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Facts refute claims of calm in Iraq

Compiled by Eamon Martin

Sept. 28 (AGR)— In a publicity blitz Sept. 23, US President George W. Bush and visiting Iraqi interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi went to great lengths to downplay violence and instability threatening to derail planned national assembly elections in January.

Almost immediately, a damning assortment of statistical evidence compiled by agencies in the employ of the US government itself surfaced in direct contradiction to Bush and Allawi’s upbeat portrayal of occupied Iraq. Stinging statements made soon after by State Department and intelligence officials, as well as baffled Iraqis, challenged the leaders’ claims even further.

Speaking with Bush at the White House on Sept. 23, Iraq’s US-appointed interim Prime Minister said the security situation was “good for elections to be held tomorrow” in 15 of Iraq’s 18 provinces.

Allawi told reporters the next day that “for now the only place which is not really that safe is Fallujah, downtown Fallujah. The rest, there are varying degrees. Some — most — of the provinces are really quite safe.”

But two days later, in a rare departure from the positive talking points used by administration spokesmen, Secretary of State Colin Powell acknowledged that the insurgency is in fact strengthening and that anti-American sentiment in the Middle East is increasing. “Yes, it’s getting worse,” he said.

As Powell made his remarks, the fledgling Iraqi security forces suffered a fresh blow to their credibility as the US military announced it had detained a top National Guard commander — one of the most-senior Iraqi security personnel — for alleged involvement in anti-occupation attacks.

Attacks against US troops, Iraqi security forces and private contractors number in the dozens each day and have spread to parts of the country that had been relatively peaceful, according to statistics compiled by a private security firm working for the US government.

Over the past 30 days, there have been more than 2,300 attacks by insurgents in Iraq, in a pattern that sprawls over nearly every major population center outside the Kurdish north.

The sweeping geographical reach and frequency of the attacks, from Nineveh and Salahuddin Provinces in the northwest to Babylon and Diyala in the center and Basra in the south, suggests a more widespread and intensifying resistance than the isolated pockets described by Allawi and Bush.

During the past 30 days insurgent attacks totaled 283 in Nineveh, 325 in Salahuddin in the northwest, and 332 in Anbar Province in the west. In the center of Iraq, attacks numbered 123 in Diyala Province, 76 in Babylon, and 13 in Wasit. There was not a single province without an attack in the 30-day period.

A sampling of daily reports produced over the past two weeks by Kroll Security International for the US Agency for International Development shows that such attacks typically number about 80 each day. In contrast, 40 to 50 hostile incidents occurred daily during the weeks preceding the handover of political authority to an interim Iraqi government on June 28.

The Kroll reports are based on data provided by US-led military forces, the US Embassy in Baghdad, private security companies working in Iraq and nongovernmental organizations.

To many natives and foreigners living in Iraq, the portrait of progress that Allawi painted during his trip to Washington does not depict reality.

After his speech to a joint meeting of Congress, Allawi described Baghdad as “very good and safe.” In fact, the number of attacks in the capital alone currently average 22 a day.

The day before Allawi made his remarks, there were 28 separate hostile incidents in Baghdad, including five rocket-propelled grenade attacks, six roadside bombings and a suicide bombing in which a car exploded at a National Guard recruiting station, killing at least 11 people and wounding more than 50.

The statistics show that there have been just under 1,000 attacks in Baghdad during the past month; in fact, an American military spokesman said this week that since April, insurgents have fired nearly 3,000 mortar rounds in Baghdad alone.

“People are very naive if they think Baghdad is safe,” said Falah Ahmed, 26, a cigarette vendor in center city. A nearby tailor, Hisham Nuaimi, 52, said Alawi “is either deceiving himself or the Americans. What do you call a city with a car bomb every day?”

As Allawi flew to the US, attacks in Salahuddin province occurred in Taji, Balad, Tikrit, Samarra, Baiji, Thuliyah and Dujayl — the seven largest population centers in the area.

Large areas of the country are wholly under the control of the resistance, such as Fallujah and the mid-Euphrates regions.

In the best-case scenario, the National Intelligence Council (NIC) said this week that Iraq could be expected to achieve a “tenuous stability” over the next 18 months. In the worst case, it could dissolve into civil war. The security situation has grown so dire that many of the few remaining nongovernmental aid organizations left in Iraq are making plans to withdraw.

