Back Issues

March - Zimbabwe's month of destiny

Mary Ndlovu, Bulawayo, Zimbabwe

2002-02-28

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/6216

March is Zimbabwe's month of destiny. A generation ago, in March 1980, we held our breath to see who would take the prize - the right to lead Zimbabweans into the future, and build a new independent nation. We knew that the war was over, Independence was around the corner and one or other of the nationalist parties would certainly be in power in April.

Now we face another March election which will determine our future for another generation. But there is no certainty, there is palpable fear. This election takes place when ZANU PF and Mugabe have ruled for 22 years. During the last two years they have watched their popularity wane as a result of failed economic polices and massive corruption. They have jumped around like a hare in the headlights trying desperately to save themselves, and the results have been catastrophic - the halving of commerical agricultural production, the crippling of much of our manufacturing sector, collapse of public education and health services and the exodus of both the professional and non-professional labour force in search of incomes that sustain their families. All of this is accompanied by state-sponsored violence which seeks to force on the population a result which they do not want - another six years of ZANU PF.

The effects are clear - inflation of 117%, unemployment approaching 70%, replacement of highly productive commercial agriculture with small scale and subsistence farming, deep poverty, deep frustration by a relatively highly educated population. And then nature - or God, or the ancestors, depending on your belief system - intervenes to provide a devastating drought which is already causing acute hunger, leading to open starvation.

In the midst of this chaos and suffering the Presidential election offers us a chance to start again, to abandon the path of destruction down which we have strayed. Can anyone imagine that a people as sophisticated as Zimbabweans are could vote for the same people who brought them into this terrible situation? No one believes that the majority of Zimbabweans will vote for President Mugabe. Opinion polls confirm what we all see with our eyes, hear with our ears and feel with our hearts. Recent violence has alienated what little support ZANU PF retained; they are left with their patronage clients who can desert them only at their own personal peril. Zimbabweans will not vote in large numbers for Mugabe.

If Mugabe can accept that fact, admit defeat and hand over power, then we have a chance - a chance to rebuild our country, to redistribute our land resources rationally, recreate our industry and perhaps the prerequisite for all of these, develop a democratic political environment. We can be the strength of the region, drawing investment, drawing tourists, drawing back our own population who have fled from economic insecurity. It will not be smooth sailing; it will be a struggle, but we will have another chance, and will have support from the international community to help us get started. The whole region will benefit from the rejuvenated economy.

Sadly, this scenario appears less and less realistic. In February two years ago, in the face of a defeat at the referendum on the constitution, Mugabe made a brave speech accepting the will of the people. But within days he launched his violent land reform and instituted measures which had been directly rejected by the voters.

What if Mugabe refuses to give up this time? He could do it by announcing a win for ZANU PF. Or he might accept that MDC had won the election, and then concoct a situation which would give him some kind of excuse not to hand over power. He has already told SADC he will accept any result except recolonisation, which is his euphemism for an MDC victory. Many Zimbabweans are not aware of the constitutional provision that although the election results will be announced on March 11, the new President only takes power on April 1. Three weeks to play deadly games.

Zimabweans will not believe any announcement that Mugabe has won. But will they react? This can not be known. And how would they react to an announcement of an MDC victory followed by a manipulation through the arrest or even assassination of Tsvangirai, the declaration of an emergency, an army intervention or any of the other possible tricks which regimes with their backs to the wall can dream up? Again, we simply don't know. But we can be sure that either of these situations will bring disaster to Zimbabwe,
and depression, perhaps worse to the region.

If Mugabe "steals the election" in whatever way, we can be sure that the international community beyond Africa will deepen their boycott. We will be more isolated. Even if Mugabe abandons some of his extremist policies in the hope of placating the west and luring back aid, it is unlikely that he will get the desired response. It is more likely that he will complete his land reform, as he puts it, we will be isolated, opposition will be brutally suppressed (he has already said he will ban the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions), thousands will flow out of the country. Our agriculture will remain largely at the subsistence level, manufacturing will not recover, and of immediate concern, where will we get food to eat in the middle of a drought?

Mugabe may then rely on the friendship of Libya to keep fuel flowing and even to bolster his security, but at a price - land and other economic assets in Zimbabwe, some of which have already been handed over. There is little evidence that Libya is a better coloniser than Britain or any other European power, and much evidence of serious mischief in other African countries in trouble.

If there is resistance, whether on a mass scale as in Madagascar, or sporadic, which is more likely, much blood will be spilled, and suffering ensue. In any case there is likely to be mass movement of people across the borders, either fleeing violence, or seeking food.

Much emphasis has been placed on the role of international observers, and especially those of SADC and South Africa. If it is clear that Mugabe has stolen the election, will South Africa go along with the pretense, gambling as they have done so far, that somehow things will go back to "normal" and they won't have to deal with it? A recent statement by Thabo that 1,000 dead in South Africa in 1994 did not mean that their election was not free and fair is not very promising. Or will they refuse to accept the result? And what then? A military intervention? Close the borders? Or simply denounce verbally and do nothing? The tunnel is dark and the light is not seen.

We do not want Mugabe removed by foreign troops, or by our own troops. We want him removed by the ballot. That is the only way that Zimbabwe can have a decent future. But two weeks before the poll date, the signals are that Mugabe will not allow that to happen. In that case, we do not hope for rescue from our fate by anyone, in or outside of Africa. At best we see a period of oppression, further economic decay, poverty and starvation. At worst we see bloody conflict, acute suffering, and death. Another failed state in Africa - brought about by the stubborn greed and ambition of one man and those parasites who surround him. And if we wish to take lessons from the experience of the past decade - failed states lead to failed regions, full of conflict, hate, fear and endless suffering.

We hope that Southern Africa can be spared from this fate. Perhaps a March miracle will occur. Perhaps we are near the end of the tunnel after all.

Africa: Hunger to Harvest Progress and Strategy

2002-02-28

http://www.bread.org/issues/africa/progress_and_strategy.html

Bread for the World's Africa: Hunger to Harvest campaign aims to win U.S. leadership for an international effort to reduce hunger and poverty in sub-Saharan Africa, including an increase of $1 billion in annual U.S. funding for effective, poverty-focused development assistance.

David Stiedl

2002-02-28

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/letters/6176

Once again, well done on the newsletter. It really is the only way to go plus yours has the bonus of being well produced and well written. Some of these newsletters are really hard work even if they are very relevant.

Few people regularly visit a web page on the off chance its been updated with intersting stuff. There is just too much choice out there and I think we now all suffer from ADHD. I have been trying to get the ILO to back up their web page with a newsletter for the past three years, but I think for these large institutions its just too much like hard work.

Margaret Isodo Joseph

Save the Children (UK)

2002-02-28

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/letters/6174

The story on women in Uganda... I was wondering about the boys/men.... While these women stay virgins and clean, free of infections, what protection or gurantees are there for these women against HIV/AIDS infection from the men who are supposed to be their husbands, responsible for determining their sexual status on the wedding night!??!?
(The price on offer is more or less an insult to women - in my view!)

Mrs. Erness A. Hill

Ph.D. Student at Howard University in African Studies

2002-02-28

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/letters/6173

Nasar Ali-Khan

2002-02-28

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/letters/6175

Economic nobel prize winner - World Bank's former chief economist Joseph Stiglitz - has explained the hidden agendas and plans of IMF and World Bank. He points out that there are always 4 steps to suck all the resources out of a country.

Here are the four steps... (details with examples are down below)

Step 1 - Privatization (or briberization) causing depression and starvation in the population.

Step 2 - The coming up with One-size-fits-all economy rescue plan. Deregulate Capital Markets of that country so that capital can easily flow in and (more importantly) out of that country. Then IMF asking 30% or 50% interest rates for money to flow back in.

Step 3 - Market-based pricing, increasing price on Water, food and cooking gas which causes 'IMF riots' in that country. Resulting in government bankruptcies and selling the remaining assets of that country at fire-sale prices to foreign investors. IMF then interferes and "BAIL-OUT" local banks and financiers. At the same time, IMF and World Bank orders that country to divert aid money to its reserve account at the US Treasury, which pays a pitiful 4% return, while that country has borrowed US Dollars at 10% or 15%. At this point: the clear winner is US Treasury and Western Banks.

Step 4 - 'Povery Reduction Strategy': Forcing Free Trade according to the rules of WTO - including intellectual property rights helping international corporations By the way, don't be confused by the mix in this discussion of the IMF, World Bank and WTO. They are interchangeable masks of a single governance system. They have locked themselves together by what are unpleasantly called, "triggers." Taking a World Bank loan for a school 'triggers' a requirement to accept every 'conditionality' - they average 111 per nation - laid down by both the World Bank and IMF. In fact, said Stiglitz the IMF requires nations to accept trade policies more punitive than the official WTO rules.
Economic nobel prize winner - World Bank's former chief economist Joseph
Stiglitz - has explained the hidden agendas and plans of IMF and World
Bank. He points out that there are always 4 steps to suck all the
resources out of a country.

Here are the four steps... (details with examples are down below)


Step 1 - Privatization (or briberization)
causing depression and starvation in the population

Step 2 - The coming up with One-size-fits-all economy rescue plan.
Deregulate Capital Markets of that country so that capital
can easily flow in and (more importantly) out of that country.
Then IMF asking 30% or 50% interest rates for money to flow
back in.

Step 3 - Market-based pricing, increasing price on Water, food
and cooking gas which causes 'IMF riots' in that country.
Resulting in government bankruptcies and selling the
remaining assets of that country at fire-sale prices
to foreign investors. IMF then interferes and "BAIL-OUT"
local banks and financiers. At the same time, IMF and
World Bank orders that country to divert aid money to
its reserve account at the US Treasury, which pays a
pitiful 4% return, while that country has borrowed US
Dollars at 10% or 15%.
At this point: the clear winner is US Treasury and Western Banks.

Step 4 - 'Povery Reduction Strategy':
Forcing Free Trade according to the rules of WTO - including
intellectual property rights helping international corporations



By the way, don't be confused by the mix in this discussion of the IMF,
World Bank and WTO. They are interchangeable masks of a single governance
system. They have locked themselves together by what are unpleasantly
called, "triggers." Taking a World Bank loan for a school 'triggers' a
requirement to accept every 'conditionality' - they average 111 per nation
- laid down by both the World Bank and IMF. In fact, said Stiglitz the IMF
requires nations to accept trade policies more punitive than the official
WTO rules.



Here are the details with examples...

-----------------------------------------------------------------------


WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN ECONOMICS
Joseph Stiglitz was Chief Economist of the World Bank

The World Bank's former Chief Economist's accusations are eye-popping...

http://www.GregPalast.com
by Greg Palast
The Observer, London
October 10, 2001

"It has condemned people to death," the former apparatchik told me. This
was like a scene out of Le Carre. The brilliant old agent comes in from
then cold, crosses to our side, and in hours of debriefing, empties his
memory of horrors committed in the name of a political ideology he now
realizes has gone rotten.

And here before me was a far bigger catch than some used Cold War spy.
Joseph Stiglitz was Chief Economist of the World Bank. To a great extent,
the new world economic order was his theory come to life.

I "debriefed" Stigltiz over several days, at Cambridge University, in a
London hotel and finally in Washington in April 2001 during the big confab
of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. But instead of
chairing the meetings of ministers and central bankers, Stiglitz was kept
exiled safely behind the blue police cordons,the same as the nuns carrying
a large wooden cross, the Bolivian union leaders, the parents of AIDS
victims and the other 'anti-globalization' protesters.The ultimate insider
was now on the outside.

In 1999 the World Bank fired Stiglitz. He was not allowed quiet
retirement;
US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, I'm told, demanded a public
excommunication for Stiglitz' having expressed his first mild dissent from
globalization World Bank style.

Here in Washington we completed the last of several hours of exclusive
interviews for The Observer and BBC TV's Newsnight about the real, often
hidden, workings of the IMF, World Bank, and the bank's 51% owner, the US
Treasury.

And here, from sources unnamable (not Stiglitz), we obtained a cache of
documents marked, "confidential," "restricted," and "not otherwise (to be)
disclosed without World Bank authorization."

Stiglitz helped translate one from bureaucratise, a "Country Assistance
Strategy." There's an Assistance Strategy for every poorer nation,
designed, says the World Bank, after careful in-country investigation. But
according to insider Stiglitz,the Bank's staff 'investigation' consists of
close inspection of a nation's 5-star hotels. It concludes with the Bank
staff meeting some begging, busted finance minister who is handed a
'restructuring agreement' pre-drafted for his 'voluntary' signature
(I have a selection of these).

Each nation's economy is individually analyzed, then, says Stiglitz, the
Bank hands every minister the same exact four-step program.


S T E P I
---------
Step One is Privatization - which Stiglitz said could more accurately be
called, 'Briberization.' Rather than object to the sell-offs of state
industries, he said national leaders - using the World Bank's demands to
silence local critics - happily flogged their electricity and water
companies. "You could see their eyes widen" at the prospect of 10%
commissions paid to Swiss bank accounts for simply shaving a few billion
off the sale price of national assets.

And the US government knew it, charges Stiglitz, at least in the case of
the biggest 'briberization' of all, the 1995 Russian sell-off. "The US
Treasury view was this was great as we wanted Yeltsin re-elected. We don't
care if it's a corrupt election. We want the money to go to Yeltzin" via
kick-backs for his campaign.

Stiglitz is no conspiracy nutter ranting about Black Helicopters. The man
was inside the game, a member of Bill Clinton's cabinet as Chairman of the
President's council of economic advisors.

Most ill-making for Stiglitz is that the US-backed oligarchs stripped
Russia's industrial assets, with the effect that the corruption scheme cut
national output nearly in half causing depression and starvation.



S T E P II
----------
After briberization, Step Two of the IMF/World Bank one-size-fits-all
rescue-your-economy plan is 'Capital Market Liberalization.' In theory,
capital market deregulation allows investment capital to flow in and out.
Unfortunately, as in Indonesia and Brazil, the money simply flowed out and
out. Stiglitz calls this the "Hot Money" cycle. Cash comes in for
speculation in real estate and currency, then flees at the first whiff of
trouble. A nation's reserves can drain in days, hours. And when that
happens, to seduce speculators into returning a nation's own capital
funds,
the IMF demands these nations raise interest rates to 30%, 50% and 80%.

"The result was predictable," said Stiglitz of the Hot Money tidal waves
in
Asia and Latin America. Higher interest rates demolished property values,
savaged industrial production and drained national treasuries.




S T E P III
-----------
At this point, the IMF drags the gasping nation to Step Three:
Market-Based
Pricing, a fancy term for raising prices on food, water and cooking gas.
This leads, predictably, to Step-Three-and-a-Half: what Stiglitz calls,
'The IMF riot.'

The IMF riot is painfully predictable. When a nation is, "down and out,
[the IMF] takes advantage and squeezes the last pound of blood out of
them.
They turn up the heat until, finally, the whole cauldron blows up," as
when
the IMF eliminated food and fuel subsidies for the poor in Indonesia in
1998. Indonesia exploded into riots, but there are other examples - the
Bolivian riots over water prices last year and this February, the riots in
Ecuador over the rise in cooking gas prices imposed by the World Bank.
You'd almost get the impression that the riot is written into the plan.

And it is. What Stiglitz did not know is that, while in the States, BBC
and
The Observer obtained several documents from inside the World Bank,
stamped
over with those pesky warnings, "confidential," "restricted," "not to be
disclosed." Let's get back to one: the "Interim Country Assistance
Strategy" for Ecuador, in it the Bank several times states - with cold
accuracy - that they expected their plans to spark, "social unrest," to
use
their bureaucratic term for a nation in flames.

That's not surprising. The secret report notes that the plan to make the
US
dollar Ecuador's currency has pushed 51% of the population below the
poverty line. The World Bank "Assistance" plan simply calls for facing
down
civil strife and suffering with, "political resolve" - and still higher
prices.

The IMF riots (and by riots I mean peaceful demonstrations dispersed by
bullets, tanks and teargas) cause new panicked flights of capital and
government bankruptcies. This economic arson has it's bright side - for
foreign corporations, who can then pick off remaining assets, such as the
odd mining concession or port, at fire sale prices.

Stiglitz notes that the IMF and World Bank are not heartless adherents to
market economics. At the same time the IMF stopped Indonesia 'subsidizing'
food purchases, "when the banks need a bail-out, intervention (in the
market) is welcome." The IMF scrounged up tens of billions of dollars to
save Indonesia's financiers and, by extension, the US and European banks
from which they had borrowed.

A pattern emerges. There are lots of losers in this system but one clear
winner: the Western banks and US Treasury, making the big bucks off this
crazy new international capital churn. Stiglitz told me about his unhappy
meeting, early in his World Bank tenure, with Ethopia's new president in
the nation's first democratic election. The World Bank and IMF had ordered
Ethiopia to divert aid money to its reserve account at the US Treasury,
which pays a pitiful 4% return, while the nation borrowed US dollars at
12%
to feed its population. The new president begged Stiglitz to let him use
the aid money to rebuild the nation. But no, the loot went straight off to
the US Treasury's vault in Washington.




S T E P 4
---------
Now we arrive at Step Four of what the IMF and World Bank call their
"poverty reduction strategy": Free Trade. This is free trade by the rules
of the World Trade Organization and World Bank, Stiglitz the insider
likens
free trade WTO-style to the Opium Wars. "That too was about opening
markets," he said. As in the 19th century, Europeans and Americans today
are kicking down the barriers to sales in Asia, Latin American and Africa,
while barricading our own markets against Third World agriculture.

In the Opium Wars, the West used military blockades to force open markets
for their unbalanced trade. Today, the World Bank can order a financial
blockade just as effective - and sometimes just as deadly.

Stiglitz is particularly emotional over the WTO's intellectual property
rights treaty (it goes by the acronym TRIPS, more on that in the next
chapters). It is here, says the economist, that the new global order has
"condemned people to death" by imposing impossible tariffs and tributes to
pay to pharmaceutical companies for branded medicines. "They don't care,"
said the professor of the corporations and bank loans he worked with, "if
people live or die."

By the way, don't be confused by the mix in this discussion of the IMF,
World Bank and WTO. They are interchangeable masks of a single governance

system. They have locked themselves together by what are unpleasantly
called, "triggers." Taking a World Bank loan for a school 'triggers' a
requirement to accept every 'conditionality' - they average 111 per nation
- laid down by both the World Bank and IMF. In fact, said Stiglitz the IMF
requires nations to accept trade policies more punitive than the official
WTO rules.

Stiglitz greatest concern is that World Bank plans, devised in secrecy and
driven by an absolutist ideology, are never open for discourse or dissent.
Despite the West's push for elections throughout the developing world, the
so-called Poverty Reduction Programs "undermine democracy."

And they don't work. Black Africa's productivity under the guiding hand of
IMF structural "assistance" has gone to hell in a handbag. Did any nation
avoid this fate? Yes, said Stiglitz, identifying Botswana. Their trick?
"They told the IMF to go packing."

So then I turned on Stiglitz. OK, Mr Smart-Guy Professor, how would you
help developing nations? Stiglitz proposed radical land reform, an attack
at the heart of "landlordism," on the usurious rents charged by the
propertied oligarchies worldwide, typically 50% of a tenant's crops. So I
had to ask the professor: as you were top economist at the World Bank, why
didn't the Bank follow your advice?

"If you challenge [land ownership], that would be a change in the power of
the elites. That's not high on their agenda." Apparently not.

Ultimately, what drove him to put his job on the line was the failure of
the banks and US Treasury to change course when confronted with the crises
- failures and suffering perpetrated by their four-step monetarist mambo.
Every time their free market solutions failed, the IMF simply demanded
more
free market policies.

"It's a little like the Middle Ages," the insider told me, "When the
patient died they would say, 'well, he stopped the bloodletting too soon,
he still had a little blood in him.'"

I took away from my talks with the professor that the solution to world
poverty and crisis is simple: remove the bloodsuckers.

----------------------------------

A version of this was first published as "The IMF's Four Steps to
Damnation" in The Observer (London) in April and another version in The
Big
Issue - that's the magazine that the homeless flog on platforms in the
London Underground. Big Issue offered equal space to the IMF, whose
"deputy
chief media officer" wrote:

"... I find it impossible to respond given the depth and breadth of
hearsay
and misinformation in [Palast's] report."

Of course it was difficult for the Deputy Chief to respond. The
information
(and documents) came from the unhappy lot inside his agency and the World
Bank.















.



--- A Nizami <nizaminz@yahoo.com wrote:
Nowadays, IMF gives "Aid" (read: debt) to many
countries that have monetary crisis, such as
Argentina, Mexico, Indonesia, etc. Most of the
monetary crisis that happen on those countries, caused
by Forex speculators that also IMF's members of honor,
such as George Soros and his friends in Quantum Fund.

In return to its aid, IMF will force those countries
to sell companies and government owned company in the
LOI (Letter of Intent) to support their national
expense, while continuing pay their debt with interest
to IMF. Of course the buyers will be from the IMF's
gang, though the bid is open and in a very cheap
price.

For example: the biggest bank in Indonesia, BCA that
has profit Rp 2,000,000,000,000,- (about USD
200,000,000,-) only sold for USD 500,000,000,- only.
BCA manages USD 10,000,000,000,- of its customer
money, and it could earn 17,5% per year from SBI
(obligation from Bank Indonesia).

Anyway, by privatization, which means selling
government owned companies (though the companies
making high profit) to IMF's member of honor that
mostly Jewish Conglomerates, it only makes the
countries weak. They don't have much money that used
to be given from the government owned company to
maintain the country. They have to depend on IMF and
its conglomerates.

Ergo, those countries, just like in USA, actually
controlled by IMF and its conglomerates. No one could
be the president without their support. It only make
the people suffer, because this government will set
the minimum wage according to IMF and its capitalists
favor.

The natural resources will be maintained by those
capitalists for their own benefit, not for the people.
The oilfield, the mining field, forestry, etc. Many of
those capitalists owned millions of hectares of land
for their mining or wood industry. For example,
Freeport own at least 5 million hectares as their
mining area in Papua, while many wood entrepreneurs
own millions of hectares in Kalimantan and Sumatera.
The native people could no longer work as farmers
since most of the land is already own by the
capitalists through the corrupt governments.

That is what happens now in many Islamic Countries.


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__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Sports - Coverage of the 2002 Olympic Games
http://sports.yahoo.com


For business and financial news from the Arab-Islamic world
visit http://suhufonline.com
Updated round-the-clock

Visit ISLAMIC BUSINESS & FINANCE NETWORK
website at http://islamic-finance.net
& ISLAMIC BUSINESS & FINANCE NETVERSITY
website at http://netversity.org

Also visit these area-specific portals:
http://www.islamic-economy.com
http://www.islamic-accounting.com
http://www.islamic-insurance.com
http://www.islamic-microfinance.com
http://www.islamic-ethics.com
http://www.islamic-economics.com
http://www.islamic-exchange.com
http://www.riba-free-banking.com
http://www.islamicfiqh.com

Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/



-----Original Message-----
From: Murtaza Jaffer [mailto:mswahili@nbnet.co.ke]
Sent: 22 February 2002 23:22
To: Shabbir AlidinaKampala; Prof. Hassanali; Nasrin Tejani; Murtaza
JafferTIMA; Munaver Dhanani; Mohamed Kassamali; Mohamed Jaffer Nakuru;
MHemani; Ladaks516@aol.com; Islamic Education Board; Husein Rashid;
Hassanain Jaffer; Hassan Jaffer; Hasnain Kassamali; Haider Jaffer;
Candle Light; Cassiem Khan; Bashir Tejani; Bashir Mugo; Asief Tejani;
Arif Suleiman; ABIDALI MOHAMEDALI; Abdi Mohamed Baffo; Abbas MullaAsgher
Jaffer
Subject: Fw: [ibfnet] IMF: Capitalists Tool to Invade the World.



----- Original Message -----
From: "Nasar Ali-Khan" <kalikhan@yahoo.com
To: <ibfnet@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Tuesday, February 19, 2002 3:43 AM
Subject: Re: [ibfnet] IMF: Capitalists Tool to Invade the World.



Economic nobel prize winner - World Bank's former chief economist Joseph
Stiglitz - has explained the hidden agendas and plans of IMF and World
Bank. He points out that there are always 4 steps to suck all the
resources out of a country.

Here are the four steps... (details with examples are down below)


Step 1 - Privatization (or briberization)
causing depression and starvation in the population

Step 2 - The coming up with One-size-fits-all economy rescue plan.
Deregulate Capital Markets of that country so that capital
can easily flow in and (more importantly) out of that country.
Then IMF asking 30% or 50% interest rates for money to flow
back in.

Step 3 - Market-based pricing, increasing price on Water, food
and cooking gas which causes 'IMF riots' in that country.
Resulting in government bankruptcies and selling the
remaining assets of that country at fire-sale prices
to foreign investors. IMF then interferes and "BAIL-OUT"
local banks and financiers. At the same time, IMF and
World Bank orders that country to divert aid money to
its reserve account at the US Treasury, which pays a
pitiful 4% return, while that country has borrowed US
Dollars at 10% or 15%.
At this point: the clear winner is US Treasury and Western Banks.

Step 4 - 'Povery Reduction Strategy':
Forcing Free Trade according to the rules of WTO - including
intellectual property rights helping international corporations



By the way, don't be confused by the mix in this discussion of the IMF,
World Bank and WTO. They are interchangeable masks of a single governance
system. They have locked themselves together by what are unpleasantly
called, "triggers." Taking a World Bank loan for a school 'triggers' a
requirement to accept every 'conditionality' - they average 111 per nation
- laid down by both the World Bank and IMF. In fact, said Stiglitz the IMF
requires nations to accept trade policies more punitive than the official
WTO rules.



Here are the details with examples...

-----------------------------------------------------------------------


WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN ECONOMICS
Joseph Stiglitz was Chief Economist of the World Bank

The World Bank's former Chief Economist's accusations are eye-popping...

http://www.GregPalast.com
by Greg Palast
The Observer, London
October 10, 2001

"It has condemned people to death," the former apparatchik told me. This
was like a scene out of Le Carre. The brilliant old agent comes in from
then cold, crosses to our side, and in hours of debriefing, empties his
memory of horrors committed in the name of a political ideology he now
realizes has gone rotten.

And here before me was a far bigger catch than some used Cold War spy.
Joseph Stiglitz was Chief Economist of the World Bank. To a great extent,
the new world economic order was his theory come to life.

I "debriefed" Stigltiz over several days, at Cambridge University, in a
London hotel and finally in Washington in April 2001 during the big confab
of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. But instead of
chairing the meetings of ministers and central bankers, Stiglitz was kept
exiled safely behind the blue police cordons,the same as the nuns carrying
a large wooden cross, the Bolivian union leaders, the parents of AIDS
victims and the other 'anti-globalization' protesters.The ultimate insider
was now on the outside.

In 1999 the World Bank fired Stiglitz. He was not allowed quiet
retirement;
US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, I'm told, demanded a public
excommunication for Stiglitz' having expressed his first mild dissent from
globalization World Bank style.

Here in Washington we completed the last of several hours of exclusive
interviews for The Observer and BBC TV's Newsnight about the real, often
hidden, workings of the IMF, World Bank, and the bank's 51% owner, the US
Treasury.

And here, from sources unnamable (not Stiglitz), we obtained a cache of
documents marked, "confidential," "restricted," and "not otherwise (to be)
disclosed without World Bank authorization."

Stiglitz helped translate one from bureaucratise, a "Country Assistance
Strategy." There's an Assistance Strategy for every poorer nation,
designed, says the World Bank, after careful in-country investigation. But
according to insider Stiglitz,the Bank's staff 'investigation' consists of
close inspection of a nation's 5-star hotels. It concludes with the Bank
staff meeting some begging, busted finance minister who is handed a
'restructuring agreement' pre-drafted for his 'voluntary' signature
(I have a selection of these).

Each nation's economy is individually analyzed, then, says Stiglitz, the
Bank hands every minister the same exact four-step program.


S T E P I
---------
Step One is Privatization - which Stiglitz said could more accurately be
called, 'Briberization.' Rather than object to the sell-offs of state
industries, he said national leaders - using the World Bank's demands to
silence local critics - happily flogged their electricity and water
companies. "You could see their eyes widen" at the prospect of 10%
commissions paid to Swiss bank accounts for simply shaving a few billion
off the sale price of national assets.

And the US government knew it, charges Stiglitz, at least in the case of
the biggest 'briberization' of all, the 1995 Russian sell-off. "The US
Treasury view was this was great as we wanted Yeltsin re-elected. We don't
care if it's a corrupt election. We want the money to go to Yeltzin" via
kick-backs for his campaign.

Stiglitz is no conspiracy nutter ranting about Black Helicopters. The man
was inside the game, a member of Bill Clinton's cabinet as Chairman of the
President's council of economic advisors.

Most ill-making for Stiglitz is that the US-backed oligarchs stripped
Russia's industrial assets, with the effect that the corruption scheme cut
national output nearly in half causing depression and starvation.



S T E P II
----------
After briberization, Step Two of the IMF/World Bank one-size-fits-all
rescue-your-economy plan is 'Capital Market Liberalization.' In theory,
capital market deregulation allows investment capital to flow in and out.
Unfortunately, as in Indonesia and Brazil, the money simply flowed out and
out. Stiglitz calls this the "Hot Money" cycle. Cash comes in for
speculation in real estate and currency, then flees at the first whiff of
trouble. A nation's reserves can drain in days, hours. And when that
happens, to seduce speculators into returning a nation's own capital
funds,
the IMF demands these nations raise interest rates to 30%, 50% and 80%.

"The result was predictable," said Stiglitz of the Hot Money tidal waves
in
Asia and Latin America. Higher interest rates demolished property values,
savaged industrial production and drained national treasuries.




S T E P III
-----------
At this point, the IMF drags the gasping nation to Step Three:
Market-Based
Pricing, a fancy term for raising prices on food, water and cooking gas.
This leads, predictably, to Step-Three-and-a-Half: what Stiglitz calls,
'The IMF riot.'

The IMF riot is painfully predictable. When a nation is, "down and out,
[the IMF] takes advantage and squeezes the last pound of blood out of
them.
They turn up the heat until, finally, the whole cauldron blows up," as
when
the IMF eliminated food and fuel subsidies for the poor in Indonesia in
1998. Indonesia exploded into riots, but there are other examples - the
Bolivian riots over water prices last year and this February, the riots in
Ecuador over the rise in cooking gas prices imposed by the World Bank.
You'd almost get the impression that the riot is written into the plan.

And it is. What Stiglitz did not know is that, while in the States, BBC
and
The Observer obtained several documents from inside the World Bank,
stamped
over with those pesky warnings, "confidential," "restricted," "not to be
disclosed." Let's get back to one: the "Interim Country Assistance
Strategy" for Ecuador, in it the Bank several times states - with cold
accuracy - that they expected their plans to spark, "social unrest," to
use
their bureaucratic term for a nation in flames.

That's not surprising. The secret report notes that the plan to make the
US
dollar Ecuador's currency has pushed 51% of the population below the
poverty line. The World Bank "Assistance" plan simply calls for facing
down
civil strife and suffering with, "political resolve" - and still higher
prices.

The IMF riots (and by riots I mean peaceful demonstrations dispersed by
bullets, tanks and teargas) cause new panicked flights of capital and
government bankruptcies. This economic arson has it's bright side - for
foreign corporations, who can then pick off remaining assets, such as the
odd mining concession or port, at fire sale prices.

Stiglitz notes that the IMF and World Bank are not heartless adherents to
market economics. At the same time the IMF stopped Indonesia 'subsidizing'
food purchases, "when the banks need a bail-out, intervention (in the
market) is welcome." The IMF scrounged up tens of billions of dollars to
save Indonesia's financiers and, by extension, the US and European banks
from which they had borrowed.

A pattern emerges. There are lots of losers in this system but one clear
winner: the Western banks and US Treasury, making the big bucks off this
crazy new international capital churn. Stiglitz told me about his unhappy
meeting, early in his World Bank tenure, with Ethopia's new president in
the nation's first democratic election. The World Bank and IMF had ordered
Ethiopia to divert aid money to its reserve account at the US Treasury,
which pays a pitiful 4% return, while the nation borrowed US dollars at
12%
to feed its population. The new president begged Stiglitz to let him use
the aid money to rebuild the nation. But no, the loot went straight off to
the US Treasury's vault in Washington.




S T E P 4
---------
Now we arrive at Step Four of what the IMF and World Bank call their
"poverty reduction strategy": Free Trade. This is free trade by the rules
of the World Trade Organization and World Bank, Stiglitz the insider
likens
free trade WTO-style to the Opium Wars. "That too was about opening
markets," he said. As in the 19th century, Europeans and Americans today
are kicking down the barriers to sales in Asia, Latin American and Africa,
while barricading our own markets against Third World agriculture.

In the Opium Wars, the West used military blockades to force open markets
for their unbalanced trade. Today, the World Bank can order a financial
blockade just as effective - and sometimes just as deadly.

Stiglitz is particularly emotional over the WTO's intellectual property
rights treaty (it goes by the acronym TRIPS, more on that in the next
chapters). It is here, says the economist, that the new global order has
"condemned people to death" by imposing impossible tariffs and tributes to
pay to pharmaceutical companies for branded medicines. "They don't care,"
said the professor of the corporations and bank loans he worked with, "if
people live or die."

By the way, don't be confused by the mix in this discussion of the IMF,
World Bank and WTO. They are interchangeable masks of a single governance

system. They have locked themselves together by what are unpleasantly
called, "triggers." Taking a World Bank loan for a school 'triggers' a
requirement to accept every 'conditionality' - they average 111 per nation
- laid down by both the World Bank and IMF. In fact, said Stiglitz the IMF
requires nations to accept trade policies more punitive than the official
WTO rules.

Stiglitz greatest concern is that World Bank plans, devised in secrecy and
driven by an absolutist ideology, are never open for discourse or dissent.
Despite the West's push for elections throughout the developing world, the
so-called Poverty Reduction Programs "undermine democracy."

And they don't work. Black Africa's productivity under the guiding hand of
IMF structural "assistance" has gone to hell in a handbag. Did any nation
avoid this fate? Yes, said Stiglitz, identifying Botswana. Their trick?
"They told the IMF to go packing."

So then I turned on Stiglitz. OK, Mr Smart-Guy Professor, how would you
help developing nations? Stiglitz proposed radical land reform, an attack
at the heart of "landlordism," on the usurious rents charged by the
propertied oligarchies worldwide, typically 50% of a tenant's crops. So I
had to ask the professor: as you were top economist at the World Bank, why
didn't the Bank follow your advice?

"If you challenge [land ownership], that would be a change in the power of
the elites. That's not high on their agenda." Apparently not.

Ultimately, what drove him to put his job on the line was the failure of
the banks and US Treasury to change course when confronted with the crises
- failures and suffering perpetrated by their four-step monetarist mambo.
Every time their free market solutions failed, the IMF simply demanded
more
free market policies.

"It's a little like the Middle Ages," the insider told me, "When the
patient died they would say, 'well, he stopped the bloodletting too soon,
he still had a little blood in him.'"

I took away from my talks with the professor that the solution to world
poverty and crisis is simple: remove the bloodsuckers.

----------------------------------

A version of this was first published as "The IMF's Four Steps to
Damnation" in The Observer (London) in April and another version in The
Big
Issue - that's the magazine that the homeless flog on platforms in the
London Underground. Big Issue offered equal space to the IMF, whose
"deputy
chief media officer" wrote:

"... I find it impossible to respond given the depth and breadth of
hearsay
and misinformation in [Palast's] report."

Of course it was difficult for the Deputy Chief to respond. The
information
(and documents) came from the unhappy lot inside his agency and the World
Bank.















.



--- A Nizami <nizaminz@yahoo.com wrote:
Nowadays, IMF gives "Aid" (read: debt) to many
countries that have monetary crisis, such as
Argentina, Mexico, Indonesia, etc. Most of the
monetary crisis that happen on those countries, caused
by Forex speculators that also IMF's members of honor,
such as George Soros and his friends in Quantum Fund.

In return to its aid, IMF will force those countries
to sell companies and government owned company in the
LOI (Letter of Intent) to support their national
expense, while continuing pay their debt with interest
to IMF. Of course the buyers will be from the IMF's
gang, though the bid is open and in a very cheap
price.

For example: the biggest bank in Indonesia, BCA that
has profit Rp 2,000,000,000,000,- (about USD
200,000,000,-) only sold for USD 500,000,000,- only.
BCA manages USD 10,000,000,000,- of its customer
money, and it could earn 17,5% per year from SBI
(obligation from Bank Indonesia).

Anyway, by privatization, which means selling
government owned companies (though the companies
making high profit) to IMF's member of honor that
mostly Jewish Conglomerates, it only makes the
countries weak. They don't have much money that used
to be given from the government owned company to
maintain the country. They have to depend on IMF and
its conglomerates.

Ergo, those countries, just like in USA, actually
controlled by IMF and its conglomerates. No one could
be the president without their support. It only make
the people suffer, because this government will set
the minimum wage according to IMF and its capitalists
favor.

The natural resources will be maintained by those
capitalists for their own benefit, not for the people.
The oilfield, the mining field, forestry, etc. Many of
those capitalists owned millions of hectares of land
for their mining or wood industry. For example,
Freeport own at least 5 million hectares as their
mining area in Papua, while many wood entrepreneurs
own millions of hectares in Kalimantan and Sumatera.
The native people could no longer work as farmers
since most of the land is already own by the
capitalists through the corrupt governments.

That is what happens now in many Islamic Countries.


__________________________________________________
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__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Sports - Coverage of the 2002 Olympic Games
http://sports.yahoo.com


For business and financial news from the Arab-Islamic world
visit http://suhufonline.com
Updated round-the-clock

Visit ISLAMIC BUSINESS & FINANCE NETWORK
website at http://islamic-finance.net
& ISLAMIC BUSINESS & FINANCE NETVERSITY
website at http://netversity.org

Also visit these area-specific portals:
http://www.islamic-economy.com
http://www.islamic-accounting.com
http://www.islamic-insurance.com
http://www.islamic-microfinance.com
http://www.islamic-ethics.com
http://www.islamic-economics.com
http://www.islamic-exchange.com
http://www.riba-free-banking.com
http://www.islamicfiqh.com

Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/



-----Original Message-----
From: Murtaza Jaffer [mailto:mswahili@nbnet.co.ke]
Sent: 22 February 2002 23:22
To: Shabbir AlidinaKampala; Prof. Hassanali; Nasrin Tejani; Murtaza
JafferTIMA; Munaver Dhanani; Mohamed Kassamali; Mohamed Jaffer Nakuru;
MHemani; Ladaks516@aol.com; Islamic Education Board; Husein Rashid;
Hassanain Jaffer; Hassan Jaffer; Hasnain Kassamali; Haider Jaffer;
Candle Light; Cassiem Khan; Bashir Tejani; Bashir Mugo; Asief Tejani;
Arif Suleiman; ABIDALI MOHAMEDALI; Abdi Mohamed Baffo; Abbas MullaAsgher
Jaffer
Subject: Fw: [ibfnet] IMF: Capitalists Tool to Invade the World.



