noted a trend of accelerating change in the evolutionary lineage leading to modern humans from ape-like ancestors. But that phenomenon seemed to have occurred over time spans measured in millions of years; it was far from clear that it has continued in the recent past or today, he added.

Hawks and Cochran, by contrast, argue that the trend “is visible even in the last tens of thousands of years,” Lahn wrote. It “runs counter to the feeling in some quarters that the evolution of the human phenotype [form] has slowed down or even stopped in our recent past.”

Defining an origin

If the study is correct, it raises new questions about how to define the “origin” of modern humans—a rather arbitrary decision in any case, Lahn remarked.

The origin is “defined probably more as a matter of convenience rather than reflecting any actual watershed evolutionary event,” he wrote. That is, it’s “useful to say that any past creatures that are within certain levels of similarities to us today should be considered as ‘the same’ as us.”

But if the changes that accompanied this event are only a trifling part of a wider trend, he added, it becomes reasonable to ask whether that further deflates the rationale for calling it an origin.

“In a sense,” he wrote, one could say “the origin is still ongoing.”

Evolution occurs when an individual acquires a beneficial genetic mutation, and it spreads throughout the population because those with it thrive and reproduce more. Ceaseless repetitions of this can change species, or produce new ones. As beneficial genes spread, harmful ones are weeded out; the whole process, called natural selection, propels evolution.

Hawks and Cochran analyzed measurements of skulls from Europe, Jordan, Nubia, South Africa, and China in the past 10,000 years, a period known as the Holocene era. They also studied European and West Asian skulls from the end of the Pleistocene era, which lasted from two million years ago until the Holocene.

“A constellation of features” changed across the board, Hawks and Cochran wrote in their presentation. “Holocene changes were similar in pattern and… faster than those at the archaic-modern transition,” the time when so-called modern humans appeared. But these changes “themselves were rapid compared to earlier hominid evolution.” Hominids are a family of primates that includes humans and their extinct, more ape-like though upright-walking ancestors and relatives.

Hawks and Cochran also analyzed past genetic studies to estimate the rate of production of genes that undergo positive selection—that is, genes that spread because they are beneficial. “The rate of generation of positively selected genes has increased as much as a hundredfold during the past 40,000 years,” they wrote.

There are ways to detect positive selection in genome data. But Mark Thomas, a genetic anthropologist at University College London, was skeptical that these would be enough to make Hawks’ and Cochran’s case. “The issue is that the most powerful methods for detecting selection are ones that lose their sensitivity going more than 30,000 years back,” he said. Other techniques can’t “distinguish between selection and population growth.”

Thomas added that he understands the skeletal data to show something different from what Hawks and Cochran say, but that he would need a fuller account of their findings to make a judgment.

Worrisome findings?

Hawks and Cochran said some of the most notable physical changes in humans have been ones affecting the size of the brain case.

A “thing that should probably worry people is that brains have been getting smaller for 20,000 to 30,000 years,” said Cochran. But brain size and intelligence aren’t tightly linked, he added. Also, growth in more advanced brain areas might have made up for the shrinkage, Cochran said; he speculated that an almost breakneck evolution of higher foreheads in some peoples may reflect this. A study in the Jan. 14 British Dental Journal found such a trend visible in England in just the past millennium, he noted, a mere eyeblink in evolutionary time.

Research published in the Sept. 9, 2005 issue of the research journal Science by Lahn and colleagues found that two genes linked to brain size are rapidly evolving in humans.

Anthropologist Jeffrey McKee of Ohio State University said the new findings of accelerated evolution bear out predictions he made in a 2000 book The Riddled Chain. Based on computer models, he argued that evolution should speed up as a population grows. This is because population growth creates more opportunities for new mutations; also, the expanded population occupies new environmental niches, which would drive evolution in new directions.

Lahn said he’s not convinced that the accelerated physical evolution is tied to population growth. “It may be a long way before” anyone can test the truth of this, he wrote.

But other factors could also explain an acceleration, according to anthropologist John Kingston of Emory University in Atlanta, Ga. Evolution might speed up because we have changed our own environment, which in turn changes the evolutionary pressures. “We now control our own environment and ecology to some extent,” he said.

For instance, if you invent spears, you perhaps can afford to be slighter-framed because you can stand further away from wild animals, Cochran said. He argued that a powerful synergy between these sorts of changes and expanding population explains the “fantastically rapid” recent evolution.

“A very big change”

Overall, the findings could amount to “a very big change” in traditional thinking for two reasons, according to McKee. First, he said, many researchers had mistakenly assumed population growth would slow down evolution, because new mutations would take too long to spread through a large population.

Second, the findings deal a final blow to a lingering view among researchers of evolution as a process “with us as the be-all-end-all,” he said. That idea went out of fashion in the 1950s but still persists “in the backs of our minds,” he added.

Many of the changes found in the genome or fossil record reflect metabolic alterations to adjust to agricultural life, Cochran said. Other changes simply make us weaker.

In the June 2003 issue of the research journal Current Anthropology, Helen Leach of the University of Otago, New Zealand wrote that skeletons from some populations in the human lineage have undergone a progressive shrinkage and weakening, and reduction in tooth size, similar to changes seen in domesticated animals. Humans seem to have domesticated themselves, she argued, causing physical as well as mental changes.

Despite all the alterations, McKee said he believes the notion of an “origin” of modern humans around 200,000 years ago remains useful. “It’s just a threshold point” at which humans take on most of the physical features we recognize, he remarked, and as such, needn’t be discarded. Cochran said it can still be argued that the key change was language; but when this originated remains far from clear.

Whatever the implications of the recent findings, McKee added, they highlight a ubiquitous point about evolution: “every species is a transitional species.”

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Is language in our genes?

Differences in our genes influence the type of language we speak, linguists report.

“Tonal” languages such as Chinese use pitch changes to convey the meaning of words, while non-tonal languages such as English don’t.

Dan Dediu and Robert Ladd of the University of Edinburgh found that groups of people who carry recently evolved versions of two genes tend to speak non-tonal languages. The genes, believed to affect brain development, are called ASPM and Microcephalin.

The newer version of ASPM appeared an estimated 5,800 years ago; Microcephalin most recently changed about 37,000 years ago. The two are among a variety of genes that have changed recently in human evolution—part of what one recent study has called a trend of quickly accelarating evolution in humans.

