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Women murdered, raped -- and ignored

By María Cecilia Espinosa

Santiago, Chile, Nov. 11 (IPS) — Women, especially if they are young, working class and poor, run the risk of having their murdered, mutilated and raped bodies show up some morning in the streets of numerous Latin American cities, as evidenced by the more than 1,500 cases reported in the last decade that remain unsolved and unpunished.

The critical situation throughout much of the region, and most especially in places like the Mexican border town of Ciudad Juárez, Guatemala City, and Alto Hospicio, Chile, as well as Brazil and El Salvador, led Amnesty International (AI) to organize a conference entitled Day of Reflection: Femicide in Latin America, held in Santiago, Chile on Nov. 5 and attended by women’s rights activists, academics, lawmakers and officials.

According to the conference participants, these crimes weigh upon the conscience of the region’s governments, because they have failed to take action in accordance with their obligations as established in international law, and have thus permitted the impunity of femicide — the murder of women who are killed specifically because they are women.

Anthropologist Isabel Espinosa, one of the speakers at the conference, told IPS that femicide typically involves sexual violence. “Quite often these women are found with their genitals mutilated, and most of them have been raped,” she said.

“Their bodies are positioned so that their sex organs are exposed...There is an intentional sexual connotation in these murders of women,” she added.

The London-based Amnesty International, which organized the Day of Reflection, launched a global Stop Violence Against Women campaign on Mar. 8 — International Women’s Day. The organization has stressed that the problem of violence against women is a human rights problem, and should be addressed on the basis of the universality, indivisibility and interdependence of these rights.

The steps needed to stop the violence include promoting gender equality, seeking justice for gender-based human rights violations, and clearly defining the responsibilities of individual governments and the international community in punishing the perpetrators of these crimes, according to AI.

Femicide has cost the lives of thousands of women in Latin America over the last decade. Women in the region have been made particularly vulnerable by the decline in socio-economic indicators, added to the deep-rooted patriarchal culture of machismo, in which misogyny is more easily tolerated, and violent death can be used as a form of intimidation to “keep women in their place.”

One of the most highly publicized cases is that of Ciudad Juárez, a Mexican city on the border with the United States. Since 1993, at least 300 women have been kidnapped, raped, tortured and murdered.

All of the victims were young and poor. Some were migrants on their way to the United States, some were students, others were workers in “maquiladoras,” for-export assembly plants located along the border that are primarily foreign-owned and completely unregulated thanks to trade liberalization.

International pressure forced the Mexican government to open an investigation in 2001. According to the information gathered by Espinosa, however, not only have the original murders remained unsolved and unpunished, but there have also been an additional 400 to 4,000 reports of missing women and between 30 and 70 unidentified female corpses found.

“The discrepancy between the figures provided by the government and women’s organizations is suspicious,” the anthropologist added.

In the meantime, in the impoverished Chilean town of Alto Hospicio, 1,100 miles north of Santiago, 17 young women, of whom 11 were under 18 years of age, were kidnapped, raped, beaten and murdered between 1998 and 2001.

Each time another young women was reported missing, the authorities blamed the victims themselves, alleging that they had run away from abusive homes or were involved in prostitution or human trafficking, reflecting an attitude described by specialists as criminalization of the poor.

“The women of Alto Hospicio were not treated as full citizens while they were missing, nor after they were found dead,” said sociologist Sonia Vargas, another of the conference’s speakers.

In the case of Chile, the government offered financial compensation to the families of the victims of Alto Hospicio, but they are still marked by the stigma of being poor, which deprives them of their right to justice, she said.

Guatemala is another example of critical levels of violence against women that have been largely ignored, a situation that AI would like to remedy.

Since 2001, the bodies of over a thousand women who have been strangled, decapitated or otherwise mutilated have been found in hotel rooms or on the street. In many cases, a sign has been placed on their corpses, reading “death to the bitches,” reminiscent of the torture used by government troops against women human rights activists during the country’s bloody 36-year civil war (1960-1996).

The victims lived in working-class or slum neighborhoods, and most were either domestic workers or students. They ranged in age from 13 to 36.

Last year alone, there were 383 violent cases of femicide reported in that Central American country, and 306 of those cases remain unsolved, according to the only study carried out on the matter, by the Non-Violence Network, a Guatemalan non-governmental organization.

In February, the United Nations acknowledged that the number of femicide cases in Guatemala, while almost completely overlooked, far outstripped those reported in Ciudad Juárez, which has been much more widely publicized.

Yakin Erturk, the UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women, personally visited Guatemala and concluded, among other things, that the high degree of impunity for violence against women made it likely that at least some of the violence was committed by the authorities.

For women’s organizations, these murders are a result of the patriarchal system that prevails throughout Latin America, where power is exercised almost exclusively by men, and women who dare to break with cultural expectations place themselves in a vulnerable situation.

In the case of many of the victims in Guatemala, Espinosa noted, “These were girls who didn’t follow traditional gender roles. They were young students who went to discotheques, and weren’t afraid to go out at night, which was seen as a transgression.”

Ingrid Wehr, a political scientist from the University of Chile, commented that in all of the different cases, the apathy shown by the police in responding to the murders “reflects the stereotypes of patriarchal societies where violence is tolerated as a form of domination over women, who are seen as lesser beings.”