----- Original Message -----
From: "Nasar Ali-Khan" <kalikhan@yahoo.com
To: <ibfnet@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Tuesday, February 19, 2002 3:43 AM
Subject: Re: [ibfnet] IMF: Capitalists Tool to Invade the World.



Economic nobel prize winner - World Bank's former chief economist Joseph
Stiglitz - has explained the hidden agendas and plans of IMF and World
Bank. He points out that there are always 4 steps to suck all the
resources out of a country.

Here are the four steps... (details with examples are down below)


Step 1 - Privatization (or briberization)
causing depression and starvation in the population

Step 2 - The coming up with One-size-fits-all economy rescue plan.
Deregulate Capital Markets of that country so that capital
can easily flow in and (more importantly) out of that country.
Then IMF asking 30% or 50% interest rates for money to flow
back in.

Step 3 - Market-based pricing, increasing price on Water, food
and cooking gas which causes 'IMF riots' in that country.
Resulting in government bankruptcies and selling the
remaining assets of that country at fire-sale prices
to foreign investors. IMF then interferes and "BAIL-OUT"
local banks and financiers. At the same time, IMF and
World Bank orders that country to divert aid money to
its reserve account at the US Treasury, which pays a
pitiful 4% return, while that country has borrowed US
Dollars at 10% or 15%.
At this point: the clear winner is US Treasury and Western Banks.

Step 4 - 'Povery Reduction Strategy':
Forcing Free Trade according to the rules of WTO - including
intellectual property rights helping international corporations



By the way, don't be confused by the mix in this discussion of the IMF,
World Bank and WTO. They are interchangeable masks of a single governance
system. They have locked themselves together by what are unpleasantly
called, "triggers." Taking a World Bank loan for a school 'triggers' a
requirement to accept every 'conditionality' - they average 111 per nation
- laid down by both the World Bank and IMF. In fact, said Stiglitz the IMF
requires nations to accept trade policies more punitive than the official
WTO rules.



Here are the details with examples...

-----------------------------------------------------------------------


WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN ECONOMICS
Joseph Stiglitz was Chief Economist of the World Bank

The World Bank's former Chief Economist's accusations are eye-popping...

http://www.GregPalast.com
by Greg Palast
The Observer, London
October 10, 2001

"It has condemned people to death," the former apparatchik told me. This
was like a scene out of Le Carre. The brilliant old agent comes in from
then cold, crosses to our side, and in hours of debriefing, empties his
memory of horrors committed in the name of a political ideology he now
realizes has gone rotten.

And here before me was a far bigger catch than some used Cold War spy.
Joseph Stiglitz was Chief Economist of the World Bank. To a great extent,
the new world economic order was his theory come to life.

I "debriefed" Stigltiz over several days, at Cambridge University, in a
London hotel and finally in Washington in April 2001 during the big confab
of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. But instead of
chairing the meetings of ministers and central bankers, Stiglitz was kept
exiled safely behind the blue police cordons,the same as the nuns carrying
a large wooden cross, the Bolivian union leaders, the parents of AIDS
victims and the other 'anti-globalization' protesters.The ultimate insider
was now on the outside.

In 1999 the World Bank fired Stiglitz. He was not allowed quiet
retirement;
US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, I'm told, demanded a public
excommunication for Stiglitz' having expressed his first mild dissent from
globalization World Bank style.

Here in Washington we completed the last of several hours of exclusive
interviews for The Observer and BBC TV's Newsnight about the real, often
hidden, workings of the IMF, World Bank, and the bank's 51% owner, the US
Treasury.

And here, from sources unnamable (not Stiglitz), we obtained a cache of
documents marked, "confidential," "restricted," and "not otherwise (to be)
disclosed without World Bank authorization."

Stiglitz helped translate one from bureaucratise, a "Country Assistance
Strategy." There's an Assistance Strategy for every poorer nation,
designed, says the World Bank, after careful in-country investigation. But
according to insider Stiglitz,the Bank's staff 'investigation' consists of
close inspection of a nation's 5-star hotels. It concludes with the Bank
staff meeting some begging, busted finance minister who is handed a
'restructuring agreement' pre-drafted for his 'voluntary' signature
(I have a selection of these).

Each nation's economy is individually analyzed, then, says Stiglitz, the
Bank hands every minister the same exact four-step program.


S T E P I
---------
Step One is Privatization - which Stiglitz said could more accurately be
called, 'Briberization.' Rather than object to the sell-offs of state
industries, he said national leaders - using the World Bank's demands to
silence local critics - happily flogged their electricity and water
companies. "You could see their eyes widen" at the prospect of 10%
commissions paid to Swiss bank accounts for simply shaving a few billion
off the sale price of national assets.

And the US government knew it, charges Stiglitz, at least in the case of
the biggest 'briberization' of all, the 1995 Russian sell-off. "The US
Treasury view was this was great as we wanted Yeltsin re-elected. We don't
care if it's a corrupt election. We want the money to go to Yeltzin" via
kick-backs for his campaign.

Stiglitz is no conspiracy nutter ranting about Black Helicopters. The man
was inside the game, a member of Bill Clinton's cabinet as Chairman of the
President's council of economic advisors.

Most ill-making for Stiglitz is that the US-backed oligarchs stripped
Russia's industrial assets, with the effect that the corruption scheme cut
national output nearly in half causing depression and starvation.



S T E P II
----------
After briberization, Step Two of the IMF/World Bank one-size-fits-all
rescue-your-economy plan is 'Capital Market Liberalization.' In theory,
capital market deregulation allows investment capital to flow in and out.
Unfortunately, as in Indonesia and Brazil, the money simply flowed out and
out. Stiglitz calls this the "Hot Money" cycle. Cash comes in for
speculation in real estate and currency, then flees at the first whiff of
trouble. A nation's reserves can drain in days, hours. And when that
happens, to seduce speculators into returning a nation's own capital
funds,
the IMF demands these nations raise interest rates to 30%, 50% and 80%.

"The result was predictable," said Stiglitz of the Hot Money tidal waves
in
Asia and Latin America. Higher interest rates demolished property values,
savaged industrial production and drained national treasuries.




S T E P III
-----------
At this point, the IMF drags the gasping nation to Step Three:
Market-Based
Pricing, a fancy term for raising prices on food, water and cooking gas.
This leads, predictably, to Step-Three-and-a-Half: what Stiglitz calls,
'The IMF riot.'

The IMF riot is painfully predictable. When a nation is, "down and out,
[the IMF] takes advantage and squeezes the last pound of blood out of
them.
They turn up the heat until, finally, the whole cauldron blows up," as
when
the IMF eliminated food and fuel subsidies for the poor in Indonesia in
1998. Indonesia exploded into riots, but there are other examples - the
Bolivian riots over water prices last year and this February, the riots in
Ecuador over the rise in cooking gas prices imposed by the World Bank.
You'd almost get the impression that the riot is written into the plan.

And it is. What Stiglitz did not know is that, while in the States, BBC
and
The Observer obtained several documents from inside the World Bank,
stamped
over with those pesky warnings, "confidential," "restricted," "not to be
disclosed." Let's get back to one: the "Interim Country Assistance
Strategy" for Ecuador, in it the Bank several times states - with cold
accuracy - that they expected their plans to spark, "social unrest," to
use
their bureaucratic term for a nation in flames.

That's not surprising. The secret report notes that the plan to make the
US
dollar Ecuador's currency has pushed 51% of the population below the
poverty line. The World Bank "Assistance" plan simply calls for facing
down
civil strife and suffering with, "political resolve" - and still higher
prices.

The IMF riots (and by riots I mean peaceful demonstrations dispersed by
bullets, tanks and teargas) cause new panicked flights of capital and
government bankruptcies. This economic arson has it's bright side - for
foreign corporations, who can then pick off remaining assets, such as the
odd mining concession or port, at fire sale prices.

Stiglitz notes that the IMF and World Bank are not heartless adherents to
market economics. At the same time the IMF stopped Indonesia 'subsidizing'
food purchases, "when the banks need a bail-out, intervention (in the
market) is welcome." The IMF scrounged up tens of billions of dollars to
save Indonesia's financiers and, by extension, the US and European banks
from which they had borrowed.

A pattern emerges. There are lots of losers in this system but one clear
winner: the Western banks and US Treasury, making the big bucks off this
crazy new international capital churn. Stiglitz told me about his unhappy
meeting, early in his World Bank tenure, with Ethopia's new president in
the nation's first democratic election. The World Bank and IMF had ordered
Ethiopia to divert aid money to its reserve account at the US Treasury,
which pays a pitiful 4% return, while the nation borrowed US dollars at
12%
to feed its population. The new president begged Stiglitz to let him use
the aid money to rebuild the nation. But no, the loot went straight off to
the US Treasury's vault in Washington.




S T E P 4
---------
Now we arrive at Step Four of what the IMF and World Bank call their
"poverty reduction strategy": Free Trade. This is free trade by the rules
of the World Trade Organization and World Bank, Stiglitz the insider
likens
free trade WTO-style to the Opium Wars. "That too was about opening
markets," he said. As in the 19th century, Europeans and Americans today
are kicking down the barriers to sales in Asia, Latin American and Africa,
while barricading our own markets against Third World agriculture.

In the Opium Wars, the West used military blockades to force open markets
for their unbalanced trade. Today, the World Bank can order a financial
blockade just as effective - and sometimes just as deadly.

Stiglitz is particularly emotional over the WTO's intellectual property
rights treaty (it goes by the acronym TRIPS, more on that in the next
chapters). It is here, says the economist, that the new global order has
"condemned people to death" by imposing impossible tariffs and tributes to
pay to pharmaceutical companies for branded medicines. "They don't care,"
said the professor of the corporations and bank loans he worked with, "if
people live or die."

By the way, don't be confused by the mix in this discussion of the IMF,
World Bank and WTO. They are interchangeable masks of a single governance

system. They have locked themselves together by what are unpleasantly
called, "triggers." Taking a World Bank loan for a school 'triggers' a
requirement to accept every 'conditionality' - they average 111 per nation
- laid down by both the World Bank and IMF. In fact, said Stiglitz the IMF
requires nations to accept trade policies more punitive than the official
WTO rules.

Stiglitz greatest concern is that World Bank plans, devised in secrecy and
driven by an absolutist ideology, are never open for discourse or dissent.
Despite the West's push for elections throughout the developing world, the
so-called Poverty Reduction Programs "undermine democracy."

And they don't work. Black Africa's productivity under the guiding hand of
IMF structural "assistance" has gone to hell in a handbag. Did any nation
avoid this fate? Yes, said Stiglitz, identifying Botswana. Their trick?
"They told the IMF to go packing."

So then I turned on Stiglitz. OK, Mr Smart-Guy Professor, how would you
help developing nations? Stiglitz proposed radical land reform, an attack
at the heart of "landlordism," on the usurious rents charged by the
propertied oligarchies worldwide, typically 50% of a tenant's crops. So I
had to ask the professor: as you were top economist at the World Bank, why
didn't the Bank follow your advice?

"If you challenge [land ownership], that would be a change in the power of
the elites. That's not high on their agenda." Apparently not.

Ultimately, what drove him to put his job on the line was the failure of
the banks and US Treasury to change course when confronted with the crises
- failures and suffering perpetrated by their four-step monetarist mambo.
Every time their free market solutions failed, the IMF simply demanded
more
free market policies.

"It's a little like the Middle Ages," the insider told me, "When the
patient died they would say, 'well, he stopped the bloodletting too soon,
he still had a little blood in him.'"

I took away from my talks with the professor that the solution to world
poverty and crisis is simple: remove the bloodsuckers.

----------------------------------

A version of this was first published as "The IMF's Four Steps to
Damnation" in The Observer (London) in April and another version in The
Big
Issue - that's the magazine that the homeless flog on platforms in the
London Underground. Big Issue offered equal space to the IMF, whose
"deputy
chief media officer" wrote:

"... I find it impossible to respond given the depth and breadth of
hearsay
and misinformation in [Palast's] report."

Of course it was difficult for the Deputy Chief to respond. The
information
(and documents) came from the unhappy lot inside his agency and the World
Bank.















.



--- A Nizami <nizaminz@yahoo.com wrote:
Nowadays, IMF gives "Aid" (read: debt) to many
countries that have monetary crisis, such as
Argentina, Mexico, Indonesia, etc. Most of the
monetary crisis that happen on those countries, caused
by Forex speculators that also IMF's members of honor,
such as George Soros and his friends in Quantum Fund.

In return to its aid, IMF will force those countries
to sell companies and government owned company in the
LOI (Letter of Intent) to support their national
expense, while continuing pay their debt with interest
to IMF. Of course the buyers will be from the IMF's
gang, though the bid is open and in a very cheap
price.

For example: the biggest bank in Indonesia, BCA that
has profit Rp 2,000,000,000,000,- (about USD
200,000,000,-) only sold for USD 500,000,000,- only.
BCA manages USD 10,000,000,000,- of its customer
money, and it could earn 17,5% per year from SBI
(obligation from Bank Indonesia).

Anyway, by privatization, which means selling
government owned companies (though the companies
making high profit) to IMF's member of honor that
mostly Jewish Conglomerates, it only makes the
countries weak. They don't have much money that used
to be given from the government owned company to
maintain the country. They have to depend on IMF and
its conglomerates.

Ergo, those countries, just like in USA, actually
controlled by IMF and its conglomerates. No one could
be the president without their support. It only make
the people suffer, because this government will set
the minimum wage according to IMF and its capitalists
favor.

The natural resources will be maintained by those
capitalists for their own benefit, not for the people.
The oilfield, the mining field, forestry, etc. Many of
those capitalists owned millions of hectares of land
for their mining or wood industry. For example,
Freeport own at least 5 million hectares as their
mining area in Papua, while many wood entrepreneurs
own millions of hectares in Kalimantan and Sumatera.
The native people could no longer work as farmers
since most of the land is already own by the
capitalists through the corrupt governments.

That is what happens now in many Islamic Countries.


__________________________________________________
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-----Original Message-----
From: Murtaza Jaffer [mailto:mswahili@nbnet.co.ke]
Sent: 22 February 2002 23:22
To: Shabbir AlidinaKampala; Prof. Hassanali; Nasrin Tejani; Murtaza
JafferTIMA; Munaver Dhanani; Mohamed Kassamali; Mohamed Jaffer Nakuru;
MHemani; Ladaks516@aol.com; Islamic Education Board; Husein Rashid;
Hassanain Jaffer; Hassan Jaffer; Hasnain Kassamali; Haider Jaffer;
Candle Light; Cassiem Khan; Bashir Tejani; Bashir Mugo; Asief Tejani;
Arif Suleiman; ABIDALI MOHAMEDALI; Abdi Mohamed Baffo; Abbas MullaAsgher
Jaffer
Subject: Fw: [ibfnet] IMF: Capitalists Tool to Invade the World.



----- Original Message -----
From: "Nasar Ali-Khan" <kalikhan@yahoo.com
To: <ibfnet@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Tuesday, February 19, 2002 3:43 AM
Subject: Re: [ibfnet] IMF: Capitalists Tool to Invade the World.



Economic nobel prize winner - World Bank's former chief economist Joseph
Stiglitz - has explained the hidden agendas and plans of IMF and World
Bank. He points out that there are always 4 steps to suck all the
resources out of a country.

Here are the four steps... (details with examples are down below)


Step 1 - Privatization (or briberization)
causing depression and starvation in the population

Step 2 - The coming up with One-size-fits-all economy rescue plan.
Deregulate Capital Markets of that country so that capital
can easily flow in and (more importantly) out of that country.
Then IMF asking 30% or 50% interest rates for money to flow
back in.

Step 3 - Market-based pricing, increasing price on Water, food
and cooking gas which causes 'IMF riots' in that country.
Resulting in government bankruptcies and selling the
remaining assets of that country at fire-sale prices
to foreign investors. IMF then interferes and "BAIL-OUT"
local banks and financiers. At the same time, IMF and
World Bank orders that country to divert aid money to
its reserve account at the US Treasury, which pays a
pitiful 4% return, while that country has borrowed US
Dollars at 10% or 15%.
At this point: the clear winner is US Treasury and Western Banks.

Step 4 - 'Povery Reduction Strategy':
Forcing Free Trade according to the rules of WTO - including
intellectual property rights helping international corporations



By the way, don't be confused by the mix in this discussion of the IMF,
World Bank and WTO. They are interchangeable masks of a single governance
system. They have locked themselves together by what are unpleasantly
called, "triggers." Taking a World Bank loan for a school 'triggers' a
requirement to accept every 'conditionality' - they average 111 per nation
- laid down by both the World Bank and IMF. In fact, said Stiglitz the IMF
requires nations to accept trade policies more punitive than the official
WTO rules.



Here are the details with examples...

-----------------------------------------------------------------------


WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN ECONOMICS
Joseph Stiglitz was Chief Economist of the World Bank

The World Bank's former Chief Economist's accusations are eye-popping...

http://www.GregPalast.com
by Greg Palast
The Observer, London
October 10, 2001

"It has condemned people to death," the former apparatchik told me. This
was like a scene out of Le Carre. The brilliant old agent comes in from
then cold, crosses to our side, and in hours of debriefing, empties his
memory of horrors committed in the name of a political ideology he now
realizes has gone rotten.

And here before me was a far bigger catch than some used Cold War spy.
Joseph Stiglitz was Chief Economist of the World Bank. To a great extent,
the new world economic order was his theory come to life.

I "debriefed" Stigltiz over several days, at Cambridge University, in a
London hotel and finally in Washington in April 2001 during the big confab
of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. But instead of
chairing the meetings of ministers and central bankers, Stiglitz was kept
exiled safely behind the blue police cordons,the same as the nuns carrying
a large wooden cross, the Bolivian union leaders, the parents of AIDS
victims and the other 'anti-globalization' protesters.The ultimate insider
was now on the outside.

In 1999 the World Bank fired Stiglitz. He was not allowed quiet
retirement;
US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, I'm told, demanded a public
excommunication for Stiglitz' having expressed his first mild dissent from
globalization World Bank style.

Here in Washington we completed the last of several hours of exclusive
interviews for The Observer and BBC TV's Newsnight about the real, often
hidden, workings of the IMF, World Bank, and the bank's 51% owner, the US
Treasury.

And here, from sources unnamable (not Stiglitz), we obtained a cache of
documents marked, "confidential," "restricted," and "not otherwise (to be)
disclosed without World Bank authorization."

Stiglitz helped translate one from bureaucratise, a "Country Assistance
Strategy." There's an Assistance Strategy for every poorer nation,
designed, says the World Bank, after careful in-country investigation. But
according to insider Stiglitz,the Bank's staff 'investigation' consists of
close inspection of a nation's 5-star hotels. It concludes with the Bank
staff meeting some begging, busted finance minister who is handed a
'restructuring agreement' pre-drafted for his 'voluntary' signature
(I have a selection of these).

Each nation's economy is individually analyzed, then, says Stiglitz, the
Bank hands every minister the same exact four-step program.


S T E P I
---------
Step One is Privatization - which Stiglitz said could more accurately be
called, 'Briberization.' Rather than object to the sell-offs of state
industries, he said national leaders - using the World Bank's demands to
silence local critics - happily flogged their electricity and water
companies. "You could see their eyes widen" at the prospect of 10%
commissions paid to Swiss bank accounts for simply shaving a few billion
off the sale price of national assets.

And the US government knew it, charges Stiglitz, at least in the case of
the biggest 'briberization' of all, the 1995 Russian sell-off. "The US
Treasury view was this was great as we wanted Yeltsin re-elected. We don't
care if it's a corrupt election. We want the money to go to Yeltzin" via
kick-backs for his campaign.

Stiglitz is no conspiracy nutter ranting about Black Helicopters. The man
was inside the game, a member of Bill Clinton's cabinet as Chairman of the
President's council of economic advisors.

Most ill-making for Stiglitz is that the US-backed oligarchs stripped
Russia's industrial assets, with the effect that the corruption scheme cut
national output nearly in half causing depression and starvation.



S T E P II
----------
After briberization, Step Two of the IMF/World Bank one-size-fits-all
rescue-your-economy plan is 'Capital Market Liberalization.' In theory,
capital market deregulation allows investment capital to flow in and out.
Unfortunately, as in Indonesia and Brazil, the money simply flowed out and
out. Stiglitz calls this the "Hot Money" cycle. Cash comes in for
speculation in real estate and currency, then flees at the first whiff of
trouble. A nation's reserves can drain in days, hours. And when that
happens, to seduce speculators into returning a nation's own capital
funds,
the IMF demands these nations raise interest rates to 30%, 50% and 80%.

"The result was predictable," said Stiglitz of the Hot Money tidal waves
in
Asia and Latin America. Higher interest rates demolished property values,
savaged industrial production and drained national treasuries.




S T E P III
-----------
At this point, the IMF drags the gasping nation to Step Three:
Market-Based
Pricing, a fancy term for raising prices on food, water and cooking gas.
This leads, predictably, to Step-Three-and-a-Half: what Stiglitz calls,
'The IMF riot.'

The IMF riot is painfully predictable. When a nation is, "down and out,
[the IMF] takes advantage and squeezes the last pound of blood out of
them.
They turn up the heat until, finally, the whole cauldron blows up," as
when
the IMF eliminated food and fuel subsidies for the poor in Indonesia in
1998. Indonesia exploded into riots, but there are other examples - the
Bolivian riots over water prices last year and this February, the riots in
Ecuador over the rise in cooking gas prices imposed by the World Bank.
You'd almost get the impression that the riot is written into the plan.

And it is. What Stiglitz did not know is that, while in the States, BBC
and
The Observer obtained several documents from inside the World Bank,
stamped
over with those pesky warnings, "confidential," "restricted," "not to be
disclosed." Let's get back to one: the "Interim Country Assistance
Strategy" for Ecuador, in it the Bank several times states - with cold
accuracy - that they expected their plans to spark, "social unrest," to
use
their bureaucratic term for a nation in flames.

That's not surprising. The secret report notes that the plan to make the
US
dollar Ecuador's currency has pushed 51% of the population below the
poverty line. The World Bank "Assistance" plan simply calls for facing
down
civil strife and suffering with, "political resolve" - and still higher
prices.

The IMF riots (and by riots I mean peaceful demonstrations dispersed by
bullets, tanks and teargas) cause new panicked flights of capital and
government bankruptcies. This economic arson has it's bright side - for
foreign corporations, who can then pick off remaining assets, such as the
odd mining concession or port, at fire sale prices.

Stiglitz notes that the IMF and World Bank are not heartless adherents to
market economics. At the same time the IMF stopped Indonesia 'subsidizing'
food purchases, "when the banks need a bail-out, intervention (in the
market) is welcome." The IMF scrounged up tens of billions of dollars to
save Indonesia's financiers and, by extension, the US and European banks
from which they had borrowed.

A pattern emerges. There are lots of losers in this system but one clear
winner: the Western banks and US Treasury, making the big bucks off this
crazy new international capital churn. Stiglitz told me about his unhappy
meeting, early in his World Bank tenure, with Ethopia's new president in
the nation's first democratic election. The World Bank and IMF had ordered
Ethiopia to divert aid money to its reserve account at the US Treasury,
which pays a pitiful 4% return, while the nation borrowed US dollars at
12%
to feed its population. The new president begged Stiglitz to let him use
the aid money to rebuild the nation. But no, the loot went straight off to
the US Treasury's vault in Washington.




S T E P 4
---------
Now we arrive at Step Four of what the IMF and World Bank call their
"poverty reduction strategy": Free Trade. This is free trade by the rules
of the World Trade Organization and World Bank, Stiglitz the insider
likens
free trade WTO-style to the Opium Wars. "That too was about opening
markets," he said. As in the 19th century, Europeans and Americans today
are kicking down the barriers to sales in Asia, Latin American and Africa,
while barricading our own markets against Third World agriculture.

In the Opium Wars, the West used military blockades to force open markets
for their unbalanced trade. Today, the World Bank can order a financial
blockade just as effective - and sometimes just as deadly.

Stiglitz is particularly emotional over the WTO's intellectual property
rights treaty (it goes by the acronym TRIPS, more on that in the next
chapters). It is here, says the economist, that the new global order has
"condemned people to death" by imposing impossible tariffs and tributes to
pay to pharmaceutical companies for branded medicines. "They don't care,"
said the professor of the corporations and bank loans he worked with, "if
people live or die."

By the way, don't be confused by the mix in this discussion of the IMF,
World Bank and WTO. They are interchangeable masks of a single governance

system. They have locked themselves together by what are unpleasantly
called, "triggers." Taking a World Bank loan for a school 'triggers' a
requirement to accept every 'conditionality' - they average 111 per nation
- laid down by both the World Bank and IMF. In fact, said Stiglitz the IMF
requires nations to accept trade policies more punitive than the official
WTO rules.

Stiglitz greatest concern is that World Bank plans, devised in secrecy and
driven by an absolutist ideology, are never open for discourse or dissent.
Despite the West's push for elections throughout the developing world, the
so-called Poverty Reduction Programs "undermine democracy."

And they don't work. Black Africa's productivity under the guiding hand of
IMF structural "assistance" has gone to hell in a handbag. Did any nation
avoid this fate? Yes, said Stiglitz, identifying Botswana. Their trick?
"They told the IMF to go packing."

So then I turned on Stiglitz. OK, Mr Smart-Guy Professor, how would you
help developing nations? Stiglitz proposed radical land reform, an attack
at the heart of "landlordism," on the usurious rents charged by the
propertied oligarchies worldwide, typically 50% of a tenant's crops. So I
had to ask the professor: as you were top economist at the World Bank, why
didn't the Bank follow your advice?

"If you challenge [land ownership], that would be a change in the power of
the elites. That's not high on their agenda." Apparently not.

Ultimately, what drove him to put his job on the line was the failure of
the banks and US Treasury to change course when confronted with the crises
- failures and suffering perpetrated by their four-step monetarist mambo.
Every time their free market solutions failed, the IMF simply demanded
more
free market policies.

"It's a little like the Middle Ages," the insider told me, "When the
patient died they would say, 'well, he stopped the bloodletting too soon,
he still had a little blood in him.'"

I took away from my talks with the professor that the solution to world
poverty and crisis is simple: remove the bloodsuckers.

----------------------------------

A version of this was first published as "The IMF's Four Steps to
Damnation" in The Observer (London) in April and another version in The
Big
Issue - that's the magazine that the homeless flog on platforms in the
London Underground. Big Issue offered equal space to the IMF, whose
"deputy
chief media officer" wrote:

"... I find it impossible to respond given the depth and breadth of
hearsay
and misinformation in [Palast's] report."

Of course it was difficult for the Deputy Chief to respond. The
information
(and documents) came from the unhappy lot inside his agency and the World
Bank.















.



--- A Nizami <nizaminz@yahoo.com wrote:
Nowadays, IMF gives "Aid" (read: debt) to many
countries that have monetary crisis, such as
Argentina, Mexico, Indonesia, etc. Most of the
monetary crisis that happen on those countries, caused
by Forex speculators that also IMF's members of honor,
such as George Soros and his friends in Quantum Fund.

In return to its aid, IMF will force those countries
to sell companies and government owned company in the
LOI (Letter of Intent) to support their national
expense, while continuing pay their debt with interest
to IMF. Of course the buyers will be from the IMF's
gang, though the bid is open and in a very cheap
price.

For example: the biggest bank in Indonesia, BCA that
has profit Rp 2,000,000,000,000,- (about USD
200,000,000,-) only sold for USD 500,000,000,- only.
BCA manages USD 10,000,000,000,- of its customer
money, and it could earn 17,5% per year from SBI
(obligation from Bank Indonesia).

Anyway, by privatization, which means selling
government owned companies (though the companies
making high profit) to IMF's member of honor that
mostly Jewish Conglomerates, it only makes the
countries weak. They don't have much money that used
to be given from the government owned company to
maintain the country. They have to depend on IMF and
its conglomerates.

Ergo, those countries, just like in USA, actually
controlled by IMF and its conglomerates. No one could
be the president without their support. It only make
the people suffer, because this government will set
the minimum wage according to IMF and its capitalists
favor.

The natural resources will be maintained by those
capitalists for their own benefit, not for the people.
The oilfield, the mining field, forestry, etc. Many of
those capitalists owned millions of hectares of land
for their mining or wood industry. For example,
Freeport own at least 5 million hectares as their
mining area in Papua, while many wood entrepreneurs
own millions of hectares in Kalimantan and Sumatera.
The native people could no longer work as farmers
since most of the land is already own by the
capitalists through the corrupt governments.

That is what happens now in many Islamic Countries.


__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Sports - Coverage of the 2002 Olympic Games
http://sports.yahoo.com



For business and financial news from the Arab-Islamic world
visit http://suhufonline.com
Updated round-the-clock

Visit ISLAMIC BUSINESS & FINANCE NETWORK
website at http://islamic-finance.net
& ISLAMIC BUSINESS & FINANCE NETVERSITY
website at http://netversity.org

Also visit these area-specific portals:
http://www.islamic-economy.com
http://www.islamic-accounting.com
http://www.islamic-insurance.com
http://www.islamic-microfinance.com
http://www.islamic-ethics.com
http://www.islamic-economics.com
http://www.islamic-exchange.com
http://www.riba-free-banking.com
http://www.islamicfiqh.com

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__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Sports - Coverage of the 2002 Olympic Games
http://sports.yahoo.com


For business and financial news from the Arab-Islamic world
visit http://suhufonline.com
Updated round-the-clock

Visit ISLAMIC BUSINESS & FINANCE NETWORK
website at http://islamic-finance.net
& ISLAMIC BUSINESS & FINANCE NETVERSITY
website at http://netversity.org

Also visit these area-specific portals:
http://www.islamic-economy.com
http://www.islamic-accounting.com
http://www.islamic-insurance.com
http://www.islamic-microfinance.com
http://www.islamic-ethics.com
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http://www.islamic-exchange.com
http://www.riba-free-banking.com
http://www.islamicfiqh.com

Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/



-----Original Message-----
From: Murtaza Jaffer [mailto:mswahili@nbnet.co.ke]
Sent: 22 February 2002 23:22
To: Shabbir AlidinaKampala; Prof. Hassanali; Nasrin Tejani; Murtaza
JafferTIMA; Munaver Dhanani; Mohamed Kassamali; Mohamed Jaffer Nakuru;
MHemani; Ladaks516@aol.com; Islamic Education Board; Husein Rashid;
Hassanain Jaffer; Hassan Jaffer; Hasnain Kassamali; Haider Jaffer;
Candle Light; Cassiem Khan; Bashir Tejani; Bashir Mugo; Asief Tejani;
Arif Suleiman; ABIDALI MOHAMEDALI; Abdi Mohamed Baffo; Abbas MullaAsgher
Jaffer
Subject: Fw: [ibfnet] IMF: Capitalists Tool to Invade the World.



----- Original Message -----
From: "Nasar Ali-Khan" <kalikhan@yahoo.com
To: <ibfnet@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Tuesday, February 19, 2002 3:43 AM
Subject: Re: [ibfnet] IMF: Capitalists Tool to Invade the World.



Economic nobel prize winner - World Bank's former chief economist Joseph
Stiglitz - has explained the hidden agendas and plans of IMF and World
Bank. He points out that there are always 4 steps to suck all the
resources out of a country.

Here are the four steps... (details with examples are down below)


Step 1 - Privatization (or briberization)
causing depression and starvation in the population

Step 2 - The coming up with One-size-fits-all economy rescue plan.
Deregulate Capital Markets of that country so that capital
can easily flow in and (more importantly) out of that country.
Then IMF asking 30% or 50% interest rates for money to flow
back in.

Step 3 - Market-based pricing, increasing price on Water, food
and cooking gas which causes 'IMF riots' in that country.
Resulting in government bankruptcies and selling the
remaining assets of that country at fire-sale prices
to foreign investors. IMF then interferes and "BAIL-OUT"
local banks and financiers. At the same time, IMF and
World Bank orders that country to divert aid money to
its reserve account at the US Treasury, which pays a
pitiful 4% return, while that country has borrowed US
Dollars at 10% or 15%.
At this point: the clear winner is US Treasury and Western Banks.

Step 4 - 'Povery Reduction Strategy':
Forcing Free Trade according to the rules of WTO - including
intellectual property rights helping international corporations



By the way, don't be confused by the mix in this discussion of the IMF,
World Bank and WTO. They are interchangeable masks of a single governance
system. They have locked themselves together by what are unpleasantly
called, "triggers." Taking a World Bank loan for a school 'triggers' a
requirement to accept every 'conditionality' - they average 111 per nation
- laid down by both the World Bank and IMF. In fact, said Stiglitz the IMF
requires nations to accept trade policies more punitive than the official
WTO rules.



Here are the details with examples...

-----------------------------------------------------------------------


WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN ECONOMICS
Joseph Stiglitz was Chief Economist of the World Bank

The World Bank's former Chief Economist's accusations are eye-popping...

http://www.GregPalast.com
by Greg Palast
The Observer, London
October 10, 2001

"It has condemned people to death," the former apparatchik told me. This
was like a scene out of Le Carre. The brilliant old agent comes in from
then cold, crosses to our side, and in hours of debriefing, empties his
memory of horrors committed in the name of a political ideology he now
realizes has gone rotten.

And here before me was a far bigger catch than some used Cold War spy.
Joseph Stiglitz was Chief Economist of the World Bank. To a great extent,
the new world economic order was his theory come to life.

I "debriefed" Stigltiz over several days, at Cambridge University, in a
London hotel and finally in Washington in April 2001 during the big confab
of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. But instead of
chairing the meetings of ministers and central bankers, Stiglitz was kept
exiled safely behind the blue police cordons,the same as the nuns carrying
a large wooden cross, the Bolivian union leaders, the parents of AIDS
victims and the other 'anti-globalization' protesters.The ultimate insider
was now on the outside.

In 1999 the World Bank fired Stiglitz. He was not allowed quiet
retirement;
US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, I'm told, demanded a public
excommunication for Stiglitz' having expressed his first mild dissent from
globalization World Bank style.

Here in Washington we completed the last of several hours of exclusive
interviews for The Observer and BBC TV's Newsnight about the real, often
hidden, workings of the IMF, World Bank, and the bank's 51% owner, the US
Treasury.

And here, from sources unnamable (not Stiglitz), we obtained a cache of
documents marked, "confidential," "restricted," and "not otherwise (to be)
disclosed without World Bank authorization."

Stiglitz helped translate one from bureaucratise, a "Country Assistance
Strategy." There's an Assistance Strategy for every poorer nation,
designed, says the World Bank, after careful in-country investigation. But
according to insider Stiglitz,the Bank's staff 'investigation' consists of
close inspection of a nation's 5-star hotels. It concludes with the Bank
staff meeting some begging, busted finance minister who is handed a
'restructuring agreement' pre-drafted for his 'voluntary' signature
(I have a selection of these).

Each nation's economy is individually analyzed, then, says Stiglitz, the
Bank hands every minister the same exact four-step program.


S T E P I
---------
Step One is Privatization - which Stiglitz said could more accurately be
called, 'Briberization.' Rather than object to the sell-offs of state
industries, he said national leaders - using the World Bank's demands to
silence local critics - happily flogged their electricity and water
companies. "You could see their eyes widen" at the prospect of 10%
commissions paid to Swiss bank accounts for simply shaving a few billion
off the sale price of national assets.

And the US government knew it, charges Stiglitz, at least in the case of
the biggest 'briberization' of all, the 1995 Russian sell-off. "The US
Treasury view was this was great as we wanted Yeltsin re-elected. We don't
care if it's a corrupt election. We want the money to go to Yeltzin" via
kick-backs for his campaign.

Stiglitz is no conspiracy nutter ranting about Black Helicopters. The man
was inside the game, a member of Bill Clinton's cabinet as Chairman of the
President's council of economic advisors.

Most ill-making for Stiglitz is that the US-backed oligarchs stripped
Russia's industrial assets, with the effect that the corruption scheme cut
national output nearly in half causing depression and starvation.



S T E P II
----------
After briberization, Step Two of the IMF/World Bank one-size-fits-all
rescue-your-economy plan is 'Capital Market Liberalization.' In theory,
capital market deregulation allows investment capital to flow in and out.
Unfortunately, as in Indonesia and Brazil, the money simply flowed out and
out. Stiglitz calls this the "Hot Money" cycle. Cash comes in for
speculation in real estate and currency, then flees at the first whiff of
trouble. A nation's reserves can drain in days, hours. And when that
happens, to seduce speculators into returning a nation's own capital
funds,
the IMF demands these nations raise interest rates to 30%, 50% and 80%.

"The result was predictable," said Stiglitz of the Hot Money tidal waves
in
Asia and Latin America. Higher interest rates demolished property values,
savaged industrial production and drained national treasuries.




S T E P III
-----------
At this point, the IMF drags the gasping nation to Step Three:
Market-Based
Pricing, a fancy term for raising prices on food, water and cooking gas.
This leads, predictably, to Step-Three-and-a-Half: what Stiglitz calls,
'The IMF riot.'

The IMF riot is painfully predictable. When a nation is, "down and out,
[the IMF] takes advantage and squeezes the last pound of blood out of
them.
They turn up the heat until, finally, the whole cauldron blows up," as
when
the IMF eliminated food and fuel subsidies for the poor in Indonesia in
1998. Indonesia exploded into riots, but there are other examples - the
Bolivian riots over water prices last year and this February, the riots in
Ecuador over the rise in cooking gas prices imposed by the World Bank.
You'd almost get the impression that the riot is written into the plan.

And it is. What Stiglitz did not know is that, while in the States, BBC
and
The Observer obtained several documents from inside the World Bank,
stamped
over with those pesky warnings, "confidential," "restricted," "not to be
disclosed." Let's get back to one: the "Interim Country Assistance
Strategy" for Ecuador, in it the Bank several times states - with cold
accuracy - that they expected their plans to spark, "social unrest," to
use
their bureaucratic term for a nation in flames.

That's not surprising. The secret report notes that the plan to make the
US
dollar Ecuador's currency has pushed 51% of the population below the
poverty line. The World Bank "Assistance" plan simply calls for facing
down
civil strife and suffering with, "political resolve" - and still higher
prices.

The IMF riots (and by riots I mean peaceful demonstrations dispersed by
bullets, tanks and teargas) cause new panicked flights of capital and
government bankruptcies. This economic arson has it's bright side - for
foreign corporations, who can then pick off remaining assets, such as the
odd mining concession or port, at fire sale prices.

Stiglitz notes that the IMF and World Bank are not heartless adherents to
market economics. At the same time the IMF stopped Indonesia 'subsidizing'
food purchases, "when the banks need a bail-out, intervention (in the
market) is welcome." The IMF scrounged up tens of billions of dollars to
save Indonesia's financiers and, by extension, the US and European banks
from which they had borrowed.