Nine hundred Americans were killed or wounded in August and a poll highlighted by the CIA in a recent briefing showed that 90 percent of Iraqis think of the Americans as occupiers and that half believe the insurgents who target Americans are trying to liberate the country.

Operations by US forces and Iraqi police are killing twice as many Iraqis — most of them civilians — as attacks by insurgents, according to statistics compiled by the Iraqi Health Ministry.

After this report was made public last week, the US-appointed Iraqi interim government banned the Health Ministry from announcing figures for civilian casualties.

Iraqis reacted with astonishment and derision to Allawi’s claim before the US Congress that 14 or 15 out of Iraq’s 18 provinces “are completely safe.”

“The truth is exactly the reverse,” said a lorry driver, Abu Akil. “There are 15 provinces which are dangerous and only the three Kurdish provinces in the north are OK. This speech was designed to be heard by Americans and not by Iraqis.”

“The speech was ridiculous,” said Maithan Maki, another driver.

Few people in Iraq know more about security in the country’s 18 provinces than its lorry drivers, who run the gauntlet of bandits, US patrols, insurgents and police. “All the roads are dangerous,” said Maki.

Akhil Khadum, who has spent 14 years driving lorries in Iraq, said: “This speech is not in touch with reality.”

All the drivers said they no longer carried cargo for the Americans as they were often stopped by insurgents who would look at their manifests to make sure the goods being transported were not going to a US company.

Meanwhile, the Bush administration now appears to be willing to risk holding an election marred by violence and incomplete balloting to keep to its schedule. As Bush and Allawi spoke optimistically, US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld suggested that elections should proceed in January even if violence prevents voting in as much as a quarter of the country.

“Nothing’s perfect in life,” he said in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Allawi has said, with US and British backing, that elections will be held as planned even if people in areas under rebel control do not vote.

That is a growing number.

Sources: Agence France-Presse, Independent (UK), Inter Press Service, Knight Ridder, Los Angeles Times, Navy Times, New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Washington Post

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South Korean nuke scandal stalls US sanctions push

By Doug Lorimer

Sept. 22— In his opening remarks to the meeting of the board of governors of the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna on Sept. 13, IAEA director-general Mohammed ElBaradei said that Iran had made “some progress” in accounting for small traces of highly enriched uranium found by UN inspectors at Iranian nuclear facilities. He added, “it appears plausible that this HEU contamination may not have resulted from enrichment of uranium by Iran at these locations.”

ElBaradei also told the IAEA board of governors that it was of “serious concern” that US ally South Korea had secretly enriched uranium to bomb-grade levels four years ago. IAEA inspectors reported that the method utilized in South Korea to enrich uranium had no civilian application and was not used in any nuclear energy programs. ElBaradei noted that the South Korean enrichment activities were in violation of the IAEA safeguard agreement.

According to the Sept. 12 Washington Post: “The IAEA, which has suspected South Korea of violating the non-proliferation treaty for six years, confronted the Seoul government last December. Several months later, diplomats said, South Korea began to acknowledge the work. Publicly, officials in Seoul said the experiments were one-time efforts by scientists working on their own. But diplomats challenged those assertions and revealed over the weekend that the Seoul government officially and repeatedly blocked IAEA inspections months after the experiments in 2000 and told the IAEA false cover stories...

“During an IAEA inspection last week, South Korean officials could not produce documentation or several scientists who were involved in the work, the diplomats said. That portrayal differs significantly from those offered by US officials who have repeatedly praised South Korea for coming clean voluntarily and co-operating with the IAEA.”

While ignoring Seoul’s violations of its international nuclear commitments, US officials in Vienna continued to insist that the HEU traces found in Iran are evidence that Iran has a secret nuclear weapons program.

In its drive to lay the groundwork for a future Iraq-style invasion of oil-rich Iran, Washington has been pushing for the 35-member IAEA board of governors to refer Iran’s nuclear energy program to the UN Security Council for possible international sanctions. However, the embarrassing South Korean revelations have forced US officials to temporarily retreat to demanding that a “deadline” be set for Iran to comply with a series of demands.