Claudio Nash, the coordinator of the Center for Human Rights at the University of Chile, told IPS that the lack of concern on the part of the authorities “results from cultural and institutional factors that permit not only serial violence, as in these cases, but also domestic violence, which are both essentially ignored by the state.”

As a consequence, he said, the state is indirectly responsible for violence against women, for having failed to act with due diligence in ensuring the investigation and punishment of these crimes and providing compensation for the victims and their families, as it is obliged to do by virtue of international law.

For Nash, there is also a cultural gender bias that serves to downplay these problems. “It’s as if for the simple fact that they are women, the violence or poverty they endure is not important, and being subjected to these kinds of attacks is almost intrinsic to being a woman. They are not seen as violations of basic human rights.”

The concept of femicide has yet to be incorporated in any national legislation, and is still used primarily in academic circles and the feminist movement, because “it is more political. It doesn’t refer solely to an individual aggressor, but also alludes to the existence of a state structure and legal system that permit these crimes,” Espinosa explained.

The Inter-American Convention on the Prevention, Punishment and Eradication of Violence Against Women — also known as the Convention of Belém do Pará, in reference to the Brazilian city where it was adopted by the Organization of American States (OAS) in 1994 — established precise definitions of violence against women and clearly specified the rights of women and the duties of the states in ensuring that those rights are fulfilled.

The Rome Statute, which is the 1998 treaty that established the International Criminal Court, also specifically refers to persecution on the grounds of gender and defines crimes against humanity as acts committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack, both of which are basic elements of femicide.

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Chilean torture report presented to president, not public

By Gustavo González

Santiago, Chile, Nov. 10 (IPS) — Sexual abuse, including rape using animals, burns from cigarettes, welding torches and acid, ripping off fingernails with pliers, immersion in water, cooking oil or petroleum, and being forced to watch other detainees, often family members, being tortured.

This partial list of torture methods used under the Chilean dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990) also includes beatings, mock executions, lengthy detentions with blindfolds or hoods, electric shock to the genitals and other sensitive parts of the body, as well as the bursting of eardrums using loud noises.

The descriptions are contained in a report presented Nov. 10 to Chilean President Ricardo Lagos by a special commission that spent a year gathering testimony from 35,000 torture victims. But Chilean society cannot yet read it.

As soon as Lagos received the report from the commission headed by Bishop Sergio Valech, a debate broke out on whether the names of the torturers should be made public and whether they should be taken to court as part of the process of reparations for the victims.

The report will be kept secret until the president decides whether it should be partially or totally made public and until he makes an announcement on reparations for the victims, said presidential spokesman Francisco Vidal.

Nevertheless, it has come out that the three-volume report contains eight chapters of testimony on the appalling practices used by the secret police and military and police bodies against opponents of the Pinochet regime.

After the Sept. 11, 1973 coup d’etat that overthrew the democratically elected government of socialist president Salvador Allende, the systematic use of torture formed part of the methods used by the de facto regime to maintain political control.

The National Commission on Political Imprisonment and Torture, which was created on Nov. 11, 2003, compiled the testimony of 35,000 former political prisoners in 110 towns and cities around the country, to determine to what extent the secret police, the military and the police participated in the torture.

IPS was told that the report also discusses the psychological damages suffered by the torture victims, as well as the material damages, in terms of their social and labor reinsertion, or exile in the case of the thousands who chose to flee to another country rather than live in constant fear.

The practice of torture was widely applied. Among the victims were many people who were not even politically active, but were detained and abused as part of a strategy of mass intimidation under a regime of state terrorism, the commission found.

The Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional (DINA) secret police that answered directly to Pinochet, and the Central Nacional de Informaciones (CNI) that replaced DINA in 1978, as well as military intelligence bodies share the greatest responsibility for the practice of torture.

The report also identifies at least 18 army regiments where political prisoners were systematically maltreated, as well as seven navy institutions, including the Esmeralda training ship.

Army commander Gen. Juan Emilio Cheyre accepted institutional responsibility last week for the dictatorship’s human rights violations, but the other branches of the military have not followed suit.

On Nov. 10, after the report was presented to the president, navy commander Admiral Miguel Angel Vergara said he would “put his hands in the fire” (vouch for) the 25,000 men under his command as well as the previous generations of members of the navy, who he said had “nothing to do with” the human rights abuses.

He added, however, that if the report presented Nov. 10 confirms denunciations by the London-based Amnesty International and other human rights groups that torture was practiced in the Esmeralda, he will make a public acknowledgment and will be profoundly sorry.

The Ethical Commission Against Torture, a local non-governmental organization, stated in a communiqué that at least 1,200 torture centers operated in Chile under the Pinochet regime, staffed by around 3,600 agents, who “should be put at the disposal of the courts.”

Mireya García, vice president of The Association of Relatives of the Detained-Disappeared (AFDD), called the presentation of the report a “historic step”, because it officially establishes, for the first time ever, that there were political prisoners and detainees tortured in Chile under the Pinochet regime.

“We hope that they will now adopt all of the measures needed for justice to be served, and for symbolic, legal and material reparations, and above all, we want this report to become an integral part of the education of new generations, so that nothing like this ever happens again in Chile,” said García.

Former colleagues of Pinochet, like retired general Guillermo Garín, once the deputy commander in chief of the Chilean army, took a much more negative view of the report. “They are digging into old wounds that should have been left to heal,” he said.