A pattern emerges. There are lots of losers in this system but one clear
winner: the Western banks and US Treasury, making the big bucks off this
crazy new international capital churn. Stiglitz told me about his unhappy
meeting, early in his World Bank tenure, with Ethopia's new president in
the nation's first democratic election. The World Bank and IMF had ordered
Ethiopia to divert aid money to its reserve account at the US Treasury,
which pays a pitiful 4% return, while the nation borrowed US dollars at
12%
to feed its population. The new president begged Stiglitz to let him use
the aid money to rebuild the nation. But no, the loot went straight off to
the US Treasury's vault in Washington.




S T E P 4
---------
Now we arrive at Step Four of what the IMF and World Bank call their
"poverty reduction strategy": Free Trade. This is free trade by the rules
of the World Trade Organization and World Bank, Stiglitz the insider
likens
free trade WTO-style to the Opium Wars. "That too was about opening
markets," he said. As in the 19th century, Europeans and Americans today
are kicking down the barriers to sales in Asia, Latin American and Africa,
while barricading our own markets against Third World agriculture.

In the Opium Wars, the West used military blockades to force open markets
for their unbalanced trade. Today, the World Bank can order a financial
blockade just as effective - and sometimes just as deadly.

Stiglitz is particularly emotional over the WTO's intellectual property
rights treaty (it goes by the acronym TRIPS, more on that in the next
chapters). It is here, says the economist, that the new global order has
"condemned people to death" by imposing impossible tariffs and tributes to
pay to pharmaceutical companies for branded medicines. "They don't care,"
said the professor of the corporations and bank loans he worked with, "if
people live or die."

By the way, don't be confused by the mix in this discussion of the IMF,
World Bank and WTO. They are interchangeable masks of a single governance

system. They have locked themselves together by what are unpleasantly
called, "triggers." Taking a World Bank loan for a school 'triggers' a
requirement to accept every 'conditionality' - they average 111 per nation
- laid down by both the World Bank and IMF. In fact, said Stiglitz the IMF
requires nations to accept trade policies more punitive than the official
WTO rules.

Stiglitz greatest concern is that World Bank plans, devised in secrecy and
driven by an absolutist ideology, are never open for discourse or dissent.
Despite the West's push for elections throughout the developing world, the
so-called Poverty Reduction Programs "undermine democracy."

And they don't work. Black Africa's productivity under the guiding hand of
IMF structural "assistance" has gone to hell in a handbag. Did any nation
avoid this fate? Yes, said Stiglitz, identifying Botswana. Their trick?
"They told the IMF to go packing."

So then I turned on Stiglitz. OK, Mr Smart-Guy Professor, how would you
help developing nations? Stiglitz proposed radical land reform, an attack
at the heart of "landlordism," on the usurious rents charged by the
propertied oligarchies worldwide, typically 50% of a tenant's crops. So I
had to ask the professor: as you were top economist at the World Bank, why
didn't the Bank follow your advice?

"If you challenge [land ownership], that would be a change in the power of
the elites. That's not high on their agenda." Apparently not.

Ultimately, what drove him to put his job on the line was the failure of
the banks and US Treasury to change course when confronted with the crises
- failures and suffering perpetrated by their four-step monetarist mambo.
Every time their free market solutions failed, the IMF simply demanded
more
free market policies.

"It's a little like the Middle Ages," the insider told me, "When the
patient died they would say, 'well, he stopped the bloodletting too soon,
he still had a little blood in him.'"

I took away from my talks with the professor that the solution to world
poverty and crisis is simple: remove the bloodsuckers.

----------------------------------

A version of this was first published as "The IMF's Four Steps to
Damnation" in The Observer (London) in April and another version in The
Big
Issue - that's the magazine that the homeless flog on platforms in the
London Underground. Big Issue offered equal space to the IMF, whose
"deputy
chief media officer" wrote:

"... I find it impossible to respond given the depth and breadth of
hearsay
and misinformation in [Palast's] report."

Of course it was difficult for the Deputy Chief to respond. The
information
(and documents) came from the unhappy lot inside his agency and the World
Bank.















.



--- A Nizami <nizaminz@yahoo.com wrote:
Nowadays, IMF gives "Aid" (read: debt) to many
countries that have monetary crisis, such as
Argentina, Mexico, Indonesia, etc. Most of the
monetary crisis that happen on those countries, caused
by Forex speculators that also IMF's members of honor,
such as George Soros and his friends in Quantum Fund.

In return to its aid, IMF will force those countries
to sell companies and government owned company in the
LOI (Letter of Intent) to support their national
expense, while continuing pay their debt with interest
to IMF. Of course the buyers will be from the IMF's
gang, though the bid is open and in a very cheap
price.

For example: the biggest bank in Indonesia, BCA that
has profit Rp 2,000,000,000,000,- (about USD
200,000,000,-) only sold for USD 500,000,000,- only.
BCA manages USD 10,000,000,000,- of its customer
money, and it could earn 17,5% per year from SBI
(obligation from Bank Indonesia).

Anyway, by privatization, which means selling
government owned companies (though the companies
making high profit) to IMF's member of honor that
mostly Jewish Conglomerates, it only makes the
countries weak. They don't have much money that used
to be given from the government owned company to
maintain the country. They have to depend on IMF and
its conglomerates.

Ergo, those countries, just like in USA, actually
controlled by IMF and its conglomerates. No one could
be the president without their support. It only make
the people suffer, because this government will set
the minimum wage according to IMF and its capitalists
favor.

The natural resources will be maintained by those
capitalists for their own benefit, not for the people.
The oilfield, the mining field, forestry, etc. Many of
those capitalists owned millions of hectares of land
for their mining or wood industry. For example,
Freeport own at least 5 million hectares as their
mining area in Papua, while many wood entrepreneurs
own millions of hectares in Kalimantan and Sumatera.
The native people could no longer work as farmers
since most of the land is already own by the
capitalists through the corrupt governments.

That is what happens now in many Islamic Countries.


__________________________________________________
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__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Sports - Coverage of the 2002 Olympic Games
http://sports.yahoo.com


For business and financial news from the Arab-Islamic world
visit http://suhufonline.com
Updated round-the-clock

Visit ISLAMIC BUSINESS & FINANCE NETWORK
website at http://islamic-finance.net
& ISLAMIC BUSINESS & FINANCE NETVERSITY
website at http://netversity.org

Also visit these area-specific portals:
http://www.islamic-economy.com
http://www.islamic-accounting.com
http://www.islamic-insurance.com
http://www.islamic-microfinance.com
http://www.islamic-ethics.com
http://www.islamic-economics.com
http://www.islamic-exchange.com
http://www.riba-free-banking.com
http://www.islamicfiqh.com

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-----Original Message-----
From: Murtaza Jaffer [mailto:mswahili@nbnet.co.ke]
Sent: 22 February 2002 23:22
To: Shabbir AlidinaKampala; Prof. Hassanali; Nasrin Tejani; Murtaza
JafferTIMA; Munaver Dhanani; Mohamed Kassamali; Mohamed Jaffer Nakuru;
MHemani; Ladaks516@aol.com; Islamic Education Board; Husein Rashid;
Hassanain Jaffer; Hassan Jaffer; Hasnain Kassamali; Haider Jaffer;
Candle Light; Cassiem Khan; Bashir Tejani; Bashir Mugo; Asief Tejani;
Arif Suleiman; ABIDALI MOHAMEDALI; Abdi Mohamed Baffo; Abbas MullaAsgher
Jaffer
Subject: Fw: [ibfnet] IMF: Capitalists Tool to Invade the World.



----- Original Message -----
From: "Nasar Ali-Khan" <kalikhan@yahoo.com
To: <ibfnet@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Tuesday, February 19, 2002 3:43 AM
Subject: Re: [ibfnet] IMF: Capitalists Tool to Invade the World.



Economic nobel prize winner - World Bank's former chief economist Joseph
Stiglitz - has explained the hidden agendas and plans of IMF and World
Bank. He points out that there are always 4 steps to suck all the
resources out of a country.

Here are the four steps... (details with examples are down below)


Step 1 - Privatization (or briberization)
causing depression and starvation in the population

Step 2 - The coming up with One-size-fits-all economy rescue plan.
Deregulate Capital Markets of that country so that capital
can easily flow in and (more importantly) out of that country.
Then IMF asking 30% or 50% interest rates for money to flow
back in.

Step 3 - Market-based pricing, increasing price on Water, food
and cooking gas which causes 'IMF riots' in that country.
Resulting in government bankruptcies and selling the
remaining assets of that country at fire-sale prices
to foreign investors. IMF then interferes and "BAIL-OUT"
local banks and financiers. At the same time, IMF and
World Bank orders that country to divert aid money to
its reserve account at the US Treasury, which pays a
pitiful 4% return, while that country has borrowed US
Dollars at 10% or 15%.
At this point: the clear winner is US Treasury and Western Banks.

Step 4 - 'Povery Reduction Strategy':
Forcing Free Trade according to the rules of WTO - including
intellectual property rights helping international corporations



By the way, don't be confused by the mix in this discussion of the IMF,
World Bank and WTO. They are interchangeable masks of a single governance
system. They have locked themselves together by what are unpleasantly
called, "triggers." Taking a World Bank loan for a school 'triggers' a
requirement to accept every 'conditionality' - they average 111 per nation
- laid down by both the World Bank and IMF. In fact, said Stiglitz the IMF
requires nations to accept trade policies more punitive than the official
WTO rules.



Here are the details with examples...

-----------------------------------------------------------------------


WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN ECONOMICS
Joseph Stiglitz was Chief Economist of the World Bank

The World Bank's former Chief Economist's accusations are eye-popping...

http://www.GregPalast.com
by Greg Palast
The Observer, London
October 10, 2001

"It has condemned people to death," the former apparatchik told me. This
was like a scene out of Le Carre. The brilliant old agent comes in from
then cold, crosses to our side, and in hours of debriefing, empties his
memory of horrors committed in the name of a political ideology he now
realizes has gone rotten.

And here before me was a far bigger catch than some used Cold War spy.
Joseph Stiglitz was Chief Economist of the World Bank. To a great extent,
the new world economic order was his theory come to life.

I "debriefed" Stigltiz over several days, at Cambridge University, in a
London hotel and finally in Washington in April 2001 during the big confab
of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. But instead of
chairing the meetings of ministers and central bankers, Stiglitz was kept
exiled safely behind the blue police cordons,the same as the nuns carrying
a large wooden cross, the Bolivian union leaders, the parents of AIDS
victims and the other 'anti-globalization' protesters.The ultimate insider
was now on the outside.

In 1999 the World Bank fired Stiglitz. He was not allowed quiet
retirement;
US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, I'm told, demanded a public
excommunication for Stiglitz' having expressed his first mild dissent from
globalization World Bank style.

Here in Washington we completed the last of several hours of exclusive
interviews for The Observer and BBC TV's Newsnight about the real, often
hidden, workings of the IMF, World Bank, and the bank's 51% owner, the US
Treasury.

And here, from sources unnamable (not Stiglitz), we obtained a cache of
documents marked, "confidential," "restricted," and "not otherwise (to be)
disclosed without World Bank authorization."

Stiglitz helped translate one from bureaucratise, a "Country Assistance
Strategy." There's an Assistance Strategy for every poorer nation,
designed, says the World Bank, after careful in-country investigation. But
according to insider Stiglitz,the Bank's staff 'investigation' consists of
close inspection of a nation's 5-star hotels. It concludes with the Bank
staff meeting some begging, busted finance minister who is handed a
'restructuring agreement' pre-drafted for his 'voluntary' signature
(I have a selection of these).

Each nation's economy is individually analyzed, then, says Stiglitz, the
Bank hands every minister the same exact four-step program.


S T E P I
---------
Step One is Privatization - which Stiglitz said could more accurately be
called, 'Briberization.' Rather than object to the sell-offs of state
industries, he said national leaders - using the World Bank's demands to
silence local critics - happily flogged their electricity and water
companies. "You could see their eyes widen" at the prospect of 10%
commissions paid to Swiss bank accounts for simply shaving a few billion
off the sale price of national assets.

And the US government knew it, charges Stiglitz, at least in the case of
the biggest 'briberization' of all, the 1995 Russian sell-off. "The US
Treasury view was this was great as we wanted Yeltsin re-elected. We don't
care if it's a corrupt election. We want the money to go to Yeltzin" via
kick-backs for his campaign.

Stiglitz is no conspiracy nutter ranting about Black Helicopters. The man
was inside the game, a member of Bill Clinton's cabinet as Chairman of the
President's council of economic advisors.

Most ill-making for Stiglitz is that the US-backed oligarchs stripped
Russia's industrial assets, with the effect that the corruption scheme cut
national output nearly in half causing depression and starvation.



S T E P II
----------
After briberization, Step Two of the IMF/World Bank one-size-fits-all
rescue-your-economy plan is 'Capital Market Liberalization.' In theory,
capital market deregulation allows investment capital to flow in and out.
Unfortunately, as in Indonesia and Brazil, the money simply flowed out and
out. Stiglitz calls this the "Hot Money" cycle. Cash comes in for
speculation in real estate and currency, then flees at the first whiff of
trouble. A nation's reserves can drain in days, hours. And when that
happens, to seduce speculators into returning a nation's own capital
funds,
the IMF demands these nations raise interest rates to 30%, 50% and 80%.

"The result was predictable," said Stiglitz of the Hot Money tidal waves
in
Asia and Latin America. Higher interest rates demolished property values,
savaged industrial production and drained national treasuries.




S T E P III
-----------
At this point, the IMF drags the gasping nation to Step Three:
Market-Based
Pricing, a fancy term for raising prices on food, water and cooking gas.
This leads, predictably, to Step-Three-and-a-Half: what Stiglitz calls,
'The IMF riot.'

The IMF riot is painfully predictable. When a nation is, "down and out,
[the IMF] takes advantage and squeezes the last pound of blood out of
them.
They turn up the heat until, finally, the whole cauldron blows up," as
when
the IMF eliminated food and fuel subsidies for the poor in Indonesia in
1998. Indonesia exploded into riots, but there are other examples - the
Bolivian riots over water prices last year and this February, the riots in
Ecuador over the rise in cooking gas prices imposed by the World Bank.
You'd almost get the impression that the riot is written into the plan.

And it is. What Stiglitz did not know is that, while in the States, BBC
and
The Observer obtained several documents from inside the World Bank,
stamped
over with those pesky warnings, "confidential," "restricted," "not to be
disclosed." Let's get back to one: the "Interim Country Assistance
Strategy" for Ecuador, in it the Bank several times states - with cold
accuracy - that they expected their plans to spark, "social unrest," to
use
their bureaucratic term for a nation in flames.

That's not surprising. The secret report notes that the plan to make the
US
dollar Ecuador's currency has pushed 51% of the population below the
poverty line. The World Bank "Assistance" plan simply calls for facing
down
civil strife and suffering with, "political resolve" - and still higher
prices.

The IMF riots (and by riots I mean peaceful demonstrations dispersed by
bullets, tanks and teargas) cause new panicked flights of capital and
government bankruptcies. This economic arson has it's bright side - for
foreign corporations, who can then pick off remaining assets, such as the
odd mining concession or port, at fire sale prices.

Stiglitz notes that the IMF and World Bank are not heartless adherents to
market economics. At the same time the IMF stopped Indonesia 'subsidizing'
food purchases, "when the banks need a bail-out, intervention (in the
market) is welcome." The IMF scrounged up tens of billions of dollars to
save Indonesia's financiers and, by extension, the US and European banks
from which they had borrowed.

A pattern emerges. There are lots of losers in this system but one clear
winner: the Western banks and US Treasury, making the big bucks off this
crazy new international capital churn. Stiglitz told me about his unhappy
meeting, early in his World Bank tenure, with Ethopia's new president in
the nation's first democratic election. The World Bank and IMF had ordered
Ethiopia to divert aid money to its reserve account at the US Treasury,
which pays a pitiful 4% return, while the nation borrowed US dollars at
12%
to feed its population. The new president begged Stiglitz to let him use
the aid money to rebuild the nation. But no, the loot went straight off to
the US Treasury's vault in Washington.




S T E P 4
---------
Now we arrive at Step Four of what the IMF and World Bank call their
"poverty reduction strategy": Free Trade. This is free trade by the rules
of the World Trade Organization and World Bank, Stiglitz the insider
likens
free trade WTO-style to the Opium Wars. "That too was about opening
markets," he said. As in the 19th century, Europeans and Americans today
are kicking down the barriers to sales in Asia, Latin American and Africa,
while barricading our own markets against Third World agriculture.

In the Opium Wars, the West used military blockades to force open markets
for their unbalanced trade. Today, the World Bank can order a financial
blockade just as effective - and sometimes just as deadly.

Stiglitz is particularly emotional over the WTO's intellectual property
rights treaty (it goes by the acronym TRIPS, more on that in the next
chapters). It is here, says the economist, that the new global order has
"condemned people to death" by imposing impossible tariffs and tributes to
pay to pharmaceutical companies for branded medicines. "They don't care,"
said the professor of the corporations and bank loans he worked with, "if
people live or die."

By the way, don't be confused by the mix in this discussion of the IMF,
World Bank and WTO. They are interchangeable masks of a single governance

system. They have locked themselves together by what are unpleasantly
called, "triggers." Taking a World Bank loan for a school 'triggers' a
requirement to accept every 'conditionality' - they average 111 per nation
- laid down by both the World Bank and IMF. In fact, said Stiglitz the IMF
requires nations to accept trade policies more punitive than the official
WTO rules.

Stiglitz greatest concern is that World Bank plans, devised in secrecy and
driven by an absolutist ideology, are never open for discourse or dissent.
Despite the West's push for elections throughout the developing world, the
so-called Poverty Reduction Programs "undermine democracy."

And they don't work. Black Africa's productivity under the guiding hand of
IMF structural "assistance" has gone to hell in a handbag. Did any nation
avoid this fate? Yes, said Stiglitz, identifying Botswana. Their trick?
"They told the IMF to go packing."

So then I turned on Stiglitz. OK, Mr Smart-Guy Professor, how would you
help developing nations? Stiglitz proposed radical land reform, an attack
at the heart of "landlordism," on the usurious rents charged by the
propertied oligarchies worldwide, typically 50% of a tenant's crops. So I
had to ask the professor: as you were top economist at the World Bank, why
didn't the Bank follow your advice?

"If you challenge [land ownership], that would be a change in the power of
the elites. That's not high on their agenda." Apparently not.

Ultimately, what drove him to put his job on the line was the failure of
the banks and US Treasury to change course when confronted with the crises
- failures and suffering perpetrated by their four-step monetarist mambo.
Every time their free market solutions failed, the IMF simply demanded
more
free market policies.

"It's a little like the Middle Ages," the insider told me, "When the
patient died they would say, 'well, he stopped the bloodletting too soon,
he still had a little blood in him.'"

I took away from my talks with the professor that the solution to world
poverty and crisis is simple: remove the bloodsuckers.

----------------------------------

A version of this was first published as "The IMF's Four Steps to
Damnation" in The Observer (London) in April and another version in The
Big
Issue - that's the magazine that the homeless flog on platforms in the
London Underground. Big Issue offered equal space to the IMF, whose
"deputy
chief media officer" wrote:

"... I find it impossible to respond given the depth and breadth of
hearsay
and misinformation in [Palast's] report."

Of course it was difficult for the Deputy Chief to respond. The
information
(and documents) came from the unhappy lot inside his agency and the World
Bank.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Firoze Manji
firoze@fahamu.org
Fahamu - learning for change http://www.fahamu.org
Tel: +44-(0)1865-791777 Fax: +44-(0)1865-203009
Cell: +44-(0)7980-985997
14 Standingford House, Cave Street, Oxford OX4 1BA, UK

Angola: Acting as a juror

2002-02-28

http://www.africancolours.com/?content/ferreira.html

One of the most respected painters in the country, August Ferreira, has recently embraced a different task. Ferreira is now a leading commissioner for Ensarte-prize launched this year by the Angola´s insurance company (ENSA), which will reward painting and sculpture winning artists with usd 10,000. The painter is in charge of receiving and, administrativelly, keep the paintings and take them to a juror which will gather, by the end of April, to reward the winners. This will sure be remembered by Ferreira who, three years ago, displayed an exhibit on “memories and experiences”, summing up more than thirty years of his painting.

Divided Minds: Intellectuals and the Civil Rights Movement

Carol Polsgrove

2002-02-28

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0393020134/ref=ase_allafr2-20/002-2166872-0713642

In the decade after Brown v. Board of Education, "white intellectuals, in the North and the South of the US... having helped for so long to keep Negroes apart and below... were faced with the challenge of racial equality," asserts Polsgrove (It Wasn't Pretty, Folks, but Didn't We Have Fun? Esquire in the Sixties). In this disturbing book, she shows them to have been "fearful, cautious, distracted, or simply indifferent." Based on interviews and archival research, she indicts not only prominent novelists and thinkers, including William Faulkner, Norman Mailer, Hannah Arendt and even the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr ("none better exemplifies the caution that northern white intellectuals... displayed toward desegregation"), but also their editors (who were "more interested in southern whites' responses to the Negro challenge than in what Negroes had to say") and the media, which "at a time when national magazines ought to have been leading the way to change... opened their pages to those who resisted it." Many of the best-known African-American novelists, cowed by "the emotional and political atmosphere of the McCarthy days," fare little better than their white counterparts in Polsgrove's hands. Only a few heroes emerge from her portrait: Lillian Smith, Kenneth Clark, Lawrence Reddick, James Silver, and most importantly, James Baldwin. Polsgrove concludes her accessible and disturbing account with a thought-provoking broadside against contemporary American intellectuals, who she thinks "have abandoned their responsibility even more completely" than those in the 1950s and 1960s and whose "publishing industry has moved farther and farther from any sense of obligation for the social enterprise." A wide range of periodicals (and their editors) from major weeklies and monthlies to small journals take a thrashing here. Polsgrove could set off a firestorm if she doesn't get the silent treatment. W.W. Norton & Company; ISBN: 0393020134, 2001.

Last Word Looms for Half the World's Languages

2002-02-28

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=655&u=/oneworld/20020221/wl_oneworld/1032_1014296537

Half the world's 6,000 languages are under threat of extinction, a new edition of the 'Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger of Disappearing' warned Thursday to mark International Mother Language Day. The death of languages also spells the end of the culture which gave rise to them, making them "a living heritage we should cherish," said Koichiro Matsuura, director-general of the United Nations (news - web sites) Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO (news - web sites)), commemorating the special day his agency established three years ago. UNESCO plans to set up a monitoring system that will warn when an endangered language--classed as those no longer spoken by at least 30 percent of a community's children--is threatened with extinction. The agency is urging countries to protect languages as natural and cultural treasures.

South Africa: TaXi Art Books

2002-02-28

http://www.africancolours.com/?content/taxi-books.html

TaXi is the title of a series of books that begins to correct the lack of published documentation on contemporary South African art. The series – initiated in 2000 by the French Institute of South Africa (IFAS) and published by David Krut Publishing – is additionally funded by Pro Helvetia - Arts Council of Switzerland, the Royal Netherlands Embassy and the MTN Art Institute. The series is envisaged as a long-term, non-profit cultural investment that will provide exposure for local writers and book designers and, in collaboration with the MTN Art Institute, develop an active educational programme and teaching resource archive. An independent advisory committee selects artists who have created a significant body of work, but who as yet have no substantial publications on their production.

UGANDA: art and women

2002-02-28

http://www.africancolours.com/?content/nabulimelilian.html

"I want women to be emancipated through Art. A lot of women are illiterate. When you just talk or give them literature they won't understand. Through Art, women can be educated. If more women artists come up and produce Art with strong messages to liberate, educate both women and men, the struggle will be faster. Through Art, one can effectively communicate social/political messages across a diversity of tribes with languages and cultural bases. Art can transcend the temporal limits of languages and speech, and that's the challenge I would like to portray in my sculptures. "

Call for Articles: Women for Women International

Submission Deadline: April 1, 2002

2002-02-28

http://www.womenforwomen.org

Women for Women International, a U.S.-based response and development organization, is starting a semi-annual journal about economic and social issues as they relate to women in
international development. The first issue of the journal will focus on the role of religion in the development process, and how it affects women. Articles with in-depth analysis of an issue within this theme, using a gender and development framework are needed.
A U.S.-based response and development organization, is starting a
semi-annual
journal about economic and social issues as they relate to women in
international development. The journal is intended as a venue for debate
among academics, professionals, and practitioners, addressing issues from
various viewpoints. Each article is expected to present a theoretical
framework as well as the practical implications resulting from its
implementation.

The journal will be marketed to the development community, including but not
limited to government policymakers, international NGOs, U.S. foundations,
and
philanthropists. In addition, it will be written in a style that is
accessible to our 35,000 grassroots supporters, in order to educate all of
them about the issues we believe must be addressed so that women are
included
in, and best served by, the programs intended to rebuild their communities.
We wish to raise public awareness about the dynamics of the development
field
and how women are affected by various projects that are intended to assist
them.

The first issue of the journal will focus on the role of religion in the
development process, and how it affects women. We are soliciting articles
with in-depth analysis of an issue within this theme, using a gender and
development framework. We are particularly interested in presenting a
dynamic
of the following debates:

- Can religion be a positive force in the development process - what
would its effect be on women's rights - how sustainable can such an
experience be?
- Is secularization in nation building the only answer - what effect
could this process have on women's rights?
- How sustainable can a secular development process be in a religious
society?
- Can a religious movement be part of a civil society?
- Why are women attracted to religious movements?
- How have women dealt with issues posed by religion in their public and
private lives?

Articles should provide at least one example of a country's experience that
demonstrates the writer's argument. Articles should incorporate theoretical
framework and a discussion of its practical implications. Dual submission
of
opposing articles is encouraged.

Articles should be 1,500-2,000 words long. Articles for the journal are due
April 1, 2002. Articles may be sent by e-mail (as attachment, preferably in
MS Word for Windows) or by regular mail (one paper copy and one copy on a
3.5" diskette, preferably in MS Word for Windows).

For Additional Submission Guidelines, please visit:
http://www.womenforwomen.org, or write to: jan@womenforwomen.org

Send Submissions to:
Journal Editor, Communications Department
Women for Women International
733 15th Street, N.W., Suite 340
Washington, D.C. 20005 USA
e-mail: jan@womenforwomen.org

Women for Women is dedicated to building a world that ensures economic,
political, and social justice with gender equality at its core. We provide
women in developing countries with the physical and emotional resources, as
well as the income-generating skills and rights-awareness training, they
need
to move out of crisis and poverty and into stability and self-sufficiency.
Additional information about our program can be found on our Website,
http://www.womenforwomen.org

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Call for Papers: Gender Issues in Agriculture

2002-02-28

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/wgender/6073

The International Journal of Agricultural Resources seeks papers which address the inter-relationships of gender with agricultural production, environment, agricultural sustainability, food security, agricultural and trade policies, development and the governance and
management of agriculture.
Call for Papers: IJARGE Special Issue - "Gender Issues in Agriculture".

* Solicitud de Ensayos (en inglés) para una tirada especial de la revista
Internacional IJARGE sobre "Temas de Género en la Agricultura". Para más
informes o para entregar un ensayo, contáctese con Dr. Kristin Jakobsson en:
IJARGE@bigpond.com

* Demande d'articles (en anglais) pour une édition spéciale de la revue
internationale IJARGE sur "Themes reliés au genre dans l'agriculture". Pour
tous renseignements, ou pour soumettre un article, veuillez contacter Dr.
Kristin Jakobsson au: IJARGE@bigpond.com


The Editor invites submissions of papers or abstracts for a special issue or
issues of the International Journal of Agricultural Resources, Governance
and
Ecology, focussing on Gender and Equity issues in agriculture.

Papers are sought which address the inter-relationships of gender with
agricultural production, environment, agricultural sustainability, food
security, agricultural and trade policies, development and the governance
and
management of agriculture. Suggestions of other possible contributors and
their contact addresses would also be most welcome.

The International Journal of Agricultural Resources, Governance and Ecology
is a refereed international journal, published in four issues a year by
InderScience UK, providing an international forum for analyses and
discussions in all aspects of agricultural resources, environment and
society. The objective of IJARGE is to establish an effective forum for
insights and communication between policymakers, government agencies,
citizens, consumer bodies, industry, public authorities and members of
academic and research institutions.

Please send suggestions for contacts, topics, abstracts or completed papers
for consideration to:

The Editor, IJARGE
PO Box 719
Armidale NSW 2350
AUSTRALIA

Marked
Attn: Dr Kristin Jakobsson
or email:IJARGE@bigpond.com


* Cross-posted from The GREAT Network: gender@uea.ac.uk

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

EGYPT: Building Human Rights Awareness among Women Refugees

2002-02-28

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/wgender/6056

The Forced Migration and Refugee Studies Program at the American University in Cairo, Egypt will host a seminar entitled, "Delivering Human Rights: Building Human Rights Awareness among Women Refugees." It will take place at the Main Campus on February 27th, 2002 from 7:00 to 9:00 pm.
THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITY IN CAIRO, EGYPT
Forced Migration and Refugee Studies Program

Seminar Series

After Eid El Adha Holidays

Wednesday
February 27th, 2002
Venue: 6thFloor Lounge - Hill House,
Main Campus
From 7:00 to 9:00 pm

Delivering Human Rights: Building Human Rights Awareness among Women
Refugees

Speaker: Dr. Magda Ali, Director of Ma an Center

Chair: Dr. Cynthia Nelson, Professor of Anthropology& Director of the
Institute for Gender & Women s Studies, AUC

(Picture ID required for entry to AUC)




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Gambia National Workshop: Community Leaders Peace Initiative

20-27 March, 2002

2002-02-28

http://www.alliancesforafrica.org

Alliances for Africa will hold a five day training event, which aims to enable and strengthen the capacity of women's organisations working in Gambia to effectively contribute to peace building processes within the West African sub-region.

Gender, Poverty and Policies: Teach-In for NGO's

New York, New York, 2 March, 2002

2002-02-28

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/wgender/6069

The United Nations Development Fund for Women and The NGO Committee on the Status of Women invite you to learn more about how economic policies affect women's lives and livelihoods at a Teach-In for NGOs: "Just Economics: Gender, Poverty and Policies."
The United Nations Development Fund for Women &
The NGO Committee on the Status of Women
a Committee of the Conference of Non-Governmental Organizations in Consultative Relationship with the United Nations

invite you to learn more about how economic policies affect women's lives and livelihoods at a Teach-In for NGOs:
"Just Economics: Gender, Poverty and Policies"

9:00am – 1:30pm, 2 March 2002
(Registration starts at 8:30am – Please note Space Limited)
Soka Gakkai International (SGI)
7 East 15th Street (between 5th Ave. and Union Square Park West)

The 46th session of the UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) has identified “eradicating poverty, including through the empowerment of women throughout their life cycle in a globalizing world” as a main theme of this years’ session.

Join leaders in the field of gender and economics in an interactive learning session on the gender dimensions of macroeconomics, trade liberalization and international financial issues.

Featuring:
* Caren Grown, Poverty Reduction and Economic Growth team, Int’l Center for Research on Women
* Radhika Balakrishnan, Associate Professor of Economics, Marymount Manhattan College
* Gerald Epstein, Professor of Economics, University of Massachusetts
* Yassine Fall, Regional Programme Director UNIFEM East Africa

We hope you will join us for this exciting opportunity!
For more information, contact: Meagan Bovell, UNIFEM at 212-906-6536 or by email at meagan.bovell@undp.org

Kenya: African Women's News Service Plans Revealed

2002-02-28

http://www.africawoman.net/about/womensnewsservice.html

The editor of the British Council and DFID sponsored Worldwoman web paper has unveiled plans for a women's news and radio service.

Kenya: First Woman Archdeacon Ordained After 150 Years

2002-02-28

http://allafrica.com/stories/200202250086.html

The Anglican Church of Kenya yesterday ordained the first woman archdeacon in 150 years. The Rev Jane Karimi Njiru, 43, was ordained archdeacon in a colourful ceremony at St Andrew's Church presided over by Bishop Moses Njue of Embu Diocese.

Morocco: Women Press For Change

2002-02-28

http://allafrica.com/stories/200202180749.html

Earlier this month, the Africa Center for Strategic Studies organised a Senior Leader Seminar which brought together military and civilian leaders from all over Africa to discuss issues related to security. Nouzha Skalli Bennis, member of the PPS, Morocco's former communist party, and municipal counsellor from Casablanca, represented the Democratic Association of Moroccan Women at the conference. She spoke with allAfrica.com about her work.

New Annotated Bibliography: Sexuality and Human Rights

The International Women's Health Coalition

2002-02-28

http://www.iwhc.org

The "Sexuality and Human Rights" Annotated Bibliography provides a comprehensive introduction to the issues related to sexual rights/sexuality and human rights. Areas highlighted include sexuality and violence, refugees/asylum, reproductive rights, lesbian and gay rights, and trafficking.

New PRB publication on gender and the environment

2002-02-28

http://www.prb.org

The Population Reference Bureau (PRB) is pleased to announce the publication of "Women, Men and Environmental Change: The Gender Dimensions of Environmental Policies and Programs." This is the second in PRB's series on emerging policy issues in Population, Health, and Environment: Making the Link. It examines the gender dimensions of environmental policies and programs, highlighting how gender differences play a part in natural resource use, how resource depletion affects women and men differently, and what has been done worldwide to integrate gender concerns in environmental planning.

Nigeria: Law professor backs Nigerian stoning

2002-02-28

http://www.africawoman.net/politics/sharialaw.html

"He promised to take care of the child. My father suggested that he should marry me, and he agreed." This is what Sufiyatu Huseini - known as Safiya - says of the man who impregnated her and effectively sentenced her to death by stoning in the Muslim northern Nigerian province of Sokoto, while he walked free through lack of corroboration.

SADC: Commitment to legislating gender

2002-02-28

http://www.idea.int/gender/articles/commitments_to_legislating_gender.htm

The SADC Gender and Development Declaration and its addendum on the prevention and eradication of violence against women and children is set to gain more prominence in regional and national debates and action, as the region moves towards the next United Nations Women's Decade in 2005.

Sierra Leone: Guerilla Girls

2002-02-28

http://homemakers.com/specialreports/guerrilla/guerilla_girls.asp

They cook, they clean, they kill. In this war-ravaged corner of West Africa, girls as young as 10 are abducted, raped and forced to become guerrilla fighters and "rebel wives."

The Project: Gender and Political Participation

2002-02-28

http://www.idea.int/gender/project.htm

IDEA's gender programme aims to emphasize not only the quantitative aspects of women's representation, but also the qualitative impact of women in decision-making processes. It aims to improve and enhance women's effectiveness in political positions and to strengthen their impact in important decision-making forums.

Africa: Good times for democracy

2002-02-28

http://www.indexonline.org/news/102_20020215_kuper.shtml

Early last year an African diplomat reported four coups in the preceding four years across Africa. Yet the same four years saw 49 democratic elections on the continent. Simon Kuper finds positive signs for African democracy.

BURKINA FASO: Denmark reduces aid over human rights and UN sanctions

2002-02-28

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/rights/6119

Denmark has reduced aid to Burkina Faso over allegations of violations of a UN arms embargo against Sierra Leone and Angola, and what it called slow progress in investigations into the death of journalist Norbert Zongo.
BURKINA FASO: Denmark reduces aid over human rights
and UN sanctions


BURKINA FASO: Denmark reduces aid over human rights and UN sanctions

OUAGADOUGOU, 19 February (IRIN) - Denmark has reduced aid to Burkina Faso
over allegations of violations of a UN arms embargo against Sierra Leone
and Angola, and what it called slow progress in investigations into the
death of journalist Norbert Zongo.

Anna Hvidt, head of Western and Eastern Africa department at the Danish
Foreign Affairs Ministry, said on Tuesday the reduction was because of the
"two negative factors". From FCFA 20 billion (US $27 million) last year,
the West African country will get FCFA 15.5 billion (US $21 million) in
2002.

Speaking in the capital Ouagadougou, the Danish official said Burkina Faso
had done very little to control arms importation and use, following
accusations by a UN weapons panel that the country had violated an embargo
against the Sierra Leone Revolutionary United Front rebel group, and UNITA
rebels in Angola. An authority set up in 2001 to monitor arms importation
and use had done nothing, she added.

Zongo publisher of a popular weekly "The Independent", was found murdered
along with three companions in December 1998. He was then investigating
the death in military custody of a driver to the President's brother. His
death sparked socio-political unrest in the country.

The new Danish government, the official said, now sees respect for
democracy, human rights and good governance by developing countries as a
condition for financial assistance. Other countries that have suffered aid
cuts for the same reasons are Eritrea, Malawi, and Zimbabwe.

Denmark has been a main donor to Burkina Faso, especially in the provision
of safe water, agriculture, rural development and energy. The aid cut,
which Hvidt called "moderate", will affect the energy and the justice
department reforms.






[ENDS]


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BURUNDI: Acting WHO representative under house arrest

2002-02-28

http://www.irinnews.org/report.asp?ReportID=22311

The acting World Health Organisation (WHO) representative in Burundi, Dr Lamine Diarra, is under house arrest, the United Nations Development Programme Resident Representative, Georg Charpentier, confirmed to IRIN on Friday.

DRC: Britain slams human rights in Kinshasa

2002-02-28

http://europe.cnn.com/2002/WORLD/africa/02/16/congo.britain.rights.reut/index.html

Britain's ambassador to the Democratic Republic of Congo accused government soldiers and police officers on Saturday of serious human rights abuses in the capital of the war-ravaged country.

Egypt: An Interview with Saad Eddin Ibrahim

2002-02-28

http://www.worldpress.org/mideast/0214egypt.htm

More than eight months after he was sentenced to seven years in prison on charges of illegally accepting foreign funds, sullying Egypt's image abroad, and embezzlement, Egyptian human-rights activist Saad Eddin Ibrahim walked free—pending a retrial—on Feb. 7.

Kenya: Another False Start for Ogiek Case

2002-02-28

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/rights/6123

The Ogiek indigenous community has expressed frustration after a case which they want to stop the President Daniel arap Moi government from degazetting parts of their east Mau forest and allocating them to outsiders was once again rescheduled to April 23. The case which has been dragging at the Kenyan courts since March last year could not go ahead since the government has yet to file a replying affidavit.
Another False Start for Ogiek Case

By John Kamau, Rights Features Service

Nairobi, 21February: The Ogiek indigenous community has expressed frustration after a case which they want to stop the President Daniel arap Moi government from degazetting parts of their east Mau forest and allocating them to outsiders was once again rescheduled to April 23.

The case which has been dragging at the Kenyan courts since March last year could not go ahead since the government has yet to file a replying affidavit.

"This is yet another false start but we will have to wait for them to file the defence", the Ogiek attorney, Kathurima M'Inoti said in Nairobi.

The lawyer had earlier told Justice Rimita of the Kenyan High Court to allow the case to go ahead ex-parte since the government had not filed the defence.

The High Court was told that the state counsel, Muthoni Kimani, who was supposed to represent the government was "out of the country".

Although the Court has powers to order a case to be heard exparte if the other parties fail to file a defence that rule appears to be evaded in the Ogiek case.