According to a Sept. 14 “Voice of America” report, US officials had found unacceptable a draft resolution on Iran’s nuclear program being circulated among the IAEA board members by British, French and German diplomats. VoA reported that the draft “urges Iran to provide immediate access to all facilities for inspection and to reconsider construction work on a heavy water reactor that could produce bomb-grade nuclear material.” It also “calls on Iran to suspend immediately all activities connected with reprocessing and uranium enrichment.”

Associated Press reported on Sept. 13 that US officials were proposing changes to the draft resolution, including that it demand Iran provide “full information” about alleged past illegal nuclear activities (Iran denies that it has engaged in any) and that Iran cease “immediately and fully” uranium enrichment and all related activities.

On July 30, Tehran announced plans to begin enrichment processing of 40 tons of uranium, which Washington claims will be used to make five nuclear bombs. Uranium enrichment, however, is also necessary for producing nuclear fuel for electricity generation.

Hossein Mousavian, Iran’s chief IAEA delegate, told AP on September 14 that his country had a legitimate right to enrich uranium under the non-proliferation treaty.

Ali Akbar Salehi, Iran’s former delegate to the IAEA, told AP on Sept. 2 that the equipment being used in Iran’s Natanz enrichment plant does not have the capacity to enrich uranium to a grade that could be used for nuclear weapons. He also noted that in addition to Iran’s agreement to allow unannounced IAEA inspections of its nuclear facilities, IAEA cameras record activity in the plant 24 hours a day.

Source: Green Left Weekly

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Latin America’s prisons: hell on earth

By Diego Cevallos

Mexico City, Mexico, Sept. 14 (IPS)— Name: David Pastor. Sentence: Five years in prison. Charge: Stealing a pair of glasses.

The criminal record of this 24-year-old Mexican is similar to those of many of the more than 650,000 inmates in Latin America’s prisons, which are veritable infernos where human rights don’t count.

“Here you’re tough or they control you, but if you’re sharp you can get by ok,” says Pastor, who is in the Varonil Norte prison in the Mexican capital, which was built to hold 4,892 prisoners but currently houses nearly 8,500.

In Latin America’s penitentiaries, where riots, violence, and overcrowding are part of the everyday landscape, there are thousands of inmates, mainly from the lowest socioeconomic strata, serving sentences for minor crimes like shoplifting because they could not afford an adequate legal defence.

In prison, “you have to win your place, and you can’t drop your guard even when you’re sleeping, because it’s full of rats [thieves and murderers] and other species,” says Pastor, who adds that he has no plans for the future, for when he gets out of prison.

The United Nations Latin American Institute for Crime Prevention and Treatment of Offenders (ILANUD) says prisons in the region, instead of serving as places where inmates pay for what they did and are rehabilitated, have become human warehouses and schools of crime.

Illustrations of the dire conditions in penitentiaries in Latin America abound. In the Urso Branco prison in Porto Velho, Brazil, 14 detainees were killed by fellow inmates during an uprising last April.

During the riot, the prisoners threw bodies off the roof and brandished body parts of five inmates they had mutilated.

At La Esperanza prison in El Salvador, an Aug. 31 uprising left 31 dead and a similar number wounded, and in May more than 100 inmates died in a prison fire in Honduras.

According to the Costa Rica-based ILANUD, the flagrant violations of the human rights of prisoners are aggravated by the severe overcrowding.

That problem was found in the prisons of every one of the 18 countries studied by ILANUD in 2003, but in 15 the overcrowding reached critical levels: overpopulation rates of 120 percent of capacity or higher.

In many countries, the majority of prisoners have not even been sentenced yet. In Honduras, 79 percent of inmates are pending sentencing, in Uruguay 72 percent, Ecuador 70 percent, Peru 67 percent, Panama 58 percent, and Bolivia 56 percent.

As a result, many spend months or even years in prison before they are sentenced or declared innocent.

In Latin America, those deprived of their freedom are basically deprived of all of their fundamental rights and subjected to insalubrious and violent conditions, which in and of themselves constitute cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatment, says the ILANUD report.

A study by the Latinoamerican Commission for the Rights and Freedoms of the Workers and Peoples (CLADEHLT) says that for some inmates, prisons are “the beginning of a training program from which they will graduate as criminals...(and) for the great majority, prisons are just a daily practice, a race against death.”