Dediu and Ladd calculated statistical links between 983 locations in the genome and 26 different linguistic features in 49 distinct populations from around the Old World. They found that there is generally no link between genes and language features. But when biases for geography and history were removed, a pattern emerged between in which tonal language speakers lacked the more recently evolved forms of ASPM and Microcephalin.

The gene-language relationship in this case “cannot be explained by historical and geographical factors, thus strengthening the claim of a causal relationship between them,” the researchers wrote in this week’s early online issue of the research journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The study introduces a new methodology “for studying the relationship between genetic and linguistic diversities,” they wrote. They added that they hope future experiments will reveal how these genes influence individual brains and, ultimately, the language preferences of whole populations.

UK Schools divided on race

A remarkable picture of how Britain is ‘sleepwalking’ towards US-style segregation of schools along racial lines is highlighted today by government figures that reveal many towns are developing schools that are overwhelmingly white, Asian or black.

A majority of pupils in many areas of the country – particularly in deprived former mill towns in the north of England – have little contact with children from different ethnic backgrounds, even though they live in close proximity.

[…]

According to the Department for Education and Skills, Blackburn with Darwen council, recently the subject of a BBC Panorama documentary on the parallel lives led by different communities, is one of the most divided boroughs. Four secondary schools out of nine there attract more than 90 per cent of their pupils from just one community.

The Tories last night outlined a dramatic plan to reverse the segregation – setting targets to ensure white and Asian pupils are educated together at any academies set up in northern towns such as Blackburn.

David Willetts, the shadow education secretary, told The Observer: ‘There are towns which have been divided into two where social, ethnic and religious divisions are all aligned and create enormous tensions. Schools in these towns are becoming more and more segregated. One way to tackle them is, if you’re creating an academy, you set a target that it should take its students from both communities.’

His remarks came after new government figures illustrate the recent warning by Jack Straw, the Commons leader and MP for Blackburn, that people are ‘breathing the same air but walking past each other’.

In Straw’s borough, there are three overwhelmingly white schools – Darwen Vale High (95.5 per cent white), Darwen Moorland High (91.6 per cent white) and St Bede’s Roman Catholic High (96.3 per cent white). The segregation is matched on the other side of the racial divide. At Beardwood High, 94.5 per cent of pupils are Asian. Just 2.5 per cent of the school’s pupils are white. Only one school in the borough reflects the ethnic breakdown of a community whose population is 70.5 per cent white and 26.5 per cent Asian. Of the pupils who go to Witton Park High, 71.7 per cent are white and 26.6 per cent are Asian.

The position in Bradford, scene of race riots in 2001, is not much better. Of 28 secondary schools, 10 have 90 per cent or more pupils from one community.

Bradford’s population is 62.8 per cent white and 32.7 per cent Asian. At Ilkley Grammar School, 93.8 per cent of pupils are white, with just 2.3 per cent from the city’s Asian community. Of the pupils attending Belle Vue Boys’ School, 95.6 per cent are Asian and just 1.2 per cent are white.

Stephen Byers, a former schools minister, told The Observer: ‘These figures show that in parts of the country we are sleepwalking towards the segregation of schools on racial grounds. With no public debate, we are enshrining division and discrimination at an early age. Separate communities are growing up alongside each other with little or any common point of reference.

‘As a result people, living in neighbouring communities could for all intents and purposes be on a different planet from each other. If we want to see the development of an inclusive and healthy society, this is an issue that needs to be addressed and not simply ignored.’

Experts say there are many reasons why pupils tend to flock to schools dominated by their own community. Faith schools, for instance, are unlikely to attract many pupils from across the ethnic divide.

Ted Cantle, who wrote the landmark ‘parallel lives’ report following the 2001 riots in Burnley, Oldham and Bradford, told The Observer: ‘There is some evidence that once a school starts to divide it does reach a tipping point where one side or the other feels this school is no longer for them.’

Simon Burgess, professor of economics at Bristol University, said: ‘If you compare segregation in schools with the ethnic segregation in the neighbourhoods around that school then the segregation in schools is higher than that in the surrounding neighbourhoods.’

London – and to a lesser extent Birmingham – presents a more positive picture. Tim Brighouse, the capital’s schools ‘tsar’, said: ‘London has always been a place where waves of people have gone to over the years.’

Alan Johnson, the Education Secretary, said the government was tackling the problem. ‘This is exactly why we are bringing in a new duty to promote community cohesion. Faith schools and also non-faith schools will have to undertake action to enhance community cohesion. This can involve twinning and sharing teachers so that this kind of problem can be tackled.’

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Africa’s universities collapsing

[…]

Africa’s best universities, the grand institutions that educated a revolutionary generation of nation builders and statesmen, doctors and engineers, writers and intellectuals, are collapsing. It is partly a self-inflicted crisis of mismanagement and neglect, but it is also a result of international development policies that for decades have favored basic education over higher learning even as a population explosion propels more young people than ever toward the already strained institutions.

The decrepitude is forcing the best and brightest from countries across Africa to seek their education and fortunes abroad and depriving dozens of nations of the homegrown expertise that could lift millions out of poverty.

The Commission for Africa, a British government research organization, said in a 2005 report that African universities were in a “state of crisis” and were failing to produce the professionals desperately needed to develop the poorest continent. Far from being a tool of social mobility, the repository of a nation’s hopes for the future, Africa’s universities have instead become warehouses for a generation of young people for whom society has little use and who can expect to be just as poor as their uneducated parents.

“Without universities there is no hope of progress, but they have been allowed to crumble,” said Penda Mbow, a historian and labor activist at Cheikh Anta Diop who has struggled to improve conditions for students and professors. “We are throwing away a whole generation.”

As a result, universities across Africa have become hotbeds of discontent, occupying a dangerous place at the intersection of politics and crime. In Ivory Coast, student union leaders played a large role in stirring up xenophobia that led to civil war. In Nigeria, elite schools have been overrun by violent criminal gangs. Those gangs have hired themselves out to politicians, contributing to the deterioration of the electoral process there.

In Senegal, the university has been racked repeatedly by sometimes violent strikes by students seeking improvements in their living conditions and increases in the tiny stipends for living expenses. Students have refused to attend classes and set up burning barricades on a central avenue that runs past the university.

