Pilgrimage is an act of faith

By M H AHSAN

About 2 million Muslims from more than 70 countries journey to the holy city of Mecca each year to make the spiritual pilgrimage known as the Hajj. The pilgrimage is one of five Pillars of Islam that form the framework of Islamic life. All Muslims who are physically and financially able are expected to perform the Hajj at least once. The Hajj begins on the eighth day of Dhul-Hijjah (month for Hajj), the 12th month of the Islamic year, and lasts for as long as six days.

"Labbaik Allahumma Labbaik. Labbaik, La Shareek Laka, Labbaik. Innal Hamdah, Wan Nematah, Laka wal Mulk, La Shareek Laka" "Here I am at Thy service O Lord, here I am. Here I am at Thy service and Thou hast no partners. Thine alone is All Praise and All Bounty, and Thine alone is The Sovereignty. Thou hast no partners."

Hajj Days Description:

Day One:
The 8th Day of Dhul-Hijjah
On the eighth day the pilgrim put on his Ihram and head out of Makkah to Mina. He spends the whole day and night in Mina involved in prayer, preparing himself to set out to 'Arafat. He prays Dhuhr and 'Asr shortened two Rak'ahs (units) each, Maghrib three Rak'ahs and 'Ishaa shortened to two Rak'ahs.

Day Two:
The 9th day of Dhul-Hijjah
This day is known as Yawm 'Arafah, after praying Salaatul-Fajr in Minaa, the pilgrim waits until just after sunrise, then he heads out of Mina to Plain of 'Arafah which he should enter around noon. In 'Arafah he prays Salaatdh-Dhuhr and Salaatul-'Asr joined and shortened. He should then wait in 'Arafah until just after sunset, then set out to Muzdalifah (an area between 'Arafah and Minaa). There he should pray Maghrib and 'Ishaa together with 'Ishaa shortened, then spend the rest of the night in prayer and sleep.

Day Three:
The 10th day of Dhul-Hijjah
This day is known as 'Eid al-Ad-haa. The pilgrim should pray salaatul-Fajr in Muzdalifah, then leave Muzdalifah for Mina shortly before sunrise. In Mina he collects seven small stones and heads for the largest Jamrah. As he throws each stone at the Jamrah he should say Allahu Akbar. On completion of the rites of stoning he should clip or shave his head and take off his Ihram. He should then go to the place where animals are kept and slaughter an animal if he is making a Hajj Qiraan or Hajj Tamattu'. After that he goes to Makkah and makes seven circuits of the Ka'bah known as Tawaaf al-Ifaadah, then returns to Mina and spends the rest of the night there.

Day Four:
The 11th day of Dhul-Hijjah
On this day he should pray Fajr in Mina and wait until after Dhuhr then he should head for the three Jamrahs. On the way there, he collects enough pebbles with which to stone all three of them. He should start with Jamratul-Oolaa then al-Wustaa and al-Aqabah.

Day Five:
The 12th day of Dhul-Hijjah
He does as he did on the 11th and, on the completion of the stoning, he is allowed to return home. Before leaving the vicinity of Makkah the pilgrim should perform the farewell Tawaaf known as Tawaaf al-Widaa'.

Day Six:
The 13th day of Dhul-Hijjah
It is however recommended that he stay for the 13th and do exactly as he did on the 11th and 12th. After completing the stoning he should then perform the farewell Tawaaf of the Ka'bah before leaving Makkah. áÈíß Çááåã áÈíß áÈíß áÇ ÔÑíß áß áÈíß Åä ÇáÍãÏ æÇáäÚãÉ áß æÇáãáß áÇ ÔÑíß áß Labbayk, Allahumma Labbayk! Labbayka, Laa shareeka laka labbayk. Innal-hamda wan-ni'mata laka wal-mulk, laa shareeka lak (Here I am, O Allah, here I am You have no partner; here I am! You alone deserve all praise and gratitude! To you belong all favors, blessings and Sovereignty and You have no partner.)

MAY GOD BLESS YOUR HAJJ - AAMEEN SUMMA AAMEEN
- posted by dhamaka @ 7:49 AM

 
Shh ... Iraq (US) owes $200bn war debt

By Ian Williams

There has been a lot of discussion of debt forgiveness for Iraq, but there have also been some interesting, almost forbidden, topics in the debate. Perhaps the least mentioned issue is the reparations of US$200 billion that Iraq allegedly owes, mostly to Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, from the first Gulf War of 1991.

As US envoy James Baker toured the world asking countries like France, Bulgaria Germany and Russia to forgive Iraqi debt, neither he nor Washington has made much noise about the reparations issue, even though, according to a report just submitted by the Congressional Budget Office, in addition to its external debts of up to $128 billion, Iraqi also owes $199 billion in reparations for the invasion of Kuwait.

Last week, Baker did raise the issue with the Kuwaitis, who indignantly rebuffed any suggestion that it would waive its compensation claims. Indeed, Kuwait Foreign Minister Sheikh Mohammad refused even to discuss the issue. With little publicity outside the country, it seems that the Kuwaiti parliament passed a law last year forbidding any relaxation in the reparations, which was assessed at that time at $98 billion. Under the old regime of Saddam Hussein, American diplomats pursued the claims against Iraq with considerable and vindictive vigor, but now the US taxpayer is footing the bill, they are less keen.

Reparations are an old fashioned idea. Most historians see German reparations after World War I as a significant cause of the second. Kuwait seems prepared to live with potential Iraqi resentment and maybe even some American disgruntlement.

So far, Iraq has paid $18 billion in compensation, with the bulk going to Kuwait. The cash came from oil revenues under the United Nations' oil-for-food program. The original cut was 30 percent, reduced then to 25 percent, but after the American occupation the Security Council reduced the amount to 5 percent of oil revenues. However, the Compensation Commission has already agreed on another $30 billion in compensation, once again mostly to Kuwait.

The 5 percent levy remains, according to Security Council resolution 1483, "unless an internationally recognized, representative government of Iraq and the governing council of the United Nations Compensation Commission, in the exercise of its authority over methods of ensuring that payments are made into the compensation fund, decide otherwise, this requirement shall be binding on a properly constituted, internationally recognized, representative government of Iraq and any successor thereto."

In their more aggressively hawkish mode last year, American leaders were demanding that Russia, France and Germany in particular write off all Iraqi debts. It was unfair, the Americans claimed, that the suffering Iraqi people should have to struggle to pay off debts incurred by the tyrant who oppressed them.

Of course, the same people had shown no compunction in insisting on repayment of the billions lent to Nigerian and Zairean kleptomaniacs at Washington's behest, let alone the South Africans repaying the bills run up by the apartheid regime to keep blacks in the townships and Bantustans. But they never mentioned the Kuwaiti reparations, since American tax payers, and the creditor countries together, may want to know why, having liberated Kuwait, they should subsidize the oil rich emirate now.

It is easy to see why there is not much publicity about this unique instance of reparations actually being paid. The US, for example, simply refused to recognize the World Court judgment against it for mining Nicaraguan harbors, although it eventually came to a settlement with the pro-American government that replaced the Sandinistas.

The precedent it sets is dangerous for the region. There is a definite chance of laying a trail for future conflicts between Iraq and Kuwait, but also with Iran. As part of the ceasefire agreement between Iran and Iraq under UN resolution 598, then UN secretary general Perez de Cuellar appointed a commission to determine who started the war. Giandomenico Picco, who was the UN official in charge of it, remembers that the commission was composed of three European historians, who, as well as wanting to remain anonymous, for reasons of personal safety, decided unequivocally that Iraq was the aggressor.

The report was released, very, very quietly, in December 1991. It was inconvenient, not just because Tehran was no one's favorite regime at the time, but also because the Security Council had just ordered Iraq to pay compensation for damages incurred in the war on Kuwait. Picco points out that the 598 commission did not mention compensation, so he is not sure that its results implied reparations. However, nor are the reparations that Iraq is paying the result of any judicial legal process. They result from a decision that the Security Council made, under heavy and vindictive American pressure.

If the Iranians had been less isolated, or had had friends to put their case to, they could surely have argued that they had a claim for reparations, which was both earlier and more ethical than Kuwait's. After all, the $100 billion that the Gulf states now claim for debt from Iraq was spent on attacking Iran.

Saddam's attack on Iran in 1980 was, of course, supported in various forms by Britain, France and the US. The Iranians are aware of this, and recently members of parliament have mentioned sums of $200 billion in reparations. They have a very good claim, legally, and certainly a very embarrassing one for the US, and for Kuwait.