Homicide rates within Latin American prisons are 25 times higher than on the outside, and suicide rates are at least eight times higher.

“I don’t think anyone can argue that prisons are rehabilitation centers,” Silvia Otón, a penal lawyer who is handling the cases of several inmates in prisons in Mexico, told IPS. What they are, “with all of the corruption among guards and police, is a hell of injustices. There may be exceptions, but they are definitely very few.”

A report by the Mexican League for Defence of Human Rights (LIMEDDH), a member of the International Federation of Human Rights (FIDH), says Mexico’s penitentiaries are schools of crime where there is no respect for even the most basic human rights.

Prisons throughout Latin America are described in similar terms.

The Human Rights Commission of Uruguay’s lower house of parliament describes the prisons of that South American country as “concentration camps where prisoners live in subhuman conditions.”

Uruguay’s 24 prisons, which were built to hold a total of 3,266 inmates, house 7,201, according to statistics from June 2003.

In Colombia’s prisons, “constitutional and human rights are flagrantly violated, which turns them into infernos,” states a report by that country’s ombudsman’s office.

Although the total capacity of Colombia’s 174 penitentiaries is 48,791 prisoners, they hold more than 66,500.

In Brazil, where 210,000 prisoners are held in installations built for a maximum of 180,000, human rights groups describe prisons as hotbeds of crime and violence.

In August, the Brazilian government of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva launched a plan to improve health conditions in prisons, at a cost of $9million a year.

“We cannot abolish prisons, but they can be improved,” said Justice Minister Marcio Thomaz Bastos, at the presentation of the plan. “We can ensure the detainee does not come out of prison worse than when he went in.”

In Argentina, inmates are sometimes coerced by prison staff to kill fellow prisoners, prosecutors, defense lawyers or even judges who try to denounce injustices or get the system under control, says a March report on that country by the International Observatory of Prisons.

The list of reports denouncing the conditions in Latin America’s prisons is long, and few contain any indication that the situation is improving.

Although a multitude of national laws and international conventions have been created to regulate the situation in prisons and attempt to guarantee respect for the rights of inmates, the situation in the region’s penitentiaries continues to decline.

“The state is chiefly responsible, because it does not want, or is unable, to guarantee the fundamental rights of inmates, and often confines them in situations of terrible injustices, fear, and torture,” said the Mexican lawyer, Otón.

David Pastor, who is serving out his sentence in a tiny cell shared with three other inmates, says the prison system has marked him forever: “After living in here and seeing what I’ve seen, I’ll never be the same, I can tell you that.”

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Five years after NATO’s attack, Kosovo pushes mass privatization

By Neil Clark

Sept. 21— “Wars, conflict — it’s all business,” sighs Monsieur Verdoux in Charlie Chaplin’s 1947 film of the same name. Many will not need to be convinced of the link between US corporations now busily helping themselves to Iraqi state assets and the military machine that pried Iraq open for global business. But what is less widely known is that a similar process is already well underway in a part of the world where B52s were not so long ago dropping bombs in another “liberation” mission.

The trigger for the US-led bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 was, according to the standard western version of history, the failure of the Serbian delegation to sign up to the Rambouillet peace agreement. But that holds little more water than the tale that has Iraq responsible for last year’s invasion by not cooperating with weapons inspectors.

The secret annex B of the Rambouillet accord -- which provided for the military occupation of the whole of Yugoslavia — was, as the Foreign Office minister Lord Gilbert later conceded to the defense select committee, deliberately inserted to provoke rejection by Belgrade.

But equally revealing about the west’s wider motives is chapter four, which dealt exclusively with the Kosovan economy. Article I (1) called for a “free-market economy,” and article II (1) for privatization of all government-owned assets. At the time, the “rump Yugoslavia” (a federation of just Serbia and Montenegro) — then not a member of the IMF, the World Bank, the WTO or European Bank for Reconstruction and Development — was the last economy in central-southern Europe to be uncolonized by western capital. “Socially owned enterprises,” the form of worker self-management pioneered under Tito, still predominated.

