brad brace

The international journalists’ organisation, Reporters Without Borders, has condemned two cases of Fiji journalists being arrested and questioned for several hours by police in the past 10 days.

The latest was that of Fiji Times reporter Serafina Salaitoga, who was arrested at her home in the presence of her children, after writing a story that quoted a businessman Charan Jeath Singh as commenting about Suva politics.

Isaac Lal of the Daily Post was arrested and interrogated about an article linking a convict, Josefa Baleiloa, to an alleged plot to assassinate national leaders.

Mr Lal was picked up after the police spokeswoman complained about being quoted in the report.

Reporters Without Borders says these arrests will foster a climate of fear among journalists and harm news coverage.

A Papua New Guinea corruption watchdog has warned that civil discontent over alleged government corruption is growing.

The group say there could be a violent public backlash because of the ever increasing number of corrupt dealings in the Government.

Transparency International’s PNG boss Mike Manning says the breakdown of law and order is getting worse.

“We don’t have any answers immediately as to how we fix a single part of the breakdown of the system of law and order and the breakdown of the systems which would control corruption,” he said.

“But we do know that we’re reading about them day after day after day and that they’re getting worse.”

Transparency International PNG has also criticised government agencies like the Ombudsman Commission for not following through with investigations into leadership issues.

Failed State definition:

A state could be said to “succeed” if it maintains, a monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force within its borders. When this is broken (e.g., through the dominant presence of warlords, militias, or terrorism), the very existence of the state becomes dubious, and the state becomes a failed state.

Progress on food security issues will only come when we begin to ask the right question and challenge the myths that trap us.
by Frances Moore Lappe

News broadcasts report a horrific “world food crisis.” But there is no food shortage. In fact, there’s more than enough food to make us all chubby—even counting only the “leftovers,” what remains after turning more than a third of the world’s grain and fish catch into feed.

The forecast for world cereal production in 2008 stands at a record 2,164 million metric tons, says the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization. That’s an increase of 2.6 percent over last year, the previous global high.

Again: The shortage is not of food. It is one of democracy. At its heart, democracy means power distributed so that citizens’ interests—our values and our common sense—show up in policies.

Yet, can you imagine citizens anywhere setting things up so that just one company, controlling a huge share of the entire world’s grain trade, could enjoy a 65 percent profit surge last year, while at the same time food price hikes are pushing 100 million more people into poverty and hunger? (The most recent quarterly Archer Daniels Midland profit surge came largely from the company’s financial division that makes money on price volatility via commodity futures trading.)

Or think about this: In a world where even before this historic price climb almost a billion people couldn’t afford enough to eat, what citizen would say, “Why don’t we start shifting prime farmland into agrofuel production and push prices still higher!?”

Neither could happen if citizens had real power. Each violates our common sense and our hardwired human need for fairness.

So this crisis makes me ask: Why are we playing Monopoly when we could be living democracy? In today’s deadly global Monopoly game, the biggest money players get ever bigger while most others get progressively knocked out of the game. We’ve seen it in the housing market and now we’re seeing it in the food market. In this game, what does growth mean? The 1990s saw considerable economic expansion, but for every $100 in growth only 60 cents went toward ending poverty. In Monopoly, after many long hours the game finally ends, and all but one player goes to bed “broke.” Everybody’s had fun. But in real life, it’s not fun. The outcome is premature death for millions of our fellow humans.

FOR 40 YEARS I’ve been asking why it is so hard for humans to see the needless misery we’re generating. Gradually I came to see that in large measure the answer is the power of ideas. One very dangerous idea perpetuating our global democracy crisis is this: We humans are so flawed that we have to turn over our fate to an infallible, almost mystical force: The Market. The danger is that this idea leaves us feeling powerless. We’re blind to the obvious fact that left to its own devices, unguided by democracy, a market inexorably concentrates wealth and power so tightly that it infects political decision-making. So we end up with, in effect, “privately held” government.

The result? Hunger-generating policies that no assemblage of real citizens would dream up.

For several decades, for example, countries in the Global South were encouraged by international lending, aid, and trade agencies to let go of the goal of food independence. While in the North many extol the goal of oil independence, comparable food independence was somehow deemed a bad idea. Aid was often proffered on conditions that undermined local producers. In 1986 John Block, Ronald Reagan’s agriculture secretary, called the idea of poor countries feeding themselves an “anachronism of a bygone era.”

Within a generation, countries in the Global South that had been food exporters became massive food importers. And today, as food prices jumped by almost half in nine months, poor people are living—or, more accurately, dying—from the consequences of this disastrous policy.

Peeling away the layers to grasp the roots of needless hunger, we find them in people’s lack of power—the lack of capacity to act on our values and in our interests. If hunger results from extreme power imbalances in human relationships, the questions before us are:

How do we empower more and more people, starting with ourselves?

How do we reshape relationships so everyone has the power to live in dignity and to meet their needs?

Through this new lens, removing the influence of money in political decision-making is not a separate political matter; it is essential to ending hunger on this abundant planet. In the past decade, for example, U.S. agribusiness spent almost $1 billion lobbying our government for policies, including massive farm subsidies, that are in many cases undermining poor people’s capacities to feed themselves. Such subsidies, for example, undermine smallholders, from corn growers in Mexico to cotton growers in Mali.

Many Americans have given up on reclaiming democracy from moneyed interests. They should not. It can be done; it is being done. We must crack open the best-kept secret in America: that public financing of elections is working statewide in three states. We can take that success national. (Visit www.just6dollars.org.) Simulta­ne­ously, we can get behind candidates in this election year who commit to shifting support to family-scale sustainable farmers in all aid and trade legislation, domestic as well as in foreign, and who are willing to halt the deadly agrofuel program. (One third of U.S. corn production will go to ethanol this year.)

Through the lens of remaking power relationships, we also see food as a right of citizenship, one now inscribed—either for all citizens or for children—in 22 national constitutions. We know how to make this right real. And we can build on the proven anti-hunger policies of progressive taxation, a legal minimum wage that is a living wage, anti-monopoly enforcement, and protection of the rights of trade unions. In the same vein, we can back policies that encourage producer and consumer cooperatives, the kind that already create more jobs worldwide than do multinational corporations.

To prevent future crises, we can embrace the goal of food independence, as much as possible, at both the local and national levels. For how can any people feel free if they remain at the mercy of international market vagaries and mani­pulation?

Today’s food price rises are predictable outcomes of policies flowing from decades of anti-democratic decision-making. Each of us can explain to our friends, neighbors, co-workers, and legislators that our crisis is human-made. Food scarcity is a myth; the deeper scarcity is of democracy. And we can spread the good news, too, that we each have the power to be part of creating real, living democracy.

Frances Moore Lappé, cofounder of the Small Planet Institute, is the author of 16 books, including, most recently, Getting a Grip: Clarity, Creativity, & Courage in a World Gone Mad.

Just two days ago, Gordon Brown was urging us all to stop wasting food and combat rising prices and a global shortage of provisions.