Ironically, as Picco points out, almost the only world leader to reinforce the 1991 commission's finding that Iraq had committed aggression against Iran was one George W Bush. In his speech to the UN in September 2002, the president very clearly put aggression against Iran in the litany of charges against Saddam, to the joy, albeit temporary, of President Mohammad Khatami of Iran, who was sitting in the audience.

While not shouting about the reparations issue, it would appear that Baker at least has it in hand. One suspects that, whether the Kuwaitis like it or not, some part of the final UN resolutions recognizing and admitting a new Iraqi government will abolish the Compensation Commission and renounce any outstanding claims.
- posted by dhamaka @ 7:47 AM

 
Trekkers' paradise is Nepalis' hell

By Julian Gearing

KATHMANDU - There are a number of ways to break a person's legs. Maoist guerrillas in Nepal often use rocks. They lay the person down and smash the thighbones and shins. There is no need to describe the pain felt by the victim. Or the devastating effect crippling a person has in a mountainous country where walking is often the only way to get around. Breaking legs is a primitive but effective way of sowing terror into the population.

How then do these Nepalese communists treat well-off "decadent" Westerners trekking in Nepal's mountain trails? In a strange irony, these insurgents don't kidnap and torture such prime targets, or demand ransom, as in the Philippines, nor do they break their legs. Instead, they offer foreign visitors virtually VIP treatment, though usually for a small mandatory fee.

Comrade Prachanda, the enigmatic Nepalese Maoist leader, claims that he loves the Nepalese people. Yet his "people's army" has a strange way of showing it.

It could only happen in the world's "greatest trekking paradise", a country rich in idyllic mountains, but dirt poor for the majority of the population. Since 49-year-old Comrade Prachanda, whose real name is Puspa Kamal Dahal, began the communist insurgency aimed at replacing the monarchy with "true people's democracy" in 1996, the conflict has claimed over 8,000 lives and threatens to turn the poor Himalayan country into a basket case. In Kathmandu, the capital, politicians bicker and students agitate, while King Gyanendra resolutely hangs on to power, having dissolved parliament and assumed ruling powers on October 4, 2002.

It is often in the hills and mountains, the tourists' trekking playground, where the crisis is most acute. It is here that Prachanda's Maoists on the one hand and the Nepalese army and police on the other excel at torture and killing.

Yet, as one Kathmandu restaurant owner put it, "Despite the troubles, the tourists keep coming." While the number of arrivals has dropped to about 270,000, down about 50 percent since 1996, and foreign embassies offer travel advisories warning foreigners to be careful, tourists and climbers still flock by the planeload to the land of Mount Everest.

It is surreal. Privileged foreigners visiting Nepal live in one world, the Nepalese people live in another.

On the winding mountainous trail from Tolka to Chomrong on the route up to the Annapurna base camp, foreign trekkers occasionally run into the foot soldiers of Prachanda's Maoist insurgency, as well as in other trekking areas. Sheila, a trekker from England, recalled the encounter she and her friends had with two Maoists near Chomrong. "They were small boys and looked worried and embarrassed when they asked us for a trekking 'fee'," she said. "We guessed there were men with guns in the surrounding forest, so we paid the 200 rupee fee [about US$4.5]. And we got a receipt."

A few trekkers miss out and don't see sight or sound of the Maoists. Others do worse than Sheila and her friends. Rolph, a trekker from Holland, recalled his party being stopped by a large group of armed Maoists who asked them for 4,000 rupees each. The trekkers bargained it down to 2,000 rupees. Climbers who were about to climb Mount Makalu were forced to pay 10,000 rupees each in 2002. In the same year, eight trekkers in the Everest region were evacuated by the authorities to prevent their holiday from being ruined by gunfire. Soldiers and Maoists were battling it out nearby. The trekkers were airlifted by army helicopter from Lukla airport's small landing strip in the high mountains to Kathmandu, a thrill of a ride.

There have been a few foulups. Some cases have been reported in which trekkers were beaten because they refused to pay the men and women with guns. Foreign embassy advisories suggest not to resist the call for a "donation". And a British army officer strolling in the hills recruiting Gurkha soldiers for the British army was abducted in 2003, then released, with profuse public apologies offered by Maoist leader Prachanda. The British officer claimed he was "well-treated" by his captors.

For foreign tourists, a meeting with Maoists is usually a "big adventure". This is something to tell the folks about back home. Trekkers boast of being given a "People's Liberation Army of Nepal" receipt - a note offering thanks for the "donation to fight feudalism, imperialism, expansionism and all types of reactionaries". After all, the "encounters" are usually polite and the "donation" is a small price to pay for the pleasure of trekking in this mountain paradise.

Cruel justice
But for Kal Bahadur Budha, Nepal was no paradise. Budha was born and raised in Humla in the impoverished west of the country, the Maoist heartland. In 2003, the 27-year-old farmer was kidnapped by Maoists and taken to another villager after he failed to persuade his brother to quit the police force, following pressure from the insurgents. Villagers were reportedly forced to watch as he dug a ditch. According to press reports citing the captive audience, when he refused to lie in the ditch, the Maoists chopped off his legs and buried him alive. In another incident reported by the press, 79-year-old Prabahang Kedem had his head slowly cut off by rebels with a kukri knife in front of his family, his last words a curse on his young assailants. Eyewitnesses claim that after his head was severed, his body was hacked into pieces. His crime? Refusing to pay a donation to the Maoists.

Prachanda's war didn't start off this way. When the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) rose out of the splintering of the communist party movement in 1995 following the end of absolute monarchy and the beginning of parliamentary democracy in 1990, the emphasis in the countryside was on "winning hearts and minds". This was not hard. Nepal lives under a pall of feudalism, casteism, corruption and a chasm between the small percentage of the rich and the masses, the poor. As one foreign aid worker put it, life for the poor is "short, brutish and ugly", especially in the hidden valleys where people suffer "years of drudgery, backbreaking labor, dirt, cold, disease and bites, and the rule of the club or gun". As much as 75 percent of the population live in the countryside, many close to or below the poverty line, often at the beck and call of landlords and the elite. Prachanda's Maoists have reason to be angry with the landlords, the police and the politicians.

The Maoists, under Prachanda and the party's intellectual and ideology chief, Baburam Bhattarai, were itching for more direct action following the Communist Party of Nepal-United Marxist Leninist's (CPN-UML) poor showing in elections in 1990. Building on an already existing strata of support among the poor and disenfranchised people in the country's most backward region, the west, Prachanda and Bhattarai began their "people's war" in 1996, a movement initially dismissed in Kathmandu as "insignificant".

This was the era of "father-like" Maoist village meetings where political lectures on equality and the failings of Nepal's feudal and corrupt elite were lapped up. Many young people willingly flocked to the Maoist ranks. This was the Maoism as seen in China in the 1930s under the guidance of the communist guerrilla leader Mao Zedong, a visionary helping and winning over the people.

But then more and more voices from the Nepalese hills spoke of youngsters being forced at gun or knifepoint to join. As the army and police stamped down hard, the level of brutality ratcheted up on both sides. Stories from human rights groups surfaced of villagers being forced by the Maoists to act as cannon fodder in attacks on police and army targets. Many are reported to have lost their lives in suicidal attacks.

Evidence of Maoist brutality grew. Over the past three years, many of the Maoist village meetings have ended up resembling the "struggle sessions" of the Chinese Cultural Revolution 1966-76 or the "killing fields" of Cambodia's Khmer Rouge, 1975-79. According to local sources, the victims were suspected transgressors to the "cause" - small landowners, richer villagers, teachers - or those who refused or were too poor to pay the "tax" demanded.

The "trick" to sowing fear into the population appears to be to gather together the villagers to watch. In some cases, the victim's family members were forced to inflict the punishment, an eerie echo of the excesses when Chinese Red Guards forced children to kill their parents. Young male and female Maoists appear to be the main players in this "purification". In one case two years ago, a teacher became the taught when he was stabbed and hung in front of his school pupils.

Nepalese journalist Puskar Gautam says the brutality may partly be the result of the fighters being out of the direct control of the leaders and that in the massive recruiting, the correct political ideology was not properly instilled. Other commentators see the nod of Prachanda behind the violence. There is discipline in the brutality. Thieves, drinkers or gamblers, if caught, might lose a hand or foot, according to reports. They are the fortunate. For the unfortunate numbering in the hundreds, there is torture, beatings and eventual murder. People have been thrown off cliffs or tied down with rocks, then thrown into the river. Others have been burnt, beheaded, crucified or disemboweled. This "friendly and hospitable" trekkers' heaven can change in a flash into Dante's hell.