The case was earlier being handled by State Counsel, Valerie Onyango and it is not clear why Muthoni Kimani is taking it over. Kimani handled the earlier forest case at the High Court sitting in Eldoret where the court gave the government the go ahead to degazette the forests.

Meanwhile the Ogiek lawyer will on Monday serve the new minister for environment Mr Joseph Kamotho with a court order that stops any interference with the east Mau land until the current case is heard and determined.

"The numerous changes at the ministry of environment and natural resources means we have to keep on serving the new ministers with the same order. We do not want to find ourselves in a position where a minister says he was not served with an order", said Kathurima.

Ever since the case was filed last year the ministry of environment is having its third minister after a reshuffle saw the exit of Joseph Nyenze, and then Noah Katana Ngala.

Addressing the press outside the High court, the Ogiek Welfare Council spokesman, Joseph Towett said the community is "determined to have the case concluded".

More than 100 Ogiek elders jammed the corridors of the High Court to listen to the case.

"We will not tire to come here", an elder told Rights Features Service.

The Ogiek are Africa's last known honey-hunters and have been fighting to save their land from encroachment by timber, tea and political interests.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Rights Features Service is a Nairobi-based regional organisation that uses internet power to campaign for human rights. With a reliable network of journalists, RFS works with the civil society to advance and promote human rights in the region and solicate for support from the international community through information dissemination.

The Coordinator
Rights Features Service
First Floor, College House
University Way
PO Box 63828 Nairobi
Tel: 254-2-311724

Manual on the Effective Investigation and Documentation of Torture

2002-02-28

http://www.hrea.org/erc/Library/medical_personnel/ohchr01.html

This manual is intended to serve as international guidelines for the assessment of persons who allege torture and ill-treatment, for investigating cases of alleged torture and for reporting findings to the judiciary or any other investigative body. The documentation methods contained in this manual are also applicable to other contexts, including human rights investigations and monitoring, political asylum evaluations, the defence of individuals who "confess "to crimes during torture and needs assessments for the care of torture victims, among others.

SIERRA LEONE: Up to one million may not vote, NGO says

2002-02-28

http://www.irinnews.org/report.asp?ReportID=22617

Hundreds of thousands of Sierra Leoneans may not be allowed to vote in forthcoming elections because of shortcomings within the recently ended registration process, the NGO Campaign for Good Governance (CGG) said on Friday.

South Africa to abide by majority view on Zimbabwe

2002-02-28

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/rights/6106

If the majority view of all election observer missions in Zimbabwe does not find the March 9 presidential poll free and fair, then SA will not be able to recognise the election result, says Deputy Foreign Minister Aziz Pahad.
SA to abide by majority view on Zimbabwe
Pahad gives pledge as Harare expels observer

Business Day SA - Monday, 18 February, 2002 - www.bday.co.za

Parliamentary Editor

CAPE TOWN If the majority view of all election observer missions in Zimbabwe
does not find the March 9 presidential poll free and fair, then SA will not
be able to recognise the election result, says Deputy Foreign Minister Aziz
Pahad.
Pahad's words, at Friday's news briefing on the situation in Zimbabwe, came
the day before Zimbabwe's government deported the European Union's (EU's)
observer mission leader Pierre Schori.

The action also followed the declaration of Britain's Baroness Valerie Amos
as part of a G8 team in SA to discuss the New Partnership for African
Development that the turmoil in Zimbabwe was a cloud over the initiative but
not a litmus test for President Thabo Mbeki's plan for African renewal.
Pahad said government had no intention of "whitewashing" the election
process, and pointed to the multisectoral composition of the observer
mission as evidence of its overall credibility.

It also emerged on Friday that Bobby Godsell and André Lamprecht would join
the last deployment of the SA observers on March 3. The two were the only
volunteers from Mbeki's big business working group, which was asked to
supply volunteer monitors.

Those who did not take up the invitation included Nail's Saki Macozoma,
Murray & Roberts' David Brink, Anglo American's Julian Ogilvie-Thompson and
Michael Spicer, FirstRand's Laurie Dippenaar, Paul Kruger of Sasol, and
Standard Bank's Derek Cooper.

The second part of the SA observer mission, which includes Percy Sonn from
the directorate of public prosecutions and head of the Public Service
Commission Stan Sangweni, will leave on Wednesday. Others leaving this week
are representatives from AgriSA, the National African Farmers Union, the
Congress of SA Trade Unions and black business.

Pahad said there would be seven or eight observer missions in Zimbabwe,
including one from Parliament, the Southern African Development Community
and the multisectoral one.

He said he hoped when the poll was over, all missions would be able to
express a unanimous opinion on whether it was free and fair. If there were
differences of opinion, SA would abide by the majority view, he said. If
"things go badly in Zimbabwe", then it spelt serious problems for SA and the
rest of the region.

Meanwhile, Sapa reports that Schori, who arrived in London yesterday,
accused the Zimbabwean government of "unacceptable" behaviour in abruptly
expelling him. He dismissed as "fabrications" allegations of prejudice.
EU foreign ministers will meet today to consider imposing economic and
diplomatic sanctions against Zimbabwe. The EU put its threat of sanctions on
hold after the Zimbabwean government agreed to allow in a team of 150 EU
observers to cover presidential elections.
__________

Sudan: DINKA WOMAN WHIPPED IN NYALA

2002-02-28

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/rights/6079

SVTG has received new information on Abok Alfa Akok, the Dinka woman previously sentenced to death by stoning in Nyala. SVTG can confirm that Abok, an 18 year old pregnant woman, was sentenced by the Criminal Court in Nyala on 12 February to 75 lashes. The sentence was carried out immediately, on the same day as sentencing, after which Abok was released. The lawyer acting on Abok’s behalf has launched an appeal to the High Court on the grounds that the sentence was given and immediately executed, thus making it impossible for Abok to seek legal advice and completely preventing her from exercising any right of appeal.

-----Original Message-----
From: kfn-editor-admin@kabissa.org [mailto:kfn-editor-admin@kabissa.org]On Behalf Of osman.h
Sent: 18 February 2002 17:15
To: Undisclosed-Recipient:;
Subject: Press release 18/02: Dinka woman whipped in Nyala



S V T G

Sudanese Victims of Torture Group

PRESS RELEASE: 18 February 2002
DINKA WOMAN WHIPPED IN NYALA
SVTG has received new information on Abok Alfa Akok, the Dinka woman previously sentenced to death by stoning in Nyala.

SVTG can confirm that Abok, an 18 year old pregnant woman, was sentenced by the Criminal Court in Nyala on 12 February to 75 lashes. The sentence was carried out immediately, on the same day as sentencing, after which Abok was released.

The lawyer acting on Abok’s behalf has launched an appeal to the High Court on the grounds that the sentence was given and immediately executed, thus making it impossible for Abok to seek legal advice and completely preventing her from exercising any right of appeal.

The Court of Appeal in Southern Darfur overturned the sentence of death by stoning which was issued to Abok, who was accused of adultery, and sent the case back to the lower criminal court in Nyala for new sentencing where Abok was given 75 lashes, as described above.



Background to the case

SVTG previously reported that Abok Alfa Akok had been sentenced to execution by stoning on 8th December 2001, for the crime of adultery. Abok had been accused of adultery by her husband, also a Christian Dinka, however Abok told police that she had been raped.

The sentence was based upon Article 146 of Sudan’s 1991 Penal Code, which is based upon the government’s interpretation of Shari’a (Islamic) Law, and states that the offence of adultery is punishable by:

i) Execution by stoning when the offender is married (mushan)

ii) One hundred lashes when the offender is not married (non-mushan)

iii) Male, non-married offenders may be punished, in addition to whipping, with expatriation for one year.

The Nyala Criminal Court held a summary trial (muHaakama ijaaziyya) on 8 December 2001. Abok was tried without the presence of a lawyer, had no knowledge of her rights in court and was denied access to legal advice prior to the trial. She does not speak or understand Arabic and therefore could not comprehend the trial proceedings. Abok’s lawyer lodged an appeal on 11 December 2001 against the sentence on the grounds that she did not receive a fair trial.

SVTG is very concerned by the recent execution of a sentence on Abok which effectively denied her access to legal advice and prevented her from exercising her right of appeal against the sentence.

SVTG calls upon the government of Sudan to:

i) Respect the legal rights of all those individuals imprisoned in Sudan, allow them effective access to legal advice and representation, and guarantee fair and prompt appeal trials.

ii) Ensure the physical and psychological integrity of all prisoners.

iii) Guarantee in all circumstances respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms in accordance with international human rights standards.

SVTG is an independent non-governmental human rights organisation, for further details on this press release or any other information please contact;
The Sudanese Victims of Torture Group
Park Business Centre
Kilburn Park Rd
London NW6 5LF
UK
Tel: +44 20 76258055
Email: Osman.h@virgin.net

TANZANIA: Rights group slams riot control tactics

2002-02-28

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/rights/6120

A local human rights group has accused the Tanzanian police of committing human rights violations during last week's riots involving Muslim youths in Dar es Salaam, the Tanzanian capital, in which two people were killed.
TANZANIA: Rights group slams riot control tactics

NAIROBI, 19 February (IRIN) - A local human rights group has accused the
Tanzanian police of committing human rights violations during last week's
riots involving Muslim youths in Dar es Salaam, the Tanzanian capital, in
which two people were killed.

Ezekiel Masanja, acting director of the Tanzania Legal and Human Rights
Centre told IRIN on Tuesday that his organisation had demanded a public
apology from police authorities for the "violations they had committed"
during and after the riots, as well as the resignation of top police
officers.

"The police mistreated people. There were gross violations, they broke
into houses and there was harassment of women and children. The police
commissioner should take responsibility for that," Masanja said.

The riots erupted after fighting between two rival Muslim factions at the
Mwembechai mosque, in Dar es Salaam, according to Masanja. The BBC
reported on Thursday that the two groups had been "at loggerheads" over
use and control of the Mwembechai mosque for a service to commemorate two
people who had died in the prayer house during riots in 1998.

Riot police used live bullets, as well as dozens of tear-gas canisters, to
disperse groups of youths who were hurling stones at them in different
streets around the mosque, according to the Guardian newspaper.

Up to 53 persons have been arrested by police in connection with
Wednesday's riots in the Magomeni Mwembechai area, and 23 have appeared in
court. The remaining 30 detainees had yet to be charged, the paper
reported.

Two Islamic leaders, Sheikh Ponda Isa and Sheikh Musa Kandecha, were among
seven others who appeared in court on Monday charged with the murder of
the two people - one police officer and one civilian - during the
violence, and were remanded in custody until 4 March, the Guardian
reported on Tuesday.

Alfred Tibaigana, Dar es Salaam regional police commander and senior
assistant commissioner of police, admitted that 16 children and 17 women
were among those arrested in the scuffle, but said they were released
after being cleared of any involvement in the riots, according to the
paper. Tibaigana, however, did not reveal the names of the other arrested
persons except the two leaders, the Guardian said.

According to Masanja, the conduct of Tanzanian police has been changing
over the last decade, and officers were "developing a culture of
brutality".

Tanzania's human rights record came under the spotlight during violent
clashes between riot police and supporters of the opposition Civic United
Front in Zanzibar in January 2001, in which at least 22 people were
killed.

Amnesty International said in a press statement in November 2001 that it
had set out details, in a memorandum sent to the governments of Tanzania
and Zanzibar, of human rights violations by the security forces during the
January clashes, including killings, mass arrests, torture and rape.
[ENDS]


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Uganda: Bills threaten human rights

2002-02-28

http://www.cnn.com/2002/WORLD/africa/02/21/uganda.rights.reut/index.html

A U.S.-based human rights watchdog group warned Thursday that bills before the Ugandan parliament to fight terrorism and regulate associations threatened human rights in the east African country.

Zimbabwe: SADC lets us down

2002-02-28

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/rights/6105

It is a sad fact that every democratic-minded and peace loving Zimbabwean believes our Sadc brothers and sisters have let us down when it mattered most. While the rest of the international community, particularly the European Union and the United States, is taking steps to ensure that Zimbabwe conducts its presidential election in a democratic fashion, Sadc has decided to look the other way and let Zimbabweans bear the brunt of both state orchestrated violence and a flawed electoral process.
SADC lets us down

Zimbabwe Standard - Sunday, 17 February, 2002 - www.mweb.co.zw/standard

By Lilian Patel's folly

IT is a sad fact that every democratic-minded and peace-loving Zimbabwean
believes our Sadc brothers and sisters have let us down when it mattered
most. While the rest of the international community, particularly the
European Union and the United States, is taking steps to ensure that
Zimbabwe conducts its presidential election in a democratic fashion, Sadc
has decided to look the other way and let Zimbabweans bear the brunt of both
state-orchestrated violence and a flawed electoral process.

It is folly for Sadc to claim that it is in the best interest of Zimbabweans
to let "Harare solve its own problems". History has shown that the Zanu PF
government falls short when it comes to administering elections where there
is a real chance of it losing. The 1990 and 2000 general elections bear
testimony to this. Faced with defeat in 2000, Zanu PF decided to take a
shortcut to victory by embarking on an orgy of terror to cow people into
voting for it.

It is now a fact that thousands of people were terrorised by Zanu PF thugs
during the run-up to the last parliamentary election, while many others
either lost their lives or were beaten and maimed. The same pattern has
emerged during the campaign for the March 9/10 presidential election in
which short of a massive fraud, 78-year-old President Robert Mugabe is
expected to lose soundly.

Against such a background of state-sanctioned terror and electoral
chicanery, our friends in Sadc have the audacity to claim that democracy
exists in Zimbabwe and that the international community should leave us
alone.

Leading this exercise in deception is Malawian foreign affairs minister and
Sadc Zimbabwe task force chair, Lilian Patel. Last week she was here to lend
legitimacy to a shamelessly flawed electoral process. How a person who flies
to Harare and stays in some city hotel, mixing only with government
officials, can claim that political persecution does not exist in Zimbabwe
is difficult to understand. The silly woman claimed the independent press
was totally free in Zimbabwe because she had seen "piles" of the "opposition
press" on the streets of Harare.

Did she ever bother to stop and ask the newspaper vendors themselves whether
they were able to freely conduct their business? What about those towns
where her so-called "opposition press" has been banned together with the
opposition?

She is blind to the raft of repressive laws that were hastily enacted in the
weeks surrounding her visit, including a draconian press law passed while
she was still here.

Perhaps it is too much for one to expect tough and honest talk from Patel.
She hails from a country which has experienced 30 years of dictatorship and
is struggling with corruption and the usual indispensibility syndrome by its
current leadership. There has been systematic intimidation of the
opposition.

Many Sadc leaders regard their organisation as a mutual support group. Their
commitment to the democratic values set out in the Sadc protocol is paper
thin. And they have chosen to ignore the electoral principles laid down by
their parliamentarians as recently as last year.

Admittedly South Africa and Botswana are inclined towards a more robust
policy on Zimbabwe. And Mozambique is becoming increasingly disenchanted
with its former allies in Harare.

But Sadc is not an organisation we can look to for principled leadership
given the sort of acumen demonstrated by Patel and Co. Sadc has so far
ignored violations of laid-down procedures in the land acquisition process,
turned a blind eye to orchestrated political violence-pretending that both
parties are equally guilty-and collaborated with Zanu PF in the facile
pretence that the media is responsible for Zimbabwe's poor image. They even
touchingly asked our ministers to send them details of what was happening in
the country so they could put the record straight!
__________

ZIMBABWE: EU pull-out a green light for abuse- Amnesty

2002-02-28

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/rights/6118

Amnesty International has expressed concern that the pull-out of European Union (EU) observers will result in an escalation of human rights violations in Zimbabwe. "The decision to withdraw EU observers will give the green light for further serious human rights violations in Zimbabwe," the rights organisation said.
ZIMBABWE: EU pull-out a green light for abuse- Amnesty

JOHANNESBURG, 20 February (IRIN) - Amnesty International has expressed
concern that the pull-out of European Union (EU) observers will result in
an escalation of human rights violations in Zimbabwe.

"The decision to withdraw EU observers will give the green light for
further serious human rights violations in Zimbabwe," the rights
organisation said.

President Robert Mugabe's government kicked-out Pierre Schori, the Swedish
ambassador to the United Nations and the head of the EU's observer
mission, on 16 February. This triggered the pull-out of the 30-member
observer team, and EU sanctions that include a travel ban on Mugabe and
his close political associates, as well as a freeze on their overseas
assets.

Mugabe is up against Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) leader Morgan
Tsvangirai in next month's presidential election.

"It is alarming that the largest contingent of international observers
will not be on the ground during these crucial days leading up to the
election. By their very presence they acted as a check to state-sponsored
violence and intimidation occurring on a daily basis," Amnesty
International said in a statement.

The rights group believes the "lack of impartial international observers
will facilitate further suppression of the rights to freedom of
expression".

Amnesty International appealed to the other remaining observer teams from
the Southern African Development Community (SADC) Parliamentary Forum, the
Commonwealth and the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) to send a larger
number of observers to make up for the absence of the EU, which was
expected to field 150 monitors.

In the run-up to the 9-10 March elections, professional policing standards
have been undermined by political instructions, the organisation alleged.
"During the past two weeks, Amnesty International has documented ... grave
violations of the right to public assembly and association, which the
organisation believes were facilitated by the lack of international
observers."

Among the cases documented by Amnesty International was an attack on
Monday (18 February) on MDC offices in Harare by ZANU-PF supporters, in
the presence of police.

Another was the arrest of 11 church leaders on 16 February for an
inter-denominational event in Bulawayo. Police officials claimed that the
march by Roman Catholic, Anglican, Presbyterian, and Methodist churches
would endanger public order or breach the peace.

Police arrested Anglican Reverend Noel Scott at his pulpit on charges that
he violated the recently passed Public Order and Security Act (POSA).

"Other leading clergy and worshippers followed police, who had detained
Rev. Scott, to the central police station of
Bulawayo, where they prayed outside the police station. Another 10 people,
including Catholic priest Father Kevin O'Doherty, were also arrested and
charged under the POSA, and were later released on remand on 18 February."

Amensty said police also arrested "some 15 members of the National
Constitutional Assembly (NCA) on 15 February for taking part in a peaceful
demonstration that had been banned by police under the POSA. Several of
those arrested alleged that they had been assaulted by police while in
custody."

"On 10 February, Zimbabwean police cancelled a rally in Gokwe by ...
Tsvangirai, stating that the rally would be likely to degenerate into
violence and was therefore banned under the POSA. Yet police did not
intervene when ZANU-PF attacked the rally organizers on 9 February and
burned their vehicle," Amnesty International said.

The organisation believes that "inaction or use of excessive force by
police violates international standards for policing. Despite the POSA
stating that only force that is reasonably justifiable in the
circumstances can be used, other provisions of the law endanger the right
to freedom of expression".
[ENDS]

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Zimbabwe: Mugabe Pledges to Ban Union, Expel Whites

2002-02-28

http://www.gvnews.net/html/DailyNews/alert318.html

Addressing about 15 000 supporters at Murombedzi growth point in Zvimba, a few kilometres from his rural home of Kutama, Mugabe said he intended to de-register the ZCTU because it had abandoned its role of working for the welfare of Zimbabwean workers and was now openly supporting the MDC.

ZIMBABWE: Torture centres operating, say human rights NGOs

2002-02-28

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/rights/6117

Opponents of the Zimbabwean government are being abducted to "torture centres" across the country that serve as bases for ruling party militia, Zimbabwean human rights groups allege.
ZIMBABWE: Torture centres operating, say human rights NGOs

JOHANNESBURG, 20 February (IRIN) - Opponents of the Zimbabwean government
are being abducted to "torture centres" across the country that serve as
bases for ruling party militia, Zimbabwean human rights groups allege.

"Violence on an organised basis has continued without decline throughout
the country," the latest Zimbabwe Human Rights Forum report on political
violence said. "In most cases victims are abducted to bases where they are
tortured and then released. These bases are springboards for militia
operating in the area and also serve as torture centres."

The report, released on Tuesday, said 26 people - 15 named as opposition
Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) supporters - were killed in political
violence between 1 January and 16 February. It identified 24 "militia
bases" across the country allegedly run by war veterans or ruling ZANU-PF
party members where torture has taken place.

The Zimbabwe Human Rights Forum, an umbrella body of nine human rights
NGOs said: "It is of particular concern to the Forum that the use of
sexual torture ... has resurfaced. This has included forced rape by men,
witnessed by both the perpetrators and others."

Zimbabwe's Deputy High Commissioner to South Africa, Danson Mudekunye,
denied the allegations.

"Foreign ministers of SADC [Southern African Development Community] were
recently in Zimbabwe and they give a different picture to what this report
is giving," he told IRIN. "They say there is a decrease in politically
motivated violence. Most of these foreign ministers have missions in
Zimbabwe. How could they get it so wrong?"

According to the report: "Victim statements have increasingly indicated
that the youth militia involved in organised violence [have] received
formal training in it. Internationally recognised torture techniques are
being implemented as in the case of a ZANU-PF base at Mahusekwa Growth
Point [in Marondera, 50 km southeast of Harare]."

A member of the human rights group told IRIN that the report was compiled
based on newspaper accounts, feedback from monitors in the field, and
testimonies from victims. She said that a catch-all description of the
assailants as "youth militia" was used, because it was difficult to
clearly identify whether the culprits belonged to the government's
national youth service, ZANU-PF, or the war veterans.

"People being tortured are people identified in the community as MDC
supporters," she added. "They are taken from their homes and tortured.
Some escape, some are taken to police stations where they go through an
interrogation process and then they are released."

Forum reports are available at:
http://www.hrforumzim.com
[ENDS]


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Zimbabwe: Zanu PF plans to slash urban votes

2002-02-28

http://www.zwnews.com/issuefull.cfm?ArticleID=3722

The MDC has said the government was planning to reduce polling stations in the opposition party's strongholds during next month's presidential election, while increasing the numbers in areas where the ruling Zanu PF enjoyed support. Many Zimbabweans, the opposition said, will be disenfranchised by the Registrar-General's decision on the number of polling stations.

Europe: Endorsement campaign for a Charter of Rights for Migrant Domestic Workers

2002-02-28

http://www.december18.net/campaigncharter.htm

The Charter of Rights was developed by Migrant Domestic Workers in a series of workshops organised by RESPECT in Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Spain and the UK. Besides reflecting the experiences of migrant domestic workers including the violations of their rights in Europe, the Charter also reflects the demand for recognition of "domestic" work as "proper" work. More information about the Charter and to endorse it online can be found on the December 18 website.

Human Trafficking: Charming Girls And Greedy Merchants!

2002-02-28

http://allafrica.com/stories/200201220075.html

Trafficking in girls and women has easily become the modern parallel to the Atlantic slave trade. Ahmed Tahir explored the contours of this terrain, and wrote this revealing account, which highlights the methods and routes out of Africa, and the experiences the ladies pass through at their stations.

Refugees, Asylum Seekers, Migrants, and Internally Displaced Persons

Human Rights Watch World Report 2002

2002-02-28

http://www.hrw.org/wr2k2/print.cgi?refugees.html

INTRODUCTION: THE YEAR IN PROFILE:
-Fiftieth Anniversary of the 1951 Refugee Convention
-United Nations World Conference Against Racism
-Fiftieth Anniversary of UNHCR and New High Commissioner, Ruud Lubbers
-Impact of September 11 on Refugees and Migrants

UN Convention on rights of migrant workers

Ratification update

2002-02-28

http://www.december18.net/UNconvention.htm

Ecuador deposited its instrument of ratification with the UN on 5 February 2002. This brings the total number of ratifications to 19 out to the 20 needed to enforce the Convention. An updated list of ratifications can be found at the December 18 website.

US Anti-trafficking report 2002

Collection of information

2002-02-28

http://www.state.gov/g/inl/rls/tiprpt/2001/

US law requires the Trafficking Office of the Department of State to publish an annual report on the status of anti trafficking work by governments worldwide. The State Department Trafficking Office is presently collecting information for the 2002 report. Governments will be submitting their views and the U.S. embassies worldwide will send reports to the Trafficking Office. NGOs can also submit information to the Trafficking Office for consideration. As this US report is the only report prepared by any entity on the state-of-the-state response to trafficking, it is important for NGOs to contribute their views. The International Human Rights Law Group encourages you to submit reports on the situation in your country and also your views on the Report itself. Last year, many NGOs complained about the Report generally, the inappropriate placement of some countries in the 3 categories and the Report's failure to reflect the actual situation in their own countries. The deadline for the submissions is March 8.
You will find a form at http://www.december18.net/traffickingconventionsUSreport2002.htm
that was prepared by the IHRLG (only in English). It includes all of the questions you need to answer and the address of the Trafficking Office. The deadline for the submissions is March 8. Please note that the Trafficking Office may share information you submit with other departments in the US government. However, if you do NOT want your information or your organization's name shared with your government (which might call to ask the State Department for their sources of information), then you MUST say so in your letter.

ANGOLA: Transparency needed over oil accounts

2002-02-28

http://www.irinnews.org/report.asp?ReportID=22554

The campaign group Global Witness has called on the Angolan government to introduce greater transparency and accountability over its oil accounts to end the alleged "full-scale embezzlement" of oil revenues.

Corruption, investor perceptions and the Argentine Crisis: Lessons for South Africa

2002-02-28

http://www.psam.ru.ac.za/

South Africa now forms part of the global market place where its free-floating currency is subject to the notoriously fickle perceptions of international investors. Although the recent run on the rand was potentially exacerbated by South African companies withholding their export earnings to increase their exchange value, a more fundamental reason for the rand’s weakness is the lack of investor confidence in the South African economy.

GHANA: Hotline to weed out passport contractors

2002-02-28

http://allafrica.com/stories/200202180661.html

Mr. Hackman Owusu-Agyeman, Minister for Foreign Affairs, has issued a hotline service number to Ghanaians for use when they encounter difficulties in acquiring passports.

Nigeria: How to end corruption in judiciary

2002-02-28

http://www.ngrguardiannews.com/news2/nn849307.html

FOR a corruption free judiciary in the country, the state governors must co-operate with the National Judicial Council (NJC) and the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission (ICPC), says the Chief Justice of the Federation, Muhammadu Lawal Uwais.

NIGERIA: Maduekwe orders Niwa to form anti-graft unit

2002-02-28

http://allafrica.com/stories/200202200067.html

Apparently worried by the protests from business communities and some staff of National Inland Water Ways Authority, the Minister of Transport, Chief Ojo Madueke has ordered the authorities of NIWA to establish an anti-grant unit or face his wrath.

SIERRA LEONE: Monitor cautions National Electoral Commission

2002-02-28

http://allafrica.com/stories/200202200508.html

As the name implies, Monitor, a project of the Campaign for Good Governance, has been closely monitoring the registration process with a nation-wide team that observed nearly one thousand centers in all the districts except Kambia.

South Africa: SADC Police, France, Ponder Money Laundering

2002-02-28

http://allafrica.com/stories/200202270159.html

Police, bankers, auditors and diplomats were on Tuesday gathered in Johannesburg to address the growing problem of money laundering in Southern Africa. The first Southern African Regional Conference on Money Laundering kicked off in Morningside, Sandton. It continues until Thursday.

A critical look at Britain 'Out of Africa'

2002-02-28

http://www.africaaction.org/docs02/brow0202.htm

Among rich country leaders, British Prime Minister Tony Blair has taken the lead in calling for increases in development aid, and greater attention to addressing global and African poverty. This message, contrasting to the indifference to Africa displayed by Blair's counterpart in Washington, won applause on Blair's recently completed trip to West Africa, but commentators also raised many hard questions about British policies.

AFRICA'S NEW APPROACH TO DEVELOPMENT

2002-02-28

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/development/6126

BURUNDI: European Commission to donate over US $15 million

2002-02-28

http://www.irinnews.org/report.asp?ReportID=22612

The European Commission (EC) is to donate US $15.3 million in humanitarian aid to Burundi, a press release from the EC stated on Friday.

Canada Fund for Africa implemented

2002-02-28

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/development/6087

On February 7, the Government introduced legislation implementing the December Federal Budget which set out "A Canada Fund for Africa". The Fund will be used for activities that "significantly promotes the fulfillment of the objectives set out in the New Partnership for Africa's Development, adopted as the New Africa Initiative by the Organization of African Unity at Lusaka in July 2001 and, in particular, those objectives that were identified for support in the Africa Action Plan called for by the Group of Eight industrialized countries in Genoa in July 2001.
he Government Legislates the Canada Fund for Africa: On
February 7, the Government introduced legislation implementing the
December Federal Budget which set out "A Canada Fund for Africa". The
Fund will be used for activities that "significantly promotes the
fulfillment of the objectives set out in the New Partnership for
Africa's Development, adopted as the New Africa Initiative by the
Organization of African Unity at Lusaka in July 2001 and, in particular,
those objectives that were identified for support in the Africa Action
Plan called for by the Group of Eight industrialized countries in Genoa
in July 2001 and that are adopted by the Group of Eight at its summit
scheduled at Kananaskis in June 2002". Information provided to CCIC
indicates that the Fund will be administered as a separate account
within CIDA. The $500 million committed to the Fund will therefore be
spread over the several years in the life of the Fund and will not be
allocated from the government's fiscal surplus for 2001/02 as originally
intended in the December Budget. Rather than be charged against one
year, the Fund will appear in Canadian ODA statistics for the year in
which a disbursement is made for a program under the Fund (as is the
normal practice for all CIDA commitments). Canadian ODA performance
(our ODA to GNP ratio) will therefore increase modestly for the years in
which these disbursements are greatest.

East and Southern Africa: FIRST MINISTERIAL MEETING ON ECONOMIC PARTNERSHIP

2002-02-28

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/development/6115

The First Ministerial Meeting on Trade Policy Compatibility and Impact Assessment of Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) and Preliminary Adjustment Scenarios, on the Regional Strategy Paper ( RSP)and the COMESA compensation and infrastructure fund ( COMESA Fund), was held on 18th February 2002 at COMESA Centre, Lusaka, Zambia.

COMMON MARKET FOR EASTERN AND
SOUTHERN AFRICA

21 02 02



PRESS RELEASE

FIRST MINISTERIAL MEETING ON ECONOMIC PARTNERSHIP AGREEMENTS (EPA) REGIONAL STRATEGY PAPER (RSP) AND THE COMESA FUND

The First Ministerial Meeting on Trade Policy Compatibility and Impact Assessment of Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) and Preliminary Adjustment Scenarios, on the Regional Strategy Paper ( RSP)and the COMESA compensation and infrastructure fund ( COMESA Fund), was held on 18th February 2002 at COMESA Centre, Lusaka, Zambia.

The meeting was officially opened by the Right Honourable Enock Kavindele, Vice President of the Republic of Zambia.

The meeting was attended by delegates from Burundi, Comoros, Djibouti, DR Congo, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Madagascar, Malawi, Mauritius, Namibia, Réunion (France) Rwanda, Seychelles, Sudan, Swaziland, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

The meeting was also attended by representatives of East African Community (EAC) ; Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD); Indian Ocean Commission (IOC), Southern African Development Community (SADC), the Secretariat of Africa, Caribbean and Pacific Group of States (ACP) as well as the European Commission.

This high level discussion was a follow up to an earlier three day meeting (14th to 16th February 2002) of experts on the same subjects.

The Ministerial delegates discussed the recommendations made by experts , took decision and made recommendations where need be.

On the COMESA Compensation and Infrastructure Fund (COMESA Fund)

The Ministers directed the COMESA Secretariat to

i. Indicate clearly in the paper that the Fund will accord preferential treatment to less developed countries (LDC).

ii. Develop detailed mechanisms on how the Fund will be constituted, managed, criteria under which projects to be funded will be identified and selected, and how funding will be disbursed.

iii. The COMESA Secretariat was also directed to open negotiations with potential donors and international financial institutions for the purpose of supporting the Fund.


The COMESA Fund has been put on Agenda for the discussion at the meeting COMESA Ministers of Finance to be held in Swaziland on 8th - 9th April 2002. The support of the Finance Ministers is vital for the establishment of the Fund.


The COMESA Fund is intended to assist COMESA countries address structural imbalances in their economies as well as help develop infrastructure.

On Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs),
The meeting agreed that EPAs should be economically meaningful, politically acceptable and socially sustainable.

The meeting further agreed that EPAs should include strong developmental dimension , coherent with the overall objectives of the Cotonou Agreements and the developments needs and choices of ACP States and the region.

It was emphased that Member States should be the ones to determine what elements should be negotiated at the AU, ACP , and regional levels.

During these negotiations the concern of LDCs and the specificities of small land locked and island countries should be taken into account.

COMESA and other Regional grouping shall assist member States to carryout detailed economic impact assessment studies , to allow the region to be better to prepare for the upcoming negotiations.

The proposal from the meeting is that negotiations are to be in two tiers.

The first tier of negotiations should take place from September 2002 until 2004/2005.

Whereas the second tier of negotiations could be held between 2004/5 and 2007.

Such an approach would ensure that position adopted by the ACP during negotiations would be in harmony with other developments taking place at regional, continental, and multilateral levels.

On Regional Strategy Paper

The Regional Strategy Paper focussed on increasing economic growth and reducing poverty through high levels of economic integration.

The Draft Regional Strategy Paper and Regional Indicative Programme were therefore a joint effort the regional organisations: COMESA, EAC, IGAD and IOC. The paper was studied and amended by the experts meeting in Lusaka on 14th to 16th February 2000, and further discussed by the first Ministerial Meeting on EPAs , RSPs and COMESA Fund 18th February 2002 . The amended paper is to be transmitted as an initial proposal to the European Commission ( which was represented at this meeting,) so that they too make their initial comments.

The draft will then be worked on by the said regional organisations, and the European Commission, so that the final version is submitted for approval to the COMESA Council of Ministers meetings in May 2002 in Addis Ababa. Ethiopia.

Malawi: Libertarians Meet Ahead of IMF Talks

2002-02-28

http://allafrica.com/stories/200202250391.html

A hoard of civil society representatives from over 45 non governmental organisations have started meeting in Blantyre to discuss issues of current food crisis, macroeconomic framework and good governance ahead of International Monetary Fund (IMF) mission's visit next week.

Meagre Education Funds Betray Realism of $50 Billion Anti-Poverty Proposal

2002-02-28

http://www.europaworld.org/issue68/meagreeducation8202.htm

The British Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, has reiterated his call for a major new initiative from the rich industrialised nations aimed at tackling poverty. His call for a $50 billion fund to improve the lot of poorer countries, published in a Treasury pamphlet this week, echoes the call he made in a speech to the Washington Press Club last December. Hardly reported at the time this speech was clearly an attempt to put flesh on the bones of the plea heard frequently from sources as diverse as World Bank President, James Wolfensohn and European Commissioner Poul Neilson that when it comes to fighting poverty there is an frightening gap between aspirations and resources.

PEOPLE’S BUDGET: SACC, SANGOCO, COSATU

2002-02-28

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/development/6107

The budget announced by the Minister of Finance appears to be moderately expansionary; however, it comes with a very low deficit, and tax cuts biased to middle to upper income earners. The expenditure growth falls short of what is required to address backlogs and put South Africa on a new developmental growth path.
-----Original Message-----
From: press-admin@cosatu.org.za [mailto:press-admin@cosatu.org.za]On
Behalf Of Patrick Craven
Sent: 20 February 2002 16:28
To: press@cosatu.org.za
Subject: People's budget response


----------------------------------------

Press statement issued by the Congress of South African Trade Unions.

To receive future press statements go to
http://gate.cosatu.org.za/mailman/listinfo/press

----------------------------------------

PEOPLE’S BUDGET:
IMMEDIATE RESPONSE TO BUDGET
SPEECH

- SACC, SANGOCO, COSATU -

The budget announced by the Minster of Finance this
afternoon appears to be moderately expansionary;
however, it comes with a very low deficit, and tax cuts
biased to middle to upper income earners. The
expenditure growth falls short of what is required to
address backlogs and put South Africa on a new
developmental growth path.

The budget deficit fell to 1.4% of GDP in 2001 – the
lowest in South Africa’s recent history – and between
1.7% and 2% over the forthcoming MTEF period. The
People’s Budget views this as completely inappropriate
for South Africa, given the massive social and
infrastructural backlogs we face. This year’s deficit
target is extremely low even in comparison with
developed countries facing fewer such challenges – for
example, it is reportedly about half of Germany’s budget
deficit: GDP ratio for this year. This emphasis on fiscal
austerity and the ruthless cutting of the budget deficit,
even way below previously targeted levels, deprives
South Africa of much-needed resources which could be
channelled to delivery. The People’s Budget believes
that a deficit: GDP ratio of up to 4%, if spent
appropriately, would be more conducive to growth and
development.

EXPENDITURE

Overall real expenditure growth is 4.1%, meaning
around 2% in per capita terms (after population growth).
While this growth is welcome, it is still inadequate in the
face of the massive backlogs and recovering the lost
ground of the extreme fiscal austerity of the late 1990’s.

While the Minister paid lip service in his speech to job
creation, this was not matched in the budget by any
major new interventions which would have any significant
new impact on the unemployment crisis.

In terms of social services, while noting the increases in
social grants above CPIX this year, we would have liked
to hear some signals from the Minister around the
introduction of a comprehensive social security system
for South Africa. MTEF projections will need to be
revised upwards to fund this, pending the conclusion of
the process around the report of the Commission of
Enquiry. In particular, the People’s Budget has
proposed the introduction of a Basic Income Grant for all
South Africans, as the most effective social security
measure in alleviating poverty.

We are very concerned that the education allocation is
lagging behind and will be inadequate to meet South
Africa’s skills needs. The health expenditure does not
appear sufficient to fund key health initiatives which the
People’s Budget has proposed, such as the National
Health Insurance System and a comprehensive
HIV/AIDS strategy.

The water budget appears far too low. We are also
concerned about the cuts in the land budget, given the
massive demand for redistribution of land.

We would have hoped to see an announcement that
government will decline further options on the arms deal.
This would have diverted unnecessary military
expenditure into areas where it is badly needed.
Instead, the costs continue to rise, going up by 14% this
year. We note that this year, government will be
spending more on the military than on police.

We welcome the commitment to job creation in sections
of the public service such as health and police. We also
welcome the allocation of R3.3b from the contingency
fund to meet shortfalls in the public service wage bill.

REVENUE

The People’s Budget notes that revenue projections
have once again been overshot. We welcome the
success in raising more tax revenues. We believe that
these resources should be channelled into social
spending and infrastructure, where huge backlogs still
need to be addressed. We are concerned that the
consistent underestimating of revenue year after year
means that revenue end up being channelled into deficit
reduction rather than being spent where it is needed.

In terms of income tax cuts, while we welcome tax relief
for lower-middle income earners, we are concerned that
the wealthy have once again benefited from undeserved
tax cuts. This deprives the fiscus of resources for
national economic development. We are disappointed
that the bottom marginal income tax rate is unchanged
at 18%, whereas South Africa’s top income earners will
benefit from a tax cut from 42% down to 40%. We do,
however, welcome the raising of the income tax
threshold from R23 000 to R27 000.

