brad brace

Somali pirates on Thursday afternoon seized a ship carrying more than 30 military tanks in a dramatic hijacking that sent ripples in the maritime industry.

The Ukrainian vessel flying the flag of Belize was expected to dock in Mombasa Friday morning with its cargo that was believed destined to Southern Sudan according to maritime sources.

The ship was on its last two of a 10-day voyage and was hijacked between Kismayu and Mombasa, Seafarers Assistance Programme Coordinator Mr Andrew Mwangura said.

“The ship, whose design is that of a vehicle carrier, had 17 crew members and 38 military tanks on board,” he said on the phone adding: “This was to be the third ship to dock in Mombasa with military equipment from Ukraine.”

Mr Mwangura said that although the destination of the tanks was not immediately known, they were likely destined to Southern Sudan where the previous ones had been delivered.

Somali waters are considered the most dangerous in the world, with each militia group controlling their own sections of the ocean.

Ships carrying food aid to the war ravaged country have to be escorted by navy war ships, with the most recent being Canadian Navy which ends its escort mission on September 27.

News agency reports quoting Ukraine’s foreign ministry, had earlier reported that the ship was carrying T-72 tanks and had a crew of 21 on board. The captain contacted the ship’s owner by telephone and reported that armed men were boarding, shortly before losing communications.

The country has not had an effective national government for 17 years, leading to a collapse of law and order both on land and at sea.

Multipolar World

The international financial crisis has suddenly accelerated a tendency that has been manifest since the United States’ first setbacks in Iraq: American hegemony, and, one should say, Western hegemony, which seemed to settle over the world after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Communist system at the end of the 1980s-beginning of the 1990s, has seen its heyday.

Already since the beginning of the 21st century, Western claims to impose a Western conception of human rights and to promote democracy as the best guarantor of security and prosperity have been challenged. The so-called emerging states, notably in Asia, preach another kind of modernization. The poor countries commonly called “third world countries” during the Cold War, denounced the unkept promises of development aid. As it benefited from the economic globalization it sought to insert itself into, China, joined by Vladimir Putin’s Russia, challenged Western pretensions to fixing the rules of the game.

The United Nations General Assembly, before which Nicolas Sarkozy spoke Tuesday, September 23, emphasized the birth of this multipolar world. It’s what French diplomacy has advocated for decades. However, contrary to what was imagined, multipolarity is not presenting itself as an orderly construction based on several power centers maintaining well-codified relations among themselves.

The multipolar world that is brewing is, quite the contrary, disorganized, almost anarchic. No organizing principle seems to preside over its constitution. Russia may well attempt to find new allies in Latin America, China and Africa against the United States; their interests diverge when Russia changes borders in the Caucasus by force. Both have reasons to rejoice over the decline of the American ex-”hyperpower,” but, in fact, their dependence on the global economy makes them as much victims as beneficiaries of the international financial crisis.

Everyone, or almost everyone, demands new rules. Nonetheless, before new equilibria emerge from the present disorder, it would be wise to expect some dangerous squalls.

Secret tank deal shows poor priorities

A secret tank deal by Kenya’s Army would have gone unnoticed if Somali pirates hadn’t hijacked a Ukrainian ship ferrying the 33 tanks to the port of Mombasa.

The Russian built T-72 tank can run on three types of fuel: diesel, benzene and kerosene.

Its not clear when the Department of Defence placed an order for T-72 tanks from Russia. The Army has not explained how much it spent on the equipment, neither has it explained the role of the 33 tanks in Kenya’s security strategy.

Apart from tanks, Somali pirates found tons of ammunition and auxiliary equipment within the ship, which they have threatened to offload for use in their country’s civil war. The pirates are demanding US$35 million in ransom before they release the vessel and its cargo.

Typical of most African governments, Kenya’s leaders are spending billions of dollars on security while ordinary people die of hunger, disease and poor shelter. Kenya ranks at the bottom of international social and economic indicators.

A growing population is putting pressure on neglected infrastructure. Public hospitals lack drugs as thousands of Kenyans perish each year on a road network broken to the point of tatters. Kenyan cities are going without fresh water due to lack of investment in water production.

The capital city of Nairobi is getting less water today than it was receiving a decade ago after a colonial era dam collapsed at Sasumua. The port city of Mombasa gets water from a supply system built by the British when the town’s population was less than a third of current figures.

Lack of investment in electricity production has made Kenya’s electricity tariffs the highest in Africa. Industries suffer from constant power blackouts which have undermined economic growth, leading to massive losses and job cuts.

Agricultural production in Kenya is far below demand. The country is producing less coffee, maize, tea, wheat, millet and everything else compared to twenty years ago. Sugar milling companies in Western Kenya, stuck with 19th century technology, are creaking out low quality sugar in significantly less quantities than when Kenya was a British colony.