International human rights groups point fingers at both sides in the conflict. Apart from "the disappeared", those civilians who were said to have been taken into custody by the authorities, but whose whereabouts are now unknown, the survivors paint a picture of savagery. Hospitals and clinics document the injuries inflicted by Maoist's rocks, bullets and kukri knives and the effects of beatings, torture and rape carried out by the security forces. Patients with broken legs are common. Some never walk again.

It is not just the rich and middle class who are "terrified" by the Maoists, or "Maobadi", as they are known in Nepali. The poor fear both Maoists and security forces, having to say yes to both, according to local observers. Little wonder that thousands have fled the countryside for the city of Kathmandu, into India, or into badly paid menial servitude in the Middle East. For many youngsters, it's a choice of fight for the Maoists or flee.

Terror and tourism
For foreign tourists flying into Kathmandu airport, it is hard to get a handle on the situation. Travel agents say there is a "little trouble" but it is "nothing to worry about". On most days in the tourist season, Thamel, the capital's tourist ghetto, is bustling with mostly Western travelers in search of adventure, pizza and pie, or good hash. The talk is of great trekking trails and Maoist encounters.

Only when a bomb goes off or a bandh, a strike, is called by Prachanda's Maoists does the Hindu kingdom's capital take on the persona of a city at war. Soldiers and police hunker down with their rifles behind sandbags on street corners, the normally clogged streets taking on the appearance of a ghost town.

It is not just the Maoists who bring normal life to a halt. Students, teachers and others upset with the king, fed up with the corruption, fed up with the bickering political parties, and fed up with the killing, often take to the streets to air their discontent. Shouts are raised. Stones are thrown. Bullets or tear-gas canisters are fired. And more casualties fill the hospital emergency wards.

For the tourists who find themselves confined to their hotels and guesthouses at such times, the astute read books describing the regicide of 2001. A good choice is Massacre at the Palace: The Doomed Royal Dynasty of Nepal by Jonathan Gregson. In it the author documents how on June 1, 2001, Crown Prince Dipendra ran amuck when his father, King Birendra, refused to allow him to marry his sweetheart. The drunken prince grabbed a shotgun and an M-16 assault rifle and sprayed his family with gunfire before turning a gun on himself. The king and queen died, as did seven other members of the royal family. This wasn't the end of the monarchy. Prince Gyanendra, viewed by many as the black sheep of the family, took over as king.

This bloody event, and the arrival of a new monarch, King Gyanendra, added to the growing chaos in the country. Now, with millions of dollars' worth of United States military aid being given to the government, and with US military advisors to combat what is now post-September 11 called the "terrorist" threat, the scene is being set for more confrontation.

Nepal is at war with itself as it struggles to enter the 21st century. If Comrade Prachanda has his way, he will take the country back to "year zero". In a rare interview in 1999 with Li Onesto, a journalist from the leftist Revolutionary Worker publication, Prachanda talked of the inspiration Nepal's communist movement gained from Mao's communist victory in China in 1949 and the Chinese Cultural Revolution. He said he followed Mao's path in developing a mass class struggle in the countryside. "We came to understand Mao's vision that the backward rural areas will be the real basin of the revolution," he said.

In this interview, the elusive Prachanda paraphrased Mao's thoughts on war, saying: "People usually think that war is very destructive, war is very bad, it kills people ... But people do not understand that war is a great process of construction. War has a very big cleansing effect."

Yet the level of brutality and destruction pursued by Prachanda's forces appears to eclipse that of the young Mao. In addition to the human artery cutting and bone breaking, Nepal's limited infrastructure has been targeted. Blowing up bridges is understandable. But the breaking of irrigation channels, the destruction of electricity solar panels, and the burning or closing of schools in a country with a 55 percent literacy rate and a fragile agricultural economy makes little sense, according to local people.

This is "Prachanda's Path", as the Maoist leadership now calls it. It bears the handiwork of Maoist intellectual Bhattarai, but it owes a major part of its thrust and inspiration to the Shining Path, the Maoist insurgents in Peru, and their leader Abimael Guzman's vision. Journalists' reports indicate Peruvian advisors from Sendero Luminoso trained Prachanda's fighters in the earlier stages of the war, though much of the support appears to come from sympathetic leftist rebel groups in India, where the Nepalese rebel leaders spend much of their time. As Prachanda is reported to have said: "There was international involvement right from the beginning."

In the 1980s, Peru's Shining Path was the international flag-bearer of Maoism. Guzman's brutal insurgency, and the Peruvian government's response, led to over 27,000 deaths in just over a decade and to the kidnapping of tourists. But with Guzman captured and sentenced to life in 1992, Prachanda appears to now be promoted as the new Mao. As Prachanda reportedly said: "A new wave of world revolution is beginning, because imperialism is facing a great crisis," adding, "our people's war may be a spark, a spark for a prairie fire." Prachanda's Path is also being promoted in effect as "Prachanda's Thoughts", just as Mao ended up putting over his message in his little red book, The Thoughts of Mao Zedong.

Yet in China, Maoism is dead, the body of its leader Mao lying in his mausoleum in Tiananmen Square in Beijing. The "worship" of Mao is just a cult, devoid of ideology, just as the international commercialization of Argentina's communist folk hero Che Guevara is just a T-shirt image with no body. Those Chinese people who are old enough prefer to put behind them the bitter memories of Mao's Chinese Cultural Revolution, an orgy of madness and killing that followed the leader's abortive attempts to "revolutionize" agriculture and industry. Mao generated millions of tons of useless scrap iron, millions of deaths from starvation, and countless deaths and trauma due to his Red Guards' frenzy. Bar a few leftist hardliners, China's leadership, rightly or wrongly, has embraced capitalism and the mantra of the late reformist communist party leader Deng Xiaopeng that "to get rich is glorious". Beijing now thumbs its nose at Prachanda. Chinese border guards eject Nepalese Maoist guerrillas if they trespass over the mountainous border into the Tibetan Autonomous Region and China's leaders back the Nepal government line against the Maoist guerrillas.

Prachanda is trying to succeed where others have failed. As was made clear in his interview with journalist Onesto, he rails against "revisionism", the backtracking of communist leaders who lose sight of the ideals of communism and "desert the revolution". Communism is dying around the world not because the basic ideology or philosophy is unachievable or wrong. It has collapsed because of the failings of its leaders, the worst examples being Russia's Joseph Stalin, Cambodia's Pol Pot and, ironically, China's Mao.

Yet failings of these leaders cannot be put down to the Nepalese leader's hated "revisionism". For him, Mao remains a hero. These revolutionaries failed because of their ego, fanaticism, virtual madness. Today, Prachanda is the leader of one of the most prominent, yet small, communist movements in the world still doggedly hanging on to a vision of a proletarian Utopia. But Prachanda may ultimately have to pay the price of excess. The Maoist grip is slipping.

He and Bhattarai have unleashed a level of brutality that is traumatizing the Nepalese people and destroying the minds of many of the younger generation, people say. Talk on the streets in Kathmandu is that Prachanda's "people's war" is out of control. Stop the killing, stop the fear, is the call.

For Prachanda, squeezing the genie back into the bottle would be tough. Amid the chaos of Nepal's politics, the political parties have called for the Maoist leader to put down the gun and for his communist splinter party to reenter the democratic arena. Yet his fighters would feel betrayed by a softening of the Maoist line, says one observer. As Nepal's capital is beset by political shadow plays, intrigue and back-stabbing, the tension is rising and rumors circle, including one in which the king is said to be trying to cut a deal with the Maoists to undercut the other political parties.

For the tourists, the intrigue will pass them by. Nepal remains for them a great place for temples and lofty mountains. They can rest easy. The kid gloves treatment of these foreign guests by Prachanda's Maoists, claims journalist Gautam, is because these communists are concerned about their "international" image and their place in the vanguard of the international Maoist struggle.

But Nepalese may wonder why "people's leader" Prachanda does not treat the Nepalese people with such care.
- posted by dhamaka @ 7:45 AM

 
India-Brazil: Cementing the South-South alliance

By Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO - Trade is the cement with which President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva aims to consolidate Brazil's alliance with the other heavyweights of the developing South. The three-day visit he just made to India marked progress in that strategy, which is based on specific economic interests and a shared attitude of pragmatism, unlike the efforts made within the Third World of the past.