In the early days, postcolonial Africa had few institutions as venerable and fully developed as its universities. The University of Ibadan in southwest Nigeria, the intellectual home of the Nobel Prize-winning writer Wole Soyinka, was regarded in 1960 as one of the best universities in the British Commonwealth. Makerere University in Uganda was considered the Harvard of Africa, and it trained a whole generation of postcolonial leaders, including Julius Nyerere of Tanzania.

And in Senegal, Cheikh Anta Diop, then known as the University of Dakar, drew students from across francophone Africa and transformed them into doctors, engineers and lawyers whose credentials were considered equal to those of their French counterparts.

[…]

Today, nearly 60,000 students are crammed on a campus with just 5,000 dormitory beds. Renting a room in Dakar is so expensive that students pack themselves into tiny rooms by the half dozen.

[…]

The graffiti-scarred dormitories, crisscrossed by clotheslines, look more like housing projects for the poor than rooms for the country’s brightest youths. A $12 million renovation of the library modernized what had been a musty, crowded outpost on campus into a modern building with Internet access. But technology does not help with its most basic problem: it still only has 1,700 chairs. Students study in stairwells and sprawled in corners.

In a chemistry lab in the science department, students take turns carrying out basic experiments with broken beakers and pipettes.

Equally frustrated are the professors, many of whom could pursue careers abroad but choose to remain in Senegal. Alphonse Tiné, a professor of chemistry, said he struggled to balance his research with the demands of teaching thousands of students.

[…]

The disarray of Africa’s universities did not happen by chance. In the 1960s, universities were seen as the incubator of the vanguard that would drive development in the young nations of newly liberated Africa, and postcolonial governments spent lavishly on campuses, research facilities, scholarships and salaries for academics.

But corruption and mismanagement led to the economic collapses that swept much of Africa in the 1970s, and universities were among the first institutions to suffer. As idealistic postcolonial governments gave way to more cynical and authoritarian ones, universities, with their academic freedoms, democratic tendencies and elitist airs, became a nuisance.

When the World Bank and International Monetary Fund came to bail out African governments with their economic reforms—a bitter cocktail that included currency devaluation, opening of markets and privatization—higher education was usually low on the list of priorities. Fighting poverty required basic skills and literacy, not doctoral students. In the mid-1980s nearly a fifth of World Bank’s education spending worldwide went to higher education. A decade later, it had dwindled to just 7 percent.

Meanwhile, welcome money flooded into primary and secondary education. But it set up a time bomb: as more young people got a basic education, more wanted to go to college. In 1984, just half of Senegal’s children went to primary school, but 20 years later more than 90 percent do.

And more of those children have gone on to high school: Africa has the world’s highest growth rate of high school attendance. Abdou Salam Sall, rector of the Cheikh Anta Diop, said 9,000 students earned a baccalaureate in Senegal in 2000, entitling them to university admission. By 2006 there were more than twice that. The university cannot handle the influx. Its budget is $32 million, less than $600 per student. That money must also maintain a 430-acre campus, pay salaries and finance research.

Even those lucky enough to graduate will have difficulty finding a job in their struggling economies. As few as one third of African university graduates find work, according to the Association of African Universities.

Governments and donors in some countries are starting to spend more on higher education. The World Bank chipped in for Cheikh Anta Diop’s library renovation, and a coalition of foundations called the Partnership for Higher Education in Africa has pledged $200 million to help African universities over the next five years.

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Blogs replacing blackboards

Blogs are replacing blackboards as Singapore moves high-technology into its classrooms as teaching tools, newspapers reported Wednesday.

Under the FutureSchools@Singapore programme, blogs, video-conferencing, tablet PCs, podcasts, 3-D software and interactive whiteboards will be available for learning, The Straits Times reported.

Five schools in the city state have been selected to pioneer the use of innovative teaching methods that harness info-communication technologies (ICT), the education ministry confirmed in a press release.

Tech-savvy Singapore, one of Asia’s most wired nations, aims to set up 15 such schools at primary and secondary levels by 2015.

"ICT tools such as immersive virtual environments and educational games will be used to enhance learning," the ministry statement said.

"These schools will push the frontiers of teaching and learning practices by harnessing ICT at a school-wide level," it added.

The first five schools, including a new primary that will start its student intake next year, will integrate ICT into their curriculum over four years.

Despite the new tools, the schools will stay focused on the core goals of education, planning lessons around the national curriculum and preparing students for national exams, the ministry said.

The selected schools will also study how the use of technology affects the students’ cognitive, emotional and social development, it said.

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Elective genitoplasty on the rise

One of the world’s most prestigious health journals has lashed a fast-growing trend in the United States and Britain for "designer vaginas," the tabloid term for cosmetic surgery to the female genitalia.

The fashion is being driven by commercial and media pressures that exploit women’s insecurities and is fraught with unknowns, including a risk to sexual arousal, the British Medical Journal (BMJ) says.

Known as elective genitoplasty, the surgery usually entails shortening or changing the shape of the outer lips, or labia, but may also include reduction in the hood of skin covering the clitoris or shortening the vagina itself.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that the practice is spreading fast in the United States as well as in Britain, but the picture is unclear, the BMJ says.

Not only is there a disturbing lack of data about the phenomenon, there has been negligible assessment about surgical after-effects — and almost zero reflexion as to whether a labial "problem" exists in the first place, the BMJ says angrily.

In 2004-5, 800 "labial reductions" were conducted by Britain’s state-run National Health Service (NHS), more than a doubling of the figure of six years earlier. Other operations were carried out by the private sector, although the full figures are unknown.

The authors of the article, London gynaecologist Sarah Creighton and clinical psychologist Lih Mei Liao, conducted their own small-scale probe into why women sought this surgery.

"Our patients sometimes cited restrictions on lifestyle as reasons for their decision," they say.

"These restrictions included inability to wear tight clothing, go to the beach, take communal showers or ride a bicycle comfortably, or avoidance of some sexual practices.

"Men, however, do not usually want the size of their genitals reduced for such reasons. Furthermore, they find alternative solutions for any discomfort arising from rubbing or chaffing of the genitals."

Patients who sought genitoplasty "uniformly" wanted their vulvas to be flat and with no protrusion, similar to the prepubescent look of girls in Western fashion ads, they found.

"Not unlike presenting for a haircut at a salon, women often brought along images to illustrate the desired appearance," say Creighton and Liao. "The illustrations, usually from advertisements or pornography, are always selective and possibly digitally altered."