Amidst all these, the Kenyan government has seen it fit to invest billions of shillings in military equipment. As stated earlier, if it wasn’t for Somali pirates, majority of Kenyans would never have known that tanks were about to get imported into the country. But, lack of priority in government procurement appears to be the norm these days.

Its been announced that Kenya will spend about $23 million in the purchase of second-hand fighter jets from the Kingdom of Jordan. The F-5 fighter that the Kenyan Airforce is so fond of went out of production in 1989, meaning that the jets Kenya is buying are at least 19 years old. Kenya will also pay Jordan to train its pilots in using the junk aircraft.

Meanwhile, other branches of the security forces are on a shopping bonanza. Regular and Administration police have enhanced their recruitment drives to boost numbers. They are receiving modern equipment, weapons, 4-wheel drive trucks, uniforms and riot gear. Considering the conduct of police during the post-election violence, its obvious that this enhanced expenditure is not for the benefit of ordinary men and women.

The Kenya Police has just finished rehabilitating giant Russian-built helicopters fitted with night-vision equipment, gun detectors and communications technology. The helicopters will carry a team of quick response officers assisted by highly trained dogs.

Just this week, the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights - a government body - blamed police for the execution of 500 Kikuyu youth and the disappearance of scores of others. According to survivors, the dead and the disappeared were all abducted by people identifying themselves as police officers. A man whose dramatic arrest in Nairobi was shown on the front page of the Daily Nation, was later found dead in the city mortuary.

For most Kenyans, the acquisition of helicopters, night vision equipment and vicious dogs can only portend doom as far as personal freedoms are concerned.

By purchasing bigger weapons to arm a greater number of police and soldiers, the Kenyan government is treading a path set by authorities in situations of high wealth inequality. Kenya is among the top three most unequal societies on earth.

On one hand there is an extremely wealthy minority whose standard of living can comfortably secure them a place among the world’s rich and famous. On the opposite extreme is a majority of people without access to adequate food, housing, health care and education. These are people whose future is so bleak that the only options are crime, prostitution, alcoholism and violence.

Amidst this depressing scenario, authorities seek to preserve the status quo by unleashing greater surveillance of the disadvantaged majority. The objective is to make life safer and easier for the rich minority.

The fruits of economic growth are used to buy guns instead of building roads. Public funds are used to buy tanks instead of medicines for government hospitals. In an unequal society, the government will find it better to employ soldiers and police rather than employing doctors and teachers. Instead of facilitating constructive engagement between the rich and the poor, the system is designed to keep them apart.

Such trends have happened elsewhere and Kenya is blindly going down the same path. Unfortunately, that particular path usually ends up in self-destruction, for the human spirit cannot tolerate oppression forever.

Russia’s ambassador to Managua said Wednesday that his country will replace the Nicaraguan army’s aging weaponry.

Ambassador Igor S. Kondrashev said there are no plans, however, to expand the Central American country’s military arsenal.

Nicaragua acquired most of its arms and military equipment from the former Soviet Union in the 1980s, when the leftist Sandinista government was fighting U.S.-backed rebels. The army has insisted it needs new helicopters and Navy ships to patrol Caribbean waters, where there is a boundary dispute with Colombia.

Kondrashev made the comments in an interview with Canal 8 TV station, but he did not say if Russia would ask for financial compensation or would simply replace the equipment as a gift to Nicaragua — which was one of the first nations to support Russia in its war against Georgia.

Kondrashev applauded President Daniel Ortega’s government for formally recognizing the independence of the Russian-backed breakaway Georgian republics of South Ossetia and Abkhazia on Sept. 5.

Kondrashev also did not say the plans included replacement of Nicaragua’s shoulder-fired SAM-7 missiles. The United States has been trying to negotiate destruction of those weapons to keep them from landing in terrorists’ hands.

Last year, Ortega promised to destroy more than 650 of Nicaragua’s remaining 1,051 Soviet-made missiles in exchange for hospital equipment and medicine from the United States.

Russia also has been building military ties with Ortega’s ally, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.

Kondrashev said a group of Russian experts would visit Nicaragua next month to identify other potential joint projects, including petroleum exploration in the Caribbean and the Pacific Ocean and the construction of roads and bridges.

More than fifty years after World War II, the Solomon Islands Police Bomb Disposal Unit are still destroying live bombs.

Senior Sergeant Emmanuel Maepurina of the OIC Bomb Disposal Unit stated that since January, 732 live bombs were disposed at the Tenaru area where some of the bombs were also collected. It is estimated that thousands more are around, posing danger to unsuspecting citizens.