The aim is to construct a "new trade geography" in the world, said Lula, but stressed that this does not mean playing down the "fundamental" importance of exchange with rich countries. Instead, it means creating new alternatives, reducing dependence, and uniting developing countries to negotiate in equal conditions all global or regional agreements, the president said.

The outstanding result of Lula's India visit was the signing of a market access treaty that establishes tariff preferences between India and the countries of Mercosur (Southern Common Market), made up of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay. Brazil's Mercosur partners sent representatives as part of Lula's retinue.

Within four months, the two parties to the agreement will select the products that will have reduced tariffs in bilateral trade, and decide on rules of origin and dispute settlement mechanisms. The accord, a first step towards future free trade, "inaugurates a new era in South-South cooperation", said Lula.

Five other agreements - on cooperation in space research, including the joint launch of satellites, and on cultural exchange and tourism - were also signed in New Delhi. More than a hundred Brazilian business executives accompanied the president on his visit. Negotiations with their Indian colleagues extended through Thursday, as they explored the range of possibilities for bilateral trade, investment and technology transfer.

But trade between Brazil and India today is relatively modest: just US$1.04 billion last year, or one percent of Brazil's total foreign trade flow. However, it is growing rapidly, more than doubling in the past three years.

Brazil's minister of development, industry and trade, Luiz Fernando Furlan, says bilateral trade could grow five-fold in five years. An annual flow of $5 billion is no exaggeration, he says, considering the size of the two markets (Brazil has a population of 174 million, India has 1.1 billion).

Fuel alcohol mixed with gasoline is becoming more and more common in India, which throws open the door for massive Brazilian exports of this alternative fuel and the related technology. The two countries are leaders in the production of sugarcane, the raw material for alcohol, and over the past three decades Brazil has developed an intensive program for substituting gasoline with ethanol. Brazilian firm Dedini transferred technology to India last year that has led to the construction of alcohol distilleries. There will be as many as 15 of these fuel alcohol plants operating in India in two years, announced the company.

Aircraft, footwear, furniture and food could diversify Brazil's exports to India, which are currently concentrated in crude oil, soya, and iron ore. Imports from India are already quite diverse, however, including diesel fuel, medications, capital goods and chemical products.

Trade holds a central place in the intensive diplomacy that Lula is carrying forward, both in terms of strengthening the national economy and firming up international alliances. His top priority right now is to consolidate and expand the Group of Three (G3), comprising of Brazil, India and South Africa. The latter two have already received visits and are negotiating trade agreements with Mercosur. Lula will pay a visit to the next target, China, in May.

Brazil's foreign trade is currently concentrated in the United States and the European Union, which absorb nearly half of the South American giant's exports. But progress has been made in the search for new markets. Argentina and China are the second and third leading importers of Brazilian products, surpassed only by the United States.

The Brazilian effort to multiply exchange with countries in the developing world, which was begun with Mercosur and is continuing in the negotiations for South American integration, now extends to all continents. In June, when Brazil will host in Sao Paulo the meeting of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, Lula hopes to launch the bases of the System of Trade Preferences Among Developing Countries, an idea that emerged in the 1980s but was never implemented.

The intensification of trade within the developing South is accompanied by other demands from these countries, or at least by the heavyweights, which are seeking the democratization of international relations. For example, Brazil, India and South Africa are pushing for an expanded UN Security Council, in which they would also hold permanent seats, today monopolized by Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States.
- posted by dhamaka @ 7:44 AM

 
China, India confront the Wal-Marts

By Jayanthi Iyengar

Nothing reflects better the unity in diversity shared by China and India, the world's largest and second largest consumer markets, than the manner in which both countries have approached the opening up of their retail sectors to foreign investors, as well as the significant problems and popular resistance they face in the liberalization process.

"In terms of sheer size, India and China have huge potential in the retail sector," says N V Sivakumar, executive director of PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), India. The global consultancy firm recently completed a study on the global retail potential and Sivakumar has been involved with this project from the Indian end.

Though both countries have been quick to partially open up foreign direct investment (FDI) in their retail sectors, they have faltered when it came to opening up fully. They fear the public backlash that could follow, if unchecked growth of the foreign retailers were to be permitted. "Both countries have had relatively more closed economies for decades. Hence the 'fear' of the unknown is more, especially since the potential impact will be on millions of existing employees and hundred-thousands of existing small business," says Arvind Singhal, chairman of KSA Technopak, a management consulting organization focusing on consumer products and retail sectors.

He summarizes some of the reasons which could be at the root of these fears. These include:

Existence of highly fragmented retailing.
Organized large retailing, especially from global giants like Wal-Mart, Tesco, Carrefour, Makro and others, could potentially cause major disruption to small retailers.
Large international retailers might upset the import balance, by preferring to source more globally rather than use local production bases.
Large international retailers might also resort to predatory pricing, thereby disrupting local small and large retailers.

Predictably, having partially opened up their retail sectors, both countries struggle with regulating the often illegal and uncontrolled growth of the foreign retailers, though the hesitation is greater in the case of India than China. Both countries were die-hard socialists prior to opening up economically. Yet resistance to everything foreign lingers more strongly in the Indian psyche than that of the Chinese, possibly because of the promotion of swadeshi meaning national self-sufficiency, and swaraj, or self-rule. These have been propounded as powerful and defining goals by national leaders, from Mohandas K Gandhi, the Mahatma, to former prime minister Indira Gandhi.

In spite of some regulatory constraints, foreign retailers have found both these markets highly attractive. "China has been voted as the country with greatest positive outlook change in the last year, as it has long-term growth prospects with rising disposable incomes and an increasing qualified labor pool," says Sivakumar.

Further, the race to corner the retail space is so strong in these emerging markets that foreign retailers have not hesitated to cut a few corners. In China, the French retail chain, Carrefour, was publicly castigated in 2000 for violating the Chinese federal government's norms for regional expansion. As a fallout of that affair, stricter entry norms now are being discussed with foreign retailers, including minimum capital requirements, compulsory land use and other clearances at the time of approval. Fresh expansion would only be approved after the cleared projects have gone on stream and violators have been punished, according to the proposed guidelines.

German retailer faces charges in India
In India, allegations currently abound against the world's fourth largest retailer, Germany's Metro Cash & Carry GmbH, for violating licensing conditions. One of the latest to enter the Indian market, it was granted approval, along with Shoprite Checkers of South Africa, in 2001 to carry on cash and carry wholesale business. The Indian domestic retail lobby, comprised of small and large traders, is convinced that the company is selling directly to retail customers, while Metro GmbH is taking the position that it is selling only to retailers, which is permitted under the law. This case is being fought in the Indian legal system and the ball now is in the Indian courts to decide whether the German retailer is guilty of violating entry norms.

To understand the charged atmosphere that surrounds the opening up of the retail sector in India and China, one needs to understand how public opinion has influenced the opening up process. To start with, India permitted foreign retailers to sell directly to retail customers. In 1997, it took a step back. The Foreign Investment Promotion Board (FIPB) decided that it would "encourage" foreign investors to set up manufacturing facilities in the country, instead of permitting entry merely to traders. The immediate cause for this change in approach was manifold. At the basic level was the fear voiced by the domestic trader lobby that the millions of kirana shops - the Indian equivalent of the mom and pop stores in the United States - would be wiped out by the foreign onslaught.

The FIPB was also receiving far too many applications for trading, instead of fresh FDI investment proposals. FDI in China was booming, despite the mandatory capital and other requirements that the country was placing on foreign investors seeking to do business there. Last, a substantial number of the applications for trading licenses were actually coming in from the Chinese.

India was worried about the Chinese, who were known both for dumping as well as their ability to corner markets with their low-price advantage. Given strains over the years in Sino-Indian relations, there were also security dimensions to allowing Chinese traders to enter India, especially when the Foreign Investment Promotion Board lacked the wherewithal to run security checks on the applicants. The net result was the new norm, introduced in 1997, which categorized foreign companies into three broad types:

Companies that set up domestic manufacturing facilities and sold products manufactured domestically.
Companies that came in to trade prior to the 1997 norms.
Companies that came in to trade after the 1997 norms were adopted.

India favors those that manufacture and sell domestically.
There were no restrictions on the sale of products by the first set of companies. Thus, India has consumer durable companies like Sony, LG, Samsung and Phillips, which manufacture and sell products in India. They also import and sell some of their high-tech product lines such as laser printers and photocopiers, on the certification that current manufacturing techniques and costs do not yet permit them to manufacture these items domestically. They undertake to do so in the near future.