“The DINA never had a policy of torture,” maintained retired general Manuel Contreras, the former head of this Chilean secret police force, who was second in command only to Pinochet.

A 1991 report by a truth commission found that 3,000 people were murdered or “disappeared” by the Pinochet regime. However, that report did not specifically discuss torture victims who survived.

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Energy deals ease tension for Colombia, Venezuela

By Humberto Márquez

Caracas, Venezuela, Nov. 12 (IPS) — Colombia and Venezuela, whose leaders are at different ends of the political spectrum, have found in the world’s growing thirst for energy projects on which they can see eye to eye, while they tone down their political differences.

Right-wing Colombian President Alvaro Uribe met this week in the resort town of Cartagena on Colombia’s Caribbean coast with his Venezuelan counterpart Hugo Chávez, to discuss plans for cross-border pipelines that will connect oil and gas-producing regions on the Atlantic with energy consumers in the Asia Pacific region and the Pacific coastal region of the Americas.

“Colombia has a clear interest in taking advantage of its geographic location to become a transit route for trade in hydrocarbons, and especially natural gas, after the year 2020,” Carlos Romero, a graduate studies professor of international affairs at Venezuela’s Central University, told IPS.

That interest joined with the interests of Venezuela, the world’s fifth-largest oil exporter, which has the largest natural gas reserves in the region — 146 trillion cubic feet, with prospects of adding another 170 trillion to that total.

Colombia’s interest also coincides with those of the Caribbean island nation of Trinidad and Tobago, which has more than 26 trillion cubic feet of gas reserves.

Uribe and the left-leaning Chávez had already agreed in July to build a 177-km pipeline, at a cost of between $135 and $170 million, to transport gas from Ballenas in northern Colombia to Maracaibo in northwestern Venezuela, until the year 2007.

After that, when Colombia’s stocks will have run out and Venezuela will have put in pipelines connecting the gas fields in the eastern part of the country with consumer regions in the west, the direction of the flow will reverse, and gas will be transported from Venezuela to northern Colombia through the same pipeline.

Chávez and Uribe also agreed to combine that project with a pipeline connection to Panama and to join the “Plan Puebla Panama,” a regional transport and energy integration program involving southern Mexico and Central America, in order to pipe natural gas from Venezuela to Central America and even North America.

The presidents are discussing projects entailing energy interconnection and new highways and roads at a time when bilateral trade is growing, to more than $1.5 billion in the first eight months of the year, which makes it possible to reach a new record of more than $2.5 billion by year-end.

The proposal for a 1,300-km oil pipeline connecting the oil-producing region of Maracaibo in western Venezuela with Colombia’s Pacific coast, which would allow Venezuela and Trinidad and Tobago to export gas to the fast-growing markets of Asia, is an indication that a long-term alliance is envisioned.

“With a long-range vision, Chávez is attempting to diversify markets and become less dependent on the United States,” which buys one out of every two barrels of oil pumped in Venezuela, said professor of international studies Italo Luongo.

Uribe is Washington’s closest ally in Latin America, while Chávez, who has close ties with socialist Cuba, is often described by the international press as a “leftist firebrand.”

For years, Chávez (who has been in power since 1999) has criticized the US-financed Plan Colombia anti-drug and counterinsurgency strategy. He also insists on remaining neutral towards the civil war in Colombia — one of the positions he has taken that have not endeared him to Washington.

In addition, the Venezuelan leader has claimed that sectors of the “Colombian oligarchy” as well as former Colombian army chief Gen. Martín Carreño (who was recently sacked by Uribe) have backed plots to remove him from power.

Colombia’s armed conflict has leaked over its borders, with refugees fleeing into Ecuador and to Venezuela, with which Colombia shares a 2,219-km frontier. In addition, Colombian insurgents and paramilitaries make cross-border incursions.

Uribe expressed his “recognition of the Chávez administration’s interest in helping us with this security problem that has been such a headache for Colombia and its sister country Venezuela.”

The meeting in Cartagena also helped dispel rumors about an arms race, which were triggered when Caracas arranged to purchase 40 helicopters from Russia, to beef up security along the border.

But Beatriz de Majo, an expert on Colombian-Venezuelan relations, told IPS that the controversy and risks of confrontation are real, “and the economic agreements are merely a veneer covering up the security problem that will open up along the border.”

De Majo pointed out that the Uribe administration is negotiating an agreement with the right-wing United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC) umbrella group, under which some 3,000 paramilitaries are to demobilize in the near future in eastern Colombia, close to the Venezuelan border.

“A vacuum of force would thus be created in a drug crop-growing area, and the guerrillas would be tempted to fill the vacuum and gain control over the region. What would the Colombian army do? It would undoubtedly intervene, new armed clashes would occur, and the violence would likely leak over the border into Venezuela,” said de Majo.

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Civil unrest in China no longer a rarity

By Benjamin Robertson

Beijing, China, Nov. 12 — An outbreak of violence in recent weeks has left several people dead and prompted a declaration of martial law in several townships across this vast nation.

Among other things, it has highlighted the challenges for a Chinese government desperate to preserve stability while at the same time pursuing reforms that continue to tear at the nation’s social and economic fabric.

The event in question, a riot between the minority Hui, who are nominally Muslim, and the majority Han Chinese, appeared to have been sparked by a fatal car crash involving a Hui driver and a Han child.