According to Mr. Maepurina, all Provinces except Makira Province, Temotu Province and Rennell and Bellona were visited to confiscate bombs. Makira, Temotu and Rennell and Bellona were believed to have never been visited during the war.

Three tours have been conducted to the Weather Coast in Guadalcanal, Central Province and the Western Province. Guadalcanal and Western Provinces were the main Provinces where both American and the Japanese had fought in. This is quite evident from the ship wrecks, plane wrecks, water tanks and the air fields built during World War II.

Senior Sergeant Emmanuel Maepurina advised the public to alert the police whenever a bomb is sighted. Either alive or dead, Mr. Maepurina advised that bombs are not to be touched or moved, as from experience, Solomon Islanders tend to move the objects not realizing it could be dangerous.

Mr Maepurina also stated that home made bombs are illegal, therefore anyone caught doing so will be dealt with accordingly.

“For example, early this year, a person from the Kakabona area was using a home made grenade made from World War II relics to catch fish, exploded before he could use it and was rushed to the hospital where he died the next day.” Says Mr. Maepurina.

He also confirmed that home made bomb victims are high.

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.

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.

MANAGUA, Nicaragua — At a secret location somewhere in Nicaragua, shoulder-fired missiles capable of taking down a jetliner lie behind heavy fencing and locked double doors.

The missiles are dangerous artifacts of another era, a time before the end of the Cold War, when the Soviet Union fed arms to Marxist Sandinistas then in power, and the United States surreptitiously countered by organizing and arming an anti-Sandinista force known as the contras. The bloody conflict between the Sandinistas and contras during the 1980s is long gone, but the Soviet weapons remain, locked in a kind of limbo between Nicaragua and the United States, which fears the missiles could fall into the hands of terrorists.

Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega, a former Sandinista rebel, has proposed exchanging the missiles for medical supplies, an offer that a U.S. State Department official, speaking on condition of anonymity, called “unprecedented.” Paul A. Trivelli, the U.S. ambassador to Nicaragua, immediately pronounced the offer “very good.”

But the deal hasn’t happened, and since Trivelli’s initial remark, U.S. officials have been reluctant to speak publicly on the matter. The reasons, some Nicaraguan and American observers say, are that the proposal has not been put on paper and that suspicions remain in both countries that Ortega — who frequently taunts the United States — might be luring the Bush administration into an embarrassing diplomatic trap by making a complex offer that might never come to fruition.

“Ortega’s going to go around six months to a year from now and be able to say, ‘We made this generous offer and the U.S. ambassador came out the next day and said ‘great idea,’ and what have we gotten for it?’ ” said Eduardo Gamarra, director of the Latin American and Caribbean Center at Florida International University. “Yes, he’s playing them.”

Manuel Coronel Kautz, Nicaragua’s vice minister of foreign relations, said in an interview that “Daniel Ortega has never made a proposal that wasn’t serious.”

American officials have been pressing Nicaragua for several years to get rid of its stockpile of more than 1,000 shoulder-fired, anti-aircraft missiles — one of the largest caches in the Western Hemisphere outside the United States. Ortega is offering to destroy 651 of his nation’s missiles, while keeping 400 that his military advisers say are necessary to maintain a balance of power with other Central American nations. Still, the destruction of more than 600 missiles would be a major coup for U.S. diplomats, and more than 22 times the number of missiles the United States helped destroy in Bolivia in 2005.

The diplomatic push to destroy Nicaraguan missiles is part of a worldwide effort that has led to the destruction of 17,000 shoulder-fired missiles in the past five years, according to State Department figures. More than 1 million of the weapons have been manufactured in countries around the world, including the United States, and while many of those have been destroyed, no one knows how many are still in circulation.

The campaign to eradicate missiles gained momentum after a 2002 attack in which two SA-7 missiles nearly struck an Israeli airliner in Mombasa, Kenya, and again after a 2003 strike on a cargo plane in Iraq that caused damage but no fatalities.

The following year the United States, concerned that the Nicaraguan missiles were vulnerable to theft, began paying to build a facility to store them. The missiles that American officials want to destroy are now kept in state-of-the-art bunkers that cost the United States $130,000 for construction and staff training, according to a State Department source. The United States also has funded weapons storage facilities in Cambodia and Bosnia, the source said.

Ortega offered to exchange missiles for medical supplies on July 31, saying “this won’t be a gift, but simply a barter with them.” Ambassador Trivelli, who declined multiple requests through a spokeswoman to be interviewed, told Nicaragua’s La Prensa newspaper that he would pass the offer along to U.S. authorities “with great pleasure.”