But yesterday the Prime Minister and other world leaders sat down to an 18-course gastronomic extravaganza at a G8 summit in Japan, which is focusing on the food crisis.

The dinner, and a six-course lunch, at the summit of leading industrialised nations on the island of Hokkaido, included delicacies such as caviar, milkfed lamb, sea urchin and tuna, with champagne and wines flown in from Europe and the U.S.

But the extravagance of the menus drew disapproval from critics who thought it hypocritical to produce such a lavish meal when world food supplies are under threat.

On Sunday, Mr Brown called for prudence and thrift in our kitchens, after a Government report concluded that 4.1million tonnes of food was being wasted by householders.

He suggested we could save up to £8 a week by making our shopping go further. It was vital to reduce ‘unnecessary demand’ for food, he said.

Last night’s dinner menu was created by Katsuhiro Nakamura, the first Japanese chef to win a Michelin star. It was themed: Hokkaido, blessings of the earth and the sea.

But Dominic Nutt, of the charity Save the Children, did not approve.

‘It is deeply hypocritical that they should be lavishing course after course on world leaders when there is a food crisis and millions cannot afford a decent meal,’ he said.

‘If the G8 wants to betray the hopes of a generation of children, it is going the right way about it. The food crisis is an emergency and the G8 must treat it as that.’

In 2005, at the G8 summit in Gleneagles, Scotland, world leaders promised to increase global aid by £25billion a year by 2010 and raise aid to Africa, the world’s poorest continent, by £12.5billion. But the bloc of rich nations is only 14 per cent of the way towards hitting its target.

Britain is meeting its commitments in full, but other countries are understood to be dragging their feet - and there are fears the figures on global aid could be watered down.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Italian leader Silvio Berlusconi, who face pressure to cut spending at home, are understood to be leading the charge to weaken the Gleneagles proposal.

Tory international development spokesman Andrew Mitchell said: ‘The G8 have made a bad start to their summit, with excessive cost and lavish consumption.

‘Surely it is not unreasonable for each leader to give a guarantee that they will stand by their solemn pledges of three years ago at Gleneagles to help the world’s poor.

‘All of us are watching, waiting and listening.’

A World Bank study released last week estimated that up to 105million more people, including 30million in Africa, could drop below the poverty line because of rising food prices.

Yesterday the European Union agreed to channel £800million in unused European farm subsidies to African farmers, as part of its response to the global food crisis.

‘The EU really can give a boost to agriculture in developing countries,’ Jose Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission, told the meeting.

The money will be used to buy seed and fertiliser and fund agriculture projects in Africa.

The meal was served at the Windsor Hotel, on the shores of Lake Toya, where the presidential suite costs £7,000 a night.

Japan has spent a record sum of money and deployed about 20,000 police to seal off the remote lakeside town of Toyako for the three-day talks.

The US has been operating “floating prisons” for the detention of suspects held without trial in the so called “war on terror” in order to conceal their numbers and locations. An analysis of the operation of prison ships, set to be published this year by the human rights organization Reprieve, has been compiled from the statements of the US military, the Council of Europe and related parliamentary bodies, and the testimonies of prisoners themselves.

The Reprieve study includes the account of a prisoner released from Guantánamo Bay, who described a fellow inmate’s story of detention on an amphibious assault ship. “One of my fellow prisoners in Guantánamo was at sea on an American ship with about 50 others before coming to Guantánamo … he was in the cage next to me. He told me that there were about 50 other people on the ship. They were all closed off in the bottom of the ship. The prisoner commented to me that it was like something you see on TV. The people held on the ship were beaten even more severely than in Guantánamo.”

Clive Stafford Smith, Reprieve’s legal director, said: “They choose ships to try to keep their misconduct as far as possible from the prying eyes of the media and lawyers. We will eventually reunite these ghost prisoners with their legal rights. By its own admission, the US government is currently detaining at least 26,000 people without trial in secret prisons, and information suggests up to 80,000 have been ‘through the system’ since 2001. The US government must show a commitment to rights and basic humanity by immediately revealing who these people are, where they are, and what has been done to them.”

Reprieve says that the US may have used up to 17 ships since 2001. The report also claims there have been more than 200 new cases of rendition since President George Bush declared in 2006 that the practice had stopped.

Regime-Quakes in Burma and China

When news arrived of the catastrophic earthquake in Sichuan, my mind
turned to Zheng Sun Man, an up-and-coming security executive I met on
a recent trip to China. Zheng heads Aebell Electrical Technology, a
Guangzhou-based company that makes surveillance cameras and public
address systems and sells them to the government.

Zheng, a 28-year-old MBA with a text-messaging addiction, was
determined to persuade me that his cameras and speakers are not being
used against pro-democracy activists or factory organizers. They are
for managing natural disasters, Zheng explained, pointing to the
freak snowstorms before Lunar New Year. During the crisis, the
government was able use the feed from the railway cameras to
communicate how to deal with the situation and organize an
evacuation. We saw how the central government can command from the
north emergencies in the south.

Of course, surveillance cameras have other uses too like helping to
make Most Wanted posters of Tibetan activists. But Zheng did have a
point: nothing terrifies a repressive regime quite like a natural
disaster. Authoritarian states rule by fear and by projecting an aura
of total control. When they suddenly seem short-staffed, absent or
disorganized, their subjects can become dangerously emboldened. Its
something to keep in mind as two of the most repressive regimes on
the planetChina and Burmastruggle to respond to devastating
disasters: the Sichuan earthquake and Cyclone Nargis. In both cases,
the disasters have exposed grave political weaknesses within the
regimesand both crises have the potential to ignite levels of public
rage that would be difficult to control.

When China is busily building itself up, creating jobs and new
wealth, residents tend to stay quiet about what they all know:
developers regularly cut corners and flout safety codes, while local
officials are bribed not to notice. But when China comes tumbling
downincluding at least eight schools in the earthquake zone the
truth has a way of escaping from the rubble. Look at all the
buildings around. They were the same height but why did the school
fall down? a distraught relative in Juyuan demanded of a foreign
reporter. Its because the contractors want to make a profit from
our children. A mother in Dujiangyan told The Guardian, Chinese
officials are too corrupt and bad%.They have money for prostitutes
and second wives but they dont have money for our children.

That the Olympic stadiums were built to withstand powerful quakes is
suddenly of little comfort. When I was in China, it was hard to find
anyone willing to criticize the Olympic spending spree. Now posts on
mainstream web portals are calling the torch relay wasteful and its
continuation in the midst of so much suffering inhuman.

None of this compares with the rage boiling over in Burma, where
cyclone survivors have badly beaten at least one local official,
furious at his failure to distribute aid. Simon Billenness, co-chair
of the board of directors of U.S. Campaign for Burma, told me, This
is Katrina times a thousand. I dont see how it couldnt lead to
political unrest.