Under the second category, only two companies have been granted permission to operate in India. They are Nanz and Spencers, which hold permission to sell their products directly to retail customers.

In the third category - those entering the market after 1997 - foreign retailers can set up wholly owned subsidiaries in India for the purpose of trade, but they can sell only to wholesalers (who are essentially domestic retailers) and not to retail customers. This set of retailers can come in as franchisees and/or as cash and carry wholesalers.

Bata India, India's largest retailer is also a manufacturer. It has been in India since 1931, entering India long before the wave of nationalization in the mid-1970s. To rule out scope for ambiguity, the Foreign Investment Promotion Board approvals define a wholesale buyer to be one who holds a sales tax registration number.

The charge against Metro GmbH is that it is selling to retailers. The campaign is led by the Federation of Associations of Maharashtra state (FAM), a state-level organization of small traders. Among others, FAM is supported by the Karnataka and Tamil chambers of commerce at the state levels and by the Confederation of India Industry at the national industry chamber level.

FAM is also being supported by parliamentarians, politicians, political parties and even the Swadeshi Jagaran Manch. The SJM is the nationalist wing of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), whose traditional vote-bank has been business. As People's Democracy, the mouthpiece of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), points out in its December 2003 issue, "It was primarily because of the support from several parliamentarians and political parties that the government of India was obliged to take a decision not to permit FDI in retail trade."

Fears foreign retailers will swamp domestic retail
The federation in Maharashtra has stated in the Metro GmbH context that it had been reassured in writing by Murasoli Maran, the late minister for industry and commerce, that domestic retail trading would be closed to foreign retailers. Maran is not around to reiterate his statement, but the FAM seems to be factually correct, since the industry ministry did issue a press note in February 2001, soon after Metro GmbH had been given a clearance to do business.

"The approval given to Metro Cash and Carry GmbH recently, which have received extensive press coverage, is for setting up of state-of-the-art cash and carry wholesale complexes. The company is not permitted to have retail outlets or sell products to consumers directly. It may be added that approval for cash and carry wholesale trading have been given in the past also. Any violation of the approval terms renders the company liable to action," the statement said.

The public furor had died down then, but the FAM renewed its attack on Metro GmbH in 2003 after it came to light that the German retailer was on a membership drive, possibly recruiting retail members. FAM wrote its complaints to opposition political parties as well as to Minister for Commerce Arun Jaitley in November 2003.

The Federation of Associations of Maharashtra, backed by similar organizations, contends that Metro GmbH has issued 250,000 loyalty cards within nine months of entering the market and is violating its license conditions by selling directly to retailers. Loyalty cards are incentive cards that grant a buyer bonus points with every purchase from the same shop and/or manufacturer. The trader lobby is arguing that the cards have been issued to commercial organizations, associations of professionals such as doctors, lawyers, employees of information technology companies, architects, chartered accountants - categories that do not fit the description of allowed retailers.

"In some cases, these cards have been issued to employees of certain organizations even without explicit consent or knowledge of the concerned organizations," says the People's Democracy, the communist newspaper.

Further, it says, Metro's customers are buying products not connected to their business, as stated to be the case in its sales tax registration. Also, the German retailer is selling even single units of a product, without specifying minimum purchase requirements, which clearly proves that "it is indulging in nothing but retail trade", the publication says.

Foreign retailers now an election issue
With announcements about the dissolution of the Indian parliament next month and the general elections scheduled to take place soon afterward, the political stridency surrounding the retail issue is self-explanatory.

Since Metro GmbH has started operations at Yashwantpur and Kanakpura areas in Bangalore, where it has opened stores of 17,600 square meters in area, the Karantaka (state) government has been rattled. Consequently, backed by the central government, it has filed a writ petition in a Bangalore court against Metro GmbH. The German retailer is being represented by legal hawk and former commerce minister, P Chidambaram.

The left-wing parties have been supporting the trader lobby all along because of their anti-multinational corporation (MNC) line but FAM, the Maharastra traders association, also claims support from former ministers, Dr Man Mohan Singh - the father of India's liberalization under a Congress Party government - Margaret Alva, and parliamentarian Priyaranjan Das Munshi.

Not to be outdone, SJM national convener Muralidhara Rao recently made a vehement anti-Metro presentation to the Federation of Karnataka Chambers of Commerce and Industry, saying: "Our market is an asset," which could not be "sold away to multinationals". SJM, Swadeshi Jagaran Manch, is the nationalist wing of the governing Bharatiya Janata Party.

While the courts will ultimately decide on the merits of the charges leveled against Metro GmbH, the cause of this charged political atmosphere is easy to understand. By the Maharastra trade federation's reckoning, India has 30 million domestic retail traders. PricewaterhouseCooper's Sivakumar pegs current figures at 20 million retailers, while Euromonitor had estimated 12 million retailers in 2001, apart from the millions of low-cost kiosks and push-cart vendors who dot the Indian retail landscape.

Each of them is a potential voter in a country where 600 million persons are registered on the polling lists, but the picture becomes clearer when one looks at the rest of the statistics.

According to Euromonitor, the retail sector is India's second largest employer after agriculture. It employs about 10 percent of the labor force, estimated at 39.3 million people in 2001. It was also one of the fastest growing employers, averaging an annual growth of 37 percent between 1996 and 2001, until it was displaced by Business Process Outsourcing (BPO). The BPO sector provides back-office services to overseas client using the Internet. In money power, the organized retail trade in India was worth Rs11.2 trillion (US$247 billion) during the same period.

India has 11 shops for every 1,000 people
The Indian retail industry was, and continues to be, highly fragmented. According to global consultancy firm A C Neilson, India had the highest shop densities in the world. In 2001, it was estimated there were 11 outlets for every 1,000 people.

Further, a report prepared by McKinsey & Company, global management consultants, and the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), predicted that global retail giants such as Tesco, Kingfisher, Carrefour and Ahold were waiting in the wings to enter the retail arena. It further stated that the Indian retail market holds the potential of becoming a $300 billion per year market by 2010, provided the sector is opened up significantly.

All of this - the strength of retailing in India and inroads by foreign retailers - clearly explain the fears that fuel public imagination and why the political leadership in democratic India feels compelled to build consensus and take the people along on its path to totally opening up the retail sector.

"Incidentally, major concerns are there even in developed markets (eg UK, US, France and Germany) on allowing unrestrained growth of large format big box discounters," says Singhal, the chairman of KSA Technopak management consultants. "Most of them are not allowed to operate in 'city centers' and have to take local permissions from local counties and districts before they can open new stores. In many cases, such new store openings have met with strong protests from local businesses," Singhal says.

In China, despite the difference in ideologies and political systems - which clearly permits autocratic decision-making in Beijing - the picture is not dissimilar.

To understand the dampening of enthusiasm - to opening up the retail sector in China, one needs to look at two documents, the World Trade Organization (WTO) accession agreement and the recently circulated foreign investment norms for foreign retailers - and juxtapose them against public reactions.

WTO requires China to admit foreign retailers
Under China's WTO commitments, during the first year of the five-year transition period ending December 2004, Beijing agreed to open up its retail sector to foreign retailers in two phases. For the first two years, foreign retailers had to come in as joint ventures, while in the last two years they could also enter as fully owned subsidiaries. In the first phase, China agreed that to permit joint ventures to be set up in the five special economic zones and six cities. These are the zones in Shenzhen, Zhuhai, Shantou, Xiamen and Hainan and the cities of Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin, Guangzhou, Dalian and Qingdao.

In the special economic zones, foreign suppliers were permitted to provide comprehensive services for their product distribution, including after-sales services. In the case of Beijing and Shanghai, foreign retailers were allowed to set up only four joint ventures in each, while in the other four cities, the number of joint ventures was capped at two per retailer.

The provincial capitals, including Chongqing in Chongqing province and Ningbo in Zhejiang, were to be opened to foreign investors in the second year. By January 2003, all the regional, quantity and foreign equity shared restrictions were to be lifted. This meant that from 2003 onwards, a foreign company could own 100 percent retail subsidiaries in China, subject to some exceptions. For department stores of over 20,000 square meters, and chain stores with more than 30 outlets, the foreign equity in the joint venture was to be capped at 50 percent.

Further, the WTO agreement also allowed China to impose sector-specific restrictions on foreign retail activity in some sectors. Only those that had already been in business for more than a year were to be allowed to sell books, newspapers and magazines. The timetable permitted the foreign-funded retailers to deal in pharmaceuticals, pesticides and petroleum products in the fourth year and chemical fertilizer only in the fifth year.