Yugoslavia had publicly owned petroleum, mining, car, and tobacco industries, and 75 percent of industry was state or socially owned. In 1997, a privatization law had stipulated that in sell-offs, at least 60 percent of shares had to be allocated to a company’s workers.

The high priests of neo-liberalism were not happy. At the Davos summit early in 1999, Tony Blair berated Belgrade, not for its handling of Kosovo, but for its failure to embark on a program of “economic reform” — new-world-order speak for selling state assets and running the economy in the interests of multinationals.

In the 1999 Nato bombing campaign, it was state-owned companies — rather than military sites — that were specifically targeted by the world’s richest nations. Nato only destroyed 14 tanks, but 372 industrial facilities were hit — including the Zastava car plant at Kragujevac, leaving hundreds of thousands jobless. Not one foreign or privately owned factory was bombed.

After the removal of Slobodan Milosevic, the west got the “fast-track” reforming government in Belgrade it had long desired. One of the first steps of the new administration, was to repeal the 1997 privatization law and allow 70 percent of a company to be sold to foreign investors — with just 15 percent reserved for workers. The government then signed up to the World Bank’s programs — effectively ending the country’s financial independence.

Meanwhile, as the New York Times had crowed, “a war’s glittering prize” awaited the conquerors. Kosovo has the second largest coal reserves in Europe, and enormous deposits of lignite, lead, zinc, gold, silver and petroleum.

The jewel is the enormous Trepca mine complex, whose 1997 value was estimated at $5 billion. In an extraordinary smash and grab raid soon after the war, the complex was seized from its workers and managers by more than 2,900 Nato troops, who used teargas and rubber bullets.

Five years on from the Nato attack, the Kosovo Trust Agency (KTA), the body that operates under the jurisdiction of the UN Mission in Kosovo (Unmik) — is “pleased to announce” the program to privatize the first 500 or so socially owned enterprises (SOEs) under its control. The closing date for bids passed last week: 10 businesses went under the hammer, including printing houses, a shopping mall, an agrobusiness and a soft-drinks factory. The Ferronikeli mining and metal-processing complex, with an annual capacity of 12,000 tons of nickel production, is being sold separately, with bids due by November 17.

To make the SOEs more attractive to foreign investors, Unmik has altered the way land is owned in Kosovo, allowing the KTA to sell 99-year leases with the businesses, which can be transferred or used as loans or security. Even Belgrade’s pro-western government has called this a “robbery of state-owned land.” For western companies waiting to swoop, there will be rich pickings indeed in what the KTA assures us is a “very investor-friendly” environment. But there is little talk of the rights of the moral owners of the enterprises — the workers, managers and citizens of the former Yugoslavia, whose property was effectively seized in the name of the “international community” and “economic reform.”

As the corporate takeover of the ruins of Baghdad and Pristina proceeds apace, neither the “liberation” of Iraq nor the “humanitarian” bombing of Yugoslavia has proved Chaplin’s cynical anti-hero to be wrong.

Source: Guardian (UK)

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No one takes responsibility for deaths along border

By Constanza Vieira

Bogota, Colombia, Sept. 25 (IPS) -- It is still far from clear who was responsible for the recent killings of seven Venezuelans near the Colombian border as well as other murders in Venezuelan territory.

Both Colombia’s right-wing President Alvaro Uribe and the leader of the leftist Democratic Pole, Gustavo Petro, said it was not prudent to categorically state that the killings were the work of Colombia’s right-wing paramilitaries or leftist guerrillas.

A third possibility, mentioned by Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez himself, is that the attackers belonged to the radical pro-Chavéz Bolivarian Liberation Front (FBL), which recently emerged.

Six Venezuelan soldiers and a 23-year-old female engineer from Venezuela’s state oil company, PDVSA, were killed by armed attackers on Sept. 17 in the oil-producing region of Orinoquia, between the Caño Limón oil field in eastern Colombia and the Guafitas oil field in southwestern Venezuela.

Four engineers and seven of their military guards, who repelled the attackers, survived the ambush, which occurred as the PDVSA team was arrying out an inspection of oil fields.

In that region, the Colombian-Venezuelan border is marked by the Arauca River, which separates the Venezuelan state of Apure from the Colombian department of Arauca.