Given that income tax cuts only benefit about a fifth of the
population, we would have wanted to see more broadly
based tax relief through the VAT system, given that this
is a highly regressive tax. In particular, we have called
for the extension of VAT zero-rating to all basic
foodstuffs and other goods predominantly consumed by
the poor, and the introduction of a higher VAT rate on
luxury goods.

The People’s Budget is very concerned that privatisation
revenues are again being factored in to the budget.
R12.2b is projected for this year, to be channelled into
debt reduction rather than infrastructure development.
This will place undue pressure to accelerate the
privatisation process to meet fiscal aims, rather than
looking at a more appropriate and developmental state
asset restructuring strategy.


We will be studying the budget in more detail and
making further comments in due course.


Patrick Craven and Moloto Mothapo
Acting COSATU Spokespersons
011 339 4911 0r 082 821 7456

siphiwe@cosatu.org.za
082-821-7456
339-4911

*********************************************************

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copies of our most recent press statements.

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South Africa: Centre for Civil Society calls for research proposals

2002-02-28

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/development/6186

The Centre is committing a series of small research grants to encourage new and innovative research on civil society. We would thus like to invite researchers to submit proposals in the following thematic areas: The state, shape & size of civil society in South Africa, Civil society in Contemporary democratic era, Civil society and Development, Africa and International.
Centre for Civil Society
CALL FOR RESEARCH PROPOSALS

The Centre for Civil Society, established at the University of Natal in July 2001, aims to promote civil society as a legitimate and flourishing area of scholarly activity in South Africa. It also intends to develop and promote partnerships aimed at knowledge-sharing and capacity building in the sector. As part of its mandate, the Centre is committing a series of small research grants to encourage new and innovative research on civil society. We would thus like to invite researchers to submit proposals in the following thematic areas:

1. The State, Shape & Size of Civil Society in South Africa

The dramatic changes in the civil society sector, following the transition to democracy have, to some extent, already been documented and the Centre would like to support further research in this area. We are particularly interested in proposals that intend to engage with, elaborate, interrogate, interpret and [even] carry forward the findings of the Johns Hopkins Study on the South African Non-Profit Sector. In addition, we would like to encourage studies on the changing nature of the workplace in the non-profit sector.

2. Civil Society in the Contemporary Democratic Era
Civil society played a key role in bringing about the new democratic order in South Africa. Eight years into our transition, CSOs are confronting both old problems like poverty and inequality and new scourges like HIV/AIDS. The Centre is interested in supporting studies that look at civil society&#8217;s responses to these contemporary challenges, particularly regarding new approaches, alliances, formations and social movements. Further areas of interest include, working and lobbying for change in the legal, political and fiscal environment within which CSOs operate, and the need to build and strengthen a culture of philanthropy in the country.

3. Civil Society and Development

CSOs are struggling to define an appropriate relationship with the state. The Centre would like to support research on the fluid and essentially complex relationship between these agencies and their responsibilities vis-à-vis the grand development project. We would be particularly interested in how these roles/ responsibilities have changed subsequent to the government&#8217;s adoption of the Growth Employment and Redistribution Strategy (GEAR) in 1996. We will also support research on the influence of international donors and financial institutions on the development agenda in SA. In the light of all the above, studies on the extent to which sections of civil society are becoming corporatized [out of necessity or choice] and the impact of this development on communities, will be supported.

4. Africa

Civil society on the African continent, and its struggles against authoritarian regimes and for democracy, human rights, economic justice and development, is not very well-documented. We would like to encourage researchers to develop proposals with regard to these under-researched areas. (This can be done in partnership with research centres & individuals on the continent).

5. International
The last decade has witnessed an increase in the size and influence of transnational civil society. The Centre is keen to support research on this sector and its relationship to globalisation and global governance. In addition we will support research investigating the interaction between and the evolving relationship of Northern and Southern civil society.

Proposals must not exceed 10 pages and must reach us before the 30th of March 2002. They can be faxed or E-mailed, marked for the attention of Hermien Kotzé (Research Manager). Fax number (031)- 260 2502, E-mail: kotzeh@nu.ac.za

For further details, contact Hermien at tel. (031)-260 2248 or leave a message with Ms Poonen at (031)-260 3577.

South Africa: Peoples Budget Coalition tables own budget

2002-02-28

http://www.sabcnews.co.za/economy/labour/0,1009,28736,00.html

The Peoples Budget coalition, with a claimed support base of 25 million people, is arguably the real opposition budget. First tabled last year, trade unions, churches and non-governmental organisations have repeated the act, putting an alternative 53-page spending plan on the table. Molefe Tsele, general-secretary of the South African Council of Churches, says his organisation represents churches with a membership of over 12 million worshippers, while Cosatu has 1,8 million signed-up members. Supporters of community-based organisations make up the rest.

ZAMBIA: Government told to diversify

2002-02-28

http://www.irinnews.org/report.asp?ReportID=22269

The World Bank has drawn up a tentative plan to rescue Zambia's troubled economy as the country's strategic copper mining industry totters towards what analysts fear could be inexorable collapse.

Zambia: Less Than $1 Means Family of 6 Can Eat

2002-02-28

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/development/6112

She is sitting on a warped stool in a roofless market with the ferocious midday sun bearing down on her. A sinewy woman with deep-set eyes and sharp features that jut sphinxlike from under her black head scarf, Rose Shanzi awoke with a start this morning, and the primordial question that jarred her from sleep is stalking her again: Will she and her children eat today?
Less Than $1 Means Family of 6 Can Eat

By Jon Jeter
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, February 19, 2002; Page A01

MARAMBA, Zambia -- She is sitting on a warped stool in a roofless market
with the ferocious midday sun bearing down on her. A sinewy woman with
deep-set eyes
and sharp features that jut sphinxlike from under her black head scarf,
Rose Shanzi awoke with a start this morning, and the primordial question
that jarred her from
sleep is stalking her again:

Will she and her children eat today?

It is always a compound question. With five children to feed, often
there is not enough food to go around; tough choices have to be made.
Still, all the answers Rose is
searching for today lie in the neat rows of tomatoes arranged by size,
ripeness and price on the wooden table standing at eye level before her.

"If I sell my tomatoes, we will eat today," she is saying simply. "If I
don't, we don't eat."

To buy enough food to get her family through another day, Rose will need
to earn roughly 75 cents.

Day in and day out, survival for one-fifth of the world's population
turns on what others consider loose change. Much as one woman in a
remote town in southern
Africa tries to keep hunger at bay for just a little longer, so too are
1.3 billion others throughout the developing world who earn, on average,
less than $1 a day.

The percentage of the world's population living on less than $1 a day is
smaller than it was 10 years ago. But in absolute terms it has hardly
budged in more than two
decades, actually inching up slightly from its 1990 level, according to
World Bank statistics, based on household surveys around the globe.

In this hardscrabble town on Zambia's southern border, nothing comes
easily. The 75 cents that Rose needs to make ends meet is about 50
percent more than she
ordinarily earns from her vegetable stand in a 12-hour day.

Moreover, the competition is stiff. Rose is one of no fewer than 4,000
vendors peddling everything from double-A batteries to zebra-skinned
love seats at Maramba's
sprawling market. At least a few dozen women here sell tomatoes just as
red and ripe as Rose's.

And although the tomatoes cost just a few pennies per handful, customers
are hard to come by. Jobs have evaporated since duty-free shipments of
foreign-made clothes
began pouring into Zambia a decade ago, shutting down virtually all of
the textile factories here and in the nearby city of Livingstone.

"No one has money anymore," Rose is saying as she sizes up a woman who
handled her vegetables but left without buying anything. "The town has
no buying power.
Selling anything is like squeezing blood from a stone."

The littlest of her children, 3-year-old Betty, finished off the
family's last dollop of porridge this morning. No one else in the
household has eaten in nearly a day,
leaving Rose unsure if the knot in her stomach is hunger, or anxiety, or
both.

She has not made as much as a cent today, and she's been sitting here
for more than two hours now. There have been luckless days when she's
gone home with nothing,
and it is that possibility that preoccupies her now. Eyes shut, hands
clenched tightly together in her lap, Rose bows her head in prayer.
Resurfacing, she is smiling
weakly, rejuvenated momentarily by faith, inspired by fear.

"If you are a mother," she is saying, her gaze fixed on the middle
distance, "you don't know what suffering is until you have watched your
babies go hungry. I have
suffered many times."

Whether in Africa, Asia, Latin America or the former Soviet Union,
surviving on less than $1 daily is like living in a time warp, a
universe of hand-to-mouth existences
wholly untouched by technology's advance, the Berlin Wall's collapse,
the torrents of cash flowing from one increasingly borderless country to
another in this new
epoch of surging global trade.

And nowhere has time stood as still as it has here: sub-Saharan Africa.

New Trade Policies

Following decades of colonial misrule and early experiments in
socialism, nearly 40 African governments have adopted laissez-faire
trade policies, submitting to the
so-called structural adjustment programs of the World Bank and
International Monetary Fund -- which reduce spending on public services
and increase privatization --
in hopes of attracting foreign investment and loans.

Yet while sub-Saharan Africa's 640 million people represent about 10
percent of the world's population, the region accounts for only 2
percent of all international trade,
less than it did during the last days of colonialism 50 years ago.

Zambia, a landlocked, butterfly-shaped nation of 10 million people, is
as poor as Africa gets. Eight of every 10 Zambians live on less than $1
a day. Ruled by British
mining concerns for more than a quarter-century, then colonized by the
British in 1924, Zambia won independence 40 years later.

For the 27 years that followed, President Kenneth Kaunda pursued
economic policies that joined government and the economy at the hip.
Daunting trade barriers,
massive state subsidies and onerous business regulations protected and
steered a fragile economy heavily reliant on a single commodity: copper.

Inefficient and unproductive, propped up by foreign loans and dragged
down by plunging copper prices, Kaunda's "humanist" system slid
inexorably into collapse. Fed
up with constant shortages of food and fuel and with Kaunda's
authoritarian leadership, Zambians forced their independence hero to
allow elections, then voted him out
in 1991 in favor of a trade union leader promising reform, Frederick
Chiluba.

Under Chiluba, Zambia eliminated tariffs on foreign goods, weaned
farmers off practically all government subsidies and support, and sold
more than 300 state-owned
enterprises, including the country's copper mines. Virtually overnight,
a socialist command economy had been replaced by a deregulated,
free-market model.

The payoff so far is an economy fueled by little more than grit and
guile, practically devoid of valuable commodities. Since 1992, Zambia
has shed nearly 100,000 jobs;
last month, mining giant Anglo American abandoned its attempt to make
its Zambian copper mines profitable, putting 4,000 jobs in peril. Less
than 10 percent of
working-age Zambians work full time in the formal sector, leaving the
jobless to sell whatever they can get their hands on at markets like the
one here in Maramba -- or
on the streets after dark. Police say prostitution has skyrocketed since
1992, especially in urban hubs such as Lusaka, Livingstone and Kitwe.

"You won't find many Zambians old enough to remember it who would want
to return to the Kaunda era," said Fred M'membe, executive editor of the
Post, an
independent newspaper in Lusaka. "But you won't find anyone who will say
that we're better off now than we were 10 years ago. No one alive today
has ever seen such
poverty. How do you run a modern economy when the vast majority of your
earners are taking home pennies a day?"

'Mama, I Am Hungry'

"It seems I just woke up one morning and everything was gone." Rose is
explaining how she got into the business of selling tomatoes.

That was four years ago, after her husband lost his job as a firefighter
when the government began restructuring the workforce. That was after
the last of the nearly 40
clothing manufacturers in Livingstone and Maramba shut down, unable to
compete with secondhand goods pouring in from Europe and the United
States.

What was she to do? She was a 40-year-old woman with a high school
diploma, with four children and another on the way. There was no work to
be had, so she did not
look. There was no dole, so she could not wait. There was no charity, so
she could not beg.

"If I cry or go to my neighbors, what good would that do?" Rose is
saying. "They have nothing either. They are suffering just as much."

Friends who had lost their jobs at the local textile factories had begun
selling vegetables and charcoal that they purchased from wholesalers.
Rose decided to join them.

The number of vendors at the Maramba market, which opened in 1952,
remained constant for nearly 40 years, then tripled over the next 10 as
unemployment swelled.

"My husband was dying along with the town," Rose is saying of her
husband's slow disintegration from kidney failure. He died a year ago, a
broken man in a broken
town.

"I think not being able to support his family is what really killed him.
He was a proud man. He hated not being the breadwinner. But it was the
only way we could make
it. All of my neighbors work here at the market. For most of us, it is
the only way to survive."

She is saying this when a lithe figure with braided hair and a
featureless, torn dress appears as if dropped from the sky, hurtling
into Rose's lap with playful fury.

"Mama, I am hungry," 10-year-old Ennelis is saying as Rose gathers the
girl up in her arms. It is the girl's summer vacation, and she awoke to
a house with no food.

"Then help me work," Rose is saying to her.

The girl is like a talisman today. Within 30 minutes of her arrival,
three customers appear at the tomato stand, forking out about 8 cents
apiece for a handful of the
medium-size tomatoes. Ennelis, who worked the vegetable stand alone for
three weeks last year when her mother was bedridden with malaria, rips
scraps of paper from
one of Zambia's independent newspapers, the Monitor. An editorial
laments the failure of Chiluba's economic policies. Ennelis wraps the
tomatoes inside.

Rose hates to count money during the day. She is afraid that there are
too many idle young men around waiting to snatch a day's revenue from
some unsuspecting
woman's hand.

So she usually hides the crumpled, faded bills underneath the plain,
white doily on her table. The newspaper provides Rose with both
something to do in between
customers and an idea of how business is going that day.

"If you are just reading bits and pieces of a story at the end of the
day, you have made good money," Rose is saying. "If you have a lot to
read at the end of the day,
then you have not made very much money. If I have used up most of my
newspaper today, I will be able to buy maybe two small bags of maize
meal, and that is all I
need to make me happy today."

Rose's Budget

Ask just about anyone in southern Africa what it means to go hungry, or
what constitutes a food shortage, and they will say they are without
"maize meal," or "mealie
meal," depending on the country. It is all the same thing: the region's
all-purpose staple, used to make porridge for breakfast and nshima for
lunch and dinner and any
meal in between.

Nshima -- called sadza in Zimbabwe, pap in South Africa -- is the color
of grits, the consistency of polenta. Zambians eat it with just about
everything. Sprinkled with
groundnuts, chopped okra or maybe just some sugar, it is a meal in
itself when little else is available.

"If you don't like nshima," said Judith Namakube, a vendor at the
Maramba market who sells oranges and other fruits, "you aren't Zambian."

Relatively speaking, Rose does better than many other Zambians. Her
husband left her with a two-bedroom home. She has no electricity,
relying on kerosene lamps and
candles for light, charcoal for heat and fire. But with a tap in her
back yard, she does have access to clean water, saving the time it would
take to fetch it from faraway
wells or dealing with waterborne illnesses such as cholera.

And Rose has been able to make the most of her meager earnings by
joining a relief agency project that provides small loans to poor
entrepreneurs. The money is not
much, maybe $20 every six months. But it tides Rose over in particularly
rough times, ensuring that she has a steady supply of tomatoes to sell.

"It is not a lot of money," said Joshua Tom, a project coordinator for
CARE, the U.S.-based relief agency that runs the microlending fund here.
"But it can mean the
difference between life and starvation for a lot of people here."

Living on $1 a day makes budgeting difficult, but also reduces it to a
few simple priorities.

Of Rose's profits from the stand -- roughly $12 to $18 per month -- half
goes for food. About $2 goes for the fees charged by Ennelis's public
school. She pays $2 a
month for water, another $1.50 in property taxes and 50 cents for the
government's health insurance plan. Whatever is left goes to pay off her
loan from CARE.

Health insurance for the whole family would cost double what Rose pays
for herself, so whenever other family members get sick and need to go to
the clinic, they
simply pretend to be Rose. That works fine for Rose and her four
daughters, but when her 20-year-old son came down with malaria last
year, employees at the local
clinic wanted to know how he came to be named for a woman.

"He told them that his parents really, really wanted a girl," Rose is
saying, dabbing her eyes while laughing at a rare triumph.

Water, education and health care were free during most of Kaunda's rule,
and it rankles her that she now has to pay for basic services.

"That's money I could spend on meat," Rose is saying testily. The family
eats meat only once a year, usually at Christmas when Rose splurges.
"It's rubbing salt in our
wounds to take jobs away from the people and then make them pay for
things they cannot afford because they're not working."

Another customer wanders by, followed by another maybe an hour later. By
3 p.m., Rose has earned a little more than half of what she needs to buy
two three-pound
bags of maize meal, meaning that the market's end-of-the-day rush will
make or break her. The few people in town with jobs usually stop at the
market on their way
home, but it's anyone's guess whether they will need any tomatoes or if
they will choose Rose's over those of the dozen or so other vendors who
sell them.

Still, Rose is feeling confident. Perhaps more important, she wants
Ennelis to feel confident, safe, to believe that she will have food
today.

"Children should not live with such grown-up worries," she will say
later.

So she gives the girl the equivalent of about 12 cents and sends her off
to buy vegetables for this evening's nshima. An act of faith.

"Pick out what you want to eat with the nshima and take them home for
you and your sister to chop," she is saying to Ennelis, whose right hand
is outstretched in
anticipation. She skips off happily.

Enough for Dinner

The market is a hive, snatches of color and sound and chaos that flit
across the landscape like reels in a movie: young men pushing
wheelbarrows; an old toothless man
holding a squawking chicken in a plastic bag; barefoot children weaving
through the vendors' stands, chasing one another; women squinting in the
sun from their
misshapen stools.

Rose is beckoning a boy to fetch her a cup of tea for a nickel. It has
been nearly 24 hours since she last ate anything.

"This is what I usually have for lunch," she is saying. "It settles an
empty stomach."

Then, a flurry of customers. Rose springs from her stool. A woman buys
one of Rose's biggest tomatoes for about 12 cents. A young man in a tie
buys another. A
woman who attends the same church as Rose palms three of the small ones
and hands Rose about 8 cents.

"Rose, I am skinny, but you are really getting skinny," she is saying as
Rose wraps her tomatoes in newspaper. "You are going to look as old as
me if you don't eat."

"This life we live makes us old before we are ready," Rose is saying as
she hands the package across the table.

The sun is setting when Rose returns to her stool and retrieves the
scraps of newspaper from underneath her table. She sizes up her
surroundings and, seeing no signs
of danger, pulls the wrinkled bills from underneath her doily. She melts
into her seat while she counts:

Three thousand nine hundred Zambian kwachas. About 97 cents. Rose is
smiling as she rises from her stool to go buy the maize meal that she
promised her daughter,
then start her 30-minute walk home.

"Ah," she is saying as she stretches her arms toward the sky, "today we
are rich."

© 2002 The Washington
Post Company







* Please note NEW address and phone number *

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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World Bank Bonds Boycott
Center for Economic Justice
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Web: www.worldbankboycott.org

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Zim's Economic Woes Blamed On IMF, World Bank Reforms

2002-02-28

http://allafrica.com/stories/200202220325.html

The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, which have turned their back on Zimbabwe, should accept responsibility for the debilitating effects their policies have had on the southern African nation. In a 56-page report on the impact of the public debt on the country, the Zimbabwe Coalition on Debt and Development blamed the policies instigated by the two institutions for plunging Zimbabwe into an economic recession.

CHUCHES IN AFRICA MOBILISE ON AIDS

2002-02-28

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/hivaids/6053

In most of sub-Saharan Africa, Christian churches have stood quietly by as AIDS has decimated whole communities. "The disease has been so long associated with illicit sexual activity that there's been an overpowering silence on the issue," admits the Rev. Ted Karpf, HIV/AIDS missioner for the Anglican Communion in southern Africa. But now a growing number of Western NGOs and development agencies hope to persuade other African churches to follow Uganda's example. There, religious leaders like Mugagura have helped the government cut HIV infection rates from 14 percent in the early '90s to 8.3 percent in 2000 (and they're still falling.)
CHUCHES IN AFRICA MOBILISE ON AIDS
In most of sub-Saharan Africa, Christian churches have stood quietly by as
AIDS has decimated whole communities. "The disease has been so long
associated with illicit sexual activity that there's been an overpowering
silence on the issue," admits the Rev. Ted Karpf, HIV/AIDS missioner for the
Anglican Communion in southern Africa. But now a growing number of Western
NGOs and development agencies hope to persuade other African churches to
follow Uganda's example. There, religious leaders like Mugagura have helped
the government cut HIV infection rates from 14 percent in the early '90s to
8.3 percent in 2000 (and they're still falling.) "We've increasingly
recognized how important religion is, not only in the care and support of
people who are affected by AIDS, but also in our ability to prevent new
infections," says Dr. Paul De Lay, acting director of the Office of HIV/AIDS
at the United States Agency for International Development in Washington. De
Lay says the church is key not only in shaping people's moral decisions, but
in operating much of sub-Saharan Africa's infrastructure, where 40 percent
of health care is provided by missionary hospitals. Last December his office
unveiled a new program that offers grants to faith-based groups in
developing countries for AIDS prevention and AIDS treatment programs.

The learning curve will be steep. When HIV prevalence rates were presented
at a conference for African religious leaders in New York recently, the
audience reacted with gasps of disbelief. "I didn't know it was that bad in
Africa," said Msgr. John Aniagwu, a Roman Catholic priest from Nigeria,
where one in 10 adults is HIV-positive. In some cases, the clergy's
ignorance stemmed from blind faith. "We never preach about AIDS, because we
think Christians cannot commit adultery or indulge in bad sexual behavior,"
says the Rev. Gabriel Kpokame, who leads a Pentecostal church in Côte
d'Ivoire, which has the highest infection rate in West Africa.

Most ministers feel helpless to preach about prevention because of their
opposition to birth control, including condoms. Pernessa Seele, founder of
the Balm in Gilead - the U.S. nonprofit that organized the New York meeting
- says her mission is not to reverse that position, but to remind leaders
that AIDS is not only transmitted sexually. "The impact of AIDS is so great
in these countries that if we get our religious communities to talk about
getting tested, talk about the orphan problem, just talk about AIDS, period
dispelling the stigma that is a great accomplishment.

That's not to say that African churches have done nothing. In some cases,
they have spoken out more boldly than government leaders. In South Africa,
for example, where President Thabo Mbeki has questioned whether HIV causes
AIDS, religious leaders have campaigned for affordable AIDS drugs and
challenged the Vatican's stance on condoms. In Namibia, Catholic leaders
have endorsed the message "ABCD": Abstain, Be faithful, use Condoms, or face
Death. And Karpf says leaders of the African indigenous church talk to their
followers about "the beauty of wrapping gifts." "It's taboo to talk about
body parts in polite society," he says. Some church groups operate clinics,
provide counseling to AIDS patients and their families and support AIDS
orphans.

There is still a long way to go. Most of those who attended Seele's four-day
conference left newly galvanized. Aniagwu, who had admitted to "not doing
much" about AIDS previously, will now teach his 20,000 congregants how to
prevent it. Mugagura, the Balm in Gilead's project director in Africa, says
openness is key. "I preach AIDS in and out of season," he says. "Whoever I
meet, I talk about AIDS. I am like a madman on AIDS." Of course, no one is
forgetting the lack of money, infrastructure and basic medical care across
sub-Saharan Africa. But here, too, religion has an important and practical
role: averting panic. "If there was no faith in God, there would be total
misery," says Mugagura. "Treatment with drugs is still expensive, and most
people cannot afford it. But they can afford to believe in God.

SOURCE: Newsweek International, 18/02/2002

ETHIOPIA: FOCUS on economic impact of AIDS

2002-02-28

http://www.irinnews.org/report.asp?ReportID=22218

The devastating impact of HIV/AIDS in Africa is all too evident. Millions have died, their children orphaned and entire communities destroyed. But it is the crippling effect of AIDS on African economies that is now starting to ring alarm bells.

ETHIOPIA: Millions at risk from meningitis

2002-02-28

http://www.irinnews.org/report.asp?ReportID=22272

Millions of people in Ethiopia are still at risk from a meningitis epidemic which broke out last September, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) warned this week.

Journal of Health, Population and Nutrition online

2002-02-28

http://www.icddrb.org/jhpn/

The Centre for Health and Population Research publishes a peer-reviewed quarterly journal titled Journal of Health, Population and Nutrition (JHPN). The Journal incorporates the Journal of Diarrhoeal Diseases Research (JDDR). The Journal is freely available on the Internet to increase access of readers in developing countries.
Journal of Health, Population and Nutrition


I am pleased to inform you that the ICDDR,B: Centre for Health and
Population Research publishes a peer-reviewed quarterly journal titled
Journal of Health, Population and Nutrition (JHPN). The Journal
incorporates the Journal of Diarrhoeal Diseases Research (JDDR).

The Journal is freely available on the Internet (http://www.icddrb.org/jhpn)
to increase access of readers in developing countries. It is
indexed/abstracted by Current Contents: Clinical Medicine, Research Alert,
SCI Expanded, SCI JCR, Index Medicus, MEDLINE, POPLINE, EMBASE (Excerpta
Medica database), Elsevier Biobase (Current Awareness in Biological
Sciences), Elsevier GeoAbstracts, CAB Abstracts, CAB Health, etc.

An electronic copy of the brochure on JHPN is attached in PDF for you to
open and know all about the Journal-its mission, editorial policy,
organization of text, style of presentation, and space allocation for
different kinds of articles, etc. 'Information for Contributors' can also be
read and/or downloaded from its website.

I hope the Journal of Health, Population and Nutrition will be a journal of
your choice while submitting manuscripts for publication. I also request you
to encourage your friends and colleagues to submit their papers for
publication in the JHPN by sharing this mail with them.

Warm regards.

Sincerely yours,

David A. Sack, M.D.
Editor-in-Chief
Journal of Health, Population and Nutrition, and
Director, ICDDR,B: Centre for Health and Population Research
GPO Box 128, Dhaka 1000
Mohakhali, Dhaka 1212
Bangladesh
Tel: +(880-2) 882-2467
Email: jhpn@icddrb.org

************************************************************************
'HIF-net at WHO': working together to improve access to reliable
information for healthcare workers and health professionals in developing
and transitional countries. Moderator: Neil Pakenham-Walsh
<INASP_Health@compuserve.com>. Send list messages to <hif-net@who.int>

KENYA: INFANT MORTALITY RATES ALARMING

2002-02-28

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/hivaids/6085

Kenyan Public Health Minister, Prof Sam Ongeri, has said that according to the national health statistics related to reproductive health, 10 women die every day from pregnancy-related complications, and that the infant mortality rate has risen to 74 per every 1,000 live births.. Ongeri noted that his ministry is addressing reproductive health seriously to improve these worrying statistics.
INFANT MORTALITY RATES ALARMING
Kenyan Public Health Minister, Prof Sam Ongeri, said last week that
according to the national health statistics related to reproductive health,
10 women die every day from pregnancy-related complications, and that the
infant mortality rate has risen to 74 per every 1,000 live births.. Ongeri
noted that his ministry is addressing reproductive health seriously to
improve these worrying statistics.

He was speaking at his Afya House office when he received equipment and
drugs to be used towards implementation of reproductive health services from
the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) and the World Health Organisation
(WHO). The equipment, worth Sh9.2 million, include audio visual, data
processing, radio communication, medical and office equipment as well as
contraceptives and gloves.

Areas of concern are reproductive health services, quality of care, access
to services by young people, capacity building and improvement of service
providers' technical skills, supervision, referral and reproductive health
data collection and utilisation.

SOURCE: Mary Nzioka, East African Standard, 14/02/2002

New Campaign Aims to Wipe Out Deadly African Fly

2002-02-28

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=655&u=/oneworld/20020220/wl_oneworld/1032_1014216852

Organizers of an ambitious new drive to control the parasitic carrier of sleeping sickness--which has turned vast swathes of Africa into an uninhabited desert--are worried that funds will not reach the estimated US$5-10 billion needed for eradication.

New Way Found to Attack Malaria

2002-02-28

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/hivaids/6089

Researchers have found a new class of drugs that in laboratory animals can cure malaria, a mosquito-borne disease that kills more than 2 million people annually. The drug, called G25 by the French team that developed it, disables the spread of the malaria parasite by blocking its ability to make copies of itself inside the red blood cells of victims.
New Way Found to Attack Malaria
-------------------------------

Source: <malaria@wehi.edu.au>

By Paul Recer, AP Science Writer

WASHINGTON - Researchers have found a new class of drugs that in
laboratory animals can cure malaria, a mosquito-borne disease that
kills more than 2 million people annually.

The drug, called G25 by the French team that developed it, disables
the spread of the malaria parasite by blocking its ability to make
copies of itself inside the red blood cells of victims.

In laboratory studies, the researchers report Friday in the journal
Science, small doses of G25 were able to cure infections of two types
of malaria in two types of monkeys. The experiments also suggested
that the drug has a very low toxic effect, the researchers said.

"This is a very important step because they showed it worked in two
types of monkeys," said Carole Long, a malaria researcher at the Na-
tional Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, one of the Na-
tional Institutes of Health.

The researchers, led by Henri J. Vial of the University of Montpel-
lier in France, report that G25 attacks malaria by interrupting a key
part of the parasite's life cycle.

Malaria spreads by a protozoan parasite that has three stages in its
life cycle.

It is introduced into a victim by a mosquito bite. As the mosquito
takes in blood, it pumps in a blood-thinning saliva that contains the
parasite.

Once inside the body, the parasite rides the bloodstream into the
liver, where it burrows and multiplies into a cluster of thousands of
parasites. The clusters burst after a few days and the new parasites
invade red blood cells and start another stage of the life cycle.

Inside the blood cell, the parasite multiplies again, making hundreds
of young parasites. When the blood cell bursts, other blood cells are
infected. Eventually, up to 70 percent of the victim's red blood
cells can be destroyed, leading to severe anemia, fever and death.

If a victim is bitten by a mosquito, the insect can pick up the para-
site along with the blood and the malaria life cycle starts over.

The G25 compound works by blocking the parasite's attempts to multi-
ply inside the blood cells.

To reproduce, the parasite must synthesize fats that become part of
the protective membrane for each of its progeny. G25 prevents the
parasite from making this membrane, thus blocking reproduction.

Vial said in Science that although G25 blocked the fat, or lipid,
synthesis of the parasite, it had no effect on the host red blood
cell.

"If you prevent the parasite itself from synthesizing lipids, it will
not survive," Vial said.

NIH researcher Long said the work is significant because it attacks
the malaria parasite in a new way. The malaria parasite is becoming
increasingly resistant to many of the drugs now used to control or
treat the disease and "we need new classes of drugs."

Long said Vial and his colleagues "have made significant advances in
moving this toward actual drug development. I am cautiously optimis-
tic."

She noted, however, that more research must be done, particularly
studies on toxicity, before the drug could be ready for human stud-
ies.

One drawback of the drug, experts said, is that it must be injected.
Vial said in Science that his team hopes within two years to develop
a version of G25 that can be taken orally.

There are an estimated 300 million to 500 million new malaria infec-
tions worldwide each year, mostly in Africa and Southeast Asia. The
majority of the 2 million who die annually from malaria are children.

--
Science: http://www.sciencemag.org
Malaria: http://www.niaid.nih.gov/factsheets/malariares.htm

--
Dr Rana Jawad Asghar
Lecturer Postgraduate Education
Department of Infectious and Tropical Diseases
London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine
Tel: +44-207-299-4728
mailto:jawad.asghar@lshtm.ac.uk
mailto:jawad@alumni.washington.edu
http://www.DrJawad.com

--
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>

South Africa: TAC calls for clarity on AIDS policy

2002-02-28

http://www.702.co.za/news/general/899375.htm

The Treatment Action Campaign says it's time for national government to clarify its HIV/AIDS policy. The call comes after Gauteng became the third province in South Africa to announce that it’s to roll out the anti-AIDS drug Nevirapine at all provincial hospitals.

South Africa: The acceptability of reuse of the female condom

2002-02-28

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=11796811&dopt=Abstract

This study assessed whether reuse of the female condom was acceptable among two groups of women in central Johannesburg, South Africa, who were taking part in two separate studies of female condom reuse. The first group consisted of women (aged 17 to 43 years) attending a family planning/sexually transmitted infections (STIs) clinic who were participating in a cross-sectional survey of the acceptability of female condoms reuse. The second group included women (aged 18-40 years) at high risk for STI (80% self-declared sex workers) who were taking part in an ongoing cohort study to investigate the safety of reuse of the female condom through a structural integrity and microbial retention study. Among women participating in the acceptability study, 83% said that they would be willing to reuse the female condom, and 91% thought the idea of reuse of the female condom was acceptable.

South Africa: You're an embarrassment, Cosatu tells Manto

2002-02-28

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/hivaids/6092

The trade union federation, Cosatu, has come out in full support of Gauteng Premier Mbhazima Shilowa in the escalating war of words with Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang over the provision of antiretroviral drugs to prevent mother-to child transmission of HIV.
_________________________________________
Cape Times and Star 20/02/2002

You're an embarrassment, Cosatu tells Manto

By John Battersby

The trade union federation, Cosatu, has come out in full support of Gauteng
Premier Mbhazima Shilowa in the escalating war of words with Health Minister
Manto Tshabalala-Msimang over the provision of antiretroviral drugs to
prevent mother-to-child transmission of HIV.

In an angry statement released late on Tuesday, Cosatu expressed its "shock"
at Tshabalala-Msimang's attack on Shilowa over his decision to make the
antiretroviral, nevirapine, available to HIV-positive pregnant mothers
throughout the province.

"It is embarrassing that, in the background of yesterday's progressive
meeting between Nelson Mandela and President Thabo Mbeki, which gave hope on
the issue of HIV and Aids, minister Tshabalala-Msimang decided to come out
with such a bombshell.

There were no policy differences between the two leaders
"We view the minister's criticism of the premier of Gauteng today as a
stumbling block in a fight against the pandemic and a general reflection of
a lack of urgency in the matter," said Cosatu. "The federation condemns the
minister's stance and attitude. She should know that the time for
politicising the issue of nevirapine and antiretroviral drugs is over."

The unprecedented public row over the government's controversial handling of
the HIV and Aids pandemic followed a marathon meeting between President
Thabo Mbeki and former president Nelson Mandela at the African National
Congress's Luthuli House headquarters in Johannesburg.

Mandela declined to comment on Tuesday further on the HIV and Aids issue
until he had consulted with the ANC.

An ANC statement after the meeting said there were no policy differences
between the two leaders, but conceded that the ANC-led government needed to
improve on the communication of its HIV and Aids policies.

A well-placed source said both Mandela and Mbeki were keen to dispel the
notion that there was any personal animosity between them as a result of
strong differences of opinion over the approach to HIV and Aids.

'It is also high time the government comes clear on the matter'
The source said Mandela had telephoned President Mbeki on Sunday to assure
him that he had not used the words ascribed to him in quotation marks in a
headline in the Sunday Times: "Stop HIV/Aids nonsense."

Mbeki has also been at pains to dispel the notion that there is an
acrimonious relationship between the two leaders.

Shortly before the Mandela-Mbeki meeting on Monday, Shilowa announced that
all public hospitals in Gauteng would provide the anti-retroviral drug,
nevirapine, to HIV-positive pregnant women to prevent the transmission of
HIV from mother to child.

Shilowa, who according to senior ANC sources was acting with the backing of
the ANC leadership, said R30-million would be made available to finance the
programme which would be launched at seven hospitals in the next 100 days
and that all public hospitals would be provided with the drug by the end of
the current financial year.

Ayanda Ntsaluba, director-general of the national health department, came
out in full support of Shilowa's stand later on Monday.

But on Tuesday, Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang said Shilowa had
defied a resolution adopted by a national meeting of provincial MECs at a
meeting last month, which had decided to await the outcome a report on the
viability of nevirapine.

A government source said advisers had backed the decision to roll out the
provision of the drugs to pregnant mothers, following the high court ruling
in December brought by the Treatment Action Campaign which ordered
government to make nevirapine widely available to HIV-positive pregnant
women.

The advisers had argued at the time that there was no contradiction between
the government's appeal against the ruling, which sought to challenge the
right of the courts to decide matters of public policy, and the immediate
rolling out of antiretrovirals to prevent mother-to-child transmission of
the virus.

The Cosatu statement said it was high time that government listened to the
voice of the majority in South Africa. "It is also high time the government
comes clear on the matter and enhances last year's court victory against
international pharmaceutical giants," said the Cosatu statement, applauding
Shilowa's move.

http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?click_id=125&art_id=ct20020219214413762C35089
6&set_id=1

SUDAN: New push on Guinea worm disease

2002-02-28

http://www.irinnews.org/report.asp?ReportID=22606

Former US President Jimmy Carter and his wife, Rosalynn, are scheduled to attend an international conference on the eradication of Guinea worm disease in the Sudanese capital, Khartoum, in early March, to push anew for a combined effort to make the disease the second to be eradicated worldwide, after smallpox.

DRC-RWANDA: Goma schools set to reopen on Monday

2002-02-28

http://www.irinnews.org/report.asp?ReportID=22310&SelectRegion=Great_Lakes&SelectCountry=DRC-RWANDA

After a five-week hiatus following the lava flows from Mt Nyiragongo that caused widespread damage in the town on 17 January, classes will resume as scheduled on Monday, 25 February, for the schoolchildren of Goma, in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

Employers' Handbook on Child Labour: A Guide for Taking Action

2002-02-28

http://www.hrea.org/erc/Library/unionists/ioe98.html

This handbook is a reference manual for employers and their organisations to implement policies and programs in accordance with the International Labour Organization. An additional purpose of this guide is to raise awareness of current initiatives to eliminate exploitative child labour as mandated by the Resolution on Child Labour in 1996.

Human Rights Album Methodology Handbook

2002-02-28

http://www.hrea.org/erc/Library/hralbum.html

This is a methodology booklet that supplements the Council of Europe's Human Rights Album, an illustrated guide on the European Convention on Human Rights. The booklet is a result of the "Human Rights at School" project by the Milan Simecka Foundation in Slovakia. It contains lessons plans around the Convention and the UDHR and is even without the Human Rights Album a valuable resource for teachers.

Kenya: Judge Speaks On Children's Act

2002-02-28

http://allafrica.com/stories/200202250085.html

The youth were yesterday challenged to help enforce the Children's Act. The Kenya Girl Guides Association patron, Lady Justice Joyce Aluoch, asked the youth to contribute to the operation of the new law. However, she clarified that the law required the effort of children, parents and the government.

Kenya: Learning For The Deaf In Big Crisis

2002-02-28

http://www.learningchannel.org/

Less than one per cent of school-going age children with hearing disabilities are currently enrolled in learning institutions, the Kenya Society for Deaf Children (KSDC) statistics show. KSDC says that out of an estimated 230,000 listed cases of deaf and partially deaf children, only 3,500 are attending integrated special primary and secondary schools and technical institutes.

Nigeria: Bridging the education divide

2002-02-28

http://www.oxfam.org.uk/educationnow/kibera.htm

In a far flug corner of Nigeria, Kibera is a typical shanty town deprived of government health-care workers and teachers. Oxfam is working here in partnership with community leaders, improving sanitation and education opportunities.