The unrest of greatest concern to the regime is not coming from
regular civilians but from inside the military a fact that explains
some of the juntas more erratic behavior. For instance, we know that
the Burmese junta has been taking credit for supplies sent by foreign
countries. Now it turns out that it have been taking more than
creditin some cases it has been taking the aid. According to a
report in Asia Times, the regime has been hijacking food shipments
and distributing them among its 400,000 soldiers. The reason speaks
to the deep threat the disaster poses. The generals, it seems, are
haunted by an almost pathological fear of a split inside their own
ranks%if soldiers are not given priority in aid distribution and are
unable to feed themselves, the possibility of mutiny rises. Mark
Farmaner, director of Burma Campaign UK, confirms that before the
cyclone, the military was already coping with a wave of desertions.

This relatively small-scale theft of food is fortifying the junta for
its much larger heistthe one taking place via the constitutional
referendum the generals have insisted on holding, come hell and high
water. Enticed by high commodity prices, Burmas generals have been
gorging off the countrys natural abundance, stripping it of gems,
timber, rice and oil. As profitable as this arrangement is, junta
leader Gen. Than Shwe knows he cannot resist the calls for democracy
indefinitely.

Taking a page out of the playbook of Chilean dictator Augusto
Pinochet, the generals have drafted a Constitution that allows for
future elections but attempts to guarantee that no government will
ever have the power to prosecute them for their crimes or take back
their ill-gotten wealth. As Farmaner puts it, after elections the
junta leaders are going to be wearing suits instead of boots. Much
of the voting has already taken place but in cyclone ravaged
districts, the referendum has been delayed until May 24. Aung Din,
executive director of the U.S. Campaign for Burma, told me that the
military has stooped to using aid to extort votes. Rainy season is
coming, he told me, and people need to repair their roofs. When
they go to purchase the materials, which are very limited, they are
told they can only have them if they agree to vote for the
constitution in an advance ballot.

The cyclone, meanwhile, has presented the junta with one last, vast
business opportunity: by blocking aid from reaching the highly
fertile Irrawaddy delta, hundreds of thousands of mostly ethnic Karen
rice farmers are being sentenced to death. According to Farmaner,
that land can be handed over to the generals business cronies
(shades of the beachfront land grabs in Sri Lanka and Thailand after
the Asian tsunami). This isnt incompetence, or even madness, as many
have claimed. Its laissez-faire ethnic cleansing.

If the Burmese junta avoids mutiny and achieves these goals, it will
be thanks largely to China, which has vigorously blocked all attempts
at the United Nations for humanitarian intervention in Burma. Inside
China, where the central government is going to great lengths to show
itself as compassionate, news of this complicity could prove
explosive.

Will Chinas citizens receive this news? They just might. Beijing
has, up to now, displayed an awesome determination to censor and
monitor all forms of communication. But in the wake of the quake, the
notorious Great Firewall censoring the Internet is failing badly.
Blogs are going wild, and even state reporters are insisting on
reporting the news.

This may be the greatest threat that natural disasters pose to
contemporary repressive regimes. For Chinas rulers, nothing has been
more crucial to maintaining power than the ability to control what
people see and hear. If they lose that, neither surveillance cameras
nor loudspeakers will be able to help them.

The FBI has agreed to drop its demand that a San Francisco-based Internet library turn over subscriber information, according to court documents unsealed Monday. As part of a settlement, the FBI also agreed that its previously secret efforts could be publicized.

The bureau served the Internet Archive — whose Wayback Machine page allows viewers to see old versions of millions of Web pages — with a national security letter in November 2007, but under the terms of a settlement reached between the two in April, the FBI has withdrawn the letter and agreed to make most of its contents public.

Kurt Opsahl, a staff attorney with San Francisco’s Electronic Frontier Foundation who helped represent the archive, said he believes the victory is only the fourth successful challenge to a national security letter.

The FBI said the letter to the archive was part of a national security investigation and that they “permit the FBI to gather the basic building blocks for our counterterrorism and counterintelligence investigations,” according to a statement by Assistant Director John Miller.

The letters, often compared to subpoenas, don’t need approval from a judge and contain gag orders prohibiting their recipients from even speaking of their existence. The settlement in the Northern District federal court comes less than a year after New York District Court Judge Victor Marrero found national security letters unconstitutional, though his decision is under appeal.

“One of the most important victories here is that we can even say this letter was received,” said Opsahl.

The Internet Archive sued the FBI in December, arguing that the gag orders in the letters violate the First and Fifth amendments. The suit asked the court to find the letters unconstitutional and order the FBI to stop sending them.

After four months of negotiating, the FBI decided to settle, Opsahl said.

“The consequences [of litigating] would be that a second court would find that the statute was unconstitutional and that it was not applicable to libraries under this circumstance,” he said.

The use of national security letters has skyrocketed since 2001, according to the American Civil Liberties Union. A March 2007 report by the Department of Justice’s inspector general said the FBI issued more than 192,000 requests between 2003 and 2006.

In the letter served on the Internet Archive, the FBI sought the name, address and e-mail exchanges of a subscriber to the archive’s services. Opsahl said the archive only gave agents public information that they could have gotten themselves from the nonprofit’s Web site. He said the archive keeps a record only of registered patrons’ e-mail addresses.

Opsahl said that although the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which is reviewing Marrero’s decision, will now have the most say over the constitutionality of national security letters, he hopes the Internet Archive’s challenge will encourage other groups to take on the FBI.

The archive agreed to redact portions of the letter, but the FBI must prove to Judge Claudia Wilken by Dec. 1 that those sections pose a national security threat, otherwise the entire document will become public. Among the still-secret contents are the name of the targeted subscriber, the name of the FBI agent pursuing the target and more specifics about the kind of information the agent was seeking.

Burma’s government said today that at least 15,000 people are dead and 30,000 missing after Tropical Cyclone Nargis hit the country on Saturday. The storm, which struck the capital Yangon and the rice-growing Irrawaddy delta, triggered a tidal wave killing thousands and leaving hundreds of thousands homeless. The country’s isolated military junta have allowed in aid agencies to help distribute vital supplies. The UN is discussing how to supply more aid…

Myanmar Holds Election Amid Stench of Death
Ruling Junta Keeps Political Process Going Despite Scores of Dead and Dying

In Myanmar’s Irrawaddy delta, old men lie under crushed tin roofs, flies covering their faces. Nobody has come to help them exactly one week after Cyclone Nagris arrived. Dead bodies litter the sides of rivers, bloated from neglect. The stench of death overwhelms towns.

But 70 miles to the north, in Yangon, Myanmar’s largest city, two young women smile and dance on state television, a glitzy promotional campaign for a referendum that proceeded today despite the 1.5 million to 2 million Burmese who have no water, food or shelter.

“Let’s go vote … with sincere thoughts for happy days,” the dancers sing, neglecting to mention the fact that for more than 12 million Burmese conditions are so bad the vote could not proceed where they live.

Myanmar’s ruling generals today appeared more interested in promoting the vote that will entrench their rule than they were in the hundreds of thousands of their people who are drinking coconut milk because they have no clean water, who are sleeping under the stars because they have no homes, who haven’t had electricity since the storm hit.