The offer has puzzled some in Nicaragua, particularly because Ortega has spent the ensuing weeks bashing the United States and trading broadsides with Trivelli in the Nicaraguan press. On Aug. 13, Ortega called the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks “insignificant” compared with the U.S. nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II. Trivelli said Ortega’s remark was “disappointing.”

Ortega lost the Nicaraguan presidency in 1990 after 11 years in office, then staged a comeback in last year’s presidential election, winning the top job in the Western Hemisphere’s second-poorest nation. Some U.S. officials believe that Ortega’s antagonistic rhetoric is an attempt to appeal to his left-leaning base and that his actions behind the scenes are much less hostile.

“This offer is an encouraging sign,” Avil Ramarez Valdivia, a former Nicaraguan defense minister who now heads an American chamber of commerce in Managua, said in an interview. “Ortega needs a justification for turning over the missiles, and the medicine deal could be it.”

A former Nicaraguan official who has been involved in past missile negotiations said the only way he could see the deal working would be if the Bush administration slipped additional money into an aid program, such as the U.S. government’s Millennium Challenge Corp., without openly admitting a quid pro quo.

Political posturing aside, the Nicaraguan leader might have the biggest incentive to make the missile deal happen, said Roger F. Noriega, the former top Western Hemisphere official at the State Department.

“If they get into the wrong hands,” Noriega said, “he’s going to be the one held accountable.”

This is a special problem for small islands that have served as
military bases for the major powers. . . . When such bases are
abandoned or returned by the United States military services there is
a unique problem — the terms and conditions under which the local
country is assisted or endemnified for environmental or toxic
problems being left behind are NOT set by US Government law or
general regulation, but by negotiated agreements reached by the
military commander AT THE BASE at the time of closure. This form of
plausible deniability allows the US Government to say that they fully
comply with the law (there isn’t any!), and that the local host
government is in full agreement with the arrangements made.

Dumped chemical weapons missing at sea

THE last thing you might expect to encounter exploring the ocean
floor is a chemical weapon. But it seems hundreds of thousands of
tonnes of them have been dumped into the sea, and no one knows
exactly where the weapons are. Now, scientists are calling for
weapons sites to be mapped for safety’s sake.

Between 1946 and 1972, the US and other countries pitched 300,000
tonnes of chemical weapons over the sides of ships or scuttled them
along with useless vessels, according to public reports by the Medea
Committee, a group of scientists given access to intelligence data
so they can advise the US government on environmental issues.

But the military have lost track of most of the weapons because of
haphazard record keeping combined with imprecise navigation. Even
the exact chemicals were not always noted, though there are records
of shells, rockets and barrels containing sulphur mustard and nerve
agents such as sarin.

The Chemical Weapons Convention does not cover the destruction of
the sea-dumped weapons, which are considered abandoned. “There’s no
piece of legislation or treaty that deals with this stuff,” says
Peter Brewer, an ocean chemist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research
Institute in Moss Landing, California. “It’s in limbo.”

If the chemicals leak from their containers, they will break down
slowly in the cold seawater. But it is unclear what will happen if
the chemicals bind to sediment or sink into anoxic zones, says
Brewer (Environmental Science and Technology, vol 42, p 1394).

A team led by Roy Wilkens at the University of Hawaii in Manoa is
planning to look for munitions dumped off the island of Oahu.
Records only note that the weapons were dumped about “five miles
south of Pearl Harbour”. Finding them will involve a search of 60
square kilometres, says Wilkens.

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.

A group of retired and active duty generals in the army appointed to parliament in Thailand have proposed a law where traffic will be required to come to a stand still at the playing of the national anthem. The law is deemed to boost patriotism.

Parliament deferred the flag bill in an effort to study it’s chaotic affects on busy roads. It is already a requirement for all to stand still in parks, offices and stations, at the playing of the anthem on loud speakers, between 8a.m. and 6p.m.

“The national anthem lasts only one minute and eight seconds, so why can’t motorists stop their cars for the sake of the country? They already spend more time in traffic jams anyway,” stated retired General Pricha Rochanasena.

O Superman. O judge. O Mom and Dad. Mom and Dad.
O Superman. O judge. O Mom and Dad. Mom and Dad.
Hi. I’m not home right now. But if you want to leave a
message, just start talking at the sound of the tone.
Hello? This is your Mother. Are you there? Are you
coming home?
Hello? Is anybody home? Well, you don’t know me,
but I know you.
And I’ve got a message to give to you.
Here come the planes.
So you better get ready. Ready to go. You can come
as you are, but pay as you go. Pay as you go.

And I said: OK. Who is this really? And the voice said:
This is the hand, the hand that takes. This is the
hand, the hand that takes.
This is the hand, the hand that takes.
Here come the planes.
They’re American planes. Made in America.
Smoking or non-smoking?
And the voice said: Neither snow nor rain nor gloom
of night shall stay these couriers from the swift
completion of their appointed rounds.