The inspection team was making its way along the banks of the small Sarare River in Venezuela, which runs parallel to the Arauca River, a full 12 miles from the border.

“Whoever opened fire knew they were in Venezuelan territory. It was an ambush,” a local journalistic source from that area, who preferred not to be named, told IPS.

Both Colombia’s insurgents and paramilitary militias often cross the porous border. But neither the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the main rebel group, nor the United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia (AUC), the paramilitary umbrella, have claimed responsibility for the attack.

The paramilitary commander known as “El Eléctrico,” who heads the group that is active in the capital of the Colombian department of Arauca, told Henry Colmenares, the director of the local radio news program Meridiano 70, on Sept. 23 that his forces “do not operate yet” on the other side of the border.

He said that was because the Venezuelan “National Guard is in cahoots with the [Colombian] guerrillas, and it would be two against one.”

Colmenares commented to IPS that the paramilitary commander added that he and his group “have no problems with the Venezuelan military,” and are not interested in attacking them.

The paramilitary group led by “El Eléctrico” belongs to the Vencedores de Arauca Block, one of the AUC factions currently negotiating their demobilization with the government in exchange for an amnesty-like agreement. The talks are taking place in Santa Fe de Ralito, in northwestern Colombia.

Locals on the Venezuelan side of the border say they have seen Colombian guerrillas providing military training to members of the FBL. But those reports were not confirmed by ombudsperson Gloria Cuitiva of Arauca. “I have no knowledge of that, but I will start making inquiries,” she told IPS.

The guerrillas have had a strong presence in that border region of Colombia since the 1980s, when the US corporation Occidental Petroleum found oil in Caño Limón.

But since 1999, it has been the scenario of a turf war between the rebels — both the FARC and the smaller National Liberation Army (ELN) — and the paramilitaries.

While the FARC has a strict policy against offensive operations in neighboring countries, the ELN has not adopted any such decision.

“After an investigation carried out in all of the units in our organization, it has been verified that none of our troops participated” in the Sept. 17 incident, the FARC stated in a communiqué released by the commanders of the “X Front” on Friday night.

The insurgent group added that it does not see Venezuelan authorities as enemies, and “for that reason, they are not considered military targets.”

The statement also said that “by means of intelligence reports,” the group had detected in the area “the presence of extreme right-wing provocateur elements, dedicated to destabilizing the revolutionary process” — a reference to the left-leaning Chávez’s “social revolution,” which involves numerous programs in favor of the poor, including land redistribution in rural areas.

The FARC called on local residents on both sides of the border to “remain alert in the towns and villages in order to prevent infiltration by paramilitary groups sponsored by the Colombian government and sectors of the Venezuelan opposition movement, which are only seeking to create chaos and sow confusion among the population.”

Two years ago the Colombian security forces began to get involved in the increasingly intense territorial dispute over that area of eastern Colombia, which has been steadily militarized by Uribe since he took office in August 2002.

According to the London-based rights watchdog Amnesty International, the war is intensifying in the area as the armed factions step up their efforts to control the department’s natural resources by force.

The US government provides military aid and advisers to Army Brigade 18, created to guard oil installations in the area.

Amnesty reported that Occidental Petroleum and the Spanish oil company Repsol-YPF have also donated “funds to Brigade 18 through security accords.”

A 17-year-old local young man was killed in the incursion, “apparently by paramilitaries,” according to the José Alvear Restrepo Lawyers Collective, a Colombian human rights group.

In a letter to the ombudsperson’s office, the Collective gathered testimony from local residents, who said the military “have intimidated and threatened the people, telling them ‘the paramilitaries are coming.’”

Paramilitary militias are responsible for the great majority of the atrocities committed in Colombia’s four-decade civil war, according to the United Nations, which has established their ties to the army and documented military support for several paramilitary operations.

Meanwhile, the Mesa por Arauca, an umbrella group linking several Colombian and international social, labor and human rights organizations, said in a statement that in the operation in Tame, soldiers were accompanied by four paramilitaries who are habitually active in the area.

“All of the campesinos know and fear them because they know that the four of them have committed a number of murders and disappearances in the area,” says a communiqué by the Mesa por Arauca.

