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Israeli closures crush Palestinian economy

By Emad Mekay

Washington, DC, Nov. 23 (IPS) — Four years of an Israeli military crackdown on a popular Palestinian uprising, based on closures of towns and villages, have left the economy of the occupied territories in tatters and its people facing soaring poverty, the World Bank said Nov. 23.

Israeli army sieges of Palestinian towns and villages have severely smothered economic activity and restricted the movement of people and goods, added the Washington-based institution.

Although the Palestinian economy regained some strength in 2003, it remained severely depressed in 2004 compared with its performance during the pre-uprising period, according to the report.

Since the beginning of a wave of violent resistance activities — known by the Arabic word Intifadah — in September 2000, the West Bank and Gaza have endured one of the worst recessions in modern history under an Israeli policy of closures and collective punishment.

“Closures are a key factor behind today’s economic crisis in the West Bank,” said Nigel Roberts, World Bank country director for the West Bank and Gaza.

“They have fragmented Palestinian economic space, raised the cost of doing business, and eliminated the predictability needed to conduct business,” added Roberts in a statement released with the report.

The document noted that West Bank businessmen reported difficulties in obtaining needed materials from suppliers, and in shipping finished goods to market.

The report documents a 50 percent decline in the movement of commercial goods between the West Bank and Israel during 2003 compared with the level prior to the launch of expanded Israeli military offensives in March 2002.

Those offensives severely restricted Palestinian traders’ ability to conduct business outside the West Bank.

But the news was not all bad in 2003, says the report. There were fewer curfews, the most extreme form of closure, and Israel finally agreed to transfer previously withheld tax revenues to the Palestinians. The improvements came as Washington briefly pushed Israel to implement its roadmap plan, which calls for Israeli and Palestinian states existing side by side.

The changes also produced a brief fiscal stimulus, according to the World Bank.

Per capita gross domestic product (GDP) increased about one percent in 2003 against the backdrop of the modest decline in the use of military force and fewer Israeli incursions into the territories.

But the recovery did not last long, as Israel resumed its military campaign and re-enforced closures and other restrictions on movement.

Today, the report estimates, nearly one-half of all Palestinians live below the poverty, line and as many as 600,000 people are unable to meet their basic needs in food, clothing and shelter.

Facing what is known as subsistence poverty, this group, whose expenditures average less than $1.50 US a day per person, has become increasingly vulnerable to economic shocks, the report says.

Unemployment in the occupied territories stood at 25 percent in 2003, compared with 10 percent before the Intifadah.

Young people are particularly hard hit, with 37 percent of them without jobs at the end of 2003, compared with 14 percent in September 2000, according to the bank.

It warned that without major changes in Israel’s closures regime, the Palestinian economy will not rebound and poverty and alienation will continue unabated.

“A radical easing of internal closures would bring growth to the Palestinian economy, but unemployment rates would still increase,” says the report.

It forecast that an immediate easing of internal closures could lead to GDP growth of 3.6 percent by 2005.

Bank projections show that opening up Palestinian trade would raise that growth to 9.2 percent by 2006 compared with a negative growth rate in 2006 under the status quo.

“A small developing economy cannot rely on domestic demand for long-term sustainable growth,” argued the report.

It also called on the Palestinian Authority to revive its reform program and maintain fiscal discipline in order to create an investment friendly climate.

Since Israel started using military force to stop the Intifadah some 3,492 Palestinians, many of them civilians — including women and children — have died. Israeli casualties number 982 people, many of them also civilians, says the report.

In June the World Bank said a new Israeli plan to forfeit some settlements and withdraw from Gaza was insufficient to improve the situation.

That conclusion was part of an economic assessment that examined the potential impact of Israel’s disengagement plan on the Palestinian economy.

Under the plan, Israel would commit to halting the expansion of settlements and begin dismantling some outposts. It would also withdraw from occupied Gaza but would surround the area militarily.

Israel would not be required to return to the borders that existed before the 1967 Middle East war, in which Israel annexed Arab land, including the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem.

But earlier this week, Israeli leaders said they would do their best to allow a vote to choose the president of the Palestinian Authority (to replace Yasser Arafat who died Nov. 11) to take place Jan. 9, including easing travel restrictions in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.

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US accusations on Iran ‘based on single source’

By Philippe Naughton

Nov. 19— Colin Powell’s accusation this week that Iran is trying to develop a nuclear ballistic missile was based on information that is from a single, unvetted source, the Washington Post claimed Nov. 19.

A US official with access to the highly classified material is said to have told the newspaper that the information came from a “walk-in” source who approached US intelligence earlier this month.

The source brought more than 1,000 pages purporting to be Iranian drawings, including a nuclear warhead design and modifications to enable conventional Iranian ballistic missiles to deliver an atomic strike.

The accusation has prompted concern that the US may be tempted to embark on another foreign policy adventure on shaky evidence.

The newspaper said senior Bush cabinet members, including Powell, were briefed on the information last week. The material was stamped “No Foreign,” meaning it was not to be shared with allies, although President Bush was said to have shared some with Tony Blair last week.

The Washington Post report will evoke memories in Britain of the two dossiers -- one officially recognized as “dodgy,” based on out-of-date information downloaded from the internet, and the other later shown by the Butler Inquiry to lack sufficiently rigorous sourcing -- in which the Prime Minister made the case for joining the US-led invasion.

Powell used similar intelligence in a February 2003 speech to the UN Security Council, in which he tried to convince the world that Saddam Hussein had to be removed from power by force. Much of what he said later turned out to be based on unreliable information.