Plastic surgery to the labia carries risks, for this zone carries nerve fibres that are highly sensitive and are a key pathway of sexual arousal, the article warns sternly.

"Incision to any part of the genitalia could compromise sensitivity," it says.

The BMJ piece suggests genitoplasty is a classic example of where commercial, media and social pressures artificially create a problem, fuel concern over it and then put forward a solution for it.

"There is nothing unusual about protrusion of the labia," it says.

"It is the negative meaning that makes it into a problem — meanings that can give rise to physical, emotional and behavioural reactions, such as discomfort, self-disgust, perhaps avoidance of some activities and a desire for a surgical fix."

The Sampson Option

‘All the world’s a stage," observes Jacques in As You Like It, "and all the men and women merely players." No sphere of human life is more theatrical than politics. And seldom has the world’s political stage seemed more Shakespearean than it does today. To judge by the number of bodies that currently litter it, we appear to be nearing the end of Act V of The Tragedie of King George.

By the concluding scenes of Shakespeare’s greatest political tragedies – Hamlet, Julius Caesar, King Lear and Macbeth – nearly all the principal characters lie dead. So it is with King George, the tragic tale of a simple, unworldly fellow who ascends the throne of a great empire, responds heroically to an unprovoked attack, but then wreaks havoc by turning from retaliation to pre-emption.

The latest corpse to slump lifeless beneath the proscenium arch is that of Paul Wolfowitz, who last week finally resigned as president of the World Bank. As one of the principal architects of the Iraq War when he was United States deputy secretary of defence, Mr Wolfowitz was always going to be subjected to intense scrutiny in his new job.

His decision to award his girlfriend, Shaha Riza, promotion and a pay-rise was, to say the least, ill-judged, especially in the wake of his own vociferous campaign against Third World corruption.

Another central character has taken the political equivalent of slow-acting poison. Tony Blair, King George’s most loyal foreign ally, is not quite dead yet – indeed, he appears intent on delivering his final monologue in all the major capitals of the globe – but he is not long for the political world.

Think back to 2003, when the decision to invade Iraq was taken. One after another, the politicians who most strongly supported the decision have been ousted from office. The Spanish premier José Maria Aznar was one of the earliest casualties in March 2004. Leszek Miller, the man who took Poland into the war, did not last much longer. Their Italian counterpart Silvio Berlusconi went down this time last year.

As in Julius Caesar, the fault is not in the central characters’ stars, but in themselves. George W Bush’s dominant character traits, his decisiveness and tenacity, at first appeared to be strengths. But once he had been convinced by his advisers that the attacks of 9/11 furnished a pretext for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, these became weaknesses.

As in Macbeth, King George was soon "in blood stepp’d in so far" that turning back seemed no more attractive than wading onward. Remember: the corpses that litter this stage can already be counted in the tens, if not the hundreds, of thousands.

And, as in King Lear, the whole catastrophe has stemmed from a fatal confusion at the outset between the true and the false, enemy and friends. Lear succumbs to the flattery of the ugly sisters, Regan and Goneril, and casts out the blunt but honest Cordelia (not to mention the straight-talking Kent). The mistaken identity in the tragedy of King George was that of the real enemy in the post-9/11 War on Terror.

It is almost certain that the 19 hijackers hailed from Saudi Arabia (15), the United Arab Emirates (2), Egypt (1) and Lebanon (1). The chief architect of the plot, Osama bin Laden, was also a Saudi. Contrast this list of countries with the list of members of the "Axis of Evil" identified by President Bush in his famous speech of January 2002 as "regimes that sponsor terror [and] threaten America… with weapons of mass destruction": North Korea, Iran and Iraq. President Bush was quite right to target Afghanistan in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, since the Taliban regime was sheltering al-Qaeda’s leadership. But the decision to overthrow Saddam was one of history’s great non sequiturs.

The real enemy in the Global War on Terror is not the Axis of Evil but the Axis of Allies. Today, the countries most likely to produce another 9/11 are not Iran, much less North Korea, but countries long regarded as (after Israel) America’s most reliable allies in the Greater Middle East. Step forward Saudi Arabia (almost certainly still the biggest source of funding for radical Islamists) and Pakistan (very definitely their one-stop shop for nuclear weaponry).

There is, in short, a twist in this tale. Before the curtain can fall on The Tragedie of King George, we need at least three more scenes to decide the fates of three crucial characters – the only principals still left standing aside from King George himself.

First, we need a scene in Israel. Since the failure of the war against Hezbollah in Lebanon, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s popularity has been in free fall. His current approval rating is around 2 per cent, by comparison with which King George is a pop idol. Somehow, despite the resignation of his foreign minister, Mr Olmert is still clinging to political life. But he surely cannot last much longer. What happens next will be crucial, for if Binyamin Netanyahu returns to power, the probability of a military confrontation with Iran goes up above 50 per cent.

Remember, Mr Netanyahu is on record as comparing the Iranian President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, with Hitler. "It is the year 1938," Netanyahu recently declared, "and Iran is Germany." I suspect his private views are not so very far removed from those of the renowned Israeli military historian Martin van Creveld, the professor of military history at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

Van Creveld is deeply pessimistic about Israel’s future, menaced on one side by an increasingly violent and fissiparous Palestinian population and on the other by a would-be nuclear Iran. But he expects his country at least to go down fighting.

"We possess several hundred atomic warheads and rockets and can launch them at targets in all directions," van Creveld declared in an interview in September 2003. "We have the capability to take the world down with us. And I can assure you that this will happen before Israel goes under."

Then we need a scene in Saudi Arabia. Here the key figure is Prince Bandar bin Sultan bin Abdul Aziz al Saud who, as Saudi ambassador to the United States, was one of the leading advocates of the attack on Iraq. Since October 2005 he has been back in Riyadh as Secretary-General of the National Security Council, where he is said to be lobbying hard for another attack: this time (you guessed it) on Iran.

Finally, the action needs to shift eastwards to Pakistan, where it is the future of General Pervez Musharraf that hangs in the balance. Eight days ago, 40 people died in rioting in Karachi, apparently as a result of attempts by pro-government forces to discourage a rally by disgruntled lawyers, who have been incensed by Musharraf’s decision to oust the head of the Supreme Court.

After eight years of his military dictatorship, Pakistan’s democratic forces are stirring. But watch out: these include the Islamist coalition known as the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal. And the recent violence also has an ethnic dimension, pitting Mohaijirs against Pashtuns.