Although ethnic clashes are rare in China, the rapid escalation of violence that left a reported seven people dead does suggest long simmering tensions between the two communities. The region remains under military control.

The incident is only one of several reported acts of civil unrest since late October. In coastal Zhejiang province, protesters blocked a national highway over a pay dispute, igniting several cars in the process.

In the western Chinese city of Chongqing, between 10-20,000 people protested outside government buildings in response to an incident in which it was believed a government official had beaten a worker.

While in the province of Sichuan, fighting continues between police and up to 30,000 residents who are protesting thier relocation to make way for a dam. Several people have also been reported killed.

“Such occurrences take place regularly, and they are likely to continue,” said Gilles Guiheux, head of the French Research Center on Contemporary China.

Historically associated with dynastic change, social unrest today is no longer linked to grievances such as famine that would have affected hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people at any one time.

Issues now tend to be localized, focusing on redundancies, compensation levels for housing relocation, illegal seizure of farmland for development, and general abuse at the hands of plundering officials.

Today’s protesters appear to be increasingly better organized, with leaders, knowledge of laws and regulations, a degree of political acumen, and at present a focus on the grievance at hand. No longer is it simply about burning down the emperor’s palace.

The Chinese government describes social unrest as an issue of grave concern, and usually asks domestic media not to report on specific incidents.

Exact figures are sketchy but one report in China Outlook magazine, published by China’s Xinhua news agency, said three million people were involved in 58,000 acts of social unrest in 2003.

A 2001 report from China’s Central Committee’s Organization Department said: “What is especially worthy of attention is that at present the frequency of collective incidents is rising more and more, their scope is broadening more and more, the feelings expressed are becoming fiercer and fiercer, and the harm they do is becoming greater and greater.”

It added, “Frequently hundreds and thousands and even up to 10,000 were involved.”

And as uneconomical state-owned enterprises continue to be closed, dams are built to feed the nations surging power demands, and fields are planted over with concrete, the reasons for social disgruntlement will multiply.

Hu Xingdou, an outspoken researcher on social issues at the Beijing Institute of Technology, says, “These protests reflect the changing climate of China. The country is experiencing huge changes but with huge levels of waste and corruption.”

Often, Hu says, the point of protest is to attract the attention of the central government, which under the oft branded “populist” leadership of Premier Wen Jiabao is widely seen as being more sensitive towards workers.

“As a farmer, if you go to complain to local officials and they beat you up, then you need to go to higher and higher officials until you reach the central government which will investigate and hopefully make some arrests,” according to Chen Guidi, author of An Investigation into Chinese Farmers, a widely circulated and comparatively hard-hitting work on issues facing rural workers.

And this is reflected in official actions. Although usually quick to nip protests in the bud, central government investigations will later point the finger at local officials for inciting the situation through poor leadership.

According to the Beijing Sanchun Dadi Research Center, a rural affairs institute, some 40 million farmers have been affected by illegal land seizures and it appears that this is where the government has been focusing its attention.

Wary of the Chinese mantra “even the mightiest dragon cannot crush the local snake,” Beijing has been busy slashing taxes, imposing land-use conversion quotas to limit development, and strengthening laws to protect farmers from officials and property developers working in cahoots to secure land for as little as possible.

It is now a criminal offence to abuse land-use rights, that is build factories on land designated for farming.

The idea is to give more power to the citizen, who with law on his side can challenge apparent misdemeanors through the courts rather than on the streets.

One problem, says Li Ping of the Seattle-based Rural Development Institute, is that even with these steps, ignorance of the changes persists among those it is aimed at.

Having just returned from a field trip, he found that farmers questioned were unaware of the legal changes as the local government had failed to inform them.

“There needs to be a social-endorsement mechanism to alert farmers to their rights. At present that will react against officialdom based on gut instincts of what is fair or not when often the law is on their side,” Ping said.

Ping believes the government is marching in the right direction. It is likely to be a long march, however.

Source: Aljazeera

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Growing suppression, soaring poverty in tiny oil-rich country

By Tito Drago

Madrid, Spain, Nov. 11 (IPS) — The dictator of Equatorial Guinea, Teodoro Obiang Nguema, is stepping up suppression of opposition, while social conditions in the tiny West African nation are worsening, an opposition leader told IPS on his visit to Spain.

Parliamentary Deputy Plácido Micó, president of the Convergence for Social Democracy (CPDS) party, and his fellow CPDS lawmaker Celestino Bakale are the only two members of the opposition in the 100-seat parliament of Equatorial Guinea.

The elections held on Apr. 25, 2003, in which Obiang was re-elected, were fraudulent, “just as the international observers who were present” at the time stated, Micó said Nov. 10 in Madrid.

The police in Equatorial Guinea detained medical doctor Wenceslao Mansogo Alo on Nov. 8, although he was released shortly afterwards. Then Pío Miguel Obama Oyana, a city councilor in Malabo, the capital, was arrested. Both are members of the CPDS leadership.

Obama Oyana is still in custody, even though he was arrested without a warrant, “and was not caught committing any crime — which clearly proves the arbitrary nature of the regime and the absolute lack of legal guarantees, an assault on the rights and freedoms of Equatoguineans,” said Micó.