The Washington Post said in its report that the US was trying to avoid the mistakes of the past. It reported today: “US intelligence officials have been combing the information carefully and with a wary eye, mindful of the mistakes made in trusting intelligence information alleging that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.

“If the information on Iran were confirmed, it would mean that the Islamic republic is further along than previously known in developing a nuclear warhead and the means to deliver it.”

Powell’s accusation on Nov. 17, during a trip to South America, that Iran was trying to build “delivery systems” for a future nuclear weapon was the latest salvo in the war of words between Washington and Tehran over the nuclear issue.

The Bush administration has repeatedly accused Iran of using its nuclear energy program to screen its real aim of producing an atomic bomb. The Iranians deny it and the issue is expected to be hotly debated next week at a meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

“You do not have a weapon until you put it in something that can deliver a weapon,” Powell said.

“I am talking about information that says they not only have these missiles, but I am aware of information that suggests that they were working hard to put the two together.”

In a separate report about Powell’s remarks, the Los Angeles Times quoted one Bush administration source as saying that officials “were surprised he went public on something that was weak and, because it was weak, was not supposed to be used.”

Source: Sunday Times (UK)

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Hawks push regime change in North Korea

By Jim Lobe

Washington, DC, Nov. 22 (IPS) — The coalition of foreign-policy hawks that promoted the 2003 invasion of Iraq is pressing President George W Bush to adopt a more coercive policy toward North Korea, despite strong opposition from China and South Korea.

By most accounts, North Korea ranked high in bilateral talks between Bush and Northeast Asian leaders, including Chinese President Hu Jintao, at the summit of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum in Santiago, Chile this past weekend, although the final communiqué did not address the issue.

Bush reportedly tried to make clear that his patience toward Pyongyang and its alleged efforts to stall the ongoing “Six-Party Talks” was fast running out and that Washington will soon push for stronger measures against North Korea in the absence of progress toward an agreement under which Pyongyang will dismantle its alleged nuclear-arms program.

Bush claimed at the APEC summit that his interlocutors, who included the leaders of the four other parties — Russia, China, Japan and South Korea — agreed with him, but Hu and South Korean President Roh Moo-Hyun have not backed down publicly from their strong opposition to a harder line toward Pyongyang.

Indeed, just before the weekend summit, Roh told an audience in Los Angeles that a hard-line policy over North Korea’s nuclear weapons would have “grave repercussions,” adding, “There is no alternative left in dealing with this issue except dialogue.”

The South Korean leader also denounced the idea of an economic embargo against Pyongyang.

That the hawks back in Washington are indeed mobilising became clear Nov. 22 when William Kristol, an influential neo-conservative who also chairs the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), faxed a statement entitled ‘Toward Regime Change in North Korea’ to reporters and various “opinion leaders” in the capital.

PNAC, which boasts Vice President Dick Cheney, Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Cheney’s powerful chief of staff, I Lewis Libby — among a dozen other senior Bush national-security officials — as signers of its 1997 charter, issues statements relatively infrequently.

“It’s clear that they see the transition (between the Bush administration’s two terms) and before any new round of the Six-Party Talks — as the time to try to set policy direction,” one veteran analyst told IPS.

Kristol’s statement referred in particular to two recent articles, including one published last week by Nicholas Eberstadt, a Korea specialist at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), which appeared in the neo-conservative The Weekly Standard, which is edited by Kristol.

The article, Tear Down This Tyranny, called for the implementation of a six-point strategy aimed at ousting North Korean Chairman Kim Jong Il, in part by “working around the pro-appeasement crowd in the South Korean government,” which apparently includes Roh himself.

The second article, published Nov. 19 in the New York Times, detailed a number of recent indications cited by right-wing officials and the press in Japan — including high-level defections and the reported circulation of anti-government pamphlets — that Kim’s hold on power may be slipping.

The article noted in particular a recent statement by the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), Shinzo Abe, that “regime change” was a distinct possibility and that “we need to start simulations of what we should do at that time.”

“Recent reports suggest the presence of emerging cracks in the Stalinist power structure of North Korea, and even the emergence of serious dissident activity there,” wrote Kristol. “This should remind us that one of President Bush’s top priorities in his second term will have to be dealing with this wretch(ed) regime,” he went on, citing Eberstadt’s strategy as “useful guidance for an improved North Korean policy.”

Eberstadt’s article, which criticized Korea policy in Bush’s first term for being both “reactive” and “paralysed by infighting,” proceeds from the explicit assumption that efforts to persuade North Korea to give up its nuclear programme — which US intelligence believes may already include as many as eight nuclear weapons — are almost certainly futile.

“We are exceedingly unlikely to talk — or to bribe — the current North Korean government out of its nuclear quest,” according to Eberstadt in an implicit rejection of the basic goal of the Six-Party Talks.

Moreover, he wrote, the nuclear crisis and the North Korean government are essentially one and the same: “Unless and until we have a better class of dictator running North Korea, we will be faced with an ongoing and indeed growing North Korean crisis.”

To achieve the desired “regime change,” Eberstadt called first for a purge of State Department officials who argued for engaging Pyongyang during Bush’s first term.

Washington, according to Eberstadt, should also increase “China’s ‘ownership’ of the North Korean problem” by making clear to Beijing that it “will bear high costs if the current denuclearization diplomacy failed.”

At the same time, US officials must recognise that South Korea has, under Kim and the “implacably anti-American and reflexively pro-appeasement” core of his government, become a “runaway ally” — ”a country bordering a state committed to its destruction, and yet governed increasingly in accordance with graduate-school ‘peace studies’ desiderata.”