You thought this play was nearly over. Like many an audience at Stratford, you were starting to shift in your seat. But in truth Act V has only just begun. With war looming between Iran and Israel, and Pakistan on the brink of an upheaval that could well end with Islamists in power in Islamabad, the worst bloodshed has yet to come.

I fear, in the words of the immortal Bard, that you have not yet had your fill:

"…Of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts,

Of accidental judgements, casual slaughters,

Of deaths put on by cunning and forc’d cause,

And, in this upshot, purposes mistook

Fall’n on the inventors’ heads

Niall Ferguson is Laurence A Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University

US named unknown Dutch company

Foreign Minister Maxime Verhagen has said in a letter to parliament that Vlemmo NV does not exist as far as he knows. This company was named by US authorities as a link between Iraq and Osama bin Laden.

On or around 25 July 2002, the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy (OUSDP) of the US gave a briefing entitled ‘Assessing the Relationship Between Iraq and al-Qaida’. This alternative intelligence report wrote that Osama Bin Laden’s al-Hijra Company had contacts with the Netherlands-based company Vlemmo NV, which was allegedly involved in the purchase by Iraq of military equipment, Verhagen confirmed.

But "the company Vlemmo is unknown in the Netherlands," according to the minister. "The company has never been registered with the Chamber of Commerce in the Netherlands and is also not known to the tax service. That the company may have served as a front for illegal arms trade with Iraq is equally unknown to me."

The 2002 OUSDP report was made public last month by the chairman of the US Senate’s defence committee, Carl Levin. "The contents of the intelligence report has only become known to me following the recent publication of the document," said Verhagen.

The minister had been asked to react by Socialist Party (SP) MP Harry van Bommel. Verhagen has now sent the OUSDP report to the Lower House. Parts of it have been rendered illegible by the US authorities.

Verhagen comments that apparent differences of opinion between US authorities on the possible connections between Iraq and Al Qa’ida "are an internal US matter." Apart from this, he wishes to "once again stress that the justification for intervention in Iraq for the Netherlands did not lie in the possible involvement of Iraq in terrorism, but in non-compliance with the UN Security Council resolutions."

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Iran overstates progress

Iran has continued to make further progress on its nuclear programs in defiance of UN Security Council demands. Evidence of this progress has emerged even as a May 23 deadline looms for Tehran to comply with a March Security Council resolution.

Iranian officials have continued to express a willingness to enter into negotiations with Germany and the permanent members of the Security Council. Those officials have said, however, that they will not suspend Iran’s gas centrifuge-based uranium-enrichment program despite repeated demands from the Security Council to do so.

Resolution 1747, which was adopted in March in response to Iran’s failure to comply with previous resolutions, imposed new restrictions on Tehran and expanded the scope of existing sanctions. (See ACT, April 2007.) The most recent resolution requires Iran to comply “without further delay” with Resolution 1737, which the council adopted in December. Those requirements include a demand that Iran suspend all activities related to its enrichment program, which Iran says is for peaceful purposes but that could be used to produce highly enriched uranium for bombs. (See ACT, January/February 2007.)

The March resolution requested International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director-General Mohamed ElBaradei to submit a report within 60 days to the Security Council and to the IAEA Board of Governors regarding Iran’s compliance. The council could adopt additional sanctions if Iran fails to comply.

Department of State spokesperson Sean McCormack told reporters April 9 that “there is [the] potential for more resolutions of [a] similar type down the road” if Iran continues to be uncooperative.

Resolution 1747 was the council’s third regarding Iran’s nuclear program. The first was Resolution 1696, which the council adopted last July. That resolution followed a June 2006 offer of incentives from Germany and permanent Security Council members China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, that was intended to induce Iran to end its enrichment program. (See ACT, September 2006.)

Ali Larijani, secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council and Tehran’s lead nuclear negotiator, met April 25-26 with Javier Solana, the European Union’s foreign policy chief.

The meeting ended without agreement, although Larijani said that “New ideas emerged during the negotiations,” Iranian radio reported April 27. He described these ideas, however, as “undeveloped,” adding that they “need more thinking and effort to reach maturity.” The two sides “will follow up the negotiations in two weeks,” he said.

Prior to the meeting, Iranian officials had offered mixed assessments of the potential for diplomacy. For example, an April 22 report by the official Islamic Republic News Agency quoted Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mohammad-Ali Hosseini as saying Tehran does not intend to comply with the council’s suspension demand.

However, Vice President Gholamreza Aghazadeh, who also heads Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization, spoke positively about negotiations during an April 17 interview with the semi-official Iranian Students News Agency, arguing that “the conditions for negotiations for both sides are suitable more than ever before.”

He also indicated that Tehran believes that the UN sanctions will remain in effect for only a short time, explaining that Iran does not “see the discussion of the nuclear issue at the Security Council as a long-term issue, because everyone needs everyone in the world.”

Aghazadeh indicated that the government might at some point consider withdrawing from the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT). He added, however, that Tehran currently has no plans to do so.

He also suggested that Tehran might further decrease its cooperation with the IAEA if the Security Council adopts another resolution penalizing Iran.

Iran has previously taken such measures. For example, Tehran announced the day after Resolution 1747 was adopted that it would end its compliance with a portion of the subsidiary arrangements for its IAEA safeguards agreement. That provision requires Tehran to provide design information for new nuclear facilities as soon as it authorizes construction. Previously, Iran was required to provide design information for new facilities only six months before introducing nuclear material. (See ACT, March 2003.)

IAEA safeguards agreements, which are required under the NPT, allow the agency to monitor non-nuclear-weapon states-parties’ declared nuclear activities. Subsidiary arrangements specify in detail how the procedures contained in a country’s safeguards agreement should be implemented.

Since Iran’s March decision, it has denied agency inspectors access to a heavy-water-moderated nuclear research reactor that the country is constructing at Arak. An April 13 letter from Tehran to the IAEA argued that Iran is not required to allow the inspection because the reactor’s construction is at an early stage.

An April 18 letter from IAEA Deputy Director-General Olli Heinonen criticized Tehran’s decision and stated that Iran could not refuse the inspection because the government cannot modify the subsidiary arrangements unilaterally. He also said that the relevant part of the arrangements relate “to the provision of design information,” rather than the IAEA’s verification of information already provided by Iran.