The Chinese central leadership had agreed to this timetable with the WTO. Problems, however, began when the French retail giant, Carrefour, approached the provincial governments for clearances to set up retail units in their respective provinces. Lack of coordination as well as competition among the provinces allowed Carrefour to obtain far more clearances and set up far more joint ventures than was permitted under the license agreement and the WTO agreement. Before the central leadership realized what was happening, Carrefour had dotted the Chinese landscape with its outlets.

The Chinese government reprimanded but did not seriously punish the French retail giant, and seeing Carrefour get away with the violation without major losses, other foreign retailers followed suit. The net result is that today several foreign retailers have circumvented the license conditions. Apart from lack of political will, the Chinese government has also been unable to act against such violators, as it lacks specific legal mechanisms to do so.

Foreign retailers rush to corner market share
For their part, foreign retailers largely ignore the consequences of violations. With over 300 foreign retailers, large and small, already jostling for space, the race is on to corner as much of the market share as possible before China is fully integrated with the global trading community under the WTO.

Meanwhile, public criticism of foreign retailers has been growing in China. The Chinese media is replete with stories of domestic retailers being edged out of the market by mega foreign chains such as Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer. The China Daily, for instance, quotes a Wall Street Journal report that mentions a Chinese supplier being forced to lay off staff because Wal-Mart, which sources about 95 percent of its supplies from China, has been ruthlessly pressing down on the supplier's margin. This report is also quoted in India as proof of the evil intent of the foreign retailers.

A common thread in the Chinese media is the fear that the cost advantage enjoyed by the Chinese exports would be eroded if the foreign retailers were allowed to source supplies from within the country.

The expression of public distress and opposition has not ended there. Zhang Hongwei, vice chairman of the All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU), has been quoted by Chinese newspapers as saying: "Domestic retail businesses are facing complete annihilation. Major foreign retail giants have completed the layouts of their sales outlets through virtually illegal means, and other investors are coming via the same routes."

Understandably, the ACFTU, with a membership of 131 million, has taken aim at Wal-Mart as the symbolic of foreign repression. The national union has been urging "active" instead of "passive" unionization by the Wal-Mart management in its stores in China since 2000. At the Chinese Trade Unions 14th National Congress held in late September 2003, the federation further intensified its attack by officially announcing: "For companies depriving the rights of employees to establish trade unions, we reserve the right of resorting to lawsuits."

Unionization is legal in China, but only officially approved trade unions. Foreign companies could face legal action for not permitting the workers to organize for better wages, working conditions safety and other concerns.

The All-China Federation of Trade Unions has a different, land-use focus in Shanghai. The Shanghai Chain Enterprise Association (SCEA) recently pushed the panic button when Wal-Mart was given permission to enter Eastern China for the first time through a joint venture with CITIC Trust & Invest Co Ltd. After it became clear that Wal-Mart proposed to open three mega outlets, including a 100,000 square-meter super-center at Wujiaochang, a busy commercial area in west Shanghai, the Shanghai association argued that little space was available for such stores. Erecting this super shopping mall would mean razing existing structures, which in turn has set off fears of unplanned and indiscriminate land use with adverse consequences for local residents, retailers and others.

The Chinese central leadership has been quick to appease Wal-Mart, which has opened 26 units since it entered China in 1996 and procured an estimated $15 billion worth of Chinese products in 2003. Through the joint venture with CITIC Trust & Invest Co Ltd, for instance, the huge retailer proposes to bring in total investments amounting to $18 million, on an equity base of $7.2 million.

Wal-Mart CEO receives warm Chinese welcome
Understandably, when Wal-Mart Stores Inc's president and CEO Lee Scott visited China in October 2003, Vice Premier Wu Yi assured him of continued commitment to the WTO terms for opening up retailing. At the same time, such assurances have not stopped the Chinese central leadership from circulating the draft guidelines to regulate foreign retailers.

Under these proposed regulations, China would compile a list of foreign retail violators and non-violators. The law-abiding foreign retailers would be permitted to expand, while a one-year curb on expansion would be imposed on those who had violated the norms. Chronic violators would be banned indefinitely from expanding their operations.

Technically, these provisions if implemented, should have addressed and halted the Carrefour-type of expansion violations. However, the Chinese government has gone a step further by stating in the proposed guidelines that foreign retailers seeking to set up outlets in areas of less than 3,000 square meters would have to bring in 30 percent of the investments necessary up front. In the case of larger units, the proposed minimum capital requirement has been set at 5 million yuan (US$6.04 million) for 3,000-8,000 square-meter outlets and at 30 million yuan for outlets over 8,000 square meters.

Under the proposed guidelines, the large units also would have to submit applications for building approval at the time of FDI clearances. This appears to be the introduction of WTO-compatible qualitative restrictions in order to protect the domestic retail sector on the eve of global integration.

Undoubtedly, like India, China's concern also is dictated by the human dimension, the human price, of opening up to massive foreign retailing that could overwhelm domestic retailers.

Euromonitor's data for 1996-2001 show that China had 20.3 million retail units in 2001, growing at 32.6 percent over 1996-2001. Total retail sales had reached 3.2 trillion yuan, growing at the rate of 38.5 percent between 1996 and 2001. The sector employed 39.2 million people, up from 32 million in 1996, representing a 22.5 percent growth.

Part-time employment opportunities scarcely exist in the Indian retail sector, but in China, this is the fastest growing segment with 86 percent growth being notched on this front between 1996-2001. Full-time retail employment, however, grew at a more sedate 12.4 percent during this period.

So what are the solutions?

Sivakumar, executive director of PwC in India, is convinced that China is following relatively orderly growth, but says India needs to further open up its retail sector to foreign direct investment. "As demonstrated by China, this will not only lead to significant foreign investment but will also help create a base for foreign retailers to step up their sourcing from India," he says.

Political compulsions and the need to build popular consensus, however, are unlikely to permit swift evolution of policy changes to permit this opening up. This is more so in India, where democracy tempers the commercial liberalization process, than in China, but Beijing, too, is hearing calls for greater caution in its headlong drive to modernize.
- posted by dhamaka @ 7:42 AM

 
US's Kurdish ban risks backfiring

By Mark Berniker

In news that must have been music to Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's ears, L Paul Bremer, the US proconsul in Iraq, on Wednesday announced that the United States-led coalition regards the Kurdish Workers' Party, or PKK, as a terrorist organization.

Bremer's announcement in Baghdad came several hours before a meeting in Washington between US President George W Bush and Erdogan. The PKK is accused of using northern Iraq as a base for staging attacks on neighboring Turkey, which has been engaged in a decades-long struggle with Kurdish rebels and which has itself banned the PKK.

No one should underestimate the depth of enmity between the Kurds and Turks, or how both groups could complicate an already shaky security situation in Iraq, and Kurdish moves for an autonomous Kurdish enclave in the new northern Iraq are making Ankara very edgy.

Erdogan is also trying to patch up US-Turkish relations, which took a body blow when the Turkish parliament denied US-led coalition forces access to Iraq through Turkey last year, and when Turkey reversed its decision to send troops to Iraq to help with peacekeeping.

While Bremer and Shi'ite leader Ayatollah al-Sistani have voiced different ideas about how, when and in what format elections will proceed in Iraq by July 2004, the Turks and Kurds have strong views concerning whether the new Iraq should be split along federal, geographic, or perhaps ethnic lines.

Ahead of his meetings with Bush, Erdogan addressed the Council for Foreign Relations in New York, saying: "There is a demand to establish a federation in the north of Iraq. We approve of neither an ethnic, nor religious-based federation. These developments will cause a difficult situation for Iraq in the future."

But the Kurds of northern Iraq, with strong ties to more than 13 million Kurds in Turkey, and perhaps another 20 million Kurds in Iran, Syria and elsewhere around the world, want to see an Iraq with a federal government structure. The Kurds see their northern region as becoming semi-autonomous, with access to the lucrative oil fields of Kirkuk and Khanakin, an area that the US doesn't consider Kurdish territory. The Kurds were an integral ally in the US-led invasion of Iraq, and not only came to the coalition's rescue in the north of Iraq, but also gave forces a transit way to Baghdad, something Turkey was not willing to do. No US or coalition forces have been killed in northern Kurdish-controlled areas of Iraq.