“Instead of appeasing South Korea’s appeasers (as our policy to date has attempted to do, albeit clumsily),” according to Eberstadt, “America should be speaking over their heads directly to the Korean people, building and nurturing the coalitions in South Korean domestic politics that will ultimately bring a prodigal ally back into the fold,” he argued.

Washington should also ready “the non-diplomatic instruments for North Korean threat reduction,” Eberstadt wrote, arguing that preparing for the deliberate use of such options—presumably an economic embargo or even military strikes — “will actually increase the probability of a diplomatic success.”

Finally, echoing the LDP’s Abe, Eberstadt called for planning for a “post-Communist Korean peninsula” with other interested parties, “to maximise the opportunities and minimise the risks in that delicate and potentially dangerous process.”

Eberstadt’s strategy, according to a number of analysts, largely echoes the views of Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security John Bolton, a former AEI vice president who is openly campaigning to become deputy secretary of state under Condoleezza Rice.

Bolton, perhaps the administration’s most extreme hard-liner, has strong support in Cheney’s office and other right-wing strongholds, including The Weekly Standard and on the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal.

On Nov. 20, right-wing Tokyo Governor Shintaro Ishihara, who claims to be on friendly terms with Bolton, told Fuji Television that Bolton wants to impose economic sanctions against North Korea, which, in the US official’s view, would lead to Kim’s ouster “within one year.”

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Anti-apartheid warrior identifies new enemies

By Moyiga Nduru

Johannesburg, South Africa, Nov. 24 (IPS) — Former Anglican archbishop Desmond Tutu does not mince his words. Known as a straight talker, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate was a thorn in the flesh of successive apartheid regimes in South Africa until the demise of white rule in 1994.

Now, with apartheid gone, Tutu is directing his desire for social justice elsewhere. The diminutive 73-year-old, still as energetic as ever, claims that poverty and political kowtowing have become the biggest threats to South Africa’s safety and security.

“We were involved in the struggle [against apartheid] because we believed we would evolve a new kind of society: a caring, a compassionate society. At the moment many, too many, of our people live in grueling, demeaning and dehumanizing poverty. We are sitting on a powder keg,” Tutu told about 200 people at the second Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture, which took place in South Africa’s commercial center of Johannesburg Nov. 23.

More than 40 percent of South Africans, most of them black, live below the poverty line of a dollar a day according to Statistics South Africa, a government agency. But some believe this figure could be higher.

In a paper entitled “Social Security Policy Reform in Post-Apartheid South Africa: A Focus on the Basic Income Grant,” published by the Center for Civil Society at the University of Kwazulu-Natal, researcher Kumiko Makino notes that 61 percent of blacks and 38 percent of mixed-race persons are poor. Only five percent of Indians and one percent of white South Africans suffer the same fate.

Tutu, whose entertaining lecture was punctuated by bursts of applause, says South Africans can reduce poverty levels by “adopting” families — and giving them a monthly gift of around two or three dollars. “Very few poor people want a handout — they are proud. But, they also need a leg up. We can adopt a child, for whom we pay school fees,” he said.

The retired archbishop of Cape Town also took a swipe at policies for Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) which he says benefit only “a small elite that tends to be recycled.” Ironically, Tutu was introduced to the audience by one of the most prominent exponents of BEE in South Africa – businessman Tokyo Sexwale.

“We were on the verge of self-destruction. But people like Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu rose above our differences and rescued this country,” he said.

During his lecture, Tutu accused the South African elite of always demanding “an uncritical, sycophantic, obsequious conformity” which he warned would only serve to stifle South Africa’s democracy.

“We should debate more openly, not using emotive language, issues such as affirmative action, transformation in sport, racism, xenophobia, security, crime, violence against women and children,” he said.

“We want our society to be characterized by vigorous debate and dissent, where to disagree is part and parcel of a vibrant community... and not think that those who disagree, who express dissent, are disloyal or unpatriotic,” noted Tutu, adding, “I am concerned to see how many have so easily been seemingly cowed and apparently intimidated to comply.”

The former cleric singled out South Africa’s troubled debate on AIDS as an aspect of national life that could have benefited from more such “dissent.”

President Thabo Mbeki has earned the wrath of AIDS activists by questioning the link between HIV and AIDS. He has also stated that he does not personally know of anyone who has died from AIDS – this despite the fact that his former spokesman, Phakamile “Parks” Mankahlana, is widely thought to have succumbed to an AIDS-related disease.

“I would have wished to see far more open debate, for instance, of the HIV/AIDS views of the president,” noted Tutu, adding “I did not agree with the president, but that did not make me his enemy. He knows that I hold him in high regard. But, none of us is infallible and that is why we are a democracy and not a dictatorship.”

About five million of South Africa’s population of 44.8 million people are thought to have contracted HIV. Tutu said that nearly 400,000 were expected to die as a result of the pandemic this year.

He also called for more informed debate about the crisis in Zimbabwe.

“What do we want our government to do in Zimbabwe? Are we satisfied with quiet diplomacy there?” asked Tutu, who has broken ranks with other African leaders in choosing to criticize the administration of Robert Mugabe.

“Surely human rights violations must be condemned as such, whatever the struggle credentials of the perpetrator?” Tutu noted further.

There is no love lost between the cleric and Mugabe. After a comment by Tutu in which he said that Mugabe resembled the caricature of an African dictator, the Zimbabwean leader referred to Tutu as “an angry, evil and embittered little bishop” – this in an interview in May with Sky News television.

In 2000, a controversial campaign of farm occupations began in Zimbabwe, supposedly under the leadership of independence war veterans who wished to redress racial imbalances in land ownership that dated back to the colonial era.