‘Cause when love is gone, there’s always justice.
And when justive is gone, there’s always force.
And when force is gone, there’s always Mom. Hi Mom!

So hold me, Mom, in your long arms. So hold me,
Mom, in your long arms.
In your automatic arms. Your electronic arms.
In your arms.
So hold me, Mom, in your long arms.
Your petrochemical arms. Your military arms.
In your electronic arms.

“If I were the president, I could stop terrorist
attacks against the United States in a few days.
Permanently. I would first apologize to all the widows
and orphans, the tortured and impoverished, and all the
many millions of other victims of American imperialism.
Then I would announce, in all sincerity, to every
corner of the world, that America’s global
interventions have come to an end, and inform Israel
that it is no longer the 51st state of the USA but now
– oddly enough — a foreign country. I would then
reduce the military budget by at least 90% and use the
savings to pay reparations to the victims. There would
be more than enough money. One year’s military budget
of 330 billion dollars is equal to more than $18,000 an
hour for every hour since Jesus Christ was born.
That’s what I’d do on my first three days in the White
House. On the fourth day, I’d be assassinated.”
–William Blum, author of “Killing Hope: U.S. Military
and CIA Interventions Since World War II,” and “Rogue
State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower.”

NAIROBI, Kenya - The American military says Somali pirates have left two boats they had hijacked in the waters off the Horn of Africa.

The newly liberated vessels are under U.S. Navy escort farther out to sea, where naval personnel will later board the vessels and treat the 24 crew members.

A spokeswoman says the Navy is in radio contact with pirates aboard three other ships in the region, encouraging them also to leave those ships and sail back to Somalia.

The spokeswoman says no shots were fired during the incident.

The U.S. has now intervened four times in one week to help ships hijacked by Somali pirates.

In THE SHOCK DOCTRINE, Naomi Klein explodes the myth that the global free market triumphed democratically. Exposing the thinking, the money trail and the puppet strings behind the world-changing crises and wars of the last four decades, The Shock Doctrine is the gripping story of how America’s “free market” policies have come to dominate the world– through the exploitation of disaster-shocked people and countries.

At the most chaotic juncture in Iraq’s civil war, a new law is unveiled that would allow Shell and BP to claim the country’s vast oil reserves…. Immediately following September 11, the Bush Administration quietly out-sources the running of the “War on Terror” to Halliburton and Blackwater…. After a tsunami wipes out the coasts of Southeast Asia, the pristine beaches are auctioned off to tourist resorts…. New Orleans’s residents, scattered from Hurricane Katrina, discover that their public housing, hospitals and schools will never be reopened…. These events are examples of “the shock doctrine”: using the public’s disorientation following massive collective shocks – wars, terrorist attacks, or natural disasters — to achieve control by imposing economic shock therapy. Sometimes, when the first two shocks don’t succeed in wiping out resistance, a third shock is employed: the electrode in the prison cell or the Taser gun on the streets.

Based on breakthrough historical research and four years of on-the-ground reporting in disaster zones, The Shock Doctrine vividly shows how disaster capitalism – the rapid-fire corporate reengineering of societies still reeling from shock – did not begin with September 11, 2001. The book traces its origins back fifty years, to the University of Chicago under Milton Friedman, which produced many of the leading neo-conservative and neo-liberal thinkers whose influence is still profound in Washington today. New, surprising connections are drawn between economic policy, “shock and awe” warfare and covert CIA-funded experiments in electroshock and sensory deprivation in the 1950s, research that helped write the torture manuals used today in Guantanamo Bay.

The Shock Doctrine follows the application of these ideas though our contemporary history, showing in riveting detail how well-known events of the recent past have been deliberate, active theatres for the shock doctrine, among them: Pinochet’s coup in Chile in 1973, the Falklands War in 1982, the Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Asian Financial crisis in 1997 and Hurricane Mitch in 1998.

Thailand’s air force confirmed on Wednesday that the country is preparing to buy six Swedish Gripen fighter planes in a deal worth 3.7 billion kronor ($560 million). Air force chief Chalit Phukphasuk also told reporters that a decision would be made after December’s general election on whether to buy a second batch of six Saab Gripens.

A source close to the air force said that Thailand had initially planned to replace its ageing F-5E fighters with US F-16 Fighting Falcons. But the deal eventually fell through since the Americans were “not allowed by their laws to sell weapons to countries whose governments have been ousted in coups.”

Owe Wagermark, director of communications for Gripen International, was delighted with Wednesday’s announcement.

“This is absolutely fantastic. It is an important step with regard to our positioning and is incredibly positive for Gripen. It means that we will retain our position as global leaders,” he told a news agency.