The Arak reactor has caused concern because such reactors can produce plutonium, which can also be used as fissile material in nuclear weapons. Although the IAEA has found evidence that Tehran was interested in reprocessing spent reactor fuel, Iran has said that it will not do so. Resolutions 1747 and 1737 require Iran to halt work on the reactor.

Aghazadeh said April 17 that the reactor “will be completed in the next three or four years.” A knowledgeable source told Arms Control Today the next day, however, that the reactor is five to six years from completion and would not go critical for seven to eight years.

Iran has previously said that it will complete the reactor by 2009. (See ACT, May 2006.)

Iran has moved forward with its enrichment program in recent months, although some Iranian officials have apparently overstated its progress. Tehran has a pilot facility located at Natanz that contains approximately 358 centrifuges. Iran also is constructing a larger commercial facility at the same site and has a facility for converting uranium oxide into uranium hexafluoride.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad announced in an April 9 speech that “Iran is among the countries which produce nuclear fuel on an industrial scale.” But this claim was met with widespread skepticism, given that Iran has only recently installed 1,312 centrifuge machines, far fewer than commercial enrichment facilities in other states.

Russia’s Atomic Energy Agency head Sergei Kiriyenko told the press that Russian government experts say Iran cannot yet produce fuel on an “industrial level,” RIA Novosti reported April 12. Kiriyenko pointed out that centrifuge cascades need to be linked together properly in order to enrich uranium on a large scale. Whether Iran is able to do this is unclear, a European diplomat told Arms Control Today April 30.

Iran’s technical claims may be aimed at bolstering Tehran’s diplomatic leverage. Indeed, Iranian officials have previously argued that it should use its technological achievements for that purpose. (See ACT, June 2006.) Similarly, Aghazadeh argued in an April 9 television interview that the success of Iran’s enrichment program has demonstrated the futility of Security Council pressure.

Iranian nuclear officials have not publicly specified the number of centrifuges that the country is operating. But in his letter, Heinonen said that Iran reports it has “put into operation” eight 164-centrifuge cascades at the commercial facility.

Iran is feeding an unspecified amount of uranium hexafluoride into the cascades, according to the letter. Tehran is not actually enriching uranium, a knowledgeable source told Arms Control Today April 18. Instead, Iran is injecting small amounts of feedstock into the centrifuges to ready them for operation. This process produces trace amount of uranium enriched to very low levels. The European diplomat said that Iran is being “cautious” by introducing small amounts of feedstock. Previously, the centrifuges would spin properly but would break when uranium hexafluoride was introduced into them, the diplomat explained.

Earlier, Iranian officials told agency inspectors that Iran had installed two 164-centrifuge cascades at the commercial facility and that two more such cascades “were in the final stages of installation,” according to a late February report from ElBaradei.

Based on information obtained April 7 from a diplomatic source in Vienna close to the IAEA, Iran also has two additional cascades that are near completion.

Iran told the IAEA that it intends to “continue progressively with the installation of…18 cascades” into the commercial facility and “bring them gradually into operation by May,” ElBaradei reported.

Whether Tehran can meet this target date is unclear. ElBaradei told the Financial Times in February that he did not know how long Iran would take to get 3,000 centrifuges to function properly. “It could be a year, it could be six months,” he said.

Aghazadeh said April 17 that it would take Iran up to four years to install the remaining centrifuges envisaged for the facility. Tehran has said that it eventually plans to install more than 50,000 centrifuges.

Iran has no plans to build additional centrifuge facilities “at the moment,” Aghazadeh said. However, he indicated in an April 9 television interview that the country is developing a “new generation” of centrifuges.

Tehran previously told the IAEA that it is conducting research on “different types” of centrifuges, without using nuclear material. (See ACT, October 2006.) The IAEA has long been concerned that Iran, which currently uses P-1 centrifuges, has been conducting research on more advanced centrifuges.

In the April 17 interview, Aghazadeh seemed to acknowledge that Iran’s nuclear program faces limitations, saying that Tehran “undoubtedly needs the help of other countries in order to pursue its nuclear activities.” He further explained that it cannot meet the entirety of its projected nuclear fuel demands. Aghazadeh said in the April 9 interview that Iran is planning to explore for additional uranium deposits inside the country.

The United States has argued that Iran does not have enough indigenous uranium to meet its projected fuel needs. (See ACT, September 2005.)

Similarly, the managing director of Iran’s uranium-conversion facility acknowledged in February that it is not “economically viable” for Iran to produce some equipment for its nuclear program.

Iran and the IAEA have apparently reached agreement on appropriate safeguards arrangements for the commercial centrifuge facility. The agreement, which “includes unannounced inspections and containment and surveillance…has been tested,” an IAEA official told Arms Control Today April 27. The agency is currently conducting discussions with Iran “on some of the practical implementation modalities,” the official added.

The completion date for a light-water reactor that a Russian contractor is building near the Iranian city of Bushehr has again been delayed. Moscow and Tehran agreed last fall that the reactor was to start operating in September 2007 and begin providing energy two months later. Russia was scheduled to start delivering fuel to the plant in March 2007. (See ACT, November 2006.)

The two countries are currently negotiating a revised schedule for the project, which has at least in part been delayed by a financial dispute. Atomstroyexport, the Russian contractor for the project, says that Iran has failed to make its payments on time.

But Iran and Russia appear to have made some progress in recent days. According to RIA Novosti, Atomstroyexport spokesperson Irina Yesipova said April 22 that the two sides concluded “a protocol defining a set of measures to provide stable financing” for the project. If implemented, the new agreement should resolve some but not all of the project’s financial issues, she said.

The project faces another obstacle. Kiriyenko said April 23 that third-party countries have delayed supplying some equipment for the project, RIA Novosti reported. He did not elaborate, but deputy spokesperson for the Kremlin Dmitry Peskov said that these delays were caused by Tehran’s failure to comply with the Security Council resolutions, the Financial Times reported March 21.

Iran also plans to construct additional reactors. For example, Aghazadeh reiterated that Iran is planning to construct a 360-megawatt nuclear power plant. In addition, the deputy head of the Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization, Ahmad Fayaz Bakhsh, told reporters April 15 that Tehran is issuing tenders for the construction of one more 1,000-megawatt light-water reactor and another 1,600-megawatt reactor near Bushehr, according to Agence France-Presse. Construction of the plants is expected to take “between nine and 11 years,” he said.