“Obiang’s military regime is obsessed with making the CPDS, the country’s only opposition party, disappear,” he added, to explain the motivation behind the arrests of opposition leaders.

“They try to implicate our companions in coup-plotting activities, or accuse them of being friends of mercenaries, even though they know that we neither share the positions of the regime nor those of violent conspirators,” he said.

Micó was released from prison last August under a presidential pardon after spending over a year behind bars. He has been thrown in jail at least eight times.

“We are in favor of peace and are waging a peaceful struggle, to achieve respect for human rights and the rule of democracy in our country,” said Micó.

President Obiang has governed since 1979, when he overthrew his uncle, Francisco Macías Nguema, whose regime had been sustained through violent repression of opponents since the country won independence from Spain in 1968.

Not long after the 1979 coup d’etat, it became clear that Obiang would follow in Macías’ authoritarian footsteps.

In 1996, the outlook for the country’s economy abruptly changed when US oil giant Mobil Oil Corp. announced the discovery of sizable oil reserves. And in 2001, large natural gas reserves were found.

Currently engaged in offshore drilling in Equatorial Guinea are the US corporations Marathon Oil, Amerada Hess, ExxonMobil, ChevronTexaco, Vanco Energy and Devon Energy, South Africa’s Energy Africa (a subsidiary of Britain’s Tullow Oil) and the Malaysian firm Petronas.

Equatorial Guinea is now the third-largest oil producer in Africa after Nigeria and Angola.

This year, a report by a US Senate committee revealed that hundreds of millions of dollars in oil industry revenues were deposited in accounts in the names of Obiang and his relatives and associates in the Washington-based Riggs Bank.

The Senate report said the accounts were used to filter oil profits for private use. Obiang has denied the allegations.

“Our country is immensely rich, with a population that is impoverished and oppressed to an extreme that can seem incredible to those who have not seen it for themselves,” said Micó.

According to United Nations figures, 80 percent of the country’s wealth is in the hands of just five percent of the population of half a million.

“The educational system is in ruins, with children who have no schools to attend,” said Micó. “Even in the capital, many schools lack benches, and the children must sit on the floor.”

“We have great wealth, especially oil, which is currently exploited by American companies, but it only feeds government corruption, which is spiraling upwards,” he added.

Because of the high levels of corruption, there is no spending on social programs, including health. “Even in Malabo, not to mention the hinterland, if someone has to be taken to a hospital for an emergency, the medicines must be purchased in a pharmacy,” said the opposition leader.

The opposition lawmakers hope that the Spanish government of socialist Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, who took office in April, “will be better than the government of (right-wing José María) Aznar. That was the impression I got from my interview with the secretary of foreign relations, Bernardino León,” said Micó.

The legislators will report on the dismal conditions in their country at a Socialist International council meeting in Johannesburg, South Africa next weekend.

“All politicians must clearly understand that they must be committed to supporting democratization and respect for human rights in our country,” said Micó.

The parliamentary deputy marked his distance from the self-proclaimed government in exile, led in Madrid by refugee Severo Moto, saying “it has contributed nothing to our struggle for democracy.”

“It is a government made up of three political groups, even though there are many more, and our fellow countrymen in exile were not even consulted when it was set up,” he said.

“The central problem lies in the fact that the dictator not only does not want to loosen the chains, but wants to squeeze even harder, because he is afraid that any democratic development would put an end to his regime and his privileges,” he said.

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Xenophobia rising worldwide says UN

By Thalif Deen

United Nations, Nov. 8 (IPS) — The right-wing government of Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has angrily denied charges of racism against its coalition partners, accusations made in a UN report on xenophobia, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia released here.

The 20-page report, which will go before the current session of the UN General Assembly ending mid-December, identifies “two openly xenophobic parties,” the National Alliance and the Northern League, in Berlusconi’s coalition government, which has held power since June 2001.

“The representatives of these parties spread racist and anti-immigrant discourse in Italian society and have obtained the adoption of a particularly strict immigration law [the Bossi-Fini law, named for the leaders of these two parties], which was recently called into question by the Italian constitutional court,” says Doudou Diene, a UN special rapporteur on human rights, in the report.

In his report, Diene says racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia are also on the “upswing” in the rest of Europe.

“New targets of discrimination — immigrants, refugees, and non-nationals — have now been added to the traditional victims of these scourges: Jews, Arabs, Asians, and Africans,” he notes.

Diene says the rise in racism worldwide followed the terrorist attacks on the United States on Sept. 11, 2001.

“The rebirth of racist and xenophobic movements in Western Europe today needs to be analyzed against the background of the socio-economic changes taking place, including the politicization of immigration.”

In Western Europe, Diene says, the resurgence of extremist right-wing politics has been seen as a phenomenon caused by economic crisis or rapid influx of non-western immigrants into hitherto “homogenous” societies.

In France “the leading racist and xenophobic party” is the Front National, led by Jean-Marie Le Pen, who garnered 17 percent of the national vote in the 2002 presidential elections, according to the report.

One of the main goals of the Front’s platform, “based on hate and exclusion,” is to give preference for jobs and housing to nationals and Europeans, “and immediately expel all illegal immigrants.”

In Germany, the three main xenophobic and anti-Semitic parties are the German People’s Union, the German National Democratic Party and the Republicans, adds Diene.