Ola Mattsson, secretary general of the Swedish Peace and Arbitration Society (Svenska Freds), was considerable less enthusiastic.

“It should be completely out of the question for Sweden to sell Gripen planes to Thailand. It’s a military dictatorship,” he said.

Mattsson listed secular tensions in southern Thailand and an arms race in South East Asia as further reasons not to sell.

“The Swedish state shouldn’t contribute to a rearmament spiral in the region. Such a move runs contrary to our foreign and security policy,” he said.

Since assuming power in a military coup last year, the Thai government has approved a 66 percent increase in military spending.

Russia’s Su-30s were long tipped to get the nod ahead of Gripen and the US F-16s. Prior to being removed from his post, former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra is reported to have been close to signing a deal for the Russian fighters.

But last year’s military coup would appear to have tipped the balance in Gripen’s favour.

In memory

Vernon Bellecourt, WaBun-Inini, a member of the Anishinabe/Ojibwe Nation and longtime leader in the American Indian Movement, died on Oct. 13 of pneumonia at the age of 75.

Bellecourt, one of 12 children and older brother of AIM co-founder Clyde Bellecourt, was born on the White Earth Chippewa Reservation in Minnesota in 1931. It is estimated that unemployment on the reservation was 95 percent when the Bellecourt children were growing up.

Dennis Banks and Clyde Bellecourt co-founded the American Indian Movement in 1968 in Minneapolis, an organization of and for Native people that was inspired by the Black Panther Party. AIM sought to defend the community against police brutality, racism, poverty and oppression.

Vernon soon joined and was a lifelong activist in the organization. By its militant example and defense of Native peoples trying to stop the theft of their land and resources, AIM helped instill a renewed pride across the Native nations of the United States.

AIM led a 71-day takeover of the town of Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge reservation beginning Feb. 27, 1973, after U.S. marshals laid siege to a community meeting that sought AIM’s assistance against the repressive and corrupt tribal government. More than 300 federal agents surrounded the camp with armored personnel carriers, over 130,000 rounds of ammunition, and constant gunfire. Two AIM activists were murdered by government agents.

For this, the American Indian Movement leaders, including the Bellecourts and Banks, were severely repressed. Over 60 people on the reservation were murdered by police and vigilantes in the next two years, culminating in the June 26, 1975, shoot-out at Pine Ridge, where two FBI agents were killed after raiding the reservation.

The most egregious injustice against AIM activists was the frame-up and persecution of Leonard Peltier. Because two AIM members, Dino Butler and Bob Robideau, were acquitted of the FBI deaths by a federal jury in Iowa by reason of self-defense, the FBI decided the only remaining defendant charged but not yet tried had to pay. Leonard Peltier had sought refuge in Canada and was therefore not tried along with Butler and Robideau, or he also would have been acquitted.

The FBI falsified evidence to get Peltier extradited. Despite a lack of evidence, witness coercion by the FBI, and numerous irregularities, Peltier was convicted and sentenced to two consecutive life terms. To this day, he remains in a U.S. federal prison at Lewisburg, Penn., despite international and national demands for his freedom.

It is in this context of extreme U.S. government repression of the American Indian Movement that the continued resistance of leaders like the Bellecourts, Banks, Bill Means and many other Indigenous leaders is best appreciated.

An internationalist

Bellecourt was an internationalist, supporting the Palestinian, Irish, Venezuelan, Cuban, Libyan, Nicaraguan and many other causes.

When the CIA intensified its counterrevolutionary war in Nicaragua in the mid-1980s by recruiting Indigenous Miskito leaders who had joined the Contra forces, Bellecourt traveled to the country to defend the Nicaraguan revolution.

He prided himself on his uncompromising anti-imperialist stance, and recently returned from Venezuela where he traveled to express appreciation to Hugo Chávez for the Bolivarian revolution’s heating-fuel deliveries to Native communities in Minnesota.

In recent years, Bellecourt was nationally known as a spokesperson in the campaign against racist anti-Indian symbols of sports teams through the National Coalition on Racism in Sports and Media.

In 1997, he drew national attention to this anti-racist fight when he, Juan Reyna and Juanita Helphrey and other coalition members set fire to an effigy of the extremely offensive Cleveland baseball team’s Chief Wahoo, during the baseball World Series at Cleveland’s Jacobs Field. He was arrested but charges were later dropped.

In a 1995 interview with Sinn Fein, Bellecourt stated, “AIM sees the Washington Redskins, the Atlanta Braves basketball team, Kansas City Chiefs and Cleveland Indians baseball teams with their grinning buck-toothed mascot Chief Wahoo as demeaning the beautiful culture of the Indigenous nations of the Americas. We are a living people with a vibrant culture and we refuse to have our identity trivialized and degraded. Indians are people, not mascots for America’s fun and games.”