Few disputed these imbalances, which had resulted in minority whites owning most of Zimbabwe’s best agricultural land. However, certain analysts claimed the government had masterminded the occupations in a ploy to win parliamentary elections in 2000.

Both the 2000 legislative and 2002 presidential polls were marked by widespread violence, most directed against the opposition. This prompted the European Union to impose sanctions against the Zimbabwe capital Harare; however, South Africa has veered from adopting a confrontational approach towards Zimbabwe.

Mandela did not attend Tutu’s lecture.

“I apologize for not being able to attend the annual lecture. I’m in spirit with you. The arch(bishop Tutu) is the first South African to deliver the lecture,” the 86-year-old former president, who looked frail, said via satellite link.

The first Mandela lecture was delivered by former US President Bill Clinton in July last year.

After mixing freely with participants, signing autographs and posing for photos, Tutu stepped out of the hall where a Mercedes Benz sedan was waiting for him.

The backseat door of the vehicle had been opened for Tutu. However, “the arch” didn’t see the need for such formalities: he jumped into the front seat, the better to enjoy a conversation with his driver.

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Women: the invisible victims in Latin America

By Diego Cevallos

Mexico City, Mexico, Nov. 25 (IPS) — Latin America and the Caribbean have up-to-date statistics on inflation, trade, Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth, and other economic indicators. But there are few to no hard figures on violence against women, a problem that reportedly affects as many as four or five women out of 10 in the region.

With a few exceptions like Mexico and Chile, there is a “blackout” surrounding the issue, Sonia Montaño, the head of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean’s (ECLAC) Women and Development Unit, told IPS.

That is because “violence against women is hidden, and is not a priority for the public and political agendas, except on days like today,” she said, referring to the fact that Nov. 25 is the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women.

According to the few official statistics available, based on different methodologies, around 70 women are killed as a result of domestic violence in Chile every year, while there are roughly 300 fatalities in Colombia. In the cities of Mexico City and Sao Paulo, Brazil, the annual average is 100 and 80, respectively.

In Colombia, United Nations officials reported that the number of complaints of domestic violence against women rose from 50,000 a year to 60,000 between 2000 and 2003, although the number of court cases involving spousal abuse actually declined, from 8,000 to 4,000.

Next year’s Global Summit of Women will be held in Mexico City in June.

In most of the countries of Latin America, there were official ceremonies held to commemorate the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, with government officials repeating tired scripts and once again pledging to work harder on behalf of women.

Meanwhile, the media reported on cases of domestic violence against women.

“I wish there were more days for the elimination of violence against women in the year,” said Montaño by telephone from her ECLAC office in the Chilean capital.

“Battered women have no public voice, nor do they form part of unions or associations that can apply pressure or that they can turn to in order to file their complaints, except for on an occasion like this,” she said.

And during the rest of the year, the female victims of domestic violence are newsworthy “only when they die,” added Montaño.

The few available statistics on violence against women, some of which are old, indicate that 40 percent of girls and women in Latin America and the Caribbean are the victims of some sort of aggression, according to the ECLAC official.

But the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) puts the proportion at 50 percent or higher.

Whatever the actual numbers, activists, governments and international agencies agree that the problem remains a serious one, despite the broad slate of international conventions, national laws, special commissions and other instruments designed since the 1970s to tackle domestic violence.

There are many laws and international treaties on the issue, but governments have yet to translate them into actual institutions and funding, said Montaño.

According to the United Nations, violence against women refers to “any act of gender-based violence that results in, or is likely to result in, physical, sexual or psychological harm or suffering to women, including threats of such acts, coercion or arbitrary deprivation of liberty, whether occurring in public or private life.”

Montaño said the most serious cases of violence against women in Latin America are in Guatemala and Mexico, where hundreds of women have been murdered by unidentified assailants.

But she added that violence against women is also a problem in other countries, where it is suffered in silence.

In many cases, the violence does not lead to death, but “destroys the will and vitality” of the victims, leaving “survivors who cannot get on with their lives,” she said.

Little is known about these women, because their cases do not figure in the official statistics or make the news, unlike the gender-related murders known as “femicide.”

In Guatemala, an average of one woman a day has been murdered since 2001, mainly from the lower-income strata. They are strangled, shot, or stabbed, and often mutilated.

In Ciudad Juárez, on the border between Mexico and the United States, at least 300 women have been killed and more than 500 have gone missing over the past 10 years, and the murders still remain unsolved.

Many of the Ciudad Juárez victims were stabbed and their bodies found in remote isolated areas. A large number showed signs of torture and rape.

Montaño said the cases of Guatemala and Mexico “show what happens in society when violence becomes a way of life and other elements, like unfettered modernization, are factored in.”

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Big tobacco: dirty tricks in the Asian market

By Marwaan Macan-Markar

Bangkok, Thailand, Nov. 26 (IPS) — Finally, the world has a stark picture of the plots hatched by tobacco multinationals to lure Asians to smoke.

The revelations come courtesy of Tobacco Control, a quarterly published by the prestigious British Medical Journal. These previously undisclosed details are expected to turn the heat on the tobacco giants as they seek out more Asian customers to enhance their profits.

“Obstacles to tobacco control in Asia that were once puzzling may now be understood,” writes Judith Mackay in the editorial of the latest issue of Tobacco Control, which hit the newsstands this week.

“The industry infiltrated some of the most respected scientific institutions (such as universities), and scientists who argued against the scientific evidence on the damaging effects of tobacco are now known to have been paid to do so,” Mackay adds.

What prevailed in the Philippines was typical. An article that describes the work of the tobacco lobby in that South-east Asian archipelago notes how the tobacco industry’s efforts were able to “limit the effectiveness of proposed anti-tobacco legislation.”