The latest annual report of the country’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution reports there were 169 extreme right-wing groups in Germany by the end of 2003 (compared with 146 in 2002).

“As in other countries, the German extreme right-wing parties are increasingly using the Internet to spread their racist, xenophobic and anti-Semitic messages,” Diene says.

In Britain, the leading extremist political group is the British National Party (BNP), which in the 2003 election obtained the best result ever by an extreme right party since the 1970s.

A study conducted by the European Union Accession Monitoring Program states the BNP has honed its “racism into a specifically anti-Muslim message.”

A new racist party, the November 9th Society, which was established in 2004, “openly proclaims its status as a British Nazi party with a platform based on the theories of Hitler and the superiority of the Aryan race,” according to the UN study.

Following Austria’s 1999 election, the extreme-right Freedom Party (FPO) became the country’s second most popular, with 27.7 percent of the vote, and joined the conservative People Party in the government.

“The Austrian experience also illustrates a grave danger threatening democratic systems in Europe and throughout the world: the influence of the extreme right on traditionally democratic parties,” says the UN report.

In the Netherlands, the major peddlers of hate and xenophobia have been right-wing parties such as the Centrumdemcraten, Nieuwe Nationale Partij, the Nederlands Blok and a host of other extra-parliamentary groups.

The study also singles out racism in Belgium, Spain, Switzerland and Russia. The situation in Russia is “becoming particularly worrisome, with an increase in violence against foreigners, particularly Caucasians, Asians and Africans.”

The study finds that North America, defined as the United States and Canada, is an area of contrasts.

The two countries are not only haven for countless immigrants from around the world — the promised land of wealth and equal opportunities — but have also developed “some of the world’s most racist and xenophobic ideologies and movements.”

Even after slavery ended and equality was proclaimed by US law, the vast majority of Native Americans, African Americans and now Latinos, “live in the poorest and most marginalized social sectors,” says Diene’s report.

The number of extremist groups in the region, such as the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazi groups and people’s militias, is believed to have reached at least 540 by the late 1990s.

“To this is added the post-Sept. 11 situation, which has brought a resurgence of activity among racist and xenophobic groups and increased the level of violence, in particular against specific individuals and communities: Muslims, Arabs and Asians.”

Due to its geographical proximity to the United States, Canada is not immune to these phenomena, the report adds. “Groups that preach racial or ethnic hatred do exist there.”

The study also identifies racial groups in Asia (including in India and Japan), Africa (including Rwanda and Sudan), South America (including the indigenous people in Peru, Bolivia and Guatemala) and the Middle East (including Lebanon and the West Bank and Gaza) whose members are victims of discrimination.

“The current realities of racism, ethnocentrism, xenophobia and related intolerance should be acknowledged as major threats to peace, security and human development,” it concludes.

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Europe should start worrying as US dollar becomes less bullish

Analysis by Will Hutton

Nov. 14 — There were two stories last week that will have world-shaping implications. The first was in a Paris hospital and a compound in Ramallah. The other, unfolding in the world’s foreign exchange dealing rooms, hardly made it beyond the business pages, but deserves to be taken just as seriously. We witnessed the storm warnings of what promises to be a financial crisis of epic proportions, threatening both the US and the EU.

Europe and Asia have both been on the receiving end of massive foreign currency speculation for the past 20 years and the countries concerned have been left badly scarred. Italy, France and Britain have suffered currency crises that have overshadowed their politics for years; the Tories never recovered their reputation for economic competence after the pound was forced out of the ERM (European Exchange Rate Mechanism) in 1992. In Asia, the experiences of Indonesia and South Korea tell a similar story.

The one country to have blithely sailed on through all this turbulence has been the US, but that is what is about to change. The political consequences for George W. Bush promise to be every bit as difficult as they have been for other governments. The dollar has been insulated because it is the linchpin of the international financial system. The US possesses the currency that is the everyday unit of account in international trade and finance; even al-Qaida uses it to finance its terror network. The US has used this happy fact to go on an international rake’s progress, spending regularly more abroad every year than it earns by a massive $500 billion. Its cumulative international debts stand at some $3 trillion. The rest of the world accepts the dollars because it needs and wants to; until the euro, there was no other choice.

So the endless supply of dollars has gone on, springing as if like a mile-high geyser from a burst financial water-main and building up a growing lake of currency, mopped by the world’s central banks, principally those in Asia, with Japan and China leading the pack.

The big question in international finance is whether this process can carry on indefinitely, because there are different rules for the US and the dollar, or whether the dollar will fall like every other currency whose economy takes on debts that ultimately it cannot service.

Last week, the markets suggested the answer m -- the dollar is no different. It touched record lows against the euro in what the president of the European Central Bank called a brutal fall.

For more than a decade, the world economy has rested on a Faustian pact: the rest of the world will soak up any amount of dollars the US wants to provide as it imports more than it exports, builds up its network of military bases and fights its wars and invests in factories and offices worldwide to supply the US market with cheaply made goods and services. More than half of the US imports come from overseas affiliates of US companies. The US lives beyond its means, but the rest of the world has the opportunity to ship goods into the globe’s greatest market. China’s growth has been predicated on this capacity; it, in turn, has sucked in imports from Japan and Europe and so the world economy has motored on.