Bellecourt was a strong opponent of the U.S. genocide and occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan, and he spoke at several ANSWER Coalition (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism) anti-war rallies since 2003 in Washington, D.C., and San Francisco.

The Party for Socialism and Liberation extends its deepest condolences to his family, comrades and friends. We pledge our continued solidarity with the Native struggle for self-determination and justice.

Vernon Bellecourt, presente!

The Bellecourt family is collecting donations to help pay for medical and burial costs. Donations and cards can be sent to:

Clyde Bellecourt
3953 14th Avenue South
Minneapolis, MN 55407

BANGKOK - The gem merchants of Bangkok display their glistening wares proudly; diamonds from Africa, sapphires from Sri Lanka and rubies, of course, from Myanmar.

The red stones from the country formerly known as Burma are prized for their purity and hue. But they have a sinister flaw.

The country’s military rulers rely on sales of precious stones such as sapphires, pearls and jade to fund their regime. Rubies are probably the biggest earner; more than 90 percent of the world’s rubies come from Myanmar.

International outrage over the generals’ brutal crackdown on pro-democracy rallies encouraged the European Union this week to consider a trade ban on Myanmar’s gemstones, a leading export earner in the impoverished country.

There is also pressure in Washington to close a loophole on existing U.S. sanctions which allows in most of its precious stones.

But in neighbouring Thailand, where the majority of Myanmar’s gems are bought and sold, the stone merchants have yet to be put off business with the junta.

“People are unhappy about what’s going on but they are not angry enough to stop buying rubies,” said Pornchai Chuenchomlada, president of the Thai Gem and Jewellery Traders Association.

“If they killed a lot of people like they did in 1988 we might consider banning their products,” said Pornchai, adding that he personally bought little from Myanmar on moral grounds.

Official media say 10 people were killed when soldiers fired on protesters, including Buddhist monks, in downtown Yangon last week, but the real toll is thought to be much higher.

The junta killed an estimated 3,000 people during the last major uprising in 1988.

VALLEY OF RUBIES

Myanmar’s generals are estimated to have earned around $750 million since they began holding official gem and jade sales in 1964. A far bigger number of precious stones are smuggled over the border into Thailand and China.

The official expositions, held twice a year in the tropical heat of Yangon, are increasingly popular. More Chinese bidders are attending, attracted by slabs of jade.

The state holds a majority stake in all mining operations in Myanmar, including the “Valley of Rubies”, the mountainous Mogok area, 200 km north of Mandalay, famed for its rare pigeon’s blood rubies and blue sapphires worth tens of thousands of dollars apiece.

Conditions in the mines, off-limits to outsiders, are reported to be horrendous.

Debbie Stothard of the Alternative ASEAN Network on Burma said her organisation had reports of mining operators hooking employees on drugs to improve productivity. Needles are shared, raising the risk of HIV infection, she said.

“Heroin is given to people at the end of the working day as a reward,” said Stothard. “Young people go off to the mines with big hopes and dreams and they come back to die.”

“These rubies are red with the blood of young people.”

REVULSION

Couples buying engagement rings often now ask where the diamonds come from since last year’s Hollywood film “Blood Diamond” raised awareness about gems which finance conflicts.

But even during the late 1990s, when war was still raging in Sierra Leone, where the film was based, only between 4 percent and 15 percent of the world’s diamonds were estimated to have come from conflict zones.

Brian Leber, a third generation jeweller from the U.S. state of Illinois, decided years ago to stop buying Myanmar gems.

“I think it’s more important to sleep at night,” said the 41-year-old who founded The Jewellers’ Burma Relief Project, an organisation that supports humanitarian projects in the country.

Although the United States imposed a ban on imports of Myanmar gems in 2003, a customs loophole allows in stones cut or polished elsewhere. As Myanmar exports virtually all its gems uncut, this interpretation rendered the ban useless.

Leber is hopeful last week’s brutal crackdown will convince U.S. lawmakers to close this loophole. He would like to see consumers shun all gems from Myanmar, whatever their cachet, until the generals are gone.

“For the time being, Burmese gems should not be something to be proud of. They should be an object of revulsion.”

In Bangkok, some dealers have stopped handling stones from Myanmar and they are angry that colleagues haven’t followed suit.

“This is a Buddhist country. I was expecting the price of rubies to drop dramatically after they shot at the monks, but I’m beginning to think these people are hypocrites,” said one Bangkok-based jeweller, who declined to be named.

“It’s the only country where you can get really top quality rubies, but I stopped dealing in them. I don’t want to be part of a nation’s misery.”