South Africa: Tortured Child is Back At School

2002-02-28

http://allafrica.com/stories/200202150471.html

A 13-year-old boy who was so severely tortured and beaten by his teacher that he may never be able to father a child has become a loner, a truant and a bed wetter. Kenneth Mpofu from Daantjie tribal trust near Nelspruit enrolled at a new school this week but hasn't received any counselling and can't seem to break from the shackles of the abuse.

SUDAN: NGO expresses concern for neglected "lost girls"

2002-02-28

http://www.irinnews.org/report.asp?ReportID=20879

The nongovernmental organisation Refugees International on Tuesday expressed concern that the US refugee resettlement programme for the so-called "lost boys of Sudan" had not been matched by an equal effort on behalf of Sudanese refugee girls by the UN refugee agency and the US administration.

Trauma Intervention and Conflict Resolution in Ethnopolitical Warfare

A Graduate Level Curriculum

2002-02-28

http://www.hrea.org/erc/Library/medical_personnel/psysr01.html

This guide outlines the components of graduate curriculum course which addresses applying psychology to alleviate the social and psychological problems in communities devastated by ethnopolitical warfare. The curriculum may be incorporated into an existing program for post-graduate or post-doctorate training course.

UGANDA: AIDS and war orphans a compelling concern

2002-02-28

http://www.irinnews.org/report.asp?ReportID=22306

Uganda has an estimated 1.7 million orphans, the highest number in the world, and 25 percent of all households look after at least one child orphaned by either HIV/AIDS or war, according to a new study by the Ministry of Gender and Labour and Social Development, cited by the nongovernmental organisation World Vision.

South Africa Lays Apartheid to Rest

2002-02-28

http://www.rnw.nl/hotspots/html/sa020220.html

South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission is closing its doors. Although formally dissolved, a skeleton staff is putting the finishing touches to a report that is meant to sum up the apartheid years. The commission, headed by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, was a unique device designed to help South Africa to deal with its past and in so doing reconcile white and black. But has it done so?

The United Nations World Conference Against Racism

2002-02-28

http://www.minorityrights.org

Margot Salomon - Minority Rights Group World Conference Against Racism Project Officer - suggests that despite the adverse publicity surrounding the 2001 Durban Conference, the work over the last 18 months has been positive and has made significant contribution towards addressing and combating racism.
The United Nations World Conference Against Racism

Margot Salomon - MRG's World Conference Against Racism Project Officer - suggests that despite the adverse publicity surrounding the 2001 Durban Conference, the work over the last 18 months has been positive and has made significant contribution towards addressing and combating racism.

Anyone who was engaged in the World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance process at Durban will likely agree that it was mired in high politics and low blows and often reflected the worst of the inter-state system within which the international human rights regime is elaborated.

However many have failed to acknowledge the successes a process of this type can yield. The World Conference did not begin in Durban. It began over a year before at the first preparatory meeting held in Geneva in May 2000. Over the past year, grassroots movements and networks have been established or reinforced, training on international standards and mechanisms were carried out in far corners of the world and in-depth research has been undertaken and published on the plight of diverse victims of racism and racial discrimination and methods by which racism may be addressed. The World Conference, despite its obvious shortcomings, undoubtedly served as a vehicle for the exposure of some of the most egregious and neglected forms of racial discrimination. There are few people who remain unaware of the Dalits or 'untouchables' of South Asia and the global dimensions of caste discrimination affecting 250 million people worldwide. There is renewed attention to the existence of contemporary slavery in, for example, Mauritania and Sudan, and to the ongoing plight of indigenous peoples throughout the world and their collective claim to be recognized as peoples under international law. Moreover, the World Conference produced a Declaration and Programme of Action that will further anti-racism initiatives both within the UN and beyond. A blanket condemnation of this World Conference reflects a simplistic appreciation of the nature of multilateral negotiations and, more importantly, of the successes behind the scenes that a medium of this magnitude invites.

Margot Salomon - Minority Rights Group International

UN: THIRD COMMITTEE CONSIDERS DRAFT PROPOSALS ON ELIMINATION OF RACISM

2002-02-28

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/racism/6084

The Third Committee (Social, Humanitarian and Cultural) met to hear the introduction of draft proposals relating to the elimination of racism and racial discrimination. Before the Committee were four draft resolutions, three of them -- all sponsored by Venezuela --relating respectively to the Third Decade to Combat Racism and Racial Discrimination; the follow-up to the World Conference against Racism; and measures to combat contemporary forms of racism and racial discrimination.


-----Original Message-----
From: kfn-editor-admin@kabissa.org
[mailto:kfn-editor-admin@kabissa.org]On Behalf Of OMCT
Sent: 19 February 2002 11:08
To: Appeals; Comunicados Urgentes; Communications fr
Subject: WCAR Follow-up


Dear OMCT members,

Please find herewith the UN press release regarding the introduction
of the draft resolutions relating to the elimination of racism and
racial discrimination that took place at the General Assembly's Third
Committee, last Friday 15 February.

Looking forward to hearing from you,

Best regards

Elsa Le Pennec
Racism Programme
World Organisation Against Torture (OMCT)

----------------------------

Chers membres de l'OMCT,

Veuillez trouver ci-joint un communiqué de presse des NU sur
l'introduction des projets de résolutions sur l'élimination du
racisme et la discrimination raciale qui s'est déroulé le 15 février
2002 au Troisième Comité de l'Assemblée Générale.

Restant à votre disposition pour toute information supplémentaire
concernant le programme Racisme de l'OMCT,

Meilleures salutations.

Elsa Le Pennec
Programme Racisme
Organisation Mondiale Contre la Torture (OMCT)

------------------------

Estimados miembros de la OMCT,

Por favor encuentren adjunto el comunicado de prensa de las
Naciones Unidas sobre la introducción de los projectos de resolución
sobre la eliminación del racismo y la discriminación racial,
realizado el pasado viernes 15 de febrero en el Tercer Comité de la
Asamblea General.

Cordial saludo,

Elsa Le Pennec
Programa Racismo
Organisacion Mundial Contra la Tortura (OMCT)






|--------------+----------------------------------------------------|
| |UNITED NATIONS |
| (Embedded | |
| image moved |Press Release |
| to file: | |
| pic32106.pcx)| |
| | |
| | |
| | |
|--------------+----------------------------------------------------|



THIRD COMMITTEE CONSIDERS DRAFT PROPOSALS ON ELIMINATION OF RACISM,
RACIAL
DISCRIMINATION
|----------------------------------------------------------|
| |
|Fifty-sixth General Assembly |
|Third Committee |
|60th Meeting (PM) |
| GA/SHC/3683|
| 15 February 2002|
| |
| |
|The Third Committee (Social, Humanitarian and Cultural) |
|met this afternoon to hear the introduction of draft |
|proposals relating to the elimination of racism and racial|
|discrimination. |
| |
|Before the Committee were four draft resolutions, three of|
|them -- all sponsored by Venezuela -- relating |
|respectively to the Third Decade to Combat Racism and |
|Racial Discrimination; the follow-up to the World |
|Conference against Racism; and measures to combat |
|contemporary forms of racism and racial discrimination. |
|The fourth text -- measures against political platforms |
|based on doctrines of superiority -- is sponsored by |
|Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and the Russian |
|Federation. |
| |
|The Committee is expected to take action on the draft |
|resolutions at its next meeting at 10 a.m. on Tuesday, 26 |
|February. |
| |
|Introduction of Draft Resolutions |
| |
|Adriana Pulido (Venezuela), introduced the first three |
|drafts on behalf of the "Group of 77" developing nations |
|and China. She said the second text (contained in document|
|A/C.3/56/L.84) was a new one endorsing the final document |
|of last year's World Conference against Racism, held in |
|Durban, South Africa. It supported the proposal by the |
|United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights for the |
|establishment of an anti-discrimination Unit, and invited |
|her Office to appoint five eminent experts to work with |
|the Chairman of the Human Rights Commission and produce a |
|yearly report on implementation. |
| |
|Referring to the first and third drafts (documents |
|A/C.3/56/L.83 and A/C.3/56/L.85), she said they contained |
|provisions similar to others adopted during the |
|fifty-fifth session, but they had been updated in view of |
|Durban. The draft on the Third Decade to combat racism |
|included provisions on racial discrimination against |
|Africans and people of African descent, as well as |
|financing to improve their situation. |
| |
|The third draft dealt with new manifestations of racism |
|and racial discrimination, she said. It stressed the need |
|to recall the errors of the past with a view to condemning|
|them; called for the criminalization of trafficking in |
|people, particularly women and children, and contained |
|provisions on racial profiling as well as the social and |
|cultural rights of victims of racism, racial |
|discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance. |
|Anzhela Korneliouk (Belarus), speaking on behalf of |
|Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and the Russian Federation, |
|introduced the final text (document A/C.3/56/L.86), saying|
|there was still reason for concern with respect to the |
|emergence and widespread growth of so-called "contemporary|
|racism". That type of racism was based on intolerance and |
|extremism, and further threatened international peace and |
|security, the free development of States, and the |
|assurance of equal rights among States and their citizens.|
|It was appropriate, once again, to ask the General |
|Assembly to decisively condemn political platforms and |
|activities based on doctrines of superiority. |
| |
|Summaries of Draft Resolutions |
| |
|Part I of a draft entitled Third Decade to Combat Racism |
|and Racial Discrimination and the World Conference against|
|Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related |
|Intolerance (document A/C.3/56/L.83), reaffirms that |
|racism and racial discrimination are among the most |
|serious violations of human rights in the contemporary |
|world, and expresses its firm determination and commitment|
|to eradicate, by all available means, racism in all its |
|forms and racial discrimination. |
| |
|That draft emphasizes the importance of full compliance by|
|States parties with the International Convention on the |
|Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination. It |
|would have the General Assembly strongly underline the |
|importance of education in preventing and eradicating |
|racism and racial discrimination and of creating awareness|
|of the principles of human rights, in particular among |
|young people. It would have the Assembly encourage the |
|mass media to promote ideas of tolerance and understanding|
|among peoples and different cultures. |
| |
|Further, the Assembly would urge governments to take all |
|necessary measures to combat new forms of racism, |
|especially in the legislative, judicial, administrative, |
|educational and information fields. It would call upon |
|States to bring resolutely to justice the perpetrators of |
|crimes motivated by racism, and call upon all those that |
|had not done so to consider including racist motivation as|
|an aggravating factor for the purpose of sentencing. |
| |
|Part II of the draft would have the Assembly request the |
|Commission on Human Rights to consider establishing a |
|working group or other United Nations mechanism to study |
|the problems of racial discrimination faced by people of |
|African descent living in the African Diaspora and make |
|proposals for the elimination of such problems. |
| |
|The Assembly would also request States to develop and |
|support institutional mechanisms to promote the |
|accomplishment of the objectives and measures relating to |
|indigenous peoples agreed in the present plan of action; |
|and promote, in concert with indigenous organizations, |
|local authorities and non-governmental organizations, |
|actions aimed at overcoming racism, racial discrimination,|
|xenophobia and related intolerance against indigenous |
|peoples. |
| |
|The text would have the Assembly encourage financial and |
|development institutions as well as United Nations |
|programmes and specialized agencies to assign particular |
|priority and allocate sufficient funding to improve the |
|situation of victims of racism, racial discrimination, |
|xenophobia and related intolerance, and to include them in|
|the development and implementation of projects concerning |
|them. |
| |
|Those institutions, programmes and agencies are encouraged|
|to integrate human rights principles and standards into |
|their policies and programmes; to consider including in |
|their regular reporting information on their contribution |
|to promote the participation of the victims within their |
|programmes and activities; and to examine how their |
|policies and practices affect the victims and ensure that |
|those policies and practices contribute to the eradication|
|of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related |
|intolerance. |
| |
|According to the draft resolution entitled Comprehensive |
|implementation of the outcome and follow-up to the World |
|Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, |
|Xenophobia and Related Intolerance (document |
|A/C.3/56/L.84), the Assembly would decide to hold a |
|special session in 2006 for an overall review and |
|appraisal of the implementation of the Conference outcome |
|and to consider further actions and initiatives. |
| |
|Stressing the need to translate the Durban commitments |
|into concrete actions, the Assembly would urge States to |
|establish and implement without delay national policies |
|and action plans to combat racism, racial discrimination, |
|xenophobia and related intolerance. |
| |
|Similarly, it would call upon all States to give |
|widespread publicity to the Durban Declaration and |
|Programme of Action, in order to increase, strengthen and |
|enhance that fight. |
| |
|Under a related provision, the Assembly would request the |
|Secretary-General to appoint five independent eminent |
|experts to follow the implementation of the provisions of |
|the Declaration and Action Programme. It would also |
|request the High Commissioner for Human Rights to |
|cooperate with those five experts and report annually to |
|the Assembly and the Human Rights Commission on |
|implementation of the provisions of the Declaration and |
|Action Programme. |
| |
|The Assembly also would recognize the critical importance |
|of placing the outcome of the Durban Conference on an |
|equal footing with previous Untied Nations world |
|conferences that have addressed essential social and human|
|rights issues, such as the outcomes of the 1993 World |
|Conference on Human Rights, the 1995 World Social Summit |
|for Social Development, and the 1995 Fourth World |
|Conference on Women, all of which had five-year reviews. |
| |
|By a draft entitled Measures to combat contemporary forms |
|of racism and racial discrimination, xenophobia and |
|related intolerance (document A/C.3/56/L.85), the General |
|Assembly would reaffirm the proclamation of 2001 as the |
|International Year of Mobilization against Racism, Racial |
|Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance. |
| |
|By other terms, it would reaffirm that violence against |
|others stemming from racism did not constitute expressions|
|of opinion but rather offences. The Assembly would further|
|express its profound concern about and unequivocal |
|condemnation of all forms of racism, racial |
|discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance, in |
|particular all racist violence, including related acts of |
|random and indiscriminate violence. |
|Further, the Assembly would express its profound concern |
|about and unequivocal condemnation of all forms of racism |
|and racial discrimination, including propaganda, |
|activities and organizations based on doctrines of |
|superiority attempting to justify or promote racism and |
|racial discrimination in any form. |
| |
|The Assembly would further express its profound concern |
|about and condemnation of racism, racial discrimination, |
|xenophobia and related intolerance against, and |
|stereotyping of, migrant workers and members of their |
|families, persons belonging to minorities and members of |
|vulnerable groups in many societies, |
| |
|Also by the text, the Assembly would note with great |
|concern that, despite the international community's |
|efforts at various levels, racism, racial discrimination, |
|xenophobia and related forms of intolerance, ethnic |
|antagonism and violence were showing signs of increase in |
|many parts of the world, and that the number of |
|associations established on the basis of racial and |
|xenophobic charters was increasing. |
| |
|According to a text on Measures to be taken against |
|political platforms and activities based on doctrines of |
|superiority which are based on racial discrimination or |
|ethnic exclusiveness and xenophobia, including, in |
|particular, neo-Nazism (document A/C.3/56/L.86), the |
|Assembly would urge States to take all available measures |
|in accordance with their obligations under international |
|human rights instruments to combat those phenomena. |
| |
|The Assembly would urge all States to consider the |
|adoption, as a matter of high priority, of appropriate |
|measures to eradicate activities that lead to violence and|
|condemn any dissemination of ideas based on doctrines of |
|superiority, consistent with their national legal systems |
|and in accordance with the Universal Declaration of Human |
|Rights, the International Covenants on Human Rights and |
|the International Convention on the Elimination of All |
|Forms of Racial Discrimination. |
| |
|Deeply alarmed at the continued intensification of |
|activities by neo-Nazi groups and organizations, the |
|Assembly would again resolutely condemn political |
|platforms and activities based on doctrines of |
|superiority, which are based on racial discrimination or |
|ethnic exclusiveness and xenophobia, including, in |
|particular, neo-Nazism, which entail abuse of human rights|
|and fundamental freedoms. |
| |
|The Assembly would also request the Secretary-General to |
|include, in his report to the next Assembly session, |
|information on the measures taken by Member States against|
|political platforms and activities based on doctrines of |
|superiority which are based on racial discrimination or |
|ethnic exclusiveness and xenophobia, in particular |
|neo-Nazism. |
|----------------------------------------------------------|


Organisation Mondiale Contre la Torture (OMCT)
World Organisation Against Torture (OMCT)
Organización Mundial Contra la Tortura (OMCT)
8 rue du Vieux-Billard
Case postale 21
CH-1211 Geneve 8
Suisse/Switzerland
Tel. : 0041 22 809 49 39
Fax : 0041 22 809 49 29
E-mail : omct@omct.org
http://www.omct.org

China, Brazil, India, 9 other nations form alliance against biopiracy

2002-02-28

http://enn.com/news/wire-stories/2002/02/02192002/ap_46427.asp

China, Brazil, India, and nine other of the world's most biodiverse countries signed an alliance Monday to fight biopiracy and press for rules protecting their people's rights to genetic resources found on their land. The declaration — also signed by representatives of Indonesia, Costa Rica, Colombia, Ecuador, Kenya, Peru, Venezuela, and South Africa — echoed complaints long voiced by Indians and environmentalists: that wealthy nations are "prospecting" for species in order to patent or sell them without offering concessions or benefits for local people.

Djibouti: Pesticide leak causing environmental problem

2002-02-28

http://enn.com/news/wire-stories/2002/02/02202002/ap_46435.asp

Shipping containers packed with a toxic chemical are leaking in the port of Djibouti, and the pollution could spread, a U.N. food agency said Tuesday. The chemical — chromated copper arsenate, which is used as a wood preservative — was shipped from Britain for delivery to the Ethiopian Power Corporation, according to the Rome-based Food and Agriculture Organization. The pesticide is carcinogenic and dangerous to the environment.

DOUBT CAST ON THEORY OF HOW HUMAN INTELLIGENCE EVOLVED

2002-02-28

http://sciam.rsc03.net/servlet/cc?lJpDUWEHsrHFlgDHiJDhknE0EXYT

What could be more uniquely human than the desire to understand how our minds evolved? Much of the story of evolution is entirely unknown. The results of a new study suggest that some of what scientists thought they knew may require revision.

Global Warming Effects on Sea Level Underestimated

2002-02-28

http://ens-news.com/ens/feb2002/2002L-02-19-07.html

Global sea levels could rise eight inches by the end of this century, more than the rise predicted last year by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Melting glaciers and collapsing Antarctic ice sheets, such as the 58 square mile iceberg that calved from the Matusevich Glacier Tongue earlier this month, foreshadow the problems to come.

TANZANIA: SEBASTIAN CHUWA WINS ENVIRONMENTAL AWARD DURING OLYMPIC CEREMONIES

2002-02-28

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/environment/6124

Sebastian Chuwa, an environmentalist who has long been active in implementing educational and tree-planting programs for sustainable development on Mt. Kilimanjaro, has received the "Spirit of the Land" award during Olympic ceremonies in Salt Lake City, USA. This award, presented by the Salt Lake Olympic Committee, was given to 10 US and 5 international recipients for their work in promoting environmental educational efforts during the year 2001.
TANZANIA: SEBASTIAN CHUWA WINS ENVIRONMENTAL AWARD DURING OLYMPIC CEREMONIES

SNIPPET:
Sebastian Chuwa, an environmentalist who has long been active in
implementing educational and tree-planting programs for sustainable
development on Mt. Kilimanjaro, has received the "Spirit of the Land" award
during Olympic ceremonies in Salt Lake City, USA. This award, presented by
the Salt Lake Olympic Committee, was given to 10 US and 5 international
recipients for their work in promoting environmental educational efforts
during the year 2001.

Sebastian Chuwa, a Tanzanian botanist and environmentalist, has been chosen
by the Salt Lake Olympic Committee to receive the "Spirit of the Land Award"
honoring his work in environmental education. The award was presented to ten
US and five international recipients during Olympic Ceremonies in Salt Lake
City, Utah.
In 1994, the International Olympic Committee adopted environment as the
third principle of Olympism along with sport and culture. One of the primary
goals of the Salt Lake Olympic Committee has been to ensure the protection
of Utah's environment while staging the 2002 Games. The Spirit of the Land
program embodies a commitment to raise the general consciousness of its
guests from around the world about green practices, to leave a legacy of
environmental improvement and to honor individuals from around the world who
have made substantial educational efforts on behalf of the environment.
During the past ten years Mr. Chuwa has been active in organizing
communities on Mt. Kilimanjaro to institute programs which protect the
ecology of the mountain. The rich volcanic soil of Kilimanjaro makes it one
of Tanzania's most important agricultural areas. Runoff from its slopes
supply a large surrounding region with vital water for drinking, irrigation
and hydrological power.
Working through the local school system, Mr. Chuwa has established 47
Malihai Clubs (youth conservation groups) which are teaching students the
importance of sound ecological practices and organizing them in practical
activities to help the environment. Each school group establishes a tree
nursery and raises seedlings which they replant in deforested areas which
need reclamation or distribute into the community to help raise the standard
of living for those who live on the mountain. Each year these Clubs host a
5-day Environmental Day celebration to raise environmental awareness on the
mountain and to encourage replanting of local species. Malihai Clubs on Mt.
Kilimanjaro have replanted over 500,000 trees, many of them along the
overused routes that backpackers use in climbing the mountain.
Mr. Chuwa has also co-founded the African Blackwood Conservation Project
(ABCP), along with a US team of woodworkers. This organization spearheads
educational and replanting programs for African blackwood, an important
species that is used internationally in the manufacture of musical
instruments and by the carving cooperatives of eastern Africa. Because of
over harvesting this wood is now becoming threatened and several
international groups are working towards instituting programs for its
sustainable use. In 2001 Mr. Chuwa received a grant from the Charles A. and
Anne Morrow Lindbergh Foundation which was devoted to educational and tree
planting programs for African blackwood.

U.N. conference addresses drought, creeping deserts, and poverty

2002-02-28

http://enn.com/news/wire-stories/2002/02/02202002/ap_46436.asp

Drought, poverty, creeping deserts, and scarce drinking water headline a U.N.-sponsored conference on global development and the environment this week. Delegates from 50 African, Caribbean, and Latin American countries were evaluating the 1994 U.N. Convention to Combat Desertification, which has been ratified by 180 countries but has spurred few to act.

Africa: Children's Television Service?

2002-02-28

http://www.sabceducation.co.za

SABC has identified an opportunity to make indigenous children's television programming more widely available to broadcasters throughout Africa - programmes which reflect the life experiences and cultures of African children, affirm their sense of self and place, and provide them with entertainment, information and education to promote their positive social, cognitive and emotional development. On a daily basis, a block of programming for children and young people will be made available free to-air via terrestrial broadcasters for re transmission in African countries interested in partnering with the SABC. Starting with one hour per day, the programmes will span a range of genres, providing 'edutainment' for children at home and supporting formal schooling where appropriate. Largely indigenous in nature, the programmes will be delivered in English and each partner country will customize the block according to its needs and context.
Public Tender for a Feasibility Study into a Children's Television Service
for Africa

SABC has identified an opportunity to make indigenous children's television
programming more widely available to broadcasters throughout Africa -
programmes which reflect the life experiences and cultures of African
children, affirm their sense of self and place, and provide them with
entertainment, information and education to promote their positive social,
cognitive and emotional development. On a daily basis, a block of
programming for children and young people will be made available free-to-air
via terrestrial broadcasters for re-transmission in African countries
interested in partnering with the SABC. Starting with one hour per day, the
programmes will span a range of genres, providing 'edutainment' for children
at home and supporting formal schooling where appropriate. Largely
indigenous in nature, the programmes will be delivered in English and each
partner country will customize the block according to its needs and context.
Partners are likely to include broadcasters in Africa (initially in
Anglophone Africa), international broadcasters interested in co-productions
and other forms of partnership, the Union of African Broadcasters (URTNA),
Unicef SA, donors, sponsors and producers interested in co-production
opportunities. Countries initially to be approached for partnership are
likely to include Ghana, Nigeria, Tanzania, Kenya, Botswana, Seychelles,
Mauritius, Zimbabwe and Namibia. To turn this opportunity into a reality,
the SABC seeks to commission a Feasibility Study. The study will be
conducted in collaboration with the Union of African Broadcasters (URTNA)
and interested partners, and will produce two deliverables: a research
report and a business plan. Objectives include: delivering a sustainable
African children's programming block from South Africa for licensing and
customisation by different African broadcasters; and facilitating further
indigenous production for African children's programming through
co-productions, barters and other collaborative efforts. Closing date for
tenders is 28 February 2002.

Contact: Ilzé Nix, SABC Education Television, tel: +27 11 714-5969, fax: +27
11 714-6835, email: nixi@sabc.co.za, www.sabceducation.co.za
NF148/BN/Msc

BURUNDI: Ban lifted on Net Press news agency

2002-02-28

http://www.irinnews.org/report.asp?ReportID=22610

Burundian Communications Minister Albert Mbonerane on Saturday lifted the suspension of the right of the private news agency Net Press to publish or post news on its web site, Net Press Editor-in-Chief Claude Sibomana told IRIN on Monday.

DRC: Radio Okapi to begin broadcasting on Monday

2002-02-28

http://www.irinnews.org/report.asp?ReportID=22308

A new radio network with a particular focus on peace-making efforts will be launched in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) on Monday, 25 February, to coincide with the convocation of the inter-Congolese dialogue in Sun City, South Africa.

Ethiopia: 30 Journalists for ICT Training in Addis

2002-02-28

http://allafrica.com/stories/200202270101.html

Not less than 30 journalists from the African continent on Monday commenced a one-week training programme on Information, Technology and Communication (ICT) in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The training programme put together by the Economic Community of Africa, (ECA), United Nations Education and Scientific and Cultural Organisation, (UNESCO) and United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) as well as the Association for Progressive Communication (APC), is to acquaint journalists in the continent with the latest information on the internet and general ICT needs.

Liberia: Journalists harassed under state of emergency

2002-02-28

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/media/6153

In a 21 February 2002 letter to Liberian President Charles G. Taylor, CPJ expressed deep concern over the recent arrest of three journalists and the suspension of their newspaper, which had recently criticized the current state of emergency in Liberia.

ACTION ALERT UPDATE - LIBERIA

22 February 2002

Journalists harassed under state of emergency

SOURCE: Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), New York

**Updates IFEX alert of 13 February 2002**

(CPJ/IFEX) - In a 21 February 2002 letter to Liberian President Charles G.
Taylor, CPJ expressed deep concern over the recent arrest of three
journalists and the suspension of their newspaper, which had recently
criticized the current state of emergency in Liberia.

On 12 February, police in Monrovia arrested Stanley Seakor, the publisher
and managing editor of "The Analyst", and reporters James Lloyd and Ellis
Togba. The police also suspended the publication. The journalists were
released the following day, when the newspaper was allowed to resume
publication.

According to senior police official Paul Mulbah, the arrests resulted from
"Analyst" articles that were allegedly inflammatory and "not in the interest
of peace." Mulbah pointed to two articles in particular. The first was
titled, "Emergency Power Pinches Businesses: What Rights and Freedoms Can
the President Suspend?" The second ran under the headline, "Normalcy Slips
Away: Liberians Drowning in Horrors."

The arrests followed the government's imposition of a state of emergency to
deal with the rebel insurgency in northern Liberia. In a statement issued on
the day of the arrests, the Ministry of Information announced that anyone
who commented on the state of emergency without first seeking proper
government authorization would be "dealt with" under the emergency law.

This is not the first time the government has harassed Liberia's beleaguered
independent media. In February 2001, authorities shut down four
publications, including "The Analyst", for alleged failure to pay tax
arrears (see IFEX alert of 13 February 2001). In April, the government
announced that press reports on fighting in the north of the country and on
other issues of national security should be cleared with the Ministry of
Information before publication or broadcast (see IFEX alert of 3 May 2001).

Local journalists fear that the state of emergency will be invoked to censor
critical or unfavorable reporting, as the recent arrests and closures at
"The Analyst" attest.

RECOMMENDED ACTION:

Send appeals to the president:
- noting that CPJ named him as one of the Ten Worst Enemies of the Press in
2001, based on his use of censorship, prison, and threats of violence to
silence virtually all independent journalism in Liberia
- urging his government to refrain from interfering with the work of
journalists

APPEALS TO:

President Charles G. Taylor
President of the Republic of Liberia
Monrovia, Liberia
Fax: +231 225 217

Please copy appeals to the source if possible.

For further information, contact Yves Sorokobi (ext. 112) or Wacuka Mungai
(ext. 106) at CPJ, 330 Seventh Ave., New York, NY 10001, U.S.A., tel: +1 212
465 1004, fax: +1 212 465 9568, e-mail: africa@cpj.org, ysorokobi@cpj.org,
wmungai@cpj.org, Internet: http://www.cpj.org/

The information contained in this action alert update is the sole
responsibility of CPJ. In citing this material for broadcast or publication,
please credit CPJ.
_________________________________________________________________
DISTRIBUTED BY THE INTERNATIONAL FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION
EXCHANGE (IFEX) CLEARING HOUSE
489 College Street, Suite 403,Toronto (ON) M6G 1A5 CANADA
tel: +1 416 515 9622 fax: +1 416 515 7879
alerts e-mail: alerts@ifex.org general e-mail: ifex@ifex.org
Internet site: http://www.ifex.org/
_________________________________________________________________

MALAWI: Party youths attack paper

2002-02-28

http://www.irinnews.org/report.asp?ReportID=22607

Malawi's independent press is the latest casualty of political intolerance in the region, the Media Institute of Southern Africa (MISA) said in a statement.

Nigeria: Bad, Bad, Press

2002-02-28

http://allafrica.com/stories/200202260466.html

Expectedly, the Cable News Network CNN's bureau chief in Nigeria Jeff Koinange has been a butt of verbal darts over what his critics described as his deliberate 'coinage' of his own version of happenings in Nigeria, especially the recent clashes at Idi-Araba, Lagos.

Nigeria: Lamido Urges Journalists to Ascertain Democracy Benefits

2002-02-28

http://www.mediachannel.org/

The Minister of Foreign Affairs, Alhaji Sule Lamido, has urged journalists to find out from the people at the grassroots how their lives had been changed since the return of democracy in 1999. Addressing journalists at the weekend in Kano, Lamido said there had been so much distortion of facts, manipulation and reckless utterances

Rwanda: Journalists Relied On Information From Soldiers And Militiamen, Genocide Convict Tells Court

2002-02-28

http://allafrica.com/stories/200202270375.html

Genocide convict George Ruggiu, a former journalist at Radio Television Libres des Mille Collines (RTLM), today testified before the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) that after 6 April 1994 journalists at the radio station relied on information from soldiers and militiamen for their broadcasts.

Uganda: Why ministers take cover when scribes show up

2002-02-28

http://www.monitor.co.ug/archive.php?record_number=1227&month=February&year=2002&date=23&section=Opinion

Last week, while delivering a paper on press freedom at the Islamic University in Mbale, I did say that some ministers fear the press because they are always misquoted. The following day The Monitor carried a report titled “Ministers Fear the Press, Says Karooro”.While it is true I said it, the reporter did not outline the reasons I gave for my assertion.That is Uganda’s press for you - telling only part of the story, choosing what is interesting and many a time leaving out the important.

Zimbabwe: 131 Scribes From US, Europe Seek Accreditation

2002-02-28

http://allafrica.com/stories/200202260390.html

At least 131 journalists from the United States and Europe have applied to cover the country's forthcoming presidential poll set for March 9 and 10.

Zimbabwe: Independent Newspapers banned from reporting

2002-02-28

http://www.gvnews.net/html/DailyNews/alert338.html

Zimbabwe would not allow journalists working for the Independent Newspapers group to cover the presidential election in that country, a Zimbabwean government official said on Thursday.

Angola: Bush urges ceasefire

2002-02-28

http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/africa/newsid_1843000/1843048.stm

US President George W Bush has called on Angola's leaders to seize the opportunity presented by the death of Unita rebel leader Jonas Savimbi and bring an end to the country's long-running civil war.

ANGOLA: Chiefs call for ceasefire, national conference

2002-02-28

http://www.irinnews.org/report.asp?ReportID=22270

Angola's traditional leaders this week added their voices to the call for an immediate ceasefire and the creation of a sovereign national conference to discuss the country's political future.

ANGOLA: Savimbi's death new impetus to peace process

2002-02-28

http://www.irinnews.org/report.asp?ReportID=22324

The death of veteran Angolan rebel leader Jonas Savimbi has added new impetus to the search for a settlement to the country's long-running civil war, analysts told IRIN over the weekend.

BURUNDI: Rebel faction, government agree on framework

2002-02-28

http://www.irinnews.org/report.asp?ReportID=22907

A faction of the Conseil national pour la défense de la démocratie-Forces pour la défense de la démocratie (CNDD-FDD) and the transitional government on Friday 22 February agreed on a general framework of negotiations intended to lead, as soon as possible, to a definite agreement on a cease-fire and the restoration of democracy in Burundi.

Code of Conduct for Conflict Transformation Work

2002-02-28

http://www.hrea.org/erc/Library/armed_forces/ia01.html

This short guide is designed to act as an ethical framework for transformation work and outlines the necessary principles for reaching constructive resolution to conflict. Major topics discussed in this guide include human rights in the context of conflict transformation work, impartiality, and establishing peaceful partnerships. This guide is appropriate for use in the grassroots, academic, research, religious or military sectors.

Conflict and Peace in Mountain Societies

Case Study: Ethnic Conflict in Rwanda

2002-02-28

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/conflict/6061

In the late 1980s Rwanda, the country of "a thousand hills", was considered by many Africans, visitors, and development workers to be the "jewel of East Africa" and "Africa's best kept secret". Curiously out of the camera's field of view, however, was the real situation that confronted more than 95 per cent of the country's population of 7.5 million people.
Conflict and Peace in Mountain Societies

Case Study: Ethnic Conflict in Rwanda

In the late 1980s Rwanda, the country of "a thousand hills", was
considered by many Africans, visitors, and development workers to
be the "jewel of East Africa" and "Africa's best kept secret".
Sigourney Weaver and "Gorillas in the Mist" had brought
international attention to the country through a movie filled with
romantic images of Ruhengeri Prefecture's beautiful and forested
landscapes. Volcanoes such as Karisimbi (4,507 m), Bisoke (3,711
m), and Sabinyo (3,674 m) graced the horizons of this seemingly
peaceful and mountainous country.

Curiously out of the camera's field of view, however, was the real
situation that confronted more than 95 per cent of the country's
population of 7.5 million people. The typical steep hillslope up
to the foot of the volcanoes was cleared, under intense
cultivation, and poorly protected with either structural or
biological terracing. The original afromontane forests were long
gone, and more than half of those remaining in protected areas,
such as the Parc National des Volcans, had been cleared in the
1970s and 1980s in the name of "development" and agricultural
expansion. The countryside was one of the most densely populated
in the world, with as many as 760 people per km2 and an annual
growth rate of more than 3 per cent. Hillslope erosion,
landslides, and annual soil loss were among the highest in the
world, seriously threatening food production.

Ethnic tension, primarily between the Hutu and Tutsi groups, was
more than a hundred years old and generally accepted as a fact of
life. Between April and August of 1994, however, more than 1
million people, primarily Tutsi, were killed, and 2 million more
turned into refugees, in one of the most terrible acts of genocide
of the 20th century. As mentioned by Frederick Starr, the reasons
behind this tragedy are extremely complex, widely thought to have
included environmental scarcity, overpopulation, poverty,
victimization, and ineffective, corrupt governmental regimes.
However, the inherited burden of severe ethnic cleavage and
animosity assuredly played important roles that are in need of
much greater attention and analysis.

Pre-colonial differences between the Hutu and Tutsi, for example,
were based primarily on basic distinctions between being an
agriculturalist or pastoralist, and social interchanges between
the two groups remained fluid. The German and Belgian colonial
powers, however, favored the Tutsis for positions of local power
that seriously began the process of thickening the walls of ethnic
distrust, fear, and hatred. The Hutu "revolt" of 1959 led to
Rwandan independence in 1962, which served to further divide and
segregate ethnic categories and discrimination. According to
Percival and Homer-Dixon (1995), these ethnic barriers were then
exacerbated by a number of other significant factors that included
the scarcity of land, the civil war, structural adjustment, the
fall in coffee prices, Rwanda's position as a landlocked country
with little chance for economic diversification, and a threatened
and reactive governmental regime. When President Juvenal
Habyarimana's plane exploded in the skies above Kigali on 6 April
1994, the violence that had gripped the country for the past 40
months, much of it rooted in historic grievances, also exploded.

One of the most important questions that has been asked frequently
since the resultant genocide is, "could this tragedy have been
prevented?" While dozens of international development agencies
conducted business as usual in the very places that witnessed the
most horrific massacres, were there in fact indicators of the
severity of ethnic conflict that could have served as warnings?
Most atrocities seem impossible to imagine until they actually
happen. Nevertheless, are there warning signals that should be
acknowledged and acted upon in the interests of preventing the
eruption of similar conflicts and tragedies in the future?

In addition to the solid list of "best practices" mentioned by
Starr, greater attention to the importance of ethnic grievance,
whether recent or historic, seems long overdue.

References

Byers, A. 1991. "Soil loss and sediment transport during the
storms and landslides of May 1988 in Ruhengeri Prefecture,
Rwanda." Natural Hazards.

Percival, V. and Homer-Dixon, T. 1995. Environmental Scarcity and
Violent Conflict: The Case of Rwanda. Occasional Paper: Project on
Environment, Population and Security. Washington, D.C.: American
Association for the Advancement of Science and the University of
Toronto. June 1995. Parts I and II.

Uvin, P. The Failure of the International Community to Prevent
Genocide in Rwanda. Internet site at:
www.globalpolicy.org/security/issues/uvin.htm

Photographs and Maps

---
Alton C. Byers, Ph.D.
Director, Research and Education
The Mountain Institute
107 Westridge Drive
Elkins, WV 26241
+1-304-636-6980 (tel)
+1-304-637-8413 (fax)
email: abyers@mountain.org
The Mountain Institute web site: http://www.mountain.org
Mountain Forum web site: http://www.mtnforum.org

Congo Talks On Hold Until Wednesday

2002-02-28

http://allafrica.com/stories/200202270001.html

The inter-Congolese dialogue is stalled, with Jean-Pierre Bemba, leader of the rebel MLC, boycotting the talks. In an allAfrica.com interview, Congo's information minister, Kikaya bin Karubi, denied the claim that the Kinshasa government had replaced opposition groups with its own surrogates.