The United Nations today increased its estimates of the number of dead and the number of people who urgently need aid, saying that anywhere from 60,000 to 100,000 people have died from the storm. “And that’s not counting any future casualties,” Richard Horsey, the spokesman for the UN’s humanitarian affairs office in Bangkok, said.

“It’s a major disaster, and relief is not getting there fast enough,” Horsey said. Fewer than 500,000 people have received aid, less than a third of the number who need it, he said.

“It’s a race against time,” Horsey said. “There is a huge risk that diarrheal disease, cholera and so on could start to spread, because there is a lack of clean drinking water, a lack of sanitation facilities. This could be a huge problem and it could lead to a second phase which could be as deadly as the cyclone.”

And yet the generals who run Myanmar spent the day posing for cameras, handing out boxes of aid stamped with their names on it and promoting a “yes” vote in the referendum.

Burmese citizens live in fear of a police state, and most of those brave enough to speak to reporters said they had voted yes, meaning they had voted to allot one out of every four parliamentary seats to the military, allow the president to hand over all power to the military in a state of emergency and ban Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, who leads the country’s pro-democracy movement, from public office.

“I voted yes. It was what I was asked to do,” 57-year-old U Kyaing said in Hlegu, 30 miles from Yangon.

Aye Aye Mar, a 36-year-old homemaker, was asked by a reporter if she thought anyone would vote no. Her eyes darted around to see if anyone was watching, and then she whispered, “One vote of ‘No’ will not make a difference.”

Then she raised her voice: “I’m saying ‘Yes’ to the constitution.”

There are some signs that aid into the country is slowly increasing.

The United Nations launched its first emergency appeal for the cyclone’s survivors, asking for $187 million.

The International Committee of the Red Cross sent its first shipment into Myanmar, an aid flight with 31 tons of pumps, generators, water tanks and medicine.

And today, the U.N.’s refugee agency delivered its first supplies into the country, via a border crossing in Mae Sot, Thailand. Two trucks full of mostly tents and some relief supplies will take almost a week to get to Rangon, the U.N. said today.

But there are still thousands of aid workers who have not been given visas to enter the country. The Myanmar government has suggested international organizations deliver aid without accompanying workers. But aid groups point out that the devastation is too vast for a government to handle.

TV images taken at the Yangon airport show workers hand-carrying relief supplies off of the few planes that have been allowed to land, a process far too slow for the Burmese in desperate need.

“The country, the areas which were struck by the cyclone, should get the foreign aid,” one villager said in English, his voice rising in anger.

“The aid workers in the country are saying this is just overwhelming,” Horsey said. “The scale of this in comparison to what people are able to do is just overwhelming.”

It is overwhelming local aid workers in towns such as Myaung Mya, where 10,000 survivors have arrived since the storm hit. They sleep next to each other on bare floors, no fires to keep the mosquitoes away.

“How many more days are we going to be able to feed them? People here can barely afford to feed themselves,” one local businessman said.

Shopkeepers are closing before dusk, fearing looters.

“These people have nothing left to lose,” the businessman said. “Maybe they will just go for it.”

“Our politicians were corrupt, but we had enough money to buy food,” says Shah Alam, a day labourer in Rangpur, one of Bangladesh’s poorest districts, nostalgic for the days before the state of emergency imposed in January last year. He has been queuing all day for government-subsidised rice. Two floods and a devastating cyclone last year, combined with a sharp rise in global rice prices, have left some 60m of Bangladesh’s poor, who spend about 40% of their skimpy income on rice, struggling to feed themselves.

In the capital, Dhaka, a debate is raging about whether this is a famine or “hidden hunger”. The crisis is not of the army-backed interim government’s own making. But it is struggling to convince people that the politicians it locked up as part of an anti-corruption drive would have been equally helpless. They include the feuding leaders of the two big political parties, the former prime ministers Khaleda Zia of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party and Sheikh Hasina Wajed of the Awami League.

The state of emergency, imposed to silence riotous politicians and repair corrupted institutions, can barely contain the growing discontent. This week thousands of garment workers went on strike for higher pay to cope with soaring food prices. The crisis has emboldened the political parties, which have been calling more loudly for the release of their leaders.

The army’s main headache is Sheikh Hasina, whose party is widely expected to win the election. Her detention on corruption charges has made her more popular than ever. Senior leaders of the League say it will boycott the election if the courts convict her. The threat might be empty. But it is a risk the army cannot afford to take. The patience of Western governments, which backed the state of emergency, is wearing thin. Human-rights abuses continue unabated. And they fear the political vacuum might be filled by an Islamist fringe, whose members this week went on a rampage to protest against a draft law giving equal inheritance rights to men and women.

The election will almost certainly take place. And, unlike in the past, rigging it will be hard. Bangladesh has its first proper voters’ list. Criminals will be banned from running. But to hold truly free and fair elections, the army will need to reach an accommodation with the parties. There is talk of a face-saving deal allowing Sheikh Hasina to go abroad for medical treatment, in return for a promise that the League will not boycott the election. Hardliners in the army will not like it. But they have largely been sidelined. With food prices likely to remain high and rice yields half those of India, Bangladesh desperately needs to secure food aid, investment and trade.

It also badly needs to sustain the rising flow of billions of dollars in remittances, which have lifted millions of Bangladeshis out of poverty. This complicates the government’s stated plan of considering prosecution of those who assisted the Pakistani army in a campaign that left 3m Bengalis dead in the country’s liberation war in 1971. Saudi Arabia, which accounts for 40% of total remittances, objects to an international war-crimes tribunal. If the two big political parties had their way, a large number of leaders of Jamaat-e-Islami, Bangladesh’s largest Islamist party, would stand trial.

It appears unlikely that the army will walk off the pitch and let the politicians run the country without altering the rules of the game. The interim government has already approved, in principle, the creation of a National Security Council, which would institutionalise the army’s role in politics. Last month the army chief, General Moeen U Ahmed, extended his term by one year in the “public interest”. His term now runs out in June 2009. But many Bangladeshis still doubt that he will go down in history as that rare general who gave up power voluntarily.

Thai police arrested and charged a man from Bangladesh found in possession of hundreds of fake passports and visas, a senior police official said on Sunday.

Mohammed Karim, 56, was arrested in a rented house in Bangkok by police investigating a gang of foreign counterfeiters.

They found 90 real passports, 577 fake US and European passports, 680 counterfeit visas and 1,680 fake passport photo pages, mostly for American passports, said police Lieutenant Colonel Sophon Sarapat.

“Karim confessed and he was charged with conspiring to make counterfeit passports for sale, and making fake visas,” he said.

One Thai and one Myanmar citizen also alleged to be involved in the global counterfeiting ring escaped, Sophon added.

Karim could face a maximum of 20 years in jail if convicted.

Passport fraud is a common problem in Thailand. At the end of 2006, Thai and US police launched a joint sting operation which netted 500 fake US passports.

A Thai man and a Pakistani man were arrested on that occasion.