The industry’s success also stood out following its ability to get “a prominent scientist [to] publicly repudiate links between active and passive smoking and disease,” the article revealed. “The placement of health warning labels was negotiated to benefit the industry.”

In Hong Kong, on the other hand, the tobacco industry had muscled its way into the political establishment in order to “delay the introduction of tobacco control legislation in Hong Kong from at least 1973.”

And in Thailand, the tobacco companies sought to stall Bangkok’s push to require cigarette packets to disclose all the ingredients contained in each cigarette, states the British journal.

“The Tobacco Products Control Act was identified by transnational tobacco companies (TTCs) not only as a significant threat to their operations in Thailand, but as a dangerous global precedent,” it reveals.

“Industry documents reveal a determined campaign to block, stall, or amend the proposed regulation during the legislative process,” it adds. “Industry documents also reveal that as submission of ingredient lists appeared unavoidable, leading companies operating in Thailand endeavoured to confound the disclosure requirement by disguising ingredients and reformulating brand recipes.”

Public health experts are welcoming this week’s disclosures, since they offer an unprecedented glimpse of how tobacco multinationals operate in the quest for profits in the developing world.

“This is the first time that the public has been offered such a comprehensive account of what the tobacco companies did in Asia to promote smoking,” says Mary Assunta, a research fellow at the Sydney University’s school of public health, in an interview.

The British journal’s revelations gain in significance because Asia is “an emerging market for tobacco companies,” she adds.

Currently there are over an estimated 1.1 billion smokers in the world, and the Chinese almost account for a third of that number. In addition, the World Health Organization has singled out Southeast Asia as having the “second highest annual per capita growth rate in tobacco consumption.”

Access to the tobacco industry documents was made possible in the wake of a court battle in the United States, in Minnesota, in 1998. In addition to compensation that the tobacco industry had to cough up in the case it lost that year over diseases linked to smoking, it had to disclose “millions of previously confidential tobacco industry documents.”

“The documents are a collection of letters, memos, studies, reviews of studies, marketing plans, statements of policy, article reprints and news clippings, on a wide range of topics,” writes Mackay. “The documents provide information that is not available from any other source and describe the history of industry activities over the past 50 years.”

Among the marketing plans the British journal draws attention to are those conceived by tobacco giants to create a culture in Asia aimed at luring new customers to take up smoking, particularly young women.

Until then, Asian smokers had largely been men, and “cigarettes were of low quality and made by inefficient state owned monopolies which bothered little about advertising and marketing strategies,” write Jennifer Knight and Simon Chapman, of Sydney University’s school of public health, in Tobacco Control.

“The tobacco industry believed it needed to construct a culture in which, despite tradition and social history, smoking would become desirable or even normalized for young men and women,” Knight and Chapman point out.

And the industry achieved this by creating an atmosphere that appropriated “vehicles that included music, entertainment, sport, adventure, fashion, and the emancipation of women and proposing that smoking was an apposite and integral part of these milieu,” they add.

The result of this 20-30 year campaign has left a trail of smoke among women in countries such as Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines, and Pacific Island nations such as Fiji and Papua New Guinea.

According to available reports, smoking among women in Japan hovers around 20 percent, while in Fiji it has reached 31 percent. In Malaysia, say anti-tobacco groups, nearly 17 percent of teenage girls between 12 to 18 years smoke.

“In creating this tobacco culture among the young women of Asia [the tobacco] industry was quite specific in its demographics, with one internal document referring to plans ‘to target the emerging young adult female smokers rather than the older female smokers,’ ” the British journal reveals.

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Non-conventional weapons used in Fallujah

By Dahr Jamail

Baghdad, Iraq, Nov. 26 (IPS) — The US military has used poison gas and other non-conventional weapons against civilians in Fallujah, eyewitnesses report.

“Poisonous gases have been used in Fallujah,” 35-year-old trader from Fallujah Abu Hammad told IPS. “They used everything — tanks, artillery, infantry, poison gas. Fallujah has been bombed to the ground.”

Hammad is from the Julan district of Fallujah where some of the heaviest fighting occurred. Other residents of that area report the use of illegal weapons.

“They used these weird bombs that put up smoke like a mushroom cloud,” Abu Sabah, another Fallujah refugee from the Julan area told IPS. “Then small pieces fall from the air with long tails of smoke behind them.”

He said pieces of these bombs exploded into large fires that burnt the skin even when water was thrown on the burns. Phosphorous weapons as well as napalm are known to cause such effects. “People suffered so much from these,” he said.

Macabre accounts of killing of civilians are emerging through the cordon US forces are still maintaining around Fallujah.

“Doctors in Fallujah are reporting to me that there are patients in the hospital there who were forced out by the Americans,” said Mehdi Abdulla, a 33-year-old ambulance driver at a hospital in Baghdad. “Some doctors there told me they had a major operation going, but the soldiers took the doctors away and left the patient to die.”

Kassem Mohammed Ahmed, who escaped from Fallujah a little over a week ago, told IPS he witnessed many atrocities committed by US soldiers in the city.

“I watched them roll over wounded people in the street with tanks,” he said. “This happened so many times.”

Abdul Razaq Ismail, who escaped from Fallujah two weeks back, said soldiers had used tanks to pull bodies to the soccer stadium to be buried. “I saw dead bodies on the ground and nobody could bury them because of the American snipers,” he said. “The Americans were dropping some of the bodies into the Euphrates near Fallujah.”

Abu Hammad said he saw people attempt to swim across the Euphrates to escape the siege. “The Americans shot them with rifles from the shore,” he said. “Even if some of them were holding a white flag or white clothes over their heads to show they are not fighters, they were all shot.”