While the Kurds have sizeable nationalist aspirations, there are indications that the US is actively trying to reel them in, as they try to juggle a range of competing views coming out of the Sunni and Shi'ite communities in the many other regions of Iraq. Bremer met with Kurdish leaders in early January, and apparently emphasized that their hopes for a secular Kurdish state in the north go too far, and also don't sit well with the other 80 percent of Iraq made up of non-Kurds.

But the Kurds have never been big on compromise. There is no question that Turkey, Syria and Iran don't want to see what amounts to an autonomous Kurdish state in the north of Iraq, further hardening the Kurdish position. However, to ignore the Kurd's chance for some stability and autonomy would be a mistake, as well.

On January 27, Kurdish frustrations surfaced when officials in the Irbil province of Iraq threatened to close the offices of the Peace Monitoring Force (PMF), which is commanded by Turkish officers and a force of close to 400 mainly Iraqi Turkmen and Iraqi Assyrians. The PMF was put in place to patrol a line separating the two rival Kurdish groups: the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK). Neschirwan Barzani, prime minister of the portion of northern Iraq controlled by his KDP forces, told the Associated Press that the PMF is no longer needed now that Saddam Hussein has been ousted and captured. The report quotes US Lieutenant-Colonel James Bullion of the US Army's Civil Affairs Battalion in Irbil as saying that it was "unlikely" that the Kurds would use force to expel Turkish troops in Irbil. But the tension remains.

While Barzani is talking tough, Erdogan is in Washington, and all indications point to Ankara angling for a closer relationship with the US, emerging as the foreign policy broker between the US and Europe on one hand, and the Middle East and Central Asia, on the other.

During his meeting with Erdogan, when concerns about Iraq were brought to the agenda, Bush reportedly confirmed that speculation about Iraq's territorial integrity will not be allowed. "We are aware of your [Turkey's] anxieties. You could be sure. I am an honest man; trust my word."

In a joint press briefing held after the meetings, Bush acknowledged that Turkey is an important friend and ally of the US. "We talked about a US Iraq ideal in territorial integrity and peace. [Erdogan] informed me about the Cyprus issue. I am very pleased by the effort to resolve the dispute. This is a matter that has continued for such a long time."

Erdogan's Turkey has signaled that it is willing to be a mediator between Syria and Israel, and is moving forward with resolving the longstanding row with Greece over Cyprus, so that it can position itself for possible talks on a vote to join the European Union in December.

On January 28, US Vice President Dick Cheney, speaking to a group of European newspaper columnists, reiterated US support for Turkey's bid to enter the EU, which is a far more popular proposition in Turkey than in much of Europe.

Turkey is trying to turn around from a low point for US-Turkish relations last year, when the Turkish parliament voted to not allow Turkish territory to be used as a staging ground for its invasion of Iraq. But now it appears the Turkish government will be extending some of its bases to be used for troop rotation and the gradual removal of much of the US force in Iraq through Turkey back to Europe and the US. Turkey is keen to be a broker, assisting in US troop departure from the region, something that many neighbors, and much of Islamic world, feel can't happen soon enough.

So, once again it looks like the Kurds are going to get the short end of the stick, and be told they will be given a degree of autonomy, but will not be allowed to control oil resources, pipeline taxes, or to maintain their own Peshmerga para-militia. It's hard to imagine that one, especially given the history. Surely, if the Turks have their way, the Kurdish aspirations will be muted, which could be a radicalizing influence on the more-rebellious Kurdish factions.

On January 28, Agence-France Press reported that close to 250 Arab tribal chiefs said they are strongly against Kurdish demands for the oil center of Kirkuk to be part of a still-to-be-determined Kurdish autonomous region in the north of Iraq. Kurdish leaders want to see the Kirkuk region included with the three other provinces which make up part of the Kurdish region.

Speaking at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington ahead of meetings with Bush, Erdogan said point blank that creating a federal structure based on ethnic and sectarian origins could shatter Iraq. The Turkish president went on to say the PKK is strengthening its position in northern Iraq.

Not everyone welcomed the US announcement on the PKK, however. Mahmud Uthman, an independent Kurdish politician and a member of the US-appointed Iraqi Governing Council, told RFE/RL that Ankara's accusations regarding the PKK are unfounded and that the US is only seeking to pacify its North Atlantic Treaty Organization ally Turkey: "I think it is not founded, this declaration. [It's] only to satisfy Ankara. There is no basis for it, because first of all, the name has [been] changed from PKK to People's Congress. Their name has changed and they haven't fought or shot a bullet in the last four years."

Some observers have speculated that the US move might spur hostilities between the PKK and Iraqi Kurdish forces. But Uthman says such tensions would work only to Ankara's benefit and that he does not expect clashes between Kurdish factions in Iraq: "[The PKK] does not believe in fighting. They are not using violence at all, either in Turkey or in Iraq. And I think there are no problems now between them and Iraqi Kurdish parties. So I don't see any possibility of fighting. The Turkish government very much wants to see fighting between Iraqi Kurds and those from Turkey, but I don't think they will succeed."

The PKK's imprisoned leader, Abdullah Ocalan, urged his followers to leave Turkey in 1999, following a 15-year insurgency against Ankara that claimed some 35,000 lives. Some 5,000 PKK fighters and their families are believed to be hiding in the mountains separating northern Iraq from Iran. But Uthman says, according to RFE/RL, that it is unclear how many PKK members are in Iraq and how strong a challenge they might pose if attacked by coalition troops: "Well, I don't know. A few thousand people there are armed; they are like Peshmergas, although they are not using their arms. But there are also some other Kurds from Turkey who are now refugees in camps near Erbil. They are supervised by the United Nations, of course."

While the US is grateful for the Kurds' support and critical intelligence in northern Iraq, there is also evidence that the US State Department continues to be concerned about what it sees as possible links between Kurdish groups and terrorist activities. Despite evidence of several Kurdish splinter groups, several legitimate Kurdish leaders are still going to make their voices heard as parties continue to jockey for position in the evolving political map in Iraq.

On January 25, the London-based al-Sharq al-Awsat web site reported: "The Patriotic Union of Kurdistan [PUK], led by Jalal Talabani, member of the transitional Iraqi Governing Council [IGC], has called for holding elections for the assembly that will assume sovereignty from the coalition forces by July 2004 in what he described as a compromise formula. This formula is a compromise between Shi'ite leader Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani's call for holding direct elections and the US call for holding elections to choose committees of representatives, who will elect the representatives of the transitional assembly."

Maybe the Kurds, finally, are ready to play a role in helping move Iraq towards elections and self-governance, and the removal of occupying coalition forces. But don't expect the Kurds to stay still, as Erdogan raises Turkey's foreign policy profile, and Syria and Iran also try to curb the aspirations of the Kurdish people.
- posted by dhamaka @ 7:41 AM

 
The business of stifling the Internet

By Alan Boyd

SYDNEY - Internet users are losing ground in the censorship war being fought in Asia's cyberwaves, partly because Western corporations are helping to undermine the spirit of enterprise that made the medium such a potent weapon for free speech.

While smarter and more discreet communication technologies offer a way around creeping state controls, advocates of reduced government intervention fear that multinationals may present a far greater long-term threat.

Media watchdog Privacy International warned in a year-long study released in September that corporations with a vastly different agendas were quietly hijacking the 'Net for their own commercial ends. At the same time, almost all governments worldwide - including many supposed flagbearers of democracy - were exploiting terrorism fears to enact laws that would impede the flow of information.

"Governments and their agencies have traditionally viewed new technologies with suspicion, arguing that their presence can disturb the hard-won 'balance' of rights and responsibilities, in the same way that large companies have traditionally viewed any new media as a threat to the balance of their markets," co-authors Simon Davies and Karen Banks wrote in a foreword.

"Technological developments are being implemented to protect a free Internet, but the knowledge gap between radical innovators and restrictive institutions appears to be closing," they said.

The study, and a flurry of other recent reports by media watchdogs and human-rights organizations, confirm what many frustrated Asian consumers had suspected: meddling in the 'Net has intensified during the past two or three years.

Websites and their harassed subscribers have fought back with a game of subterfuge that many had expected would eventually exhaust surveillance resources by stretching their ability to monitor constantly changing techniques. Online addresses have been rerouted through a maze of cyber corridors to fool proxy government servers that attempt to block content by filtering all data before it actually reaches the public domain. Crossover technologies between the Internet and mobile phones are opening up other possibilities, as websites use messaging services to keep regular users informed of suppressed content or shifting site locations.

Amnesty International (AI) noted this week that even in China, widely regarded as having the most repressive Internet climate worldwide, online activism has become more evident as controls have been tightened.