Mercy: completely forgotten

Mercy, 25, is a Kamba from south-east Kenya. Her husband was “an excessive drunk” and violent, so she left to live alone with their two children. She is sometimes forced to resort to ukahaba: “taking up with any man and going with him as long as he can feed your children for the day, or pay their school fees.” She is aware of the risk of HIV and AIDS but says this is “the reality” of being jobless.

She worries about security in Kibagare, the behaviour of young people and the rising incidence of rape, due partly to the increasing abuse of marijuana and alcohol.

Her children are her main concern and she longs for the opportunity to have some vocational training or a loan to start a business. “If…I am given a good foundation…I am convinced - without any doubt - that I could change my life and the future life of my children.”

I left Kitui (south-eastern Kenya) and came to live here in Nairobi in 1999. I am now 25.

When I got to Nairobi, I worked as a maid for a while, then I got married. My husband and I were blessed with two children, a boy and girl, but we did not stay together for long because he was an excessive drunk and he would beat me so much. So I decided to leave him and live alone with my children… When I left this man, he continued being a terrible drunkard, and he was hit by a car one day and died.

The harsh reality of unemployment

I raise these children on my own, with many problems. At first I was still working as a housemaid for a Nigerian family, but then they returned to their home. So now I depend on any casual labour I can find to feed them. Mostly I find temporary work washing clothes, but if I don’t get that I take up with a man, as I cannot watch my children die of hunger…

I live in a small room which I rent at 700 shillings a month, but it’s not easy to make the rent money… It is this situation that forces me into ukahaba, even if there are problems ¬ like diseases such as AIDS. I don’t have any other option. This practice of ukahaba means taking up with any man and going with him as long as he can feed your children for the day, or pay their school fees… I just have to do that so I can get food, rent and school fees for my children… This is the reality of not having a job.

I just pray to God that I get a good job or that as young people we get a good project, such as keeping chickens. Whatever kind of job really, so that I leave prostitution alone… Also if I could get a good man we can live together as husband and wife – that would be great.

Poverty undermines cooperation
We do not have [self-help] groups — those that exist are [older] women’s groups and their lives are much better than ours. We cannot work together because our problems [are so bad that] everybody can only be concerned with their own house. So now, even if you call a meeting it’s difficult to get enough people. Everybody follows their own path and thinks you will just waste their time — they do not see that any good results might come of it. I would like to have a group, but there are many different opinions on that.

The [only] organisation that I’ve seen helping people is the Catholic Church. It helps the very old women, especially those who have been left with their own children’s orphans. But even then it’s not all of them who are helped — just a very few.

“We have been completely forgotten”

Other private organisations or government agencies do not come here, they just get us together and take pictures and promise to return - but they do not. I don’t know if they feel that our problems are just too many, I don’t know…

Nowadays, we feel like everyone who comes here are liars and they just give us false hope…
because it seems that there are people using us for their own benefit. There are so many who have come here, taken our pictures and done things like that, but then they disappear, so we wonder where do they go? It looks like we have been completely forgotten…

We even wonder if we are wanted in this world – because of the conditions we live in, which truly are not fit for humans. And we wonder when will this situation change or will we die in this state? We also wonder if our children will also be poor like us, because they have no foundations upon which to build a future.

“Life back home is very hard”

My parents died a long time ago, even before I came to Nairobi. I started living with my sister and my elder brother, but now they both live back in Ukambani (Kitui district, south-eastern Kenya).

We last saw each other a very long time ago; I don’t go home because I lack the bus fare and [my brother] is also unable to come to Nairobi. With the little money that I earn I am just able to cover the rent and to buy food. I would very much like to go home but for now, life does not allow it.

Life back home is very hard, however, even more than here in Nairobi, because there money can scarcely be found at all. Back at home, even though education is free, parents contribute money to help provide a meal for the schoolchildren and it’s very hard to get that cash. It’s better here in Nairobi, where you can at least wash clothes for somebody and make some money.

“It was my wish…to support myself”

I went to school until Standard 8 (final class of primary school) and then there was no more money for fees… I was one of seven children and the last. I am the only child who went to school because my elder sister was married by then and she lived in Nairobi — she helped me. But there was no money to take me on to a college to acquire any skills, or to go to secondary school, even though it was my wish to get enough education to support myself in life…

I pray that I receive some help so that I can acquire some skills — even tailoring — so that I can fend for myself. I think if I get 1,000 shillings I can start training myself, even if it’s just one day a week, so that even if I am fired from being a maid I can take care of myself without relying on anyone. So that even if the maid jobs were not available I could have my own work and my children would be educated without many problems.

I would also find them a nice place to live so that they could grow up with good manners, because I will not lie to you, if I sent these children of mine to stay with you, you would not even last two days before returning them to me! Because they have no respect, they have been misled by others here in this kijiji (Swahili for village, here meaning Kibagare). I tell you, my sister, there are problems here.

“The fear that is in this community is great”

Cases [of rape] have increased greatly, especially of children who are deceived by grown-ups. Some are promised sweets and mandazi (popular semi-sweet doughnut) and such like. Rape is also on the increase because of drunkenness and drugs – also the smoking of bhang (marijuana), which has increased in the village. Now the children are seeing that it is OK to imitate these people…

I tell you, the fear that is in this community is great. I go everywhere with my daughter and I don’t know when I’ll stop doing this, because I do not know when this situation will change. There are so many problems that you just thank God when you wake up in the morning and find you are still alive [smiles].

Drug use has reduced the security situation in this kijiji… The police pass through here, but the young people know the time [they come]. So when the police are in the area, you don’t see anyone loitering about aimlessly. But just let the police leave, and they start committing the most outrageous acts [laughs].

Some even ask to be arrested because in jail nowadays there is food, not like here in Kibagare. Now when you hear somebody wants to commit a crime in order to be arrested, what can you do but leave them to it?! I think that, even if we do get help, these youths should go and have the drugs removed from their system first.

The impact of poverty on young girls

As you can see, so many girls are pregnant; almost every girl in this village has at least one child. Those girls don’t really care about their children because at night they leave them and go roaming around, looking for men in Kangemi and then in the morning they go home to sleep and leave the children [to fend for themselves].

They get pregnant when they are so young – around 12 years, sometimes younger – because their lives are hard. You know, because they have been born in such hardship this way of life attracts them, so they start making money early so that maybe they can start helping their parents. You often find they have left school and taken up a bad lifestyle; so many of them have started contracting different diseases. Many have died of AIDS.

“We live like we are not human beings”

The problem is that there are very many people and the population is increasing at a very fast rate. You see here, there are many houses which are so close together there is no space left to build toilets. Most people have to relieve themselves in polythene bags and tins, and in the morning you find those bags spread everywhere and sometimes in the river that people use for their domestic water supply. As a result, people get diseases…

We have drinking water but most people don’t have the 2 shillings you need to buy the water; many have died because of drinking dirty water.

I hear some people saying this is the government’s land; others say it is private so I don’t really know whose it is. It has become an issue that politicians use to get our votes at election time. There are times when we are threatened that the community will be demolished; other times [buildings are] burned down. We don’t really know where we stand — we just live on God’s mercy.