Hammad said he had seen elderly women carrying white flags shot by US soldiers. “Even the wounded people were killed. The Americans made announcements for people to come to one mosque if they wanted to leave Fallujah, and even the people who went there carrying white flags were killed.”

Another Fallujah resident, Khalil, told IPS he saw civilians shot as they held up makeshift white flags. “They shot women and old men in the streets,” he said. “Then they shot anyone who tried to get their bodies... Fallujah is suffering too much, it is almost gone now.”

Refugees had moved to another kind of misery now, he said. “It’s a disaster living here at this camp,” Khalil said. “We are living like dogs and the kids do not have enough clothes.”

Spokesman for the Iraqi Red Crescent in Baghdad Abdel Hamid Salim told IPS that none of their relief teams had been allowed into Fallujah, and that the military had said it would be at least two more weeks before any refugees would be allowed back into the city.

“There is still heavy fighting in Fallujah,” said Salim. “And the Americans won’t let us in so we can help people.”

In many camps around Fallujah and throughout Baghdad, refugees are living without enough food, clothing and shelter. Relief groups estimate there are at least 15,000 refugee families in temporary shelters outside Fallujah.

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Profits delay cheap Canadian anti-AIDS drugs

By Paul Weinberg

Toronto, Canada, Nov. 24 (IPS) — The highly touted Canadian plan to export cheap medicines to poor developing countries fighting HIV/AIDS and other health emergencies, hailed by Prime Minister Paul Martin in his June re-election campaign as a bold achievement, is in trouble over profits for participating drug makers.

And a United Nations envoy, along with non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that represent front-line health care workers in areas like sub-Saharan Africa combating the spread of HIV/AIDS, malaria and other serious aliments, are calling upon Martin’s government to push harder to get the export plan underway.

“The officials have been proceeding not with as much haste as we might have liked, now that the heat has died down, and we are not paying enough attention to how it operates on the ground,” Richard Elliott, director of legal research and policy for the Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network, told IPS.

At the center of the proposal is new Canadian legislation that permits makers of generic or copycat drugs to produce cheap versions of brand-name medicines to treat developing countries’ health emergencies without having to compensate the multinational firms that hold patents on those drugs.

A second NGO, Médecins sans frontières (MSF), known as Doctors Without Borders in the US, has proposed a list of medicines for a range of serious ailments, including HIV/AIDS, which it would like to see generic companies produce.

But Canada’s generic drug manufacturers have not responded to the MSF request.

Jeff Connell, spokesman for the Canadian Generic Pharmaceutical Association, told IPS the regulations proposed under the export plan do not offer enough financial incentives for his members to participate.

Generic firms might have to spend three to five years developing a version of a patented drug, but under the rules they are only given, at the most, four years to sell it to the countries in need, according to Connell, inadequate time to earn a fair return. “It is our member companies that actually have to produce these products, products they don’t even make right now,” he added.

“Obviously, the process has been very disappointing, and it is very difficult to figure out where the problem lies,” says Stephen Lewis, the Canadian who is a United Nations Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa.

United Nations World AIDS Day is Dec. 1.

Canada is the first country to establish a legal regime that governs the making and selling of cheaper versions of expensive patented medicines for health emergencies.

It follows a 2003 World Trade Organization (WTO) agreement to allow the bypassing of patents held by multinational drug companies, which have kept prices for many medicines out of reach for impoverished nations that are unable to make the products themselves.

The Jean Chrétien Pledge to Africa Act (named after the former Canadian prime minister who proposed the plan), which is slated to become law in January 2005, “is not as perfect as it could be,” said Lewis in an interview with IPS.

Nonetheless, he added, “it is still legislation which could yield a very significant flow of anti-retroviral drugs [used to treat people living with HIV/AIDS] if all of the actors get involved.”

Adding to the urgency of providing the Canadian exports is the fact that India — a major source of affordable generic drugs for developing countries — will in the long-term be less of a key supplier because it is obligated under WTO rules to implement pharmaceutical patent laws starting in 2005, added Lewis.

But a Canadian official says it is up to the generic drug makers and NGOs in Canada to sort out how to make the export plan and its regulations work. “Ultimately, this is a private sector initiative. This is what the legislation was intended to do,” Doug Clark, senior project leader in the patient policy directorate in Industry Canada, told IPS.

Lewis objects to what he describes as the Canadian government’s passivity towards its own initiative. “I would have thought that the minister of trade or the minister of health would be moving on this and giving really strong and internal public leadership on getting the generic [makers] to make applications [to the government for permission to make copies of new patented medicines].”

That kind of momentum would in turn encourage the generic drug manufacturers to respond, he suggested.

The UN envoy is also not convinced that generic firms in Canada will lose money from the export plan — although he acknowledges they might have to adjust their manufacturing process and expand industrial capacity to meet the demand for cheaper medicines.

But Connell says the Canadian legislation also leaves his members open to lawsuits by the patent holders in the pharmaceutical industry.

For instance, Ottawa “wants our companies to police the product from the time it leaves our factories to the time it goes into the patients’ mouths,” Connell told IPS. “[We] don’t have the staff or whatever to send to Africa to make sure that none of this product is diverted [for other commercial purposes].”

Both Norway and the European Union have shown interest in developing similar export plans. The latter’s proposal contains some flaws, states MSF in a press release. “We regret [for instance] that the proposal requires prior negotiations with the patent holder, which will inevitably delay the swift use of the mechanism.”

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Goodbye to cheap Indian AIDS drugs?