"Over the last year, there have been signs of Internet users acting increasingly in solidarity with one another, in particular by expressing support for each other online," the human-rights group stated, adding: "Such expressions of solidarity have proved dangerous, as a growing number of people have been detained on the basis of such postings."

Amnesty International listed the names of 54 Chinese nationals who had been detained or sentenced for expressing their opinions online, or for downloading information from the Internet, since November 2002 - a 60 percent increase in that period. This was in addition to an unknown number of people who were still in detention for disseminating information about the spread of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) over the Internet last year.

Most Internet criminals in China have been charged under 1995 decrees that make all users register with their local police stations and sign an agreement with the Ministry of Public Security that they will not engage in "subversion" or "endanger state security". The edicts carry prison sentences of two to 12 years. A separate proclamation issued by then-premier Li Peng in 1996 required that all international computer networking traffic, both incoming and outgoing, be routed through state channels.

China, as well as autocratic neighbors Myanmar, Laos and Vietnam, got its censorship cue from Singapore, whose filtering system is arguably the most effective in Asia. Because it controls the three Internet service providers, Singapore was able to set up a computerized proxy server in the 1990s that screens all websites for content viewed as "objectionable" or a potential threat to national security.

Although political leaders in the republic acknowledge that some loosening of media controls is inevitable as education and income levels grow, they are not in any hurry to oblige.

"I have no doubt that our society must open up further. The government has no monopoly of knowledge and ideas. To understand and tackle our challenges fully and vigorously, we need to draw on the expertise and resources of all our people," Deputy Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said in an address to the Harvard Club this month. "But we will not ape others blindly and do something simply because it appears fashionable. Coffee-shop talk is helpful for sensing the popular mood, but it cannot be the basis for deciding on national policies," Lee said.

Singapore acted as an adviser to several of the communist states when they were setting up their Internet filters in the late 1990s. Most initially had little success because of Cold War limits on technology transfers.

However, this has all changed in the past decade, as Western companies have targeted emerging investment opportunities for telecommunication systems, especially in China.

China, with a reputed 30,000 full-time Internet surveillance operatives for the country's 45 million web surfers, now has access to the same cutting-edge technology that content providers were using to skirt its censorship regime.

The Amnesty International report named Cisco Systems, Microsoft, Nortel Networks, Websense and Sun Microsystems as multinationals that had supplied Beijing with Internet equipment without imposing any conditions on its use.

Privacy International, which has also campaigned against unrestricted sales, noted: "Without the aid of this technology transfer, it is unlikely that non-democratic regimes could impose the current levels of control over Internet activity."

An equally worrying trend is that Western corporations, including many in the mass media, are manipulating the Internet to pursue their own business objectives without considering the adverse effects elsewhere. According to the Privacy International study, "multinational corporate censors" with different agendas from their governments' have represented one of the most important growth trends in recent years.

"Some American cable companies seek to turn the Internet into a controlled distribution medium like TV and radio, and are putting in place the necessary technological changes to the Internet's infrastructure to do so," warned Simon Davies and Karen Banks. "It is arguable that in the first decade of the 21st century, corporations will rival governments in threatening Internet freedoms."

Some Western governments indirectly add to this process by using commercial pressures to impose misguided censorship standards on software manufacturers, even with products that were designed to blunt the technological edge of repressive regimes. Last year the makers of Safeweb, a US software package that was developed in partnership with the Central Intelligence Agency to help Chinese users avoid censorship, were forced to install a filter on some content so it would qualify for US public funding.

Asian governments have taken note of the financial and political benefits of letting the commercial world assume the censorship burden, which takes some of the human-rights heat off security agencies.

For the past 12 months, China has been delegating responsibility for surveillance and monitoring to private companies, including Internet cafes and information service providers. Davies and Banks argued that Western governments were neglecting their leadership responsibilities to ensure that the Internet is allowed to evolve without political or commercial constraints.

In many cases this has occurred, they said, because political leaders have overreacted to perceived security threats posed by the free flow of information since the 2001 terrorist attacks in the US.

"While paying lip service to personal freedoms, the leaders of the democratic world have affirmed with uncharacteristic harmony that the pursuit of a safer society must prompt a reassessment of individual liberties and privacy," they said.

"In its most blatant manifestation, this will result in a substantial increase in the right of the state to place controls on all citizens, shifting the default in favor of comprehensive surveillance over the population.

"Technology is at the same time the culprit and the savior."
- posted by dhamaka @ 7:40 AM

 
Covetous eyes on Sri Lanka's strategic jewel

By Ramtanu Maitra

After protecting Sri Lanka Monitoring Mission (SLMM) chief and fellow Norwegian Tryggve Tellefsen since October 23, when he was first accused of aiding rebel Tamil Tigers by Sri Lankan President Chandrika Kumaratunga's Peoples Alliance (PA) party, Norway's Deputy Foreign Minister Vidar Helgesen finally announced Tellefsen's replacement with General Trond Furuhovde on January 16. Furuhovde was the first SLMM chief and had preceded Tellefsen.

The Norwegian's replacement and the incident behind it shed new light on the political fight that erupted between Kumaratunga and Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe in November, and point to the strategic churning around Sri Lanka, the island nation off the southern coast of India at the crossroads between the Middle East and the rest of Asia.

In addition to Norway, India and the US have remained unseen string-pullers in Sri Lanka's latest effort to resolve the decades-old insurgency by the island's Tamil minority led by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Elam (LTTE).

Not surprisingly, Sri Lanka's Trincomalee - a "strategic jewel" that is considered one of the best deep sea ports in the world, and which lies in the Tigers' turf - is at the center of the maneuvering.

Peacekeeper's faux pas
In October, the PA, the coalition party behind Kumaratunga, complained in parliament that Tellefsen, using the authority of his office, had alerted the Tamil Tigers so that they could evade capture. According to the PA, the Sri Lankan navy had spotted a rebel Sea Tiger ship in Sri Lankan waters, and asked for monitors from the SLMM to go with them to apprehend the suspicious ship. The PA says that Tellefsen telephoned the rebels to inquire whether it was one of their vessels - in effect forewarning the Tigers. The ship in question fled.

Meanwhile, Kumaratunga was growing increasingly uneasy over Norway's pro-Tiger bias in its involvement in the ongoing peace talks between Colombo and the Tigers. Initially, the SLMM, set up in February 2002 by the LTTE and the government of Sri Lanka, comprised 25-30 persons representing Norway, Iceland, Denmark, Finland and Sweden. But by June last year, the mission was strengthened, and now comprises 47 representatives, including naval monitors, the majority from Norway.

The PA's finger-pointing at Tellefsen is not an isolated incident. Many observers in Sri Lanka were complaining that the SLMM, under the pretext of evenhandedness, was doing a whole lot to protect the Tigers' interests. On June 14 last year, for instance, the Sri Lankan navy sank the LTTE ship, Shioshin. Frederica Jansz of The Sunday Leader newspaper reports that when her newspaper contacted Tellefsen, he said the SLMM was still in the process of gathering all information from both parties concerned and would only be in a position to make a clarifying statement thereafter. No SLMM monitors were present at the time of the confrontation.

One might wonder why not. A mere 24 hours before the incident, The Sunday Leader points out, an LTTE leader had told Tellefsen that increasing interference with LTTE ships in Tiger-controlled areas and harassment of Sea Tigers, the Tiger navy, would lead to a serious confrontation between the two sides if not checked. Tellefsen was in the Tiger-dominated town of Killinochchi on Friday, June 13, together with a delegation from the SLMM.

Kumaratunga strikes
Following the PA's accusation before parliamentarians, Kumaratunga declared Tellefsen persona non-grata on October 23. Tellefsen had to leave Sri Lanka, but Helgesen and other Norwegian authorities kept Tellefsen's sacking at bay.

The Norwegian daily Aftenposten wrote recently that Tellefsen was forced to work from Oslo with the remaining members of SLMM in Sri Lanka, using the telephone and email. This charade might have continued longer, but New Delhi intervened on behalf of the Sri Lankan president, and Norway let the Tigers' good friend go.

On November 23 last year, while premier Wickremesinghe was in Washington receiving kudos for his government's on-going talks with the Tigers, whom the United States had officially identified in 2002 as a terrorist outfit, Kumaratunga proceeded to topple the Norwegian-pulled apple cart. Kumaratunga sacked defense minister Tilak Marapana, accusing him of allowing the Tigers to use the Norwegian-brokered ceasefire that had been in