DRC: Draft agenda for inter-Congolese dialogue

2002-02-28

http://www.irinnews.org/report.asp?ReportID=22613

The inter-Congolese dialogue talks bringing together government representatives, opposition groups, splintered rebel groups and civil society members - including tribal militia representatives, church groups, unions and women's groups - from all walks of life in the Democratic Republic of the Congo opened on Monday, 25 February in Sun City, South Africa. The talks are expected to last 45 days. The draft agenda for the meetings, as published by the Office of the Facilitator for the inter-Congolese dialogue, is the following:
DRC: Draft agenda for inter-Congolese dialogue
NAIROBI, 25 Feb 2002 (IRIN) - The inter-Congolese dialogue talks bringing together government representatives, opposition groups, splintered rebel groups and civil society members - including tribal militia representatives, church groups, unions and women's groups - from all walks of life in the Democratic Republic of the Congo opened on Monday, 25 February in Sun City, South Africa. The talks are expected to last 45 days. The draft agenda for the meetings, as published by the Office of the Facilitator for the inter-Congolese dialogue, is the following:

1. Validation of delegates mandates.

2. Formal adoption of the Rules of Procedure.

3. Adoption of the Agenda.

4. General Statements.

5. End of the war:
a) Assessments: causes and consequences
b) Disarmament of armed groups
c) Assessment of the withdrawal of foreign troops
d) Assessment of the level of compliance of signatories parties to the Lusaka Agreement
e) Cost of the two wars: 1996-1998
f) Peace and security in the DRC and in the subregion. International conference on peace in the Great Lakes region
g) Peace agreement involving the belligerent countries
h) Institution of the international tribunal for the Congo

6. The new political dispensation in DRC:
a) The new political dispensation in the DRC, in particular the institutions to be established for good governance purposes in the DRC.
b) Re-establishment of the State’s administrative authority over the entire territory.
c) Transitional constitution
d) Nationality
e) Post-electoral draft constitution

7. New National Congolese Army:
a) Formation of a new Congolese national army whose soldiers shall originate from the Congolese Armed Forces, the armed forces of the RCD [Rassemblement congolais pour la democratie] and armed forces of the MLC Mouvement de liberation du Congo]
b) Identification of Congolese nationals before the formation of the new army
c) Formation of Security and Police services
d) Formation of Civil protection services
e) Demobilisation and reintegration of child soldiers and vulnerable persons
f) Mechanism for the integration of Mayi-Mayi in the Army and the Police

8. Reconstruction:
a) Examination and assessment of the validity of economic and financial conventions signed during the war
b) Examination and assessment of validity of administrative, legislative and regulatory acts promulgated during the war

9. Urgent basic economic and social programme:
a) Compensation measures for the environment destroyed by the war

10. National Reconciliation:
a) Truth and reconciliation
b) Ethnic coexistence
c) Protection of minorities
d) Establishment of principles pertaining to nationality

11. Guarantees for a successful ending:
a) Involvement of international witnesses

12. Elections and Electoral Issues:
a) Independent electoral commission

13. Adoption of Resolutions.

14. Closing Speeches.

15. Signing of the final document.


[ENDS]

DRC: Goma volcano eruption fear

2002-02-28

http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/africa/newsid_1843000/1843997.stm

A second volcano is showing signs that it may erupt in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, say volcano experts in the region.

ERITREA-ETHIOPIA: Feature - A symbolic step to peace

2002-02-28

http://www.irinnews.org/report.asp?ReportID=22556

It was a small step towards a lasting peace. But as members of the UN Security Council team walked for the first time across the symbolic Mereb River Bridge linking Ethiopia to Eritrea, they realised the enormous gulf that still exists.

Liberians Fleeing Again

2002-02-28

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/conflict/6116

As if their mother land was cursed that wars would always befall it, which unfold themselves into untold suffering, agony and despair; thousands of Liberians have once again taken unto their heels as fighting intensifies between Government forces and rebels of the Liberia United for Reconcilation and Democracy (LURD).
Liberians Fleeing Again

By A. Alvin Winford

As if their mother land was cursed that wars would always befall it, which unfold themselves into untold suffering, agony and despair; thousands of Liberians have once again taken unto their heels as fighting intensifies between Government forces and rebels of the Liberia United for Reconcilation and Democracy (LURD).

It can be recalled vividly that between 1989-97, more than 250,000 Liberians lost their lives during Liberia`s worst nightmare. That war left every fibre of the country in ruins as households are now barely surviving on less than US$ 1.00 per day, far below the poverty belt. The main rebel leader then, Charles Taylor shocked the world when he convincibly whipped twelve other top notch politicians with more than 75 per cent of the votes, during the 1997 elections that seemingly brought an end to the seven year old carnage. International monitors rated the elections as free, fair and transparent.

Just as Liberians began to bury the arches of the war by putting their lives back in order, a new war was violently unleashed on them in April 1999 by embittered Liberians who claim that the Taylor Government had reneged on its campaign promises. They further charged that the government was practising bad governance and undemocratic tenets.

Taylor squarely blames neighboring Guinea for backing the dissidents to unseat him. Since 1999, the war has now uprooted three counties, viz the largest province and bread basket Lofa County, the newly created and timber riched Gbarpolu County and the former mining area of Bomi County. More than three times the rebels have been beaten back ,without much success. Yet they continue to remain adamant in their quest to violently dethrone their number one foe, Charles Taylor.

Little by little, they have been pushing towards Monrovia, seemingly without the citizenry being gravely petrified. But the latest skirmishes between the battling forces at the Klay Junction in Bomi County, just few miles from Monrovia have sent shock waves down the spines of war wearied Liberians as the rebels threathen that they will reach Monrovia at all cost. For residents of Lofa, Gbarpolu and Bomi Counties, the best option was to troop closer to Monrovia ,which now appears as the only safe haven.

For those who could not find their way to the city center, they managed to seek refuge on the campus of the Baptist owned Ricks Institute in Virginia and the compound of the former Voice of America in Brewerville.

Still for others who were apprehensive about reaching Monrovia, joined their Sierra Leonean counterparts who have been stationed in Singje, in Cape Mount County; to move closer to the Sierra Leonean border. But several of them were disiappointed at the Bo Waterside crossing point. Sierra Leonean immigration officers were demanding LD$50.00(US$1.00) as a token per Liberian refuge to cross over.

Already indigent and hopeless, several of them were left stranded, until the political authority from Freetown intervened. As that was being settled, authorities in Freetown are complaining that there is scarcity of food and medicine to cope with the increasing humanitarian situation resulting from the influx of Liberian refugees in the region. It must be pointed out that Sierra Leone too, is yet to fully graduate from the brunt of its civil conflict, although disarmament supervised by UN peace keepers has ended.

All the same, those who found their way at Ricks and the VOA compound, the story of suffering , wailing and yearning for a better tomorrow is identical. Inmates are emaciated. Their plight is dehumanizing. Sleeping on bare floor with no blanket, their fate is uncertain.

``I can`t understand why Liberians will continue to bring war on us again. We are already suffering in the country. The war will only dampen our hope. Just imaginge for four days, I walked in the bushes to come here without eating. We have no where to sleep. They just want to kill us for nothing``, a forty year old farmer who was forced to leave his farmland explained, admidst deep sobs, being surrounded by his family of five.

Although UN agencies are striving to provide emergency rations for the displaced, it is not likely that the humanitarian crisis can be dealt with, immediately. From one family to another, th experiences are similar. The expressions signal nothing less than doom. Painfully too, some family members have registered complaints that they can not locate their children. They might have been separated during the flight for lives. Save the Children UK-Liberia is striving to reunite lost children with their parents.

The humanitrian crisis did not go unnoticed by a visiting senior member of the UN Humanitarian Committee, Ross Mountain who is accessing the plight of of over 60,000 displaced persons. Mountain, who had earlier worked with the UN World Food Program during the hey days of the previous Liberian civil conflict wantsthe international community to forego differences with the Liberian government and reach out to aid thedisplaced people.

For the few persons who can afford the cost begun leaving the country by road. At the Dula and Paynesville parking lots, the privileged fews can be seen riding buses for U.S.$ 100, per person to Ghana via Ivorycoast, while theimpoverished on lookers stand by in complete unbelief, awe and longing, as their compatriots leave for“Paradise“, while they stay to face the unknown, as war rages on.


As the war appears to close up on Monrovia, President Charles Taylor faced with an UN armed embargo and sanctions ,stemming against his alleged involvement in gun runningand diamond smuggling in Sierra Leone, declared a state of emergency in consonance with Article 86 of the Liberian Constitution. The article gives the power the president to declare a state of emergency in consultation with the Speaker and President Pro Tempore of the National Legislature when the security of the state is threatened. He has since explained the cause prompting thedeclaration of the state o f emergency to theLegislature. Already, signals are clear that the Legislature will give its full backing to the declaration of the stateof emergency, in order for the government to fully handle the menace.


During the state of emergency, the constitution guarantees the fundamental rights of individuals. But already the National Human Rights Center,a consortium of local human rights organizations has reported that the rights of some innocent individuals were tramped upon , when the government launched a search for rebels who might have infiltrated into some partsof Monrivia. The Human Rights Center cautioned security officers to exercise the highest degree of professionalism and caution, in dealing with innocent civilians, so as to avoid being antagonized by the civilian populace.

On the other hand, reports reaching Monrovia unravel that one Mehn Tobo`s lie was cut off by the invading rebels when he failed to provide them intelligence in the Klay area. This has further petrified the perturbed populace. Towns and villages are also being burnt in this latest `` liberation`` war as lives and valuable properties are being claimed.

At the same time, government has assured that the contested towns of Klay and Tubmanburg have been recaptured by government troops. The Ministry of Information reveals that the war is now being fought as far as Bopolu, the provincial capital of Gbarpolu County, some one hundred and seventy miles from Monrovia.

Although, the rebels admit that government has retaken Klay and Tubmanburg, they however, maintain that their withdrawal was a tactical one to protect civilians. They have further vowed that they will not put a halt to the madness unless Taylor resigns.

Skirmishes are also being heard of in the Bong Mines area Central Liberia. This has prompted hundreds of refugees to painfully walk towards Monrovia in the last two days.

There are several schools of thought as to how the Liberian situation can be resolved. For the leader of the Liberian People`s Party flag bearer, Dr. Togba Nah Tipoteh and his likes, the way forward is for ECOWAS to mediate between the government and rebels. Tipoteh was the first to outrightly disagree with Taylor for declaring the state of emergency.

The rebels are calling for a replacement of the Taylor government with an interim government. Sekou Konneh self style commander of LURD forces has declared his intentions to head such arrangement. Interestingly, too, Dr. Amos Sawyer former interim president and the man who chaired the 1984 Constitution Commission, has been crusading in the international communtity for an interim arrangement.

There are others who are adamant that gone are the days for armed groups to shoot their way to state power. They are calling on the rebels to lay down their arms , transform their struggle and gear up for the 2003 elections.

For Taylor, he has unwaveringly stated that under no condition as a democratically elected president, will he succumb to the wishes of terrorists (he calls the rebels terrorists). ``We don`t negotiate with terrorists``, he thundered.

Whatever the view may be, one thing is succintly clear; innocent , impoverished and war wearied Liberians are paying the harsh, painful price.


End

Morocco: UN acts in relation to Western Sahara oil dispute

2002-02-28

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/conflict/6113

The United Nations on Tuesday proposed a partition of Western Sahara as one of four possible solutions to a 25-year dispute over whether the contested territory should be free or a part of Morocco. While neither side was now willing to discuss dividing up the phosphate-rich territory, which also may have offshore oil deposits, U.N. special envoy and former Secretary of State James Baker said the Security Council could choose to present a partition plan to both sides on a nonnegotiable basis.
Sent: 20 February 2002 18:30
To: hr-africa; hr-news
Subject: [hr-africa] Sah/Mar - UN Security Council members waved red
flag at Morocco in relation to Western Sahara oil dispute.


Nizkor Int. Human Rights Team - Derechos Human Rights - Serpaj Europe
Information - v) messages - 20Feb02

i) SECURITY COUNCIL MEMBERS WAVED A RED FLAG AT MOROCCO IN RELATION WITH
MOROCCO'S DEALINGS OVER WESTERN SAHARA OIL.

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - The United Nations on Tuesday proposed a
partition of Western Sahara as one of four possible solutions to a
25-year dispute over whether the contested territory should be free or a
part of Morocco.

While neither side was now willing to discuss dividing up the
phosphate-rich territory, which also may have offshore oil deposits,
U.N. special envoy and former Secretary of State James Baker said the
Security Council could choose to present a partition plan to both sides
on a nonnegotiable basis.

Other options would include the council imposing terms for a
self-determination referendum on a nonnegotiable basis, imposing a plan
making the territory a semi-autonomous part of Morocco, or pulling the
United Nations out of the seemingly intractable dispute.

The nonnegotiable nature of the options presented by Baker appeared to
be a clear message to the 15-nation council that, in his view, the time
has come to make tough decisions or end U.N. involvement in Western
Sahara.

A dispute over whether the former Spanish colony should be independent
or part of Morocco has raged since Rabat took over the sparsely
populated territory in 1976. The Polisario independence movement waged a
sporadic guerrilla war against Morocco until a U.N.-brokered cease-fire
took effect in 1991.

The United Nations has been trying since 1992 to organize a referendum
on the territory's future. But the effort has been stalled amid
arguments over who is eligible to vote. Baker has been the special envoy
for Western Sahara since March 1997.

In a related development, several Security Council members put Morocco
on notice on Tuesday it could not let French and U.S. firms exploit oil
off the coast of the Western Sahara while the territory's status was in
dispute.

But the council, after a closed-door debate, took no action on a request
from the Algerian-backed Polisario for members to block Morocco from
allowing foreign firms to search for oil there.

WAVING A RED FLAG
"The final conclusion was that the council wouldn't intrude in the oil
dealings, but council members waved a red flag at Morocco," one council
diplomat told Reuters, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The council discussed the oil exploration issue for nearly three hours
after the top U.N. legal counsel issued a memo saying there was nothing
illegal in Morocco authorizing French oil giant TotalFinaElf and
U.S.-based Kerr-McGee Corp., to explore for offshore oil there, as it
did in October.

But legal counsel Hans Corell, in an advisory opinion, said Morocco
would violate international law if it let foreign firms go on to produce
and sell oil from Western Sahara without taking into account the
interests of its inhabitants.

The Polisario had asked the United Nations to annul the contracts,
saying oil exploitation must await the outcome of efforts to resolve
Western Sahara's ultimate status.

Diplomats said France, the United States, Bulgaria, Britain and Norway
had sought to avoid an in-depth discussion of the contracts in the
council, preferring to focus on diplomatic efforts to end the impasse.

But Ireland, Russia, Colombia and Singapore had pursued a prolonged
discussion of Corell's opinion.

In the end, council members agreed they would not intrude in the matter,
so long as both sides showed restraint, the diplomats said.

The options for resolving the territory's ultimate status were set out
in a report to the Security Council based on Baker's views and prepared
by Secretary-General Kofi Annan.

The report was issued several hours after the council concluded its
debate on the oil exploration contracts.

Annan urged the council to extend the 250-strong U.N. mission in Western
Sahara, known as MINURSO, for two more months, until April 30, to give
it time to mull its options.

Terminating the mission, Annan said, would recognize that after more
than 11 years and nearly half a billion dollars, the world body was not
going to resolve the problem "without requiring that one or the other or
both parties do something that they do not wish to voluntarily agree to
do."

[Source: By Irwin Arieff - Reuters - 19Feb02. By way of the Norwegian
Support Committee for Western Sahara]
-------------------------------------------------------

ii) ANNAN PROPOSES WESTERN SAHARA OPTIONS TO THE UN SECURITY COUNCIL,
INCLUDING THE POSSIBILITY OF A PARTITION.

Secretary-General Kofi Annan (news - web sites), frustrated at the
failure of an 11-year U.N. effort to decide the political future of
Western Sahara, gave the Security Council four options Wednesday
including the possibility of just walking away.

The U.N. chief urged the council to try again to conduct a referendum,
revise an autonomy proposal, or consider dividing the territory.

In a report to the council, Annan said the United Nations (news - web
sites) faced "a rather bleak situation" because neither the Moroccan
government nor the Polisario Front rebels which fought a 15-year war
over the territory have been willing to negotiate a solution.

After Spain abandoned the mineral-rich desert region on the Atlantic
coast of north Africa in 1975, Morocco annexed it and moved settlers in.
Some 200,000 local Saharawi people fled into exile and still live in
refugee camps in southeast Algeria.

Fighting ended in 1991 with a U.N.-negotiated cease-fire that called for
a referendum on whether Western Sahara would become independent or part
of Morocco. But U.N. efforts to identify voters have been frustrated by
disputes over who is eligible which has led to 131,038 appeals over
the U.N. list of potential voters.

Former U.S. Secretary of State James A. Baker III has spent the last
five year trying to negotiate an end to the protracted conflict. Annan
said he and Baker believe there are four options for the council:

- Resume efforts to try to hold a referendum by starting the very
lengthy appeals process.
- Baker could revise the autonomy plan taking into account the concerns
expressed by the parties.
- The council could ask Baker to explore a possible division of the
Western Sahara.
- The council could terminate the U.N. mission, "thereby recognizing
that after more than 11 years the United Nations is not going to solve
the problem.

To give the council time to decide, he asked for the U.N. mission, which
currently has 203 military observers and 25 civilian police, to be
extended for two months until April 30. It currently expires Feb. 28.

Also Tuesday, Polisario Front rebels urged the United Nations to stop
foreign oil companies that signed contracts with Morocco from going
ahead with oil exploration off the coast of Western Sahara.

Polisario Front representative Ahmed Boukhari said the two oil companies
should freeze the contracts and wait to negotiate with the legitimate
authority in Western Sahara.

After discussing a legal opinion by U.N. counsel Hans Corell on the
validity of the contacts, the Security Council decided not to take any
action.

Corell said in the Feb. 12 opinion that the Moroccan contracts with U.S.
oil company Kerr-McGee Corp. and Franco-Belgian oil giant TotalFinaElf
SA "are not in themselves illegal."

But he said if further exploration were to proceed "in disregard of the
interests and wishes of the people of Western Sahara," the contracts
would violate international law.

[Source: By Edith M. Lederer, Associated Press Writer - Associated Press
- 20Feb02, 1:43 AM ET. By way of the Norwegian Support Committee for
Western Sahara]
--------------------------------------------------------

iii) WASHINGTON CRITICIZES STATUS QUO IN WESTERN SAHARA

Moderating a conference on North Africa/U.S. cooperation at the Hannibal
Club in Washington last week, assistant secretary of state William Burns
said there was "too much intra-regional tension" between Morocco and
Algeria concerning Western Sahara. He added that the U.N. had spent more
than $420 million in the last decade supporting MINURSO but that "our
efforts have had little apparent affect." He proposed that the U.S.
could "help in this area by participating in regional exercises that
bring military officers together." The Hannibal Club was founded by
Tunisian president Zine el Abedine Ben Ali in 1998 and serves as a
"business council" between Tunisia and the U.S. Among its 30 members are
former U.S. ambassador to Tunisia Robert Pelletreau and ex secretary of
state Henry Kissinger.

[Source: Maghreb Confidential No. 544 - 14Feb02.]
------------------------------------------------------------

iv) LETTER TO THE PRESIDENT OF THE SECURITY COUNCIL FROM THE
REPRESENTATIVE OF THE POLISARIO FRONT TO THE UNITED NATIONS.

Ahmed Boukhari
Representative of the Polisario Front to the United Nations

New York, February 18, 2002

His Excellency
Ambassador Adolfo Aguilar Zinser
President of the Security Council
United Nations
New York

Mr. President,

Prior to the Security Council informal consultations on the legal
opinion remitted on January 29, 2002 by His Excellency Hans Corell, the
Legal Counsel of the United Nations, on the legality of contracts
between the Kingdom of Morocco and the two companies, Kerr McGee and
TotalFinaElf, for oil exploration in the territorial seas of Western
Sahara, I would like to call your attention to the following:

1. The Polisario Front notes and welcomes the clear and proper
recognition in paragraphs 6 and 7 of the legal opinion that the Kingdom
of Morocco does not have the legal status of an administering Power in
Western Sahara.

Paragraph 6 recalls that the 1975 Madrid Agreement between Spain,
Morocco and Mauritania "did not transfer sovereignty over the territory,
nor did it confer upon any of the signatories the status of an
administering Power"; nor did it "affect the international status of
Western Sahara as a Non-Self-Governing Territory." Paragraph 7
reaffirms that the Kingdom of Morocco "is not listed as the
administering Power of the territory in the United Nations list of Non
Self-Governing Territories, and has, therefore, not transmitted
information on the territory in accordance with Article 73(e) of the
United Nations Charter."

2. The Polisario Front takes note of the recognition by Mr. Corell in
paragraph14 that the preeminent issue in the present case is the
principle of "permanent sovereignty" of the people of Western Sahara
over natural resources in the Territory. The legal question framed by
Mr. Corell in paragraphs 14 and 21 is "whether the principle of
permanent sovereignty' prohibits any activities related to natural
resources undertaken by an administering power in a Non-Self-Governing
Territory, or only those which are undertaken in disregard of the needs,
interests and benefits of the people of that territory." Mr. Corell
concludes that international legal principles and State practice
"supports the latter conclusion."

3. However, Mr. Corell’s conclusion in paragraph 25 ? that the contracts
for exploration in the present case "are not in themselves illegal" ?
seems to assume that Morocco is the legal Administering power, an
assumption that contradicts what is stated in paragraphs 6 and 7.

Mr. Corell reached his conclusion by distinguishing between the legality
of contracts for oil exploration and contracts for oil exploitation.
Clearly, that distinction is not relevant to the present case because
the analysis supporting the distinction is based on legal principles and
State practice that apply solely to administering Powers.

4. Morocco, as stated in paragraph 6, is not the Administering power.
Therefore, it has no legal authority to enter into contracts to
determine the fate of mineral resources in Western Sahara and, as a
result, the contracts signed with Kerr McGee and TotalFinaElf for oil
exploration should be rendered null and void.

5. Furthermore, at this very crucial stage in the peace process, the
involvement of foreign economic interests will make it more difficult
for the United Nations to successfully overcome the obstacles that are
currently hindering the peace process. Morocco should not be permitted
to benefit from obstructing the peace process, nor should it be allowed
to take unilateral actions, which are a clear violation of international
legality.

6. Any action by the Security Council to legitimize or sanction the
contracts would set a precedent that not only is inconsistent with
international law, but also would send an alarming message: that it is
allegedly permissible to conspire or contract to commit illegal
activities, until those activities have been consummated.

In other words, it could be used to justify the unacceptable notion that
a stranger may enter a home, in concert with another stranger, to search
for valuables for sale, so long as the intruder does not physically
remove any property. The danger in such a scenario is reflected in the
basic legal principles that a contract for illegal purposes is void as a
violation of public policy, and that a conspiracy to commit an unlawful
act is itself unlawful.

7. Mr. Corell's conclusion that exploration contracts are not
themselves illegal is based on a fictional distinction between the
exploration and exploitation stages of mineral resource development, and
is inconsistent with the spirit of recent actions by the Security
Council to terminate the illegal control over and trade in natural
resources of Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Sierra Leone.

8. The lawful exploration and exploitation of mineral resources in
Western Sahara by third parties can only be initiated on the basis of
negotiations with the legitimate authorities of the territory; such
negotiations may only proceed after full and fair implementation of the
referendum plan for self-determination of the people of Western Sahara,
under the organization and supervision of the United Nations.

9. Against this background, the Polisario Front considers that it is not
only timely and relevant but also essential for the Security Council to
take all necessary measures to ensure that the parties to the oil
exploration contracts in Western Sahara do not proceed to execute said
contracts, and instead await the outcome of the political process and
referendum for self-determination. This is the only path to a just and
lasting peace, one that respects the inalienable right of the Sahrawi
people to self-determination and sovereignty over natural resources in
Western Sahara.

I would appreciate if you could bring the content of this letter to the
attention of the Members of the Council

I avail myself of this opportunity to express to you my highest
consideration.

Ahmed Boukhari
Representative of the Polisario Front to the United Nations

[By way of www.arso.org ]
-------------------------------------------------------------

v) OIL FUELS TENSION IN NORTH AFRICA.

Morocco's decision to allow foreign firms to drill for oil in the
disputed Western Sahara has fuelled tension between Morocco and the
Polisario Front, which claims the independence of the North African
mineral-rich territory.

"The signing of oil drilling accords off the Sahara coasts will never
make the Western Sahara part of Moroccan territory," says Fadel Ismail,
representative of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR, proclaimed
by the Polisario in 1975) in the United Kingdom and Ireland.

In October last year, Morocco signed an oil drilling accord with the
United States Kerr-McGee oil and gas company. The 12-month
"reconnaissance contract" covers 110,400 square kms in Boujdour offshore
area in Western Sahara. Kerr-McGee is already holding, along with the
British Enterprise and South African Energy Africa, six "research
permits" in Cap Draa which is located offshore on the Atlantic coast
near the disputed Western Sahara. The French company TotalFinaElf has
also obtained a drilling permit from Morocco in the Sahara.

But the contracts are being challenged by the Polisario Front (Frente
Popular par la Liberacion del Sagiat Al-Hamra y Rio de Oro) and Algeria,
which backs and shelters the Front in its southeastern desert town of
Tindouf. "Morocco has no right to conduct such activities in a territory
where the United Nations is yet to find a solution to decide its
future," Abdellah Baali, Algeria's ambassador to U.N, said in a note to
the Security Council. Algeria also asked the United Nations to intervene
in order to annul the contracts.

In an advisory opinion to the U.N. Security Council, U.N. Legal Counsel,
Hans Corell, said these pacts "are not in themselves illegal." But he
conceded that "Morocco would violate international law if it allowed
foreign firms to produce and sell oil from Western Sahara without
taking into account the interests of the disputed territory's
inhabitants." Morocco dismissed Corell's statements and said that it has
"every right to conduct any kind of investment in the Sahara, being a
part and parcel" of its territory.

"The southern provinces (Western Sahara) are a part and parcel of
Morocco. We are thus rightfully entitled to conduct any kind of
investment, including in oil drilling and exploitation," said Amina
Benkhadra, head of the Moroccan oil company (ONAREP).

"Morocco had already invested in several fields of economic activity in
the area. Now we are starting a new phase where a growing interest will
be given to mining and energy resources," she insisted.

Morocco's King Mohammed VI recently met with Luke Corbett, CEO of the
U.S. oil group Kerr-McGee. The move was seen by observers as a gesture
meant to give political significance and strength to the drilling
activities in the Sahara. The Western Sahara conflict began in 1975 when
Morocco moved in, occupied and annexed the territory following the
withdrawal of Spain, the former colonial power.

The Polisario, the political movement formed by the Sahrawis originally
to seek independence from Spain, went to war against Morocco and
Mauritania when the country was invaded by Moroccan and Mauritanian
soldiers. The Polisario defeated Mauritania in 1979, but the war
against Morocco continued for many years until a cease fire, brokered
by the United Nations, took place in 1991. The United Nations
established a mission, MINURSO, to oversee the cease-fire and a
referendum allowing the Sahrawis to vote on independence or
incorporation into Morocco.

With the chance of holding the referendum growing slimmer because of
insurmountable differences between Morocco and the Polisario over voter
lists, the United Nations Security Council voted in June 2001 for what
it called a political solution to the Western Sahara question.

The accord, brokered by former secretary of state James Baker, would
confer on the population of Western Sahara the right to elect their own
executive and legislative bodies and to run its own local government
administration, territorial budget, and basic infrastructure.

Moroccan political analyst Ahmed Iraqi believes that the accord, known
as "the third way," was basically drafted to safeguard the interests of
Morocco and its traditional allies - the U.S and France. "That is why it
is rejected altogether by Algeria and the Polisario," he says.

Both Algeria and the Polisario turned down the Baker plan and renewed
attachment to self-determination referendum as the sole solution to the
North African conflict.

For Iraqi, "the appointment of James Baker as the major mediator in this
decisive phase of the (U.N) settlement plan was not a mere chance. The
man is known for his close connections with the Texan oil lobby," he
adds. "What once appeared to some as a trivial fight over a barren
desert is now poised to develop into a real war over more strategic
interests," says Iraqi. "The discovery of oil in the area may add to the
complexity of the issue, as the interests of superpowers, like the U.S.
and France, will be mingled with those of the already warring parties:
Morocco, Algeria and the Polisario Front," he adds.

"Amidst all this, the peoples of North Africa will have to wait (even
longer before) they see their region finally living in peace and
cohabitation," says Iraqi.

[Source: IPS By Nizar Al-Aly - RABAT, Feb. 11 2002]
---------------------------------------------------------
USEFUL LINKS:
- List of Saharawi disappeared persons since 1975
http://www.derechos.org/afapredesa/doc/lista.html
- Report of the UN Office of Legal Affairs on the legality of the
Oil-contracts signed by Morocco over the natural resources of Western
Sahara. Jan 29, 2002.
http://www.derechos.org/human-rights/mena/moro/SahOil.html
- UN Documents on Western Sahara
http://www.arso.org/06-0.htm
- International Committee of the Red Cross activities in Western Sahara.
http://www.icrc.org/icrceng.nsf/CountryDetails?Readform&Country=Western_Saha
ra
- Report of the SC on the Question of Western Sahara.
S/2002/41,11.01.02.
http://www.un.org/Docs/sc/reports/2002/41e.pdf
- Le rapport de l'ambassadeur Frank Ruddy, 25ene95 [FRA/FRE]
http://www.arso.org/06-3.htm
--
FIN DEL MENSAJE END OF MESAGGE EINDE BERICHT FIM DA MENSAGEM FINE
DEL MESSAGGIO ENDE NACHRICHT FIN DEL MENSAJE END OF MESAGGE
EINDE BERICHT FIM DA MENSAGEM FINE DEL MESSAGGIO ENDE NACHRICHT
************************************************************************

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Human Rights Team.
Nizkor is a member of the Peace and Justice Service-Europe (Serpaj),
Derechos Human Rights (USA) and GILC (Global Internet Liberty Campaign).

PO Box 156037 - 28080 - Madrid - Spain. Telephone: +34.91.526.7502
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Riots rock Madagascar

2002-02-28

http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/africa/newsid_1843000/1843927.stm

Violent clashes have broken out in Madagascar between supporters of the government and the opposition.

Sudan helicopter gunship attack condemned

2002-02-28

http://www.unicef.org/media/newsnotes/02nn04sudan.htm

The heads of three United Nations agencies have condemned the attack by a Sudanese helicopter gunship that killed 17 civilians and wounded an unknown number of others at a food distribution site near Bieh.

Zimbabwe 'death plot' controversy

2002-02-28

http://www.zwnews.com/issuefull.cfm?ArticleID=3727

Zimbabwe's main opposition leader is being questioned by police over an alleged plot to assassinate President Robert Mugabe. Morgan Tsvangirai, who denies the allegations based on a mysterious videotape broadcast on Australian television, entered central Harare police station at lunchtime with a bodyguard and a lawyer. It comes amid reports that Mr Mugabe has agreed to flee Zimbabwe if he loses the election.

Zimbabwe: Commonwealth slams violence

2002-02-28

http://www.zwnews.com/issuefull.cfm?ArticleID=3721

Violent attacks by supporters of President Robert Mugabe on Sunday after an election rally addressed by Movement for Democratic Change leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, in Chinhoyi, north of Harare, have been condemned by the Commonwealth Observer Group.

Zimbabwe: Mugabe Might Not Accept Defeat

2002-02-28

http://www.gvnews.net/html/DailyNews/alert337.html

President Robert Mugabe might not concede defeat to opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai if he loses next month’s election and has already expressed such feelings to leaders of the Southern Africa Development Community (SADC), it emerged this week.

Zimbabwe: Mugabe ready to flee

2002-02-28

http://www.zwnews.com/issuefull.cfm?ArticleID=3723

President Mugabe is said to be planning secretly his escape route out of Zimbabwe after his private polling predicted he could be defeated in next month's elections. The ailing 78-year-old has been sounding out some of his African neighbours and his dwindling number of friends abroad about providing him with a safe haven.

Zimbabwe: What lies behind treason tape

2002-02-28

http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/africa/newsid_1841000/1841846.stm

In a grainy videotape recorded from a security camera, Morgan Tsvangirai is allegedly shown plotting to have President Robert Mugabe assassinated.

CALL FOR E-GOV BEST PRACTICES

SUBMIT BEST PRACTICES, CASES STUDIES AND PAPERS FOR E-GOV TOOLKIT

2002-02-28

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/internet/6160

The Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT), in association with the World Bank's InfoDev Program, is looking for best practices, case studies and papers for inclusion in a toolkit to guide the evolution of electronic government in developing countries.
This toolkit is intended to be used by technology and policy leaders in the developing world to design their own e-government projects. Submissions for this toolkit must be of practical value.

Take a look at the outline of e-government that we prepared with our international advisory board (below) - the outlines gives a good overview of the issues that will be covered in the toolkit.

Procedure: Send in your success stories, models, guides, etc, through the online form. We ask that you designate your submission as either a best practice/case example or an overview/paper.

Best practices and case examples should highlight how e-gov principles have been applied to specific projects in the developing world. The advisory board is looking for examples that provide good models for developing countries to follow.

Overviews and papers should provide generalized guidance to those who are embarking on e-government, providing advance warnings of the pitfalls but also highlighting the opportunities and cost savings available. Accountability is key to the advisory board's vision of e-government and the board will be looking for papers that reflect this.

The advisory board will review the submissions looking for quality, focus and responsiveness to the outline of issues and approaches. Authors will be given full attribution and the final product will be widely distributed by InfoDev.

Submission deadline: March 31, 2002

Questions about the project, submission process, or outline should be sent to egovtoolkit@cdt.org [Submissions sent to this address will be accepted, but we would prefer you to use the Web submission system].

E- Government Toolkit Outline

E-government is the application of information and communication technology to transform the efficiency, effectiveness, transparency and accountability of informational and transactional exchanges within government, between governments and government agencies at federal, municipal and local levels, citizens and businesses; and to empower citizens through access and use of information.

The Tools of E-Government

1) The "PUBLISH" phase of e-government -- tools that facilitate broader access to government information using information and communications technologies.
* The public expects (or will come to expect) their governments to make best-possible use of available information technologies to improve efficiency, effectiveness, transparency and accountability. Furthermore, the long term cost savings and productivity improvements the private sector has found in information technology are available to the public sector - a powerful incentive as budgets become ever tighter and expectations of government ever higher.

2) the "INTERACT" phase of e-government -- tools that promote broader public involvement in participatory government.
* Some governments are suffering from the effects of citizen apathy, while others are striving to better engage their populace in the governance process. E-government has the potential to help administrations achieve their objectives in this field by reaching out to citizens throughout the political cycles and through all levels of government. Importantly, strengthening civic engagement contributes to building public trust in government.

3) The "TRANSACT" phase of e-government -- Tools that make government services available using information and communication technologies.
* As the private sector in developing countries begins to make use of the internet to offer e-commerce services, government will be expected to keep up with technological leaders. In addition, the long term cost savings, accountability through information logs and productivity improvements will be important drivers.

Transformation Issues:

Process development: Critical to the success of e-government transformation is the understanding that e-government is not just about the automation of existing process and inefficiencies. Conversely, it is about the creation of new processes and new relationships between governed and governor.

Leadership: In order to manage this change, leaders who understand technology and policy goals will be needed at all levels through government, from elected through to administrative levels.

Strategic investment: Governments will need to prioritize some programs over others to maximize available funds in view of tightly limited resources. This will necessitate a clear objective for
programs and a clear route to that objective.

Public policy and law: New technologies have already thrown up a minefield of legal and policy questions. If e-government and e-commerce are to be successful, legislatures must be wary of short-term solutions. They must also take proactive steps to ensure that good intentions are backed up with policy commitment.

Collaboration: Governments will have to explore new relationships with the private sector and NGOs to ensure quality and delivery of government services. Some agencies may also have to overcome traditional reluctance to work with each other to maximize benefits of scale in e-government projects.

Civic engagement: E-government initiatives depend, to some extent, on an engaged citizenry and to that end, efforts to foster civic engagement are critical to the success of e-government plans.

Challenges and Opportunities:

Development: All countries implementing e-government have struggled to develop a basic infrastructure to take advantage of new technologies and communications tools.

E-literacy: Even in areas where access to technological infrastructure is nearly ubiquitous, there are still marginalized groups who are unable to make use of information and communication technologies because they are not 'e-literate'. E-government programs will have to be especially wary of marginalizing people who are not e-literate in countries and areas where literacy rates have historically been lower.

Accessibility: Governments must serve all members of society irrespective of their physical capabilities. In many countries more than one language or dialect will be prevalent -- setting appropriate standards for accessibility will be difficult. New services will have to be designed with appropriate interfaces -- this may have significant cost implications.

Digital divide: issues of class, race, location and other concerns could lead to groups of people being disenfranchised and is of special importance.

Privacy: Privacy is one of the fastest growing issue internationally. Governments are entrusted with huge amounts of personal information and must be a responsible custodian -- government programs, Web sites and services will have to ensure they live up to privacy best practice. An appropriate balance will have to be struck between legislative protection for consumers of private-sector services and self-policing.

Security: Security is costly but security breaches shatter public trust in government.

Transparency: Government must be transparent in different ways to the private sector. This will be reflected in their choice and designs of ICT systems.

Interoperability: Adding new systems on top of outmoded and legacy systems has been problematic for the private sector and will, in all likelihood, be problematic for the government sector.

Records management: New technologies are being created to help manage information. Governments have unique needs in this field.

Permanent availability and preservation: Historical documentation is of special importance for governments.

Education and marketing: E-government services are only useful if people know about them. Education and outreach programs will be needed. As the boundaries of the state become blurrier, new rules may be needed to govern the relationship of the public and private sectors.

Public/private competition/collaboration: Issues of public vs private collaboration and competition are already part of an international debate on governance. E-government steps into a difficult area.
Intergovernmentalism: Transforming government means individuals should be served by the easiest and most efficient means possible. But, this could raise serious constitutional and political issues about the relationship between states, federal government, (where applicable) local government, and the international community.

Workforce issues: Human resources planning needs to be structured with the new goals in mind.

Cost structures: Investment now, savings later. But planning and budgeting in an unstable climate is hard.

------------------------------------
Ari Schwartz
Associate Director
Center for Democracy and Technology
1634 I Street NW, Suite 1100
Washington, DC 20006
202 637 9800
fax 202 637 0968
ari@cdt.org
http://www.cdt.org

GHANA AND UGANDA: PUSHING THE BOUNDARIES OF AFRICAN TELCO PRIVATISATION

2002-02-28

http://www.balancingact-africa.com/news/current1.html

Two developments this week have illustrated the gathering pace of telecoms privatisation. The Ghanaian government has agreed to sell off its majority share in Ghana Telecom and appears to be opening its market to further competition. In Uganda the government is prepared to amend existing licences if the country's economy finds itself at a competitive disadvantage in the new world digital economy. This top story at BalancingAct concludes with a short review of what African governments have signed up to in terms of privatisation with the World Trade Organisation.

ICANN meeting in Ghana in March 2002

2002-02-28

http://www.icann.org/accra/

ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, is meeting in Ghana in March. African companies should send representatives - details at the ICANN web site.

Kids to receive Net tracking implants

2002-02-28

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/internet/6164

A controversial biometric device may soon be used to track children via the Internet.
According to its manufacturer, Applied Data Systems (ADS), Verichip can carry individualized data (such as a person's name, current condition, medical records and unique identification number) and is designed to be imbedded under a person's skin. When a special external scanner is pointed at a Verichip, "a number is displayed by the scanner" and the stored information is transmitted "via telephone or Internet." The company is marketing its product for such purposes as "identification, various law enforcement and defense uses and search and rescue." ADS now plans to test the device on a family from the United States, including their 14-year-old son.