Nov. 26 (IPS) -- As India moves to meet a New Year’s Day deadline to comply with the Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) regime of the World Trade Organization (WTO), the cheap, generic anti-AIDS drugs that this country is famed for could be a thing of the past.

On Nov. 19, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced that the Hyderabad-based pharmaceutical Hetero Drugs Limited had voluntarily withdrawn all six of its generic antiretroviral (ARV) drugs from the world body’s list of approved drugs following concerns about their laboratory tests.

ARVs are substances used to kill or inhibit the multiplication of retroviruses such as HIV.

It was the third time since June that an Indian company has removed anti-AIDS drugs following WHO inspections which claimed that bioequivalence tests — meant to show the drugs have the same effect as the original patented brands — were faulty. And this has deeply upset those involved in fighting the global HIV/AIDS epidemic.

Earlier this month Indian pharmaceutical giant Ranbaxy pulled its AIDS drugs off the WHO’s list after the global body claimed there were discrepancies in the equivalency tests. It followed the removal by India’s Cipla of two HIV/AIDS drugs in June for similar problems.

Cipla is the Indian company credited with introducing the “dollar-a-day” treatment that dramatically transformed drug access for HIV-infected people around the world.

Both Ranbaxy and Cipla were able to prove to WHO, before the voluntary pull-off, that their ARVs met the global body’s bioequivalence standards — though not before their world business had taken a knock that benefited the manufacturers of costlier patented drugs.

According to the internationally-known drug policy expert, Mira Shiva, the actual culprit in the whole debacle involving Hetero, Ranbaxy and Cipla was actually the WTO and not WHO.

Shiva, who is attached to the Voluntary Health Association of India (VHAI), a leading health NGO, said Indian pharmaceutical companies that specialize in cheap generic drugs could face legal action, initiated by the WTO, if they continued to manufacture and sell them after Jan. 1, 2005.

“The TRIPS regime (in the WTO structure) has been identified as one of the worst international trade regimes and resistance to it in developing countries has come from farmers, public interest and human rights minded social action groups, as well as drug and health activists,” Shiva told IPS.

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Allawi accused of Hussein-like leadership

By Dahr Jamail

Baghdad, Iraq, Nov. 23 (IPS)— More and more, every day Iraqis are heard saying that their country’s US-appointed prime minister is following in the footsteps of the last president. The rule of Ayad Allawi is now more in the style of the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein than a leader of a supposedly democratic state, they say.

Most Iraqis had celebrated the overthrow of the regime of Saddam Hussein. But under what has developed into a brutal and bloody occupation, people are turning against the interim prime minister as they turned against Hussein.

One of Allawi’s earliest moves after his appointment was to form a new version of the feared secret police in Iraq. The Economist reported that Allawi’s rivals accused him of “recruiting former torturers to man a new apparatus of oppression.”

In July, Paul McGeogh of the Sydney Morning Herald reported that two eyewitnesses saw Allawi execute six people at the security center in the al-Amadiyah district of Baghdad. The men had been detained for allegedly attacking US forces two weeks before the handover of power.

The appointed interim prime minister has instituted martial law, threatened to detain journalists, and banned the Arab channel al-Jazeera from reporting within Iraq. Allawi’s minister of justice has brought back the death penalty and spoken of chopping off the hands and heads of those described as insurgents.

At a refugee camp in Baghdad filled with families from the besieged city of Fallujah, anger erupts at the mention of Allawi’s name.

“Ayad Allawi says we are his family,” said Mohammad Ali, a 53-year-old refugee wounded by US bombs in his home in Fallujah. “Can you attack your family, Allawi? Do you attack your own family, Allawi?”

Allawi is a traitor to the people of Iraq, said Dr. Um Mohammed who works at a hospital in Baghdad. “He is an American puppet who enjoys the killing of Iraqis.”

A trader in central Baghdad, Abdel Hakim Abdulla, said Allawi has “never made a decision that benefits Iraqis.”

Anger is building up against Allawi also over the role he played before he was appointed interim prime minister. He is the man many hold responsible for providing fraudulent intelligence that Saddam Hussein posed a threat to the United States.

His now discredited statements to US intelligence that Saddam Hussein had links to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 were used to justify the invasion of Iraq. This had shaken his credibility amongst Iraqis from the beginning.

Allawi heads a group comprising primarily former Baathist associates of deposed dictator Saddam Hussein, has received funding from the CIA, and has unsuccessfully worked with US intelligence for years to oust Saddam through coup attempts.

Born in Baghdad in 1946 into a well-known business family, Allawi became a member of the Baath party after it rose to power. He left Iraq in 1971 to go to a university in London, and did not return to his home country until just after the US-led invasion last year.

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War Briefs

US troops open fire on bus, killing 3

US troops opened fire on a bus carrying Iraqis in Ramadi on Nov. 22, killing three people in an incident the US military described as self-defense.

A US military statement on the bus shooting said the vehicle swerved toward Marines at a checkpoint and that the driver “ignored a verbal warning and several warning shots.”

The Marines opened fire “to protect themselves and the integrity of the checkpoint,” the statement said. More details of the shooting were not available, and the military’s account could not be independently verified. (LA Times)

6,635 bodies in Baghdad mortuary

Shot, stabbed, blown up, burnt: the bodies of Iraqis killed in Baghdad lie piled in overcrowded refrigerators at the city’s central mortuary, their ever-increasing number overwhelming both staff and storage space.

“Our morgue was designed to cope with between five and ten bodies a day,” explained Dr. Kais Hassan to a reporter from the London Times this week. Hassan is the statistician whose job it is to record the capital’s suspicious or unexplained deaths. He gestured into the open door of a refrigeration unit at the stomach-turning sight of tangled corpses inside, male and female, shaded with the brown and green hues of death. “Now we’re getting 20 to 30 in here a day. It’s a disaster.”