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Pentagon link to Guinea coup plot

By David Leigh, David Pallister and Jamie Wilson

Sept. 27 — Links have been discovered between senior US military officials and the failed coup plot in Equatorial Guinea that has left Sir Mark Thatcher facing trial in South Africa.

Theresa Whelan, a member of the Bush administration in charge of African affairs at the Pentagon, twice met a London-based businessman, Greg Wales, in Washington before the coup attempt. Wales has been accused of being one of its organizers, but has denied any involvement.

A US defense official told Newsweek magazine Sept. 26: “Wales mentioned in passing... there might be some trouble brewing in Equatorial Guinea. Specifically, he had heard from some business associates of his that wealthy citizens of the country were planning to flee in case of a crisis.”

The regime of President Teodoro Obiang Nguema in oil-rich Equatorial Guinea has accused the US of backing the plot, but the Pentagon denies supporting it. US officials say it was Wales who made all the approaches to them.

Equatorial Guinea official sources claim that last November, when the plot was in its early stages, an Old Etonian mercenary, Simon Mann, paid Wales about $8,000. Mann was subsequently jailed for seven years in Zimbabwe on charges linked to the coup plot.

A few days after the alleged payment, Wales went to Washington for a dinner and conference organized by an influential group of US “private military companies,” the IPOA (International Peace Operations Association).

Whelan told the group the Pentagon was keen to see them operate in Africa, saying: “Contractors are here to stay in supporting US national security objectives overseas.” They were cheaper, and saved the use of US forces in peacekeeping and training.

She added: “The US can be supportive in trying to ameliorate regional crises without necessarily having to put US troops on the ground, which is often a very difficult political decision ... Sometimes we may not want to be very visible.”

IPOA’s members include MPRI, a company formed by retired generals. MPRI had already been allowed to compile a survey of Equatorial Guinea’s military weaknesses on President Obiang’s behalf, overcoming initial objections by the Clinton administration that it would help prop up a dictator.

MPRI persuaded the Pentagon it would be in the US national interest to allow the survey to be done, although the company never went ahead with a planned contract to strengthen Obiang’s army.

Wales made his first contact with Whelan at the dinner. The following January his firm, the Sherbourne Foundation, was paid another $35,000 by the coup plotters, according to Equatorial Guinea.

Wales then organized another meeting at the Pentagon with Whelan. This came on the eve of the day originally planned for the coup, February 19. The Pentagon says the meeting in “mid-to-late February” ranged over many African topics, and that Wales’s hints were so general that they did not call for any action to be taken.

Wales, who denies any involvement in the coup plot, has refused to comment on any of these fresh allegations.

The Obiang regime has complained that the US did not warn it of the coup plot, although it received intelligence from South Africa.

The February 19 plan is said to have been aborted after a hired aircraft broke down. The plotters then acquired an old former US Air National Guard Boeing, built to a military specification, that was flown over from Kansas with a crew from Florida for a second coup attempt. But the seller, the US firm Dodson Aviation, says there was no US government involvement in the deal.

Both the US and Britain have extensive oil interests in Equatorial Guinea which, in the words of one US official, is “the new Kuwait.”

The Texas company Marathon is building a huge liquefied natural gas plant, of which the British gas firm BG plans to buy much of the output for the next 17 years.

There is a good deal of unofficial sympathy in US military circles for the coup plotters. On Sept. 26 one of those present at the original IPOA dinner, requesting anonymity, said: “Ethically, you have to want to see Obiang removed.

“It’s a real indictment of the international community that they’ve failed to get rid of him.”

Source: Guardian (UK)

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IMF policies spread AIDS, groups charge

By Jim Lobe

Washington, DC, Sept. 24— The austerity policies imposed on developing countries by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) are undermining the global fight against the HIV/AIDS crisis, according to a new report by several prominent public-health and development groups.

Released on the eve of next week’s annual meeting here of the IMF’s board of governors, the 26-page report, “Blocking Progress” charges that the conditions which the IMF attaches to its loans and debt relief may be making it much harder for governments to finance the rapidly rising expenses of fighting the epidemic.

In particular, those policies that are aimed at keeping inflation low and public spending in check, while consistent with neo-liberal orthodoxy, may be having a disastrous impact on the ability of the government to provide critical medical and family-planning services that are urgently needed both to curb the spread of the disease and to treat its victims.