My request would be that the owners of these houses get the title deeds and that they build real houses. So that when we build homes too, we are sure that the houses will not be burned down or destroyed, so that we stop being afraid of losing our belongings as now. When somebody leaves their home to look for work, they are always afraid and hoping not to hear that something has happened in the village.

In my opinion, I think that if we could find somebody to buy us plots of land, and if they built houses and made toilets for us, I think life would change – so we could be like other Kenyans. You see, we live like we are not human beings. When I look at other people, they have so much money they don’t even know what to do with it, while for us, even finding food is by the grace of God. I wonder if there is really anybody thinking about us.

“I am convinced…I could change my life”

When I look at the children we have, I wonder: if our lives are this bad and have no direction or hope for the future, what will the future hold for our children? I feel like if we don’t get help from somewhere, it will get worse. But if, say, I am given a good foundation somewhere else, if I am given money to start a business, or if I received training in some vocational work, I am convinced – without any doubt – that I could change my life and the future life of my children. So that when I die, I would leave them at least some foundation from which they could rely on themselves, and be of use to future generations.

There are many businesses to undertake; the problem is getting money to start the business. For example, if I could get some money I could start to sell kale, cabbage, tomatoes. If we could get money, even a loan that we repay with a small amount of interest, I can see that would help us.

Our problem as young people is lack of employment. If it was possible for us to be given jobs, even something like rearing chickens, we would be able to create more opportunities and life would be better, as we would be busy rather than just being idle…

There are many causes behind the world food crisis, but one chief villain: World Bank head, Robert Zoellick.

For anyone who understands the current food crisis, it is hard to listen to the head of the World Bank, Robert Zoellick, without gagging.

Earlier this week, Zoellick waxed apocalyptic about the consequences of the global surge in prices, arguing that free trade had become a humanitarian necessity, to ensure that poor people had enough to eat. The current wave of food riots has already claimed the prime minister of Haiti, and there have been protests around the world, from Mexico, to Egypt, to India.

The reason for the price rise is perfect storm of high oil prices, an increasing demand for meat in developing countries, poor harvests, population growth, financial speculation and biofuels. But prices have fluctuated before. The reason we’re seeing such misery as a result of this particular spike has everything to do with Zoellick and his friends.

Before he replaced Paul Wolfowitz at the World Bank, Zoellick was the US trade representative, their man at the World Trade Organisation. While there, he won a reputation as a tough and guileful negotiator, savvy with details and pushy with the neoconservative economic agenda: a technocrat with a knuckleduster.

His mission was to accelerate two decades of trade liberalisation in key strategic commodities for the United States, among them agriculture. Practically, this meant the removal of developing countries’ ability to stockpile grain (food mountains interfere with the market), to create tariff barriers (ditto), and to support farmers (they ought to be able to compete on their own). This Zoellick did often, and enthusiastically.

Without agricultural support policies, though, there’s no buffer between the price shocks and the bellies of the poorest people on earth. No option to support sustainable smaller-scale farmers, because they’ve been driven off their land by cheap EU and US imports. No option to dip into grain reserves because they’ve been sold off to service debt. No way of increasing the income of the poorest, because social programmes have been cut to the bone.

The reason that today’s price increases hurt the poor so much is that all protection from price shocks has been flayed away, by organisations such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organisation and the World Bank.

Even the World Bank’s own Independent Evaluation Group that the bank has been doing a poor job in agriculture. Part of the bank’s vision was to clear away the government agricultural clutter so that the private sector could come in to make agriculture efficient. But, as the Independent Evaluation Group delicately puts it, “in most reforming countries, the private sector did not step in to fill the vacuum when the public sector withdrew.” After the liberalisation of agriculture, the invisible hand was nowhere to be seen.

But governments weren’t allowed to return to the business of supporting agriculture. Trade liberalisation agreements and World Bank loan conditions, such as those promoted by Zoellick, have made food sovereignty impossible.

This is why, when we see Dominique Strauss-Kahn of the IMF wailing about food prices, or Zoellick using the crisis to argue with breathless urgency for more liberalisation, the only reasonable response is nausea.

China defended its use of the death penalty Tuesday, after an Amnesty International report said it carried out the most executions worldwide in 2007.

Chinese authorities executed at least 470 people last year but may have killed as
many as 8,000, according to a report by Amnesty International. The human rights
group says executions were often hidden and that on average China secretly executes
22 prisoners a day, with most killed by a gunshot to the back of the head or by lethal injection.

China responded to the report by saying it tightly controls the use of the death penalty and has no plans to abolish it.

“We have strictly controlled and taken a prudent attitude toward the death penalty to ensure that the death penalty only applies to a small number of criminals who commit serious crimes,” said Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu.

“Conditions are not right” to abolish the death penalty, said Jiang, adding that such a move wouldn’t be accepted by the Chinese people.

Amnesty International said some of the executions were for non-violent crimes such as tax evasion, smuggling and organizing prostitution.

While China’s total number of executions is down from 1,010 in 2006, Amnesty International warned the 2007 number could be higher because China considers death penalty data a state secret and doesn’t make the information public.

“The secretive use of the death penalty must stop: the veil of secrecy surrounding the death penalty must be lifted. Many governments claim that executions take place with public support. People therefore have a right to know what is being done in their name,” said Amnesty International.

Activists have used protests against the Olympic torch relay to draw attention to China’s human rights record, including a recent crackdown in Tibet.

The report said 88 per cent of all known executions took place in five countries:

* China (at least 470).
* Iran (at least 317).
* Saudi Arabia (at least 143).
* Pakistan (at least 135).
* U.S. (42).

Saudia Arabia carried out the most executions per capita, while Iran, Saudia Arabia and Yemen violated international law by executing people younger than 18, said the report.

The organization said at least 1,252 people were executed in 24 countries. Around the world, up to 27,500 people are estimated to be on death row.

Fifty-four illegal Burmese migrants who were being smuggled by traffickers in southern Thailand suffocated in the sweltering confines of a tiny seafood container lorry today after the air-conditioning system failed.

Some of the 67 survivors told how they were just 30 minutes into their journey to the resort island of Phuket, where they hoped to find work, when conditions became unbearably stifling.

But the driver warned those trying to alert him by banging on the container’s walls and calling him on his mobile phone to be quiet for fear of tipping off the police as they passed through check-points along the route.

He turned on the air-conditioning, but it failed and went off after a few minutes. When the driver finally stopped on a quiet road running along the Andaman Sea 90 minutes later, many of the migrants, mostly women, had already collapsed. After discovering the horrific scene, he ran away.

“I thought everyone was going to die,” said survivor, Saw Win, 30. “I thought I was going to die. If the truck had driven for 30 minutes more, I would have died for sure.”

It underscored the plight of Burmese migrants fleeing conflict and economic collapse in their homeland who flood into Thailand across the porous border desperately seeking work.

As many as 150,000 languish in refugee camps along the border. But another 1.5 million live and work in Thailand, often in the seafood processing, fishing and construction industries that Thais shun.