“If someone asks for a ruby now I show them a nice pink sapphire.”

Yangon - Myanmar’s main Internet link remained shut for a third straight day on Sunday, as the ruling regime tried to curb the flow of information on a bloody crackdown against protesters.

“I tried on Sunday morning again but it’s failed again. I haven’t been able to check my email since Friday,” said one Yangon resident.

Internet cafes in Yangon also remained closed. Over the past week, tech-savvy citizens used the cybercafes to transmit pictures and video clips of the regime’s clampdown taken on mobile phones and digital cameras.

“People inside Myanmar can’t send emails or news to outside organisations,” said Kho Win Aung from activist group Shwe Gas Movement.

“So they are losing their chance to express what’s happening in Myanmar,” the Thailand-based activist told reporters in Bangkok.

The government cracked down on protesters last week, killing at least 13 people and injuring hundreds more, in a campaign that has also intensified pressure on media operating in the country.

In the main city of Yangon, soldiers shot dead a Japanese video-journalist Thursday and beat people found with cell phones or cameras, witnesses said.

Myanmar’s military rulers always keep a tight grip on information, heavily censoring newspapers, blocking much of the Internet and rarely allowing foreign journalists into the country.

Paris-based media rights group Reporters Without Borders said that by cutting Internet access, the regime was trying to operate “behind closed doors”.

It has condemned Myanmar as a “paradise for censors” and listed the country as one of the world’s most restrictive for press freedoms.

UNITED NATIONS - In a throw-back to Cold War disputes, leftist Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega launched a blistering attack on U.S. global “tyranny” on Tuesday and defended Iran’s right to pursue a nuclear program.

In his first speech to the U.N. General Assembly for 18 years, Ortega said U.S. leaders continued to dictate what was right or wrong “as if they were God”, while poor countries were still afflicted by “oppression and violence and terror”.

“Today we are more threatened than we were 18 years ago,” said Ortega, who spoke about two hours after U.S. President George W. Bush, in his speech to the Assembly, criticized a lack of human rights in Iran, North Korea, Cuba and other states.

Referring to the United States, Ortega said that what was called “the most exemplary democracy in the world” was “really a tyranny. It’s the most impressive, huge dictatorship that has existed — the empire of North America.”

Ortega, leader of the radical Sandinista Party, ruled his central American nation in the 1980s when his government fought U.S.-backed Contra rebels. The Sandinistas were voted out of office in 1990 but he returned to power in January.

In a speech that appeared largely improvised, Ortega said the United States dictated the world economic order and was guilty of hypocrisy in trying to deny developing countries the right to nuclear power.

“With what authority does he (Bush) question the right of Iran and the right of North Korea … to nuclear development for peaceful purposes?” he asked.

“And even if they wanted nuclear power for military purposes, with what right can we question this? The U.S. is the only country in the world to have launched nuclear bombs on innocent people — Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” Japanese cities bombed in 1945.

Iran says its nuclear program is only to generate nuclear power, but Washington and other Western capitals fear it is aimed at producing nuclear weapons.

Under Ortega, Nicaragua has cultivated ties with Iran, whose President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, an arch-foe of Washington, visited Managua in January. Ortega went to Iran in June.

Last month, oil-rich Iran promised to help fund a new $350 million ocean port and build 10,000 houses for the cash-strapped Nicaraguan government.

In his speech on Tuesday, Ortega said the General Assembly reflected a world where “a capitalist and imperialist minority is imposing global capitalism to impoverish the world, continue to enslave us all and promote apartheid against Latin American immigrants and against African immigrants in Europe”.

Thailand’s post-coup government has approved the 6.7 billion baht purchase of Israeli guns, Ukrainian armoured vehicles and Chinese missiles, a cabinet spokesman said.

The army would spend 960 million baht on 15,000 rifles and 259 million baht on 992 sub-machine guns from Israel, Nattawat Suthiyothin said after a cabinet meeting.

The cabinet also approved 3.9 billion baht for 96 Ukraine-built BTR-3E1 armoured personnel vehicles, produced by state-owned Kharkiv Morozov Machine Building Design Bureau, after heavy lobbying by Russia, China, and Canada failed.

The navy would pay 1.6 billion baht for ground-to-ground missiles from China, Nattawat said without giving further details.

The military, which ousted elected Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra in a bloodless coup last year, has faced criticism for buying new equipment at a time when Thailand’s economic growth has slowed due to post-coup political uncertainties.

Defence Minister Boonrawd Somtas told Reuters last month the military needed new tanks, ships, fighter jets and helicopters after the 1997/98 Asian financial crisis had capped annual defence spending at 80 billion baht in the past decade.

Next year’s budget allocates 143 billion baht to defence spending.