Bush’s re-election, though, has changed the fine calculus. He declares he has a mandate to be radical and the markets are pricing the consequences. He will cut more taxes and be assertive abroad, spending billions in Iraq and elsewhere; the geyser of dollars will gush ever more powerfully. There is one inexorable economic truth; if there is too much supply and too little demand, the price falls, and so it is with currencies. Bush doesn’t really care if the dollar falls and other currencies rise; like other US Presidents, he sees it as the rest of the world’s problem, just as in the past, when the dollar has fallen.

Indeed, he needs the dollar to drop to stimulate the growth of American exports and stem the inflow of imports. If the US can rig the price of the dollar sufficiently low, it becomes as effective a deterrent as protectionist tariffs to importing into the US. What is different now is that because there are so many dollars and the US is so indebted, the devaluation process will become uncontrollable and overshoot wildly, as it has for other currencies.

In that case, before it feels any benefits, the US will be dragged through the financial mill of rising interest rates, falling stock markets and mugged borrowers, with all the associated recessionary effects on its economy.

The world in general, and Europe in particular, doesn’t want this. A falling dollar means a rising euro, giving a further knock to the European economy. Last week, the distress noises from Europe began to mount. Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi called for currency intervention to try to drive the euro down and the dollar up, even though intervention unsupported by big changes in economic policy is a proven failure. Economists of every persuasion predict up to a 40 percent fall in the dollar, which means a 40 percent rise in the euro.

Nobody can say when the fall will come or whether it will turn into a crash, but when even Alan Greenspan, the chairman of the US Federal Reserve, says there is a 75 percent chance of a dollar crisis in the next five years, be sure trouble lies ahead. What will be required is an international response. The Europeans, through the IMF, will need to offer Bush stand-by credits running into hundreds of billions of euros to support the dollar and Bush himself will have to reverse his tax cuts and cut back spending at home and abroad. He will be faced with an impossible choice: eat humble pie and underpin the dollar or let the dollar go and accept the economic consequences.

But Europe, too, faces an impossible choice; further rises in the euro mean stagnation and even recession. Pressures for member states to break the euro’s fragile rules and, at the limit, even give up their membership, will become intense. This is the drama set to unfold. The markets may yet steady; this round of storm warnings could pass. But if the underlying economic realities go unaddressed, then the risk of crisis will deepen. We need politicians in mainland Europe and America who understand what is happening and central bankers prepared to act. We neither have them nor any shared philosophy and analysis that could underpin their action.

Chancellor Brown, an exception to the general rule, has only limited influence outside the euro zone. John Kerry’s election might have reduced the risk, but he would have faced similar choices.

The Democrats may come to agree, as do Labor about 1992, that it was an election to lose. But picking up the pieces may take a very long time.

Source: Observer (UK)

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Water becoming crucial in regional integration in Malawi

By Frank Phiri

Blantyre, Malawi, Nov. 9 (IPS) — Malawi has scrapped plans to privatize its two water firms, at a time when water is becoming increasingly crucial in poverty alleviation and regional integration in Southern Africa.

Malawi’s Privatization Commission (PC), the agency in charge of sale of state enterprises, says an agreement has been reached to keep assets of Blantyre and Lilongwe Water Boards intact.

The two state-run firms had initially been lined up for sale in 1996.

Sauti Maziko Phiri, executive director of the commission, told IPS that an outright sale of the two water boards had been ruled out. Instead, the government would keep the core assets and invite the private sector to run selected services, which the state was failing to maintain.

To ensure that consumers are not subjected to high tariffs by the leaseholders, formation of an independent regulator -- the Malawi Water and Energy Regulatory Authority (MWERA) -- has been proposed in Parliament. MWERA would act as a referee in the water and energy sector.

Fears of increases in the price of water have been raised by trade unions and consumer rights activists.

“If water is privatized, the poorest of the poor will suffer because they will not afford it,” says Thomas Banda, chairman of the Malawi chapter of Public Services International (PSI). PSI is a global union, which represents the world’s water workers.

Some 54 percent of Malawi’s population of 11.7 million people lives below the poverty line of one dollar a day, according to the World Bank.

Campaigners’ fears have been justified by various studies, which say the price of water, would rise in the next 10 years against the backdrop of envisaged supply shortages in the 13-member Southern African Development Community (SADC).

The studies singled out Malawi and South Africa -– both members of SADC -- which would experience water shortages by 2025 and would not meet their population growth.

Malawi and Zambia have piloted an integrated program aimed at addressing the sustainable conservation and management of water for future generations.

In Malawi, the roadmap -- Integrated Water Management Plan (IWMP) -- is expected to lift profile of water in the Malawi Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper as a crucial utility for the country to reduce poverty and achieve higher economic growth.

The Global Water Partnership Southern Africa says the plan will guide water users in Malawi and Zambia on how to develop, manage and effectively use the country’s water resources.

It says the blueprint is in line with a directive passed at the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) for the region to “develop integrated water resources management and water efficiency plans by 2005.” The WSSD summit was held in Johannesburg, South Africa, in September 2002.

But, since most developed countries such as Malawi do not have the human, technical and financial resources to fulfill the summit’s directive, delegates agreed that rich countries should bail out the poor through financial and technical aid.

In southern Africa, the funding would be channeled through the Global Water Partnership Southern Africa. So far, Malawi and Zambia have been allocated 200,000 dollars by Canada through the Canadian International Development Agency.