Just 482,925 have managed to secure work permits leaving at least a million working illegally, vulnerable to abuse from corrupt officials and exploited by unscrupulous employers. They are forced to work for as little as £1.15 a day, half what a Thai worker could expect.

The 121 migrants who found themselves crammed in the seafood container left Song Island in Burma last night for the short sea crossing by fishing boat, landing near Ranong.

They paid the traffickers £82 each to transport them to Phuket to work as day labourers, but were so tightly packed into the truck there was standing-room only in the air-tight container measuring just six metres long and 2.2 metres wide.

“It was hot when the truck started moving,” one 40-year-old survivor explained from his bed in Ranong hospital, where another 20 were treated. “We asked the driver to turn the air-conditioner on. The heat made me pass out and the next thing I knew I was in hospital.”

Police Colonel Kraithong Chanthongbai said: “The people said they tried to bang on the walls of the container to tell the driver they were dying, but he told them to shut up as police would hear them when they crossed through check-points inside Thailand.”

When police reached the scene in the early hours of this morning, tipped off by local villagers, they found 54 of the migrants already dead. Officers were seen lifting the bodies of the 37 women and 17 men, dressed in little more than T-shirts and shorts, from the truck’s rear where only rags of discarded clothing remained.

The bodies were taken to a shed where they were laid out in rows on plastic sheets. Police said they would be buried in temporary graves so that relatives could reclaim them in the future.

Tonight just two survivors remained in hospital while the other 65 were being detained by police who said they were likely to be deported as illegal immigrants.

Police were searching for the driver. The owner of the truck, part of the Rung Thip company’s fleet, was detained for questioning despite claiming to have no knowledge of the human cargo.

“We believe this must be part of a smuggling racket which has to be tracked down,” said Col Kraithong. “The large number of illegals represents a very brazen act.”

The Jubilee Act, a bill currently moving through Congress, would extend debt
cancellation to 67 low-income countries, provided they demonstrate plans to spend the
money wisely on poverty reduction programs.

Despite debt relief agreements in 1999 and 2005, countries of the Global South continue
to spend $100 million every day to pay foreign debts, often incurred by undemocratic
governments and under unfair lending practices. In 2005, Mexico spent $44 billion to
service debt, more than the entire budget allocated for education. Such a tremendous
outflow of money to rich countries clearly contradicts the international community’s
commitment to end poverty. Instead, debt payments limit a country’s ability to create
opportunities for people to live the lives they choose at home and force millions to
migrate in search of work.

Debt cancellation stimulates economies. For example, Uganda has invested its 2006 debt
relief savings of $57.9 million in primary education, healthcare and infrastructure
upgrades. Newly available resources can also support agricultural advancements and
other critical economic development projects. Greater economic prospects result from
debt cancellation and fair economic policies

Efforts to cancel upcoming municipal elections in parts of Nicaragua’s hurricane-ravaged North Atlantic Autonomous Region sparked rioting Friday in the indigenous community of Bilwi, where opposition leaders claim the Sandinista government of President Daniel Ortega is trying to establish a dictatorship.

”The situation is chaotic and dangerous, and I think it is going to get even hotter,” anti-Sandinista indigenous leader Osorno Coleman, said in a phone interview from Bilwi. “The authorities have to act prudent right now.”

Two people were shot and there were conflicting reports on their status. Several others were injured by rocks as the regional Sandinista-allied group, YATAMA, clashed with a much larger opposition group that met with a delegation of Liberal Party lawmakers who traveled to the coast to investigate the situation.

The three visiting lawmakers were initially held hostage on their airplane, which was surrounded by some 80 YATAMA supporters. A larger group of several thousand anti-Sandinista indigenous people then came to the lawmakers’ rescue, clashing with the YATAMA group.

The rioting then spread as anti-Sandinista protesters took over the YATAMA-controlled mayor’s office, looting the building and breaking windows, while another group burned two government vehicles in the street. All flights to and from the regional airport were canceled for the second time in a week.

Coleman claims that the gunshots came from the YATAMA group headed by Brooklyn Rivera, a former anti-Sandinista militant who formed a controversial electoral alliance with Ortega in exchange for a seat in the National Assembly.

Rivera, meanwhile, claims the violence and rioting was incited by the three visiting lawmakers, including Enrique Quiñónez, against whom the Sandinistas filed a criminal accusation Friday afternoon.

”The population on the coast doesn’t have guns; it was the Liberals who went there and got the people drunk and drugged and gave them weapons, which they fired indiscriminately, killing one of their own,” Rivera said.

Quiñónez said he and the other lawmakers went to the coast only to listen to the concerns of lawmakers, and that he wouldn’t dignify Rivera’s ‘’stupid comments” with a response.

”The same ones who tried to persecute and exterminate the people on the Atlantic coast in the 1980s are, with their YATAMA allies, again trying to take away the right of the coastal population to have free elections,” Quiñónez said.

The National Police sent a high-level delegation from Managua out to the Caribbean coast by helicopter to investigate, but as of Friday night police and military reportedly had not intervened in the violence, witnesses said.

At the center of the controversy is the Sandinistas’ efforts to cancel the upcoming November elections in three municipalities under the argument that the conditions for voting don’t exist due to damage caused by last September’s Hurricane Felix, which destroyed much of the region, including school houses used for voting.

Ortega last week called for a suspension of the elections in the municipalities of Bilwi, Waspam and Prinzapolka — the same three municipalities controlled by the Sandinistas and their YATAMA ally.

The opposition claims the Sandinistas’ real motive is to hold onto power by avoiding elections they would lose. Critics claim efforts to suspend the vote is another example of the Sandinista government politicizing the hurricane disaster to meet its own needs.

Enrique Sáenz, of the dissident Sandinista Renovation Movement, said the ruling Sandinista Front is ”afraid that the [Caribbean] coastal population is going to hand them the bill after their disastrous terms in office.” He noted that the previous elections have been held in the Caribbean during times of flooding and even amid violent protests, and says the conditions are no worse now.

Bernicia Sanders, a leader of an indigenous women’s group from Bilwi, traveled to Managua last week to ask opposition political parties for support in defending the region’s right to hold elections.

”We know our rights,” she said. “And we need to elect our own leaders.”

Coleman, a former anti-Sandinista militant leader from the 1980s, says that canceling the elections would be nothing short of canceling democracy. ”If they suspend the elections, we will have a dictatorship,” he said.

There is also disagreement over which government institution would have the right to cancel the elections. Ortega has said the final word is up to the regional government council, controlled by YATAMA, while opposition lawmakers insist only the National Assembly has the right to cancel an election.

http://www.nit.com.au/downloads/files/Download_165.pdf
http://www.un.org/esa/socdev/unpfii/en/declaration.html

Post-Election violence in Eldoret, Nakuru and Naivasha was organised by businessmen and political leaders, the Human Rights Watch (HRW) has claimed.