“This report should be a real wake-up call to people concerned about the alarming impact of AIDS on prospects for development and stability,” according to Paul Zeitz, executive director of the Global AIDS Alliance (GAA), who contributed to the report. “It shows the terrible price we could pay if a rigid adherence to economic orthodoxy wins out over common sense.”

Nearly three million people died of AIDS last year, almost all of them in developing countries, including many whose health systems are least able to cope. Some 9,000 people are currently dying each day, according to the latest UN statistics.

While nearly three quarters of those deaths take place in sub-Saharan Africa, the disease is spreading rapidly in Asia, especially in that region’s two most populous nations, India and China, and in Russia and other eastern and central European nations.

The impact has been little short of catastrophic in some southern African nations where the incidence of HIV/AIDS in the adult population surpasses 25 percent. Not only are health-care systems overstretched, but, because AIDS normally strikes men and women in their most productive years, economic growth -- a major preoccupation of both the IMF and its sister institution, the World Bank — has been seriously retarded in the hard-hit countries.

To deal with the crisis, UN experts at the recent International AIDS Conference in Bangkok estimated the financing needs of developing countries will increase to $12 billion next year and to $20 billion by 2007, roughly four times what wealthy nations and other donors, like the World Bank, are currently providing.

But AIDS activists are worried that developing countries will be reluctant to accept such funding if, in doing so, they will have to break their agreements with the IMF not to exceed strict “budget ceilings” resulting in a cut-off of loans by the agency and other donors who condition their own assistance on compliance with IMF adjustment programs.

The issue became acute last year when the Ugandan finance ministry tried to block the acceptance of a $52 million grant awarded by the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria for fear that it would break limits on public spending that had been agreed with the IMF.

Speaking at the World Bank in November 2003, the UNAIDS executive director posed the question directly: “When I hear that countries are choosing to comply with the ...ceilings at the expense of adequately funded AIDS programs,” he said, “it strikes me that someone isn’t looking hard enough for sound alternatives.”

The 25-page report marks an effort to address precisely that issue by arguing that the IMF’s stress on keeping inflation low -- in many cases, under five percent per year -- may not only be undermining anti-AIDS efforts, but may also be based on shaky economics.

“Despite the ...IMF’s preference for low rates of inflation,” according to the report, “there is no consensus among economists on what is an appropriate level of inflation, or at what level inflation begins to undermine economic growth rates.”

“The IMF’s insistence on very low inflation targets must be scrutinized,” said the report’s main author, Rick Rowden, of ActionAid International USA. “This issue must be brought into the center of public debate if countries are ever to be allowed to scale-up public health spending effectively to fight HIV/AIDS.”

The situation is particularly poignant in a country like Kenya where more than 4,000 trained nurses and thousands of health workers, who could be mobilized in the fight against AIDS, are unemployed because IMF targets limit the government’s public spending.

“The low-inflation targets set by the IMF lead directly to limits on the national budgets of poor countries, which lead to ceilings on national health budgets,” according to Joanne Carter, an analyst of RESULTS Educational Fund, a US lobby group that fights “diseases of poverty” in poor countries.

“Most poor countries would like to significantly increase spending on fighting AIDS, but they have give up trying to fight against the IMF because they know they must comply with their loan conditions just to keep their access to current levels of foreign aid,” she said. “If you go against the IMF, you risk getting cut off from all other sources of aid.”

The World Bank, which is a critical source of development finance, for example, conditions its loans on compliance with IMF conditions. The report calls for the Bank to de-link its lending from the IMF’s seal of approval.

Due to the weighted voting systems of their boards, both the Bank and the IMF are subject to the control of the major western industrialized nations, known as the Group of Seven (G-7).

The G-7, which is made up of the governments of the US, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Canada and Japan, is already under pressure from development groups to cancel more than $100 billion in debts owed to the IMF and the World Bank by the world’s poorest nations, most of which are in sub-Saharan Africa.

Despite their compliance with existing debt-reduction programs, these countries are still forced to pay in debt service each year than they can spend on the health of their citizens. Debt cancellation, according to the groups, would also free up money to spend on health care and fighting the AIDS crisis.

Source: OneWorld.net