As it turns out, serious questions have arisen as to whether this scheme will actually work. Security expert Richard M. Smith labeled the company's plans a mere "publicity stunt and nothing more," adding that the implants currently would be of "no value because hospitals and the police don't have the reader units." In addition, the United States Food and Drug Administration has yet to approve ADS' product for internal human use. Nevertheless, these latest developments have intensified concern over the possible effect that devices like VeriChip may have on individual privacy.

Read Julia Scheeres, "They Want Their ID Chips Now,", Wired News, Feb. 6, 2002.
An ADS statement about VeriChip is posted [url=http://www.adsx.com/VeriChip/verichip.html
]here[/url].
For further analysis by Richard M. Smith, click.
See also Julia Scheeres, "Kidnapped? GPS to the Rescue," Wired News, Jan. 25, 2002.

[source: Global Internet Liberty Campaign (GILC) Alert, Volume 6, Issue 2]

OFFICE SOFTWARE: FREE, RELATIVELY CHEAP AND EXPENSIVE

2002-02-28

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/internet/6158

Office suites are software packages like Microsoft Office which offer users applications like word processors, spreadsheets, database programs, etc. There are alternatives to using expensive office software. Read this article for the latest news on free packages like Open Office and expensive packages such as MS Office.
What is available?

Microsoft

Proprietary software that you will pay a lot of money for: Microsoft Office. I have used MS Office for years on my Windows desktop. There are plenty of good reasons to use it: it's slick, it performs well, it looks good, it has useful features, many of my colleagues use it and we can easily share documents, etc. But why would I want to purchase expensive software when I can get a good alternative for free, or for less?

Sun

[url=http"//www.sun.com]Sun[/url] bought the Star Office package and continues to develop it. Get Star Office 5.2 for free at the Star Office web page. Star Office runs on Linux, Windows and Solaris operating systems. I found compatibility with MS Office documents good in version 5.2, but it isn't perfect.

Open Office

Open Office is another viable alternative. It runs on Windows and Linux operating systems, so users can download the program and install it on their machines. In fact, the original Open Office code (program) was provided by the Star Office project.

Differences between Star Office and Open Office

"Those things which are or will be present in StarOffice but are not available on OpenOffice.org include:
- Certain fonts (including, especially, Asian language fonts)
- The database component (Adabas D)
- Some templates
- Extensive Clip Art Gallery
- Some sorting functionality (Asian versions)
- Certain file filters
For more information on the current features of OpenOffice.org, please see the "Features" page."
[from the FAQ page at openoffice.org]

You will probably have to pay for the new Star Office

The new version of Star Office, Star Office 6, may not be available for free: take a look at this article (it's machine translated by Google into English - try the original here if you understand German).
Slashdot has a detailed discussion around all three of these packages, but especially Open Office and Star Office.

Political reasons to use non-Microsoft products

I do not advocate that all Microsoft products are bad, or even worse than Linux/Unix. Personally, I feel that many of their software packages are excellent. Just because my preference is Linux does not automatically disqualify other systems - I think that would stupid and narrow-minded. However, I do object to Microsoft's history of non-regard for personal privacy. I do object to their commitment to obliterating competition offering excellent, free (or cheaper) software that will ease fiscal hardship for NGO's and educational institutions. I do object to their 'funding' policies which donate software that will soon need upgrading - at a big, Microsoft price - as hardware and software become upgraded and change.

Further, I find it interesting that certain open-source projects like Star Office and Open Office make their software cross-platform (you can use it on Windows or Linux). Microsoft is hardly flexible. They are committed to eliminating Linux as a market threat. They have sophisticated sales strategies in place to compete with Linux (our organisation received a copy of their package). But of course, that's another story - if you are interested in Microsoft's "evil empire" activities, you can take a look here.

Final comments to prospective Star Office/ Open Office users:

For the above reasons, I feel inclined to use Star Office or Open Office. For the added bonus of functionality and the promise from dedicated development teams of better and better programs as the software projects evolve, I will happily install them. Be warned, though, that the download time is large. The files are big.

Of course, these packages are not as slick and well-developed as MS Office - yet. They are new projects and I hope you choose to support them by using their software.

Privaterra initiative launched

2002-02-28

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/internet/6165

A collective of computer experts is working to enhance the privacy of non-governmental organizations around the world.
Privaterra is an ongoing program by Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility (CPSR-a GILC member). It was formed due to concerns that technological advances "have ... made it easier to spy on ... human rights workers, cracking into their communications networks and stealing access to their private information. While it is impossible to completely eradicate the possibility of such activities, encryption technology and other security measures can considerably diminish the likelihood that human rights workers' private communications and other materials will be accessed by unauthorized individuals."

Towards this end, the program will conduct privacy workshops to train members of civil society organizations and provide technical advice to such groups on how to improve their security routines. Privaterra also plans to host an online forum "where attendees and others from their organizations or other organizations can request information about privacy and security technology, or discuss related issues with us and with each other."

Visit the Privaterra website.

Youth Network on ICTs and Digital Opportunities

2002-02-28

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/internet/6162

The "Youth, ICTs and Digital Opportunities" portal was launched on 1 February 2002 to enable young people from around the world to share their experiences on how ICTs can further development. The site features news, people, events, organizations and online discussions about closing the digital divide.
Through these interactive features, it aims to foster a global network of young social entrepreneurs on the cutting edge of applying old and new communication technologies to confront the challenges of sustainable development.

Become a member!
* Share stories on how youth are involved in providing access to infrastructure (e.g. telecentres; radio stations; providing cell phone service to rural villages).

* Tell everyone about how young people are developing and sharing locally relevant content on sustainable development through websites, radio programs, and more!

* Provide tips on how youth can improve their skills as ICT trainers!

* Highlight opportunities for young people to become involved in national and international ICT policy discussions!

The "Youth, ICTs and Digital Opportunities" portal has been developed by the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) and TakingITGlobal (TIG) in collaboration with the Global Knowledge Partnership (GKP).

http://ict.takingitglobal.org

AWID Resource Net Announcements / Issue 100

Wednesday, February 27, 2002

2002-02-28

http://www.awid.org

The Association for Women's Rights in Development (AWID) celebrates its 100th issue of Resource Net "Announcements"! A warm thank you to all for your support and contributions. We continue to build "another world" with resolve, intelligence and hope.
AWID Resource Net
Announcements / Issue 100
Wednesday, February 27, 2002

AWID celebrates its 100th issue of Resource Net ?Announcements?! A warm thank
you to all for your support and contributions. We continue to build ?another
world? with resolve, intelligence and hope.

Contents / Contenido / Contenu:


EVENTS / EVENTOS / ÉVÈNEMENTS

1) Teach-in on Gender and Macroeconomics: "Just Economics: Gender, Poverty
and Policies" / UNIFEM / New York, NY, USA / March 2, 2002.
2) Third International Congress on "Women, Work and Health" / Stockholm,
Sweden / June 2-5, 2002.
3) International Conference & Call for Papers: ?Gender, Sexuality and Law
II? / Keele University, UK / June 28-30, 2002.
4) Women's Studies Symposium & Call for Contributions: "Third Wave
Feminism" / West Lafayette, IN, USA / April 5-6, 2002.
5) Call for Proposals & Conference Announcement: ?Gender, Power and (In)
Justice? / Brasilia, Brazil / October 29-30, 2002 / Proposal deadline: March
1, 2002.
6) Conference Announcement: ?Heroes ? Mothers ? Victims: Living in Violent
Conflict ? Everyday Life of Women and Men in Palestine and Bosnia? / Germany
/ March 15-17, 2002.

ANNOUNCEMENTS / ANUNCIOS / ANNONCES

7) Training Course: ?Fundraising and Online Efficiency? / On-site.
8) Call for Papers for 2002 Summer Issue of ?Asian Women? / Deadline:
May 15, 2002.
9) Call for Contributions to Women?s Studies International Forum.

RESOURCES / RECURSOS / RESSOURCES

10) Anunciando dos Boletines Electrónico de la REPEM: "LA RED VA..." y
"Voices Rising".
11) New Publication (in Russian): ?Gendered Histories from Eastern Europe?
/ Editors: Elena Gapova, Al?mira Usmanova, Andres Peto.
12) New Report: ?Gender and Peacekeeping: Opportunities and Challenges to
Improve Practice? / International Alert.

NEWS / NOTICIAS / NOUVELLES

13) WIDE Position Paper: "United Nations Conference on Financing for
Development - Observations and Demands from a gender perspective" / February
2002 / By: Brita Neuhold.


* Una sinópsis en español se encuentra al principio de cada anuncio.
* Vous trouverez un résumé en français au début de chaque annonce.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
EVENTS / EVENTOS / ÉVÈNEMENTS
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

1) Teach-in on Gender and Macroeconomics: "Just Economics: Gender, Poverty
and Policies" / UNIFEM / New York, NY, USA / March 2, 2002.

* Curso de un día para ONGs sobre 'Género y Macroeconomía' (en inglés) para
el 46º sesión de la Comisión del Estatus de la Mujer (CSW) de las Naciones
Unidas / Nueva York, NY / 2 de marzo del 2002. Para mayores detalles envíe un
correo electrónico a: meagan.bovell@undp.org, o visite el sitio Web:
http://www.undp.org/unifem/gender_macroec.html

* Cours de un jour pour ONGs sur 'le genre et macroéconomie' (en anglais)
pour le 46ième Session de la Commission sur le Status de la Femme des Nations
Unies / New York, NY / 2 mars, 2002. Pour tous renseignements, veuillez
envoyer un courriel à: meagan.bovell@undp.org, ou consulter la page Web:
http://www.undp.org/unifem/gender_macroec.html


The United Nations Development Fund for Women & The NGO Committee on the
Status of Women a Committee of the Conference of Non-Governmental
Organizations in Consultative Relationship with the United Nations
invite you to learn more about how economic policies affect women's lives and
livelihoods at a Teach-In for NGOs:
"Just Economics: Gender, Poverty and Policies".
9:00am - 1:30pm, 2 March 2002.
(Registration starts at 8:30am - Please note Space Limited)
Soka Gakkai International (SGI)7 East 15th Street (between 5th Ave. and Union
Square Park West).

The 46th session of the UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) has
identified "eradicating poverty, including through the empowerment of women
throughout their life cycle in a globalizing world" as a main theme of this
years' session.

Join leaders in the field of gender and economics in an interactive learning
session on the gender dimensions of macroeconomics, trade liberalization and
international financial issues.

Featuring:
- Caren Grown, Poverty Reduction and Economic Growth team, Int'l Center for
Research on Women
- Radhika Balakrishnan, Associate Professor of Economics, Marymount
Manhattan College
- Gerald Epstein, Professor of Economics, University of Massachusetts
- Yassine Fall, Regional Programme Director UNIFEM East Africa

For more information, contact:
Meagan Bovell, UNIFEM at 212-906-6536
E-mail: meagan.bovell@undp.org
Website: http://www.undp.org/unifem/gender_macroec.html

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

2) Third International Congress on "Women, Work and Health" / Stockholm,
Sweden / June 2-5, 2002.

* III Congreso Internacional: "Mujer, Trabajo y Salud" / Estocolmo, Suecia /
2 - 5 de junio, 2002. Informaciones sobre participación y posibilidad de
becas (para personas que procedan de países en desarrollo) en: wwh@niwl.se o
http://www.niwl.se/wwh

* IIIième Congrès International: ?Femmes, travail et santé? / Stockholm,
Suède / 2-5 juin, 2002. Renseignements sur participation ou possibilité de
bourse (pour personnes provenant de pays en voie de développement) au:
wwh@niwl.se ou http://www.niwl.se/wwh


This international and interdisciplinary congress will form a meeting place
for researchers and practitioners, as well as trade union representatives,
representatives for governments and the social partners and feminist
activists. The meeting place is meant to stimulate open and critical
discussions, to share practical experience and scholarly work on women?s
working and living conditions and their health.

Keynote speakers will present the state of art on science and practice. For
each congress theme, one practitioner and one researcher will give a keynote
speech. Others will give presentations on actions and strategies in the past,
the present and the future. A number of thematic sessions will be arranged
for the presentation of papers and posters.

The Congresses on Women, Work & Health were initiated in 1996 in Barcelona
with the aim of giving women access to information and resources that would
enable them to achieve better health and a better quality of life. The
disregard of women?s health problems and of their working conditions and
research on women?s health and work were the central topics of the first
congress.

The second Congress, held in Rio in 1999, provided greater visibility for the
production of knowledge in the field by identifying recent studies, trends
and gaps, updating indicators and proposing theoretical and methodological
innovations. The event also helped to spread awareness of an inter-related
gender, work and health approach throughout Brazil and Latin America.

Mrs Mona Sahlin, Minister of the Ministry for Industry, Employment and
Communications is the official representative of the Swedish government.

Information on the congress will be published continuously on our web site
www.niwl.se/wwh, where you will also find articles and interviews related to
the congress themes. You may also contact us at: wwh@niwl.se

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

3) International Conference & Call for Papers: ?Gender, Sexuality and Law II?
/ Keele University, UK / June 28-30, 2002.

* Conferencia Internacional & Solicitud de Ensayos (en inglés): ?Género,
Sexualidad y Ley II?. Esta conferencia objeta crear un espacio de diálogo y
de diseminación de investigación para todas y todos que trabajan la temática
del género, la sexualidad y la ley. Tendrá lugar en la Universidad de Keele,
RU, del 28-30 de junio, 2002. Envíe resumen del ensayo al:
GSL2002@Keele.ac.uk Toda información se encuentra en:
http://www.Keele.ac.uk/depts/la/GSL2002.htm

* Conférence internationale & demande d?articles (en anglais): ?Genre,
sexualité et loi II?. Cette conférence vise a crée une espace d?échange et
de dissémination de recherche pour toutes celles / tous ceux qui travaillent
les thèmes du genre, la sexualité et la loi. Elle aura lieu à l?Université de
Keele, RU, du 28-30 juin, 2002. Veuillez envoyer résumé d?article au:
GSL2002@Keele.ac.uk Pour tous renseignements, consulter la page Web:
http://www.Keele.ac.uk/depts/la/GSL2002.htm


CONFIRMED PLENARY SPEAKERS:
Martha Fineman (to be confirmed), Shohini Ghosh, Didi Herman, Amina Mama,
Selma Sevenhuijsen, Carl Stychin, Francisco Valdes, Carole Vance.

In 1998, over 200 scholars from around the world, gathered at Keele
University for the first Gender, Sexuality and Law conference. Under the
theme 'Reflections; New Directions', the conference explored the construction
of gender and sexuality as it is situated at the intersection of multiple
bodies of knowledge. The conference theme was also reflective in nature,
encouraging scholars working in the gender, sexuality and law field to
consider how the literature was unfolding and where it might develop in the
future. The result was a tremendous success, with a dynamic range of scholars
presenting new, innovative, and far-reaching research from across disciplines
and across the world.
Rather than a single, over-arching theme, this conference seeks to provide a
forum at which scholars who work broadly in the gender, sexuality and law
area can gather for the dissemination of research and the exploration of
ideas.

The conference is open to people working within feminist theory, queer theory
and critical race theory, or who are otherwise exploring, challenging and
interrogating the relationship between law and the construction of the sexed
and gendered subject.

CONFERENCE PANELS
The conference welcomes theoretically informed papers on any topic. In
particular, conference themes include:

- Risk, Governance and Insecurity;
- Politics of HIV/AIDS
- Race, Religion and Ethnicity
- Global Subjectivities and Citizenships
- Rethinking Criminal Justice
- Rights and New Constitutionalisms
- Media, Culture, and Representation
- Recentering Class and Capitalism
- Health Care and Medicalisation
- New Technologies and the Body
- Social Activism/Social Change
- Psychoanalysis
- Gender and Development
- Legal Education
- Children, Sexuality and Gender
- Femininities/Masculinities
- Sexual/Gender Minorities and Social Inclusion
- Labour In/exclusivity

HOW TO APPLY Abstracts of papers, not exceeding 200 words, should be sent to
the GSL Group AS SOON AS POSSIBLE!. Abstracts can be sent by email to:
GSL2002@Keele.ac.uk or by mail to:
The Law Department, Keele University, Staffordshire
ST5 5BG, United Kingdom
Tel: (01782) 58 3218;
Fax (01782) 58 3228

For more information, please contact us at the above or visit our web site
at:http://www.Keele.ac.uk/depts/la/GSL2002.htm

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

4) Women's Studies Symposium & Call for Contributions: "Third Wave Feminism"
/ West Lafayette, IN, USA / April 5-6, 2002.

* Simposio de Estudios de la Mujer & Solicitud de Contribuciones (en inglés):
?Tercer Ola del Feminismo?. Se llevará a cabo en la Universidad de Purdue,
IN, EE-UU, el 5-6 de abril, 2002. Invitan entregas de ensayos académicos
además de contribuciones diversas e innovadoras. Detalles se encuentran en el
sitio Web de la Universidad: http://www.sla.purdue.edu/academic/idis/womens-
studies/.

* Symposium d?études de la femme & demande de contributions (en anglais):
?Troixième Vague du Féminisme?. Il se déroulera à l?Université de Purdue, IN,
É-U, du 5-6 avril, 2002. On invite la soumission d?articles académiques et
aussi des contributions diverses et innovatrice. Tous renseignements se
trouvent sur le site Web de l?Université:
http://www.sla.purdue.edu/academic/idis/womens-studies/


The 5th biannual symposium, "Third Wave Feminism," will be held April
5-6, 2002. We invite abstracts or descriptions of projects that reflect
on-or do-Third Wave feminist work. In addition to standard academic
papers, we invite innovative and diverse contributions, including
performance pieces, installations, 'zines and other computer or
web-based resources, sound and visual artwork or collages, as well as
other kinds of writing, e.g. stories, poetry. Presentations or
performance pieces should be no more than 20 minutes in length.

Guest speakers will be Jennifer Drake, Assistant Professor of English
and Women's Studies, Indiana State University, and Leslie Heywood,
Associate Professor of English, SUNY Binghampton, the co-editors of
Third Wave Agenda: Being Feminist, Doing Feminism, who will be speaking
on "It's All About the Benjamins: Economic Determinants of that Third
Wave Feminist Thang." Erika Lopez, author of Flaming Iguanas: An
Illustrated All-Girl Road Novel Thing, They Call Me Mad Dog, and Hoochie
Momma: The Other White Meat, is our third guest speaker.

Some possible themes for presentations include:

- third wave feminism and queer theory
- defining / performing third wave feminism
- third wave and/as global feminism
- third wave and cyberspace
- bridging third wave and second wave feminisms-does a gap exist?
- third wave feminism and responses to terrorism and September 11th
- third wave pedagogies and classrooms
- becoming third wave, or realizing you've always been

Please send a 250-500 word abstract or description to:

Pat Boling, Chair, Program Committee
Women's Studies Program, LAEB 1361
Purdue University
West Lafayette, IN 47907-1361

Details about the symposium are available on the Purdue Women's Studies
Website: http://www.sla.purdue.edu/academic/idis/womens-studies/


* Cross-posted from ?Genderstudies? Mailing list: majordomo@univer.kharkov.ua


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

5) Call for Proposals & Conference Announcement: ?Gender, Power and (In)
Justice? / Brasilia, Brazil / October 29-30, 2002 / Proposal deadline: March
1, 2002.

* Solicitud de Ensayos & Anuncio de Conferencia (inglés, portugués y
español): ?Género, Poder e (In)Justicia?. Se pide ensayos sobre el tema de
los enfoques feministas a la bioética. La conferencia tendrá lugar en
Brasilia, Brasil del 29-30 de octubre, 2002. Plazo para entrega de
proposiciones: 1° de marzo, 2002. Para más información consulte el sitio Web:
http://www.msu.edu/~hlnelson/fab/index.html

* Demande d?articles et annonce de conférence (en anglais, portuguais et
espagnol): ?Genre, pouvoir et (in)justice?. On demande des articles sur le
thème des approches féministes à la bioéthique. La conférence aura lieu au
Brasilia, Brézil du 29-30 octobre, 2002. Date limite pour soumettre une
proposition est le 1er mars, 2002. Tous detailles se trouvent au:
http://www.msu.edu/~hlnelson/fab/index.html


The FAB conference will be held in conjunction with the Sixth World Congress
of the International Association of Bioethics October
30-November 4, Brasilia, Brazil.

We are seeking proposals for papers, panels, interactive sessions, and other
forms of presentation relevant to the conference theme
and on other topics that fall under the general heading of Feminist
Approaches to Bioethics. Papers should run approximately 20
minutes. Panels and other sessions may run a maximum of 90 minutes.

PROPOSAL FORMAT:

Name, affiliation and contact information of proposed presenter(s), including
e-mail
Title of session
Brief abstract (150 words)
Brief outline of proposed paper/panel/session (1-2 pages) outlining either
(a) reasoning and key conclusions (for papers) or (b)
motivation, organizational structure, and presenters (for other types of
presentations)

SUBMISSION TO: Send electronic copies of your proposal to BOTH Co-organizers
Debora Diniz (fabcongress@anis.org.br) and Susan
Sherwin (susan.sherwin@dal.ca) via email

LANGUAGES: Submissions may be made in English, Portuguese, or Spanish

FUNDING: A very limited amount of funding is available on the basis of need
from the Audre Lorde Fund. See FAB website:
http://www.msu.edu/~hlnelson/fab/index.html (Grants page) for details.


* Cross-posted from ?Genderstudies? Mailing list: majordomo@univer.kharkov.ua

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

6) Conference Announcement: ?Heroes ? Mothers ? Victims: Living in Violent
Conflict ? Everyday Life of Women and Men in Palestine and Bosnia? / Germany
/ March 15-17, 2002.

* Conferencia ? Organisaciones de mujeres comparten sus experiencias: ?Héroes
? Madres ? Víctimas: Viviendo en Conflicto Violento? / Alemania / 15-17 de
marzo, 2002. Para mayores detalles, contáctese con Birgit Schatz en:
birgit.schatz@ev-akademie-boll.de

* Conférence ? Organisations de femmes partagent leurs expériences: ?Héros ?
Mères ? Victimes: vivant auprès du conflit violent? / Allemagne / 15-17 mars,
2002. Pour tous renseignements, veuillez contacter Birgit Schatz au:
birgit.schatz@ev-akademie-boll.de


WOMEN'S ORGANISATIONS SHARE THEIR EXPERIENCES
15-17 March 2002
Evangelische Akademie Bad Boll, Germany

Long term conflict situations lead to a militarization of society, with
substantial impact on everyday life and on the division of roles between men
and women. Palestine and Bosnia serve as examples to illustrate how women are
assigned certain roles such as the mourner, the victim or the martyr's
mother. Distorting images in the media contribute to an increase in tension.
We do not know much about traumatic experiences and long term psychological
effects on women and men, or about changing gender relations in societies
where fear, violence and oppression is part of ordinary life. This
conference, aims to:

- understand, what it means to live in a situation of constant crisis
- critically assess the role of the media representation
- enable a dialogue among the representatives from the regions
- develop recommendations for local women's organisations as well as actors
in Europe relating to development work, the media and solidarity action.

The conference will be bilingual (German and English), with simultaneous
facilities in the plenary. Due to the difficult situation in Palestine, there
is always a risk that the Palestinian participants might not be allowed to
travel. In such a case, the programme will be reworked accordingly.

For further information, contact: Mrs. Birgit Schatz:
Tel: +49 7164 79217;
Fax: +49 7164 / 791211;
Email: birgit.schatz@ev-akademie-boll.de


* Cross-posted from CODEP e-newsletter

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
ANNOUNCEMENTS / ANUNCIOS / ANNONCES
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

7) Training Course: ?Fundraising and Online Efficiency? / On-site.

* Curso de Formación para aumentar la capacidad en conseguir financiamiento y
eficiencia en-linea. El Threshold Foundation ofrece cursos in-situ para ONGs.
Para más información, visite el sitio Web: www.dieschwelle.de o contáctese
con Burkhard Luber en: luber@dieschwelle.de

* Cours de formation sur la recueil de fonds et l?efficacité en-ligne. Le
Threshold Foundation offre des cours sur-site aux ONGs. Pour tous
renseignements, veuillez consulter la page Web: www.dieschwelle.de ou
contacter Burkhard Luber au: luber@dieschwelle.de


The Threshold Foundation offers courses to improve the work of NGOs working
in the fields of Human Rights, Citizens 4 Diplomacy, Environment Protection
and Conflict Management. Upcoming courses include Fundraising and On-Line
Efficiency. The specific contents of each course are fine-tuned in
communication between the NGO and trainer, Burkhard Luber, prior to the
course. The training period is one weekend. The course is held on-site at the
location of the NGO.

Training costs:
The trainees' organisation covers the cost of travel, accommodation and meals
for the trainer to come from Germany to the site of the organisation, where
the workshop will be held.

Royalties:
Not fixed, but flexible according to the financial capacities of
each trainees' organisation.

NGOs interested in such a training can contact Burkhard Luber for more
details.

Training Topics:
- Fundraising: Efficient Fundraising Strategies; How to Write Applications;
Whom to Contact/How to find Fund-Givers; Money from the European Union; On-
Line Fundraising.

- On-Line Efficiency: On-line Tools for NGOs; Advanced Search Strategies;
Countering censorship; Virtual Diplomacy; On-Line Public Relations and
Journalism; Human Rights and Environment Promotion on the Web.

The training is executed by Dr Burkhard Luber from the Threshold Foundation.
Burkhard Luber has worked with a wide range of NGOs abroad for more then two
decades and is editor of the "Grassroots Good News", an on-line NGO-magazine
for conflict management, human rights and environment issues with 3300+
receivers worldwide.

For further information about the Threshold Foundation or about the training
courses, see: www.dieschwelle.de or contact Burkhard Luber at email:
luber@dieschwelle.de


* Cross-posted from CODEP E-mail Newsletter:

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

8) Call for Papers for 2002 Summer Issue of ?Asian Women? / Deadline:
May 15, 2002.

* Solicitud de ensayos (en inglés) para la tirada de Verano de la revista
?Asian Women? sobre temas relacionados a los estudios de género. Plazo: 15 de
mayo, 2002. Para más informes, envíe un correo electrónico a:
asianfem@sookmyung.ac.kr

* Demande d?articles (en anglais) pour le numéro d?été de la revue ?Asian
Women? sur des thèmes reliés aux études de genre. Date limite est le 15 mai,
2002. Pour des renseignements supplémentaires, veuillez envoyer un courriel
à: asianfem@sookmyung.ac.kr


Asian Women seeks submissions for recent gender issue such as eco-feminism,
health, women and bio-technology, women and history, men?s studies and other
relevant themes in gender studies, slated for publication in Summer 2002 and
Winter 2002.

Asian Women, an interdisciplinary journal covering various Women?s Studies,
Men?s Studies and Gender Studies themes, hopes to share intelligent original
papers as well as case studies with you. Also, Any contributions of
theoretical papers, regional reports, or case studies based on feminist
studies and Asian studies will be welcomed. The editors welcome submissions
that are based on either collaborative or independent scholarship. They also
welcome submissions from a wide variety of Asia and other countries.

Contributors need to send their manuscripts to the Research Institute of
Asian Women any time. However, for the prompt evaluation procedure and
publication for 2002 Summer issue, contributors should send their manuscripts
by 15th of May 2002, and for 2002 Winter issue, by 15th of October 2002.

For more information, write to the Managing Editor, Research Institute of
Asian Women, Sookmyung Women?s Univesity, 53-12, Chungpa-dong 2-ka, Youngsan-
ku, Seoul, Korea 140-742 or e-mail to asianfem@sookmyung.ac.kr


* Cross-posted from: majordomo@univer.kharkov.ua

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

9) Call for Contributions to Women?s Studies International Forum.

* Solicitud de Contribuciones para el ?Foro Internacional de Estudios de la
Mujer?, una revista bi-mensual que apoya a la distribución e intercambio de
investigación feminista. Mayores informes se encuentren en:
http://www.elsevier.nl/locate/issn/02775395

* Demande de contributions pour le ?Forum international d?études de la
femme?, une revue bi-mensuelle qui appuie la distribution et l?échange de
recherche féministe. Tous renseignements se trouvent au:
http://www.elsevier.nl/locate/issn/02775395


Women's Studies International Forum (formerly Women's Studies
International Quarterly , established in 1978) is a bimonthly journal to aid
the distribution and exchange of feminist research in the
multidisciplinary, international area of women's studies and in feminist
research in other disciplines. The policy of the journal is to establish a
feminist forum for discussion and debate.

The journal seeks to critique and reconceptualize existing knowledge, to
examine and re-evaluate the manner in which knowledge is produced and
distributed, and to assess the implications this has for women's lives.

We seek contributions from people, individually or collectively, from
different countries and different backgrounds, who are engaged in
feminist research inside or outside formal educational institutions. We
welcome a variety of approaches and resources through the whole range of
disciplines: papers geared toward action-oriented research as well as those
which address theoretical methodological issues; and we encourage historical
reassessments of the lives and works of women. We urge all contributors both
to acknowledge the cultural and social specifics of their particular
approach, and to draw out these issues in their articles.

We also invite contributions to FEMINIST FORUM, the news and views
supplement which appears in each issue of the journal. FEMINIST FORUM is
aimed at promoting a network among feminists which cuts across national
boundaries; we welcome conference reports and announcements, calls for
papers, notices of new publications and reports, contacts, etc., sent in by
individuals or groups in the international feminist community.

For more information, please visit:
http://www.elsevier.nl/locate/issn/02775395


* Cross-posted from ?Genderstudies? Mailing List: majordomo@univer.kharkov.ua

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
RESOURCES / RECURSOS / RESSOURCES
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

10) Anunciando dos Boletines Electrónico de la REPEM: "LA RED VA..." y
"Voices Rising".

* Announcing REPEM?s Weekly Electronic Bulletin (in Spanish and Portuguese):
?LA RED VA...?. Also their monthly english bulletin entitled: ?Voices
Rising?. Both used as a tool to disseminate events, campaigns and actions
within the women?s movement in Latin America. To subscribe to "LA RED
VA...", please send an e-mail to: laredva@repem.org.uy To subscribe to
"Voices Rising", please send an e-mail to: repem2@repem.org.uy Contact REPEM
at: repem@repem.org.uy

* Annonce du Bulletin Électronique Semanaire de REPEM (en espagnol et
Portuguais): ?LA RED VA...?. Aussie leur bulletin mensuel en anglais intitulé
?Voices Rising?. Les deux représentent des outils pour disséminer des
évenements, campagnes, et actions dans le cadre du mouvement de la femme en
Amérique Latine. Pour s?inscrire à "LA RED VA...", veuillez envoyer un
courriel à: laredva@repem.org.uy Pour s'inscrire à "Voices Rising", veuillez
envoyer un courriel à repem2@repem.org.uy Contacter REPEM au:
repem@repem.org.uy


LA RED VA... es un boletin publicado semanalmente en correo electronico, en
español y portugues por la REPEM, (Red de Educacion Popular Entre Mujeres de
America Latina y el Caribe).
Esta revista ha demostrado desde octubre de 1997 ser una herramienta
efectiva para socializar y democratizar la información, cuando las noticias
apremian, para la diseminación de eventos, campañas y acciones del movimiento
de mujeres.
LA RED VA llega a cerca de 1000 direcciones y se replican en diferentes
redes de America Latina y el Caribe.
LA RED VA incluye diferentes temas (educación, campañas, becas, trabajo,
experiencias). No incluimos lo que aparece en Radio o TV ya que tienen
suficiente promoción.
Los/as lectores/as son las personas que principalmente contribuyen con
información, la cual es después seleccionada e incluida en cada número. Todas
las actividades de la REPEM a nivel global, regional, nacional y local tienen
un lugar especial en el boletín para su diseminación.

Para subscribirse, mande un correo electrónico a: laredva@repem.org.uy

REPEM también contribuye con la creación y diseminación del boletín
electrónico mensual en Inglés, con el objetivo de compartir información en
Inglés sobre la región latinoamericana. Esta revista llamada "Voices
Rising" se convirtió en un buen medio para interconectar el mundo inglés y
español, lo que ha culminado muchas veces en oportunidades de articulación
entre REPEM y otras organizaciones de mujeres, especialmente con DAWN y la
Oficina de Género del ICAE.

Para subscribirse, mande un correo electrónico a: repem2@repem.org.uy

Más recientemente, en particular para los procesos de revisión de Beijing y
Copenhague, LA RED VA y Voices Rising han promoviendo la diseminación de lo
que estaba ocurriendo, enviando reportes diarios escritos por representantes
de REPEM. La información y el conocimiento fueron enriquecidos por la
contribución de otras redes globales que trabajaron en este proceso con
REPEM, DAWN / GEO/ICAE y WEDO.

REPEM es una Asociacion Civil sin fines de lucro, creada en 1981.
Agrupa a 140 ONG ya mujeres activistas y academicas de los paises de
America Latina y el Caribe.
Su proposito fundamental es fortalecer y consolidar procesos de
articulacion equilibrada entre lo nacional, regional y global para
contribuir al logro de la justicia social, economica y de genero.

EJES DE TRABAJO
Desarrolla programas y proyectos en relacion a tres ejes:
- Educacion, genero y economia popular
- Educacion, genero y ciudadania
- Fortalecimiento institucional

Direccion:
REPEM
Colonia 2069
11200 Montevideo - Uruguay
Tel/fax: ++5982 4030599 - 4080089
E-mail: laredva@repem.org.uy - repem@repem.org.uy
web: www.repem.org.uy (en construccion)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

11) New Publication (in Russian): ?Gendered Histories from Eastern Europe? /
Editors: Elena Gapova, Al?mira Usmanova, Andres Peto.

* Nueva Publicación (en ruso) sobre la historia del género en Europa del Este
/ Editores: Elena Gapova, Al?mira Usmanova, Andres Peto. El libro está
disponible en: www.eastview.com

* Nouvelle publication (en russe) sur l?histoire du genre en Europe de l?Est
/ Éditeurs: Elena Gapova, Al?mira Usmanova, Andres Peto. Le livre est
disponible au: www.eastview.com


A new publication on East European women's history is now available:
Gendernye istorii Vostochnoy Evropy (Gendered histories from Eastern Europe)
Eds. Elena Gapova, Al'mira Usmanova, Andrea Peto.
Language: Russian; 416pp.
Publisher: European Humanities University, Minsk

The book results from the 1999 international conference "Writing Women's
History and History of Gender in Countries in Transition" which was hosted by
the Centre for Gender Studies at European Humanities University in Minsk. The
volume comprises texts by 29 authors from 13 nations of Central and Western
Europe and USA and invokes that part of East European history which can be
described as the history of personal as the political or the political as
personal. The book's topics include: oral history: memory, trauma, narrative;
imagined communities: gender and nation; the miserable and the powerless:
practices of exclusion; gender and law; contemporary history of the gendered
individual: rites of transition.

The book will be available in the US through East View Publications
(www.eastview.com).


* Cross-posted from ?Genderstudies? Mailing List: majordomo@kharkov.univer.ua

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

12) New Report: ?Gender and Peacekeeping: Opportunities and Challenges to
Improve Practice? / International Alert.

* Nuevo Informe de Internaional Alert (en inglés): ?Género y Procesos de
Pacificación: Oportunidades y Desafíos para Mejorar la Práctica?. Está
disponible en el sitio Web: www.womenbuildingpeace.org o por correo
electrónico ? contáctese con Bethan Cobley en: bcobley@international-
alert.org.

* Nouveau Rapport de International Alert (en anglais): ?Genre et le maintien
de la paix: opportunités et défis pour améliorer la pratique?. Il est
disponible au site Web: www.womenbuildingpeace.org, ou par courriel de Bethan
Cobley au: bcobley@international-alert.org


The briefing provides practical recommendations for a gender-sensitive
approach to multidimensional PSOs within the context of implementing United
Nations Resolution 1325. It is intended as a resource for policy-makers and
implementing agents, and is being disseminated to both military and civilian
agencies within the United Nations, European Union and civil organisations.

The record of peace support operations has revealed that conflict situations
have been exacerbated when they fail to include the needs, experiences and
perspectives of women - who are often most affected by violence and who are
key agents in facilitating and sustaining peace and reconciliation processes.
The inclusion of balanced gender perspectives in peace support operations is
critical to ensuring that the needs of local populations are met and
understood.

International Alert believes that a gender perspective can make a positive
difference to peace support operations and that gender awareness training is
vital to inform the composition and deployment of civilian and military
personnel. Working with military and peacekeeping institutions and drawing
upon their expertise, they hope to contribute to this debate and to further
encourage governments and troop contributing states to integrate gender into
their approaches as a matter of urgency and efficiency.

The report is available from the International Alert Website at:
www.womenbuildingpeace.org or by contacting Bethan Cobley at International
Alert on email: bcobley@international-alert.org


* Cross-posted from CODEP e-mail newsletter Website: www.codep.org.uk

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
NEWS / NOTICIAS / NOUVELLES
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

13) WIDE Position Paper: "United Nations Conference on Financing for
Development - Observations and Demands from a gender perspective" / February
2002 / By: Brita Neuhold.

* Documento de de Posición de WIDE sobre la conferencia de las Naciones
Unidas sobre el Financiación del Desarrollo ? ?Observaciones y Demandas desde
la Perspectiva del Género?, por: Brita Neuhold. Disponble en-linea en:
http://www.eurosur.org/wide/UN/BN_FfD.feb02.htm

* Document de Base de WIDE sur la conférence des Nations Unies sur le
Financement du Développement ? ?Observations et réclamations, de la
perspective du genre?, par: Brita Neuhold. Elle est disponible on-line au:
http://www.eurosur.org/wide/UN/BN_FfD.feb02.htm


"... The draft Outcome Document contains some rhetoric allusions to a more
equitable and ecologically sustainable view of development - with even some
references to the importance of taking gender issues into
consideration -, but generally speaking, it is a blueprint to facilitate
progress and profit for those who are already at the controls of economic and
political power. The concept of prevailing development strategies is never
really questioned, development is equaled with economic growth and - as a
delegate of the Group of 77 pointed out during the October PrepCom to an
increasing degree with globalization. With a globalization that is not gender
sensitive, ecologically sustainable and inclusive of civil society, but
directed by the economic interests of Transnational Corporations and hard-
core capitalist groups in rich countries. With a globalization which
considers Foreign Direct Investments as well as speedy commercialization and
privatization of all life on earth as the winning formula to ensure freedom
from poverty and quality of life all over the planet... ..."

Brita Neuhold's Paper gives an excellent analysis of the outcome document for
Monterrey, points out some interesting alternative positions and includes
useful recommendations from the gender perspective.

The paper is available on-line at:
http://www.eurosur.org/wide/UN/BN_FfD.feb02.htm

For more informationa about WIDE, please visit their Website at:
www.eurosur.org/wide

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