The report - Ballots to Bullets, Organised Political Violence and Kenya’s Political Crisis of Governance - claims leaders held meetings to prepare residents for ‘war’ if they lost the election.

Presenting the report on Monday, human rights researcher, Mr Ben Rawlence, called on the Government to prosecute perpetrators of chaos and restore trust of victims.

“The coalition government should support the inquiries established under the February 2008 mediation process to investigate abuses by State forces and those responsible for violence,” he said.

“As displaced people move to their ancestral homes, there is real risk that ethnic jingoism will increase and tensions rise as victims share their stories,” warns the report.

To forestall further polarisation, the HRW group recommends a safe return or re-location of displaced populations.

An international petition demanding the creation of a multinational police and army force constituted solely of forces originating from the Community of Portuguese Language Countries - a community of Peace and as such an example for the world.

The recently founded International Lusophone Movement (Movimento Internacional Lusofono) has started it’s activities by pushing an international petition demanding the creation of a multinational police and army force constituted solely of forces originating from the Community of Portuguese Language Countries (CPLC: Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, Sao Tome e Principe, Brazil, East Timor and Portugal – Mauritius and Equatorial Guinea also hold observer status), the petition so far gathered 341 signatures and can be viewed at http://www.petitiononline.com/mil1001/petition.html.

NAKHON RATCHASIMA, Thailand: There is an old story here in Thailand’s vast, rice-growing hinterland about politicians who handed out a pair of slippers at election time - one slipper before the vote and the other after they were successfully elected.

Since the earliest days of democracy in Thailand seven decades ago, candidates have used both creative and not-so-creative ways to buy votes. The eve of an election is still known here as the “night of the barking dogs” because canvassers traditionally go house to house handing out cash - rousing hounds along the way.

Fourteen months after the military took power in a bloodless coup, Thailand is returning to democracy. And this, say government officials preparing for the Dec. 23 elections, means the return of money politics.

Phones have started ringing in the offices of the country’s Election Commission, and 75 cases of alleged vote buying have been opened based on complaints and tip-offs, according to Suthiphon Thaveechaiygarn, the secretary general of the commission.

“Political parties will definitely try to buy votes,” Suthiphon said in a phone interview from Bangkok. “They are trying to develop new techniques.”

Vote buying in various forms exists in many countries, whether as last-minute road paving, “lunch money” for voters who attend rallies or the supply of food and provisions. But it is especially well entrenched in Thailand.

Economists have calculated that the economy swells by about 30 billion baht, or close to $1 billion, around election time. Supavud Saicheua, the managing director of Phatra Securities, which conducts research for Merrill Lynch in Thailand, called this estimate “not far-fetched.”

“People need to be incentivized to go to the polls,” said Supavud, who also serves on a government economic planning committee. He added that as a form of wealth distribution “it’s better than any government program.”

Typically, money or favors are handed out by canvassers from political parties and distributed to voters by village headmen. It is considered too crass and too risky for candidates to give out money themselves.

No one knows what the scale of vote buying will be in this election, but the government appears to expect the worst. Both the prime minister and the general who led the coup last year have been warning for weeks of widespread vote buying. The Election Commission has sent 2,200 investigators, some of them undercover, to zones where they believe the problem will be most common. And six police officers have been assigned to monitor each of the 400 constituencies.

A recently passed law makes it illegal, and punishable with prison, to receive money for votes. Previously, only those who paid could be prosecuted. But the law, which came into effect in October, also offers rewards of up to 100,000 baht for those who have received money and who report it before or within seven days of election day.

Yet many people, including government officials, are skeptical that the new law - especially the reward provision - can work.

“You have to compare the value of the money they are receiving to the value of their lives,” said Mehta Silapun, the director of the Election Commission in Nakhon Ratchasima, one of the main cities in northeast Thailand. “After they give the information, they still have to go back and live in the area with the people that they reported.”

Politically motivated murders are not uncommon during election time. “The person who reports vote buying must be very brave, a very good person or have friends who can protect them,” Mehta said.

Thavison Lownanuruck, the chairman of the Chamber of Commerce in Nakhon Ratchasima, says the law will discourage canvassers from handing out cash. But he predicts canvassers will provide voters with bus tickets and coupons for gasoline, as well as pay for things like school fees for children and payments on motorcycle loans.

“They will say, ‘You just give the receipt to me, I will take care of it,’ ” Thavison said.

The election will pit allies of Thaksin Shinawatra, the billionaire tycoon who was ousted as prime minister last year, against his longstanding opposition, the Democrat Party, and an array of smaller parties. The military is watching the outcome nervously for signs that Thaksin’s proxies will triumph.

“This is not just an ordinary election,” Thavison said. “The question is whether Thaksin can come back or not.”

At a government-sponsored seminar last Tuesday, Thavison asked an audience of village headmen from around northeast Thailand how many of them thought the election would be “fair.” No one raised his hand.

Thaksin has remained overseas since the coup, and his party has been disbanded. But his allies created the People Power Party, which according to some opinion polls is the front-runner in the elections.

Northeastern Thailand, populous and poor, is a leading battleground for Thaksin; 135 of the 400 constituencies in Parliament will be elected from Isaan, as the region is known. Bangkok, by contrast, elects only 36 seats.

Vote buying has long been most prevalent in Isaan, where the tradition is woven into village life. Gothom Arya, a former election commissioner, says handing out money and favors is only one part of a “neo-feudal” relationship between a villager and politician-cum-patron.

“It’s a setting where you exchange favors,” Gothom said. “You rely on me. I rely on you.”

Farmers and villagers offer their support in the expectation that their wealthy patrons will show their generosity and offer help when times get bad, Gothom said.

“Honestly speaking, this is normal,” said Somporn Trisak, owner of a small roadside restaurant in a rice-farming community near Nakhon Ratchasima city. “Every party hands out money. People take money from everyone, but who they vote for is up to them.”

Somporn said money had not yet been distributed to voters in her village, but said she had heard that local canvassers had already received money.

It remains possible that closer scrutiny by the authorities and tougher laws will deter vote buying. In 2001, when the Thai economy was still recovering from economic crisis, a popular and ironic phrase among villagers in the northeast was: “The money hasn’t come. I don’t know how to vote.”

Somphant Techa-atik, a specialist on vote buying and a newspaper columnist based in the northeastern city of Khon Kaen, says that because of high gasoline prices, the most popular form of vote buying in this election will be paying for people to return to their hometowns to vote. Many people from the northeast work hundreds of kilometers from their homes on construction sites, in resorts or in Bangkok as waiters, maids, salespeople or taxi drivers.

“If you have to spend 3,000 baht to make it back to your hometown, nobody will do it,” he said.

On Nov. 13, the police arrested the owner of a gasoline station in Nakhon Ratchasima Province and seized bank notes amounting to 10,700 baht that were stapled to a pamphlet carrying the names of candidates from the People Power Party. The Election Commission says it is investigating vote buying.

This is only the tip of the iceberg, Somphant said.

“It’s difficult to offer tangible evidence of vote buying,” Somphant said. “But everyone in Thailand knows it happens.”