According to the Ministry of Water Development, about 90 percent of Malawi’s Gross Domestic Product is generated by agriculture, while 80 percent of the country’s population earns a living on allied activities.

Malawi’s agricultural sector is predominantly subsistence and driven by rain water.

Apart from agriculture, Malawi’s power sector relies heavily on water for generating hydro electricity supplied by the Electricity Supply Corporation of Malawi.

Due to degradation of the quality of water and environment along the Shire — Malawi’s largest river used for generating electricity power — blackouts are a perennial fixture during rainy seasons. And, rationing has already started in the commercial and industrial hub, Blantyre, since last month, following heavy down pours in most parts of the southern region.

Malawi’s Chief Water Resources Officer in the Ministry of Water Development, Milford Wedson Mikuwa, said the government was reviewing laws and policies to strengthen the country’s legal framework in implementing the water plan.

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‘Market economy’of convenience for Brazil, China

Mario Osava

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Nov. 12 (IPS) — Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, in keeping with his well-known pragmatism, decided to recognize China as a market economy, when he met with Chinese President Hu Jintao in the Brazilian capital Nov. 12.

In exchange for that concession, Brazil is signing ten agreements with China that will strengthen bilateral trade, mainly in favor of Brazilian agribusiness, and provide a strong boost to Chinese investment and tourism in Brazil.

China joined the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001, but as a “non-market” economy, which makes its exports more vulnerable to trade barriers and anti-dumping measures in other countries. However, more than 20 countries have agreed to regard it as a market economy, including Australia.

President Lula said Brazil’s “strategic partnership” with China is a top priority for his government, and that bilateral trade should double, to $20 billion, by 2007.

Brazil wants to export more beef, chicken, minerals, fruit and juice, and other products to China.

Brazil’s Minister of Development, Industry and Foreign Trade, Luiz Fernando Furlán, said the government accords and private sector business deals between the two countries clinched during this week’s visit by the Chinese delegation should lead to an increase in Chinese investment in Brazil, to a total of $10 billion, over the next two years.

Brazil has been made an official tourism destination by China, which could bring the number of Chinese visitors up from the current 15,000 a year to as many as 100,000 by 2007 — an inflow of tourists that would represent $250 million in revenues, according to Brazil’s Tourism Ministry.

The recognition of its “socialist market economy” was China’s main exigency during the current official visit by President Jintao, who is accompanied by 240 government officials and business leaders.

Furlán said he was “bombarded” with that request “28 times” in the meetings he held Nov. 10 and Nov. 11 with Chinese Deputy Minister of Trade, Ma Xiuhong.

Brazilian ministers and diplomats had stated that China is not technically a full market economy, and Furlán said the recognition of it as such would only be granted as part of a “balanced” negotiation.

The decision fell to President Lula, who argued — according to Furlán — that a truly free market is not even seen in the rich countries that advocate it, like the United States, which distort trade with different barriers, like farm subsidies.

Brazil’s decision is of immense political importance to China, in its desire to gain the same recognition from other countries. Brazil, with a population of 180 million, was the first giant country to take the step.

Furlán made haste to calm the Brazilian business community, giving assurances that Brazil was not renouncing tools like anti-dumping measures (used when another country is deemed to be exporting products at artificially low prices) in the case of China.

But with the Nov. 12 decision, Brazil loses the possibility of adopting unilateral safeguards and other measures to defend local industry, and must follow WTO rules, which provide for lengthy procedures when one member nation files a complaint against another.

In the 1990s, the Brazilian umbrella industry was decimated by the influx of Chinese umbrellas, most of which were smuggled in, and the country was forced to adopt safeguards to protect its toy industry from a flood of cheap Chinese products.

These and other manufacturing sectors, like the footwear and garment industries, are fearful of greater opening to competition from China, which can offer merchandise at much more economical prices thanks to low labor costs.

Contraband Chinese merchandise is another major threat. Forza Sindical, Brazil’s second largest trade union confederation, held a demonstration in Brasilia on Nov. 11 to protest “piracy”, referring to the illegal entry of false brand name goods produced in China and other Asian countries, most of which are smuggled in through Paraguay.

Brazil and China signed agreements on Nov. 12 in Brasilia that will facilitate the export of Brazilian beef and chicken to China, settling prior disagreements over health regulations. Another agreement involved the sale of Brazilian aircraft and parts to the Asian giant.

But one of the most decisive aspects in the “strategic alliance” between the two countries is Chinese investment in Brazil. The fact that the South American country still possesses an abundance of natural resources, while China’s are being rapidly depleted by its dizzying economic growth, offers significant potential for mutually complementary cooperation.

China plans to lease land in Brazil to produce food and raw materials for its own population, and much of its investment will be devoted to transportation infrastructure, to ensure a consistent supply. Mining, iron and steel, energy and biotechnology will be other key areas of bilateral cooperation.

China will continue to seek closer ties with Brazil and the rest of Latin America, Jintao pledged in the Brazilian Congress, where he was received as an honored guest.

“This will be the century of the Pacific and Latin America,” he declared, noting that trade between his country and this region grew six-fold between 1993 and 2003, and doubled in the last three years, with signs of increasing even further in the future.

Jintao also pointed out that his country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has reached $1.4 trillion, ten times more than in 1978. China is now the world’s sixth largest economy, although it is ranked in 110th place in terms of per capita GDP.