October’s figures include 726 suspicious deaths, of which 494 were caused by gunfire. The vast majority did not die for reasons directly related to the Iraqi rebellion, the article stated, but as the result of the ongoing crime wave scourging the capital’s streets.

“It could have been so easy for the Americans,” said Dr. Hassan. “Why did they disband the army and police last year and allow those weapons and munitions to pour into the hands of criminals in our streets? Why did they leave us for a year with no national army and police? I don’t know. Now we all suffer — them and us. Am I depressed? All the time.” (Times (UK))

Calls for delay of Iraq election rejected

Iraq’s interim prime minister, Iyad Allawi, will go ahead with elections on Jan. 30 despite calls from Sunni politicians to postpone them for six months and the dire lack of security throughout the country.

“The Iraqi government is determined to hold elections on time,” Thair al-Naqeeb, Allawi’s spokesman, said Nov. 27.

A few hours earlier, leaders of 17 political parties, mostly from the Sunni Muslim community, had gathered in the palatial mansion which is home to Adnan Pachachi, a highly regarded and influential former Iraqi foreign minister. Almost all declared that it was too dangerous for Iraqis to vote and urged a delay of up to six months to ensure the broadest possible participation in the elections. As if to emphasize the lack of security, a gun battle erupted a few streets from Pachachi’s house in the Mansur district.

Violence has already delayed election preparations in most Sunni areas of Iraq. (Independent (UK), Reuters)

Oil wells bombed

An estimated 20 oil wells and pipelines were bombed or set ablaze this month in northern Iraq alone, according to an official of the Northern Company. Iraq has oil fields in the north around Kirkuk and in the south near Basra.

Maj. Gen. Anwar Mohammed Amin, chief of the Iraqi National Guardsmen in Kirkuk, said that since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s government, Kirkuk’s pipelines and wells have been attacked at least 74 times. He said that firefighters, the oil engineers, and workers are reluctant to work out of fear of reprisals.

Sami Hadi, a 37-year old firefighter, said that unidentified people left a note in front of his house threatening to kill him if he continued fighting oil fires.

The Northern Company official said that initially the favored target was oil pipelines but recently saboteurs were preferring to hit oil wells, which require more time and money to repair.

In the Khabbaza area, six out of 30 wells have been attacked even though they are located near the Northern Oil Company headquarters which supposedly has stringent security. (AP)

Foreign Minister escapes car bomb

Assassins tried to kill Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari on Nov. 28 by leaving a car packed with explosives on a road where he was about to travel. His guards discovered the bomb shortly before his convoy went past.

The bomb was the second attempt on his life in recent months.

The elaborate bomb included white blocks of TNT, a dozen or more 130mm shells and even a torpedo all connected with red electrical wire. “It’s frightening,” Zebari said. “The whole neighborhood would have been wiped out, not one or two or three houses.” (Independent (UK))

Suicide bomber rams US convoy

On Nov. 30, in the northern town of Beiji, a suicide bomber detonated a car packed with explosives next to a US convoy on Baghdad’s dangerous airport road and several casualties were seen lying next to a damaged vehicle, witnesses and authorities said. The car bomb killed four Iraqi civilians and injured 19 people, two of them US soldiers, the military said.

The road has been the scene of near daily attacks against US military and Western targets. The highway, which troops use daily to commute between the huge military base at the airport and Baghdad’s center, is considered one of the most dangerous roads in Iraq.

British Embassy staff are no longer be permitted to travel on the road. (CBS)

Relentless attacks on Iraqi police, security forces

A car bomb outside a police station in central Iraq killed at least 12 people on Nov. 29. Doctors say a minimum of 10 others were wounded in the attack in Ramadi.

A local doctor was quoted as saying 90 percent of the casualties were policemen, who were lining up to receive their salaries when the bomber struck.

“Many policemen and national guardsmen were killed, but we don’t have a figure yet,” Lieutenant Mohammed al-Fehdawi said.

The day before, armed gunmen stormed a police station west of the city of Samarra. The attackers, who faced no opposition, looted the armory and commandeered several police cars before leaving the area, Iraqi police said.

At least 57 Iraqi security troops have been killed in Mosul in recent days, and a string of police stations has been bombed.

A suicide car bomber attacked a police checkpoint in western Iraq on Nov. 29, killing and injuring several members of the Iraqi security forces. (BBC, Guardian (UK))

Security chief arrested in assassination plot

The governor of Iraq’s Shiite-dominated Najaf province said this week police have arrested his own security chief in an alleged plot to assassinate him and other top regional officials. (AP)

US toll at highest monthly level

The US military death toll for November matched the highest for any month of the war.

At least 135 US troops died in November, according to casualty reports on Nov. 30.

The worst month was April, 2004 when 135 died as the insurgence flared in Fallujah and elsewhere in the so-called Sunni Triangle where US forces and their fledgling Iraqi allies lost a large measure of control. (CBS/AP)

Pentagon wants 10,000 more troops

Faced with the problem of protecting upcoming elections, US military officials said this week that the Pentagon is now planning to soon raise the number of American troops in Iraq by 10-11,000. That’s twice the number of reinforcements first anticipated and will raise the number of US troops there to about 150,000.

That means soldiers from the Army’s 1st Infantry and 1st Cavalry and some Marines who were scheduled to leave Iraq this month may be ordered to stay longer, while soldiers from the 3rd Infantry and 82nd Airborne could be ordered into Iraq earlier than scheduled. (NBC)

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