Swiss question counterfeiting charges

Swiss police who closely monitor the circulation of counterfeit currency have challenged the Bush administration’s assertions that North Korea is manufacturing fake American $100 bills.

President Bush has accused North Korea of making and circulating the false bills, so perfect they’re called supernotes, and in late 2005 the U.S. Treasury took measures to block that country’s access to international banking. North Korea subsequently halted negotiations over dismantling its nuclear weapons program, a process that remains in limbo because of the dispute.

The Swiss federal criminal police, in a report released Monday, expresses serious doubt that North Korea is capable of manufacturing the fake bills, which it said were superior to real ones.

The Swiss report includes color enlargements that show the differences between genuine bills and counterfeit supernotes. The supernotes are identical to U.S. banknotes except for added distinguishing marks, which can be detected only with a magnifying glass. In addition, under ultraviolet or infrared light, stripes appear or the serial numbers disappear on the supernotes.

The Bundeskriminalpolizei didn’t hazard a guess as to who’s been manufacturing the supernotes, but said experts agreed that the counterfeits weren’t the work of an individual but of a government or governmental organization.

The U.S. Secret Service, the lead federal agency in combating counterfeiters, declined to provide details or respond to the Swiss report. But spokesman Eric Zahren said the agency stood by its allegations against Pyongyang.

"Our investigation has identified definitive connections between these highly deceptive counterfeit notes and the North Koreans," Zahren said. "Our investigation has revealed that the supernotes continue to be produced and distributed by sources operating out of North Korea."

The Swiss report says the Secret Service has refused to provide any information about its investigations. It notes that if the United States produced concrete evidence to back up its allegations, "it would have a basis for going to war." Under international law, counterfeiting another country’s currency is considered a cause for war.

But if the U.S. has a reason to go to war, against whom?

The Swiss police noted that before charging North Korea with counterfeiting, U.S. officials had mentioned Iran, Syria and East Germany as possible manufacturers. North Korea’s capacity for printing banknotes is extremely limited, because its banknote printing press dates from the 1970s. Its own currency is of "such poor quality that one automatically wonders whether this country would even be in a position to manufacture the high-quality `supernotes,’ " the report says.

For years, analysts have wondered why the supernotes – which are detectable only with sophisticated, expensive technology – appear to have been produced in quantities less than it would cost to acquire the sophisticated machinery needed to make them. The paper and ink used to make U.S. currency are made through exclusive contract and aren’t available on the open marketplace. The machinery involved is highly regulated.

In theory, if North Korea were producing the notes, it could print $50 million worth of them within a few hours – as much as has been seized in nearly two decades, the report said.

"What defies logic is the limited, or even controlled, amount of `exclusive’ fakes that have appeared over the years. The organization could easily circulate tenfold that amount without raising suspicions," says the Swiss police report, which also says Switzerland has seized 5 percent of all known supernotes.

Moreover, it noted that the manufacturer of the supernotes had issued 19 different versions, an "enormous effort" that only a criminal organization or state could undertake. The updates closely tracked the changes in U.S. currency issued by the Federal Reserve Bank.

The fact that the Swiss are questioning the veracity of the U.S. allegations against North Korea carries special weight in the insular world of banknote printing.

"The producers of the most sophisticated products used in banknote printing are Swiss or at least of Swiss origin. That goes for the (specialty) inks and that goes for the machines," said Klaus Bender, a German foreign correspondent and the author of "Moneymakers: The Secret World of Banknote Printing."

"Can the North Koreans do it, are they doing it? The answer is couched in diplomatic language, (but) the answer is clearly no," Bender said.

—

EXCERPT FROM THE REPORT:

"According to the US Secret Service, $50 million worth of `super-fakes’ were confiscated worldwide over the past 16 years, only a small portion of them within the United States. Measured against the US annual counterfeit damage of $200 million, the damage from $50 million worth of `super-fakes’ is not that significant. The Federal Reserve Bank produces genuine $100 dollar bills mainly for the foreign market. On their return to the U.S., the issuing bank after examination can easily distinguish the `supernotes’ from originals using banknote testing equipment, due to altered infrared characteristics. For this reason, the United States over the years has hardly suffered economic damage due to the `super dollar.’

"A (banknote) printing press like the one in North Korea can produce $50 million worth of bills in a few hours. Using its printing presses dating back to the 1970’s, North Korea is today printing its own currency in such poor quality that one automatically wonders whether this country would even be in a position to manufacture the high-quality `supernotes.’ The enormous effort put into the making of the 19 different `super-fakes’ that we know of is unusual. Only a (criminal) governmental organization can afford such an effort. What defies logic is the limited or even controlled amount of `exclusive’ fakes that have appeared over the years. The organization could easily circulate tenfold that amount without raising suspicions."

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DRC: UN traded gold for guns

Pakistani UN peacekeeping troops have traded in gold and sold weapons to Congolese militia groups they were meant to disarm, the BBC has learnt.

These militia groups were guilty of some of the worst human rights abuses during the Democratic Republic of Congo’s long civil war.

The trading went on in 2005. A UN investigative team sent to gather evidence was obstructed and threatened.

The team’s report was buried by the UN itself to "avoid political fallout".

These events took place in and around the mining town of Mongbwalu, in north-eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.

The Pakistani battalion of the UN peacekeeping mission deployed there in 2005 and helped bring peace to an area that had previously seen bitter fighting between the Lendu and Hema ethnic groups.

Locals welcomed them, but the lure of the rich alluvial gold mines proved too much to resist for some, recalls the head of the miners’ association, Liki Likambo.

"I saw a UN Pakistani soldier who came to buy gold in one of the gold negotiators here in Mongbwalu. I was there in the shop. I saw it with my own eyes."

Soon the Pakistani officers were doing deals directly with the FNI militia.

Evarista Anjasubu – a local businessman said he had known of transactions between Pakistani officers and two of the most notorious militia leaders called Kung Fu and Dragon who controlled the gold mines.

"They were already friends. I knew well. It was gold that was the basis of their friendship. So the gold extracted from the mines went directly to the Pakistanis. They used to meet in the UN camp in Mongbwalu, in a thatched house."

As the trade developed the Pakistani officers brought in the Congolese army and then Indian traders from Kenya.

Richard Ndilu, in charge of immigration at Mongbwalu airstrip, became suspicious in late 2005 when an Indian businessman arrived there and went to stay at the camp of the Pakistani peacekeepers.

Alerted to this illegal trade by her officials, the District Commissioner of Ituri, Petronille Vaweka, went to Bunia airport to intercept a plane from Mongbwalu.

She said her way was blocked by Congolese army officers, who refused to allow her to inspect the cargo.

"I knew they had gold because the price of gold increased when the Indians went to Mongwalu," she said.

"When we wanted to verify what was inside the plane the pilot refused to allow us to enter the plane – me who was the chief, he refused! It was a big scandal."

When the UN was alerted to the allegations of gold trading by Human Rights Watch in late 2005, they instituted a major investigation by the Office for Internal Oversight Services.

What they uncovered was even more explosive.

This is from a witness statement given to the UN by a Congolese officer engaged in the disarming of the militia in the nearby town of Nizi:

"The officer expressed his regrets over the malpractices of a Pakistani battalion under the auspices of Major Zanfar. He revealed the arms surrendered by ex-combatants were secretly returned to them by Major Zanfar thereby compromising the work they had collectively done earlier.

"Repeatedly he saw militia who had been disarmed one day, but the next day would become re-armed again. The information he could obtain was always the same, that it would be the Pakistani battalion giving arms back to the militia."

This evidence was backed up by an interpreter working with the Pakistani battalion at Mongbwalu.

On arriving at the Officer’s Mess, the interpreter found two militia leaders – known as Kung Fu and Dragon.

The interpreter said that the first question from Major Ali was to Kung Fu – asking him: ‘What about the weapons I gave you? What about the weapons Monuc gave you?’

A UN investigation team arrived in Mongbwalu in August 2006.

At first the Pakistani battalion there cooperated with them. But when they attempted to seize a computer with apparently incriminating documents on it a stand-off ensued.

The Pakistanis surrounded the UN police accompanying the investigators with barbed wire and put two armoured personnel carriers outside their living quarters at a nearby Christian mission.

Thoroughly intimidated, the investigators were airlifted out of Mongbwalu.

The Pakistani troops are replaced every six months and the BBC investigation concerns events that took place prior to the deployment of the current Pakistani battalion.

When we put the allegations of weapons trading to the head of the UN in Congo, Ambassador William Swing, he denied emphatically that any weapons have been handed by his troops to the militia.

"This I can categorically deny. What we have done is just the opposite. We have demobilised more than 20,000. We have taken in caches of arms. We have destroyed arms. We have done public burnings of these arms. And there is absolutely nothing to that allegation."

He says that the investigation into gold trading has yet to be completed.

The UN in New York has refused to explain what took place or why, nearly two years after the allegations first surfaced, the Congolese people have no idea what action – if any – has been taken to discipline the Pakistani soldiers concerned.

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Communists keep grip on Vietnam

Vietnam elects a new National Assembly on Sunday, although since only the Communist Party is allowed to field candidates the outcome is not in much doubt.

The election follows a crackdown on activists who had been calling for free elections. The BBC’s Bill Hayton, who in March was told to leave Vietnam by the government, has been investigating the prospects for democracy there.

The sight of a secret policeman forcing his hand over the mouth of a Catholic priest, Nguyen Van Ly, to prevent him shouting out an anti-communist poem during his trial seemed to sum up Vietnam’s attitude towards political dissent.

But at the same time as the country’s security forces are engaged in what Human Rights Watch has called "one of the worst crackdowns on peaceful dissent in 20 years", the Communist Party is experimenting with a degree of openness.

So what are the prospects for democracy in Vietnam?

At first sight Vietnam’s National Assembly looks like little more than a rubber-stamping body.

Ninety per cent of the members in the last session were members of the Communist Party and the 10% that were not all had to be approved by the party in order to stand for election.

The party maintains close control over what the assembly discusses and decides.

For example, although in theory the assembly elects the president and prime minister there is only ever one candidate on the ballot – the candidate previously chosen by the party.

But that is not the whole story, because the assembly is beginning to show some signs of independent thinking in the way it scrutinise laws and holds ministers to account.

In the past few sessions the grilling of officials seen to have failed in their jobs, live on television, has gripped the country.

Poor performances by the scandal-hit former minister of transport and the seemingly complacent head of the Supreme Court caused them to later lose their jobs.

However, some members believe that the current situation is not enough. Those such as Do Trong Ngoan want more.

"The vision and the knowledge of the National Assembly have to be developed," he says, "or the assembly will be left behind and if that happens we won’t be able to take the right decisions and that would lead to long-lasting backwardness of the country.

But while some parts of the communist system want greater openness – others do not.

The trials of dissidents in the past few months, including the priest Father Ly in March, was vivid proof.

Their crimes were to call for multi-party elections.

The Communist Party believes its role is to lead the country – and not necessarily to follow the wishes of the people.

This position is expertly articulated by the woman who is the assembly’s leading diplomat – often leading delegations to Washington and other countries – Madame Ton Nu Thi Ninh.

"I resist the idea that voters are always right," she says.

"I know that there are in any country enclaves of conservatism, look at what happened in South Africa with apartheid. What is right does not always coincide with majority rule."

Although any citizen can, in theory, stand for election to the National Assembly, they first have to be approved by the Communist Party.

There are two selection processes, both organised by the party’s umbrella organisation called the Vietnam Fatherland Front.

In the first hearing the prospective candidate must convince their work colleagues of their good character and in the second they must do the same with the people living in their neighbourhood.

This micro-control means that anyone with views outside what the party views as acceptable will not even get the chance to stand.

However, some parts of the party are keen to get more independents elected to widen the pool of talent in the assembly.

These would not be dissidents but something like a "loyal opposition". But even this, like other areas of political reform, is opposed by others.

No Vietnamese political analysts will comment on divisions within the party directly, but Martin Gainsborough, of Bristol University in the UK, keeps a close eye on the evolution of Vietnamese politics.

"Within Vietnam – both official Vietnam and unofficially – there’s a wide range of differing views about the speed of political change," he says.

"Some people within the system think the National Assembly should go further in asserting its role in the country. Others think that change is fast enough already and want to proceed more carefully. Part of the challenge, part of the ongoing debate in Vietnam is about working out those issues."

Political reform in Vietnam is slow but it is happening and so long as it does not challenge the supremacy of the Communist Party it is likely to continue.

Vietnam’s communist rulers are happy to experiment with openness to make the current system more efficient but any transition to a new system, a truly open and democratic system, is still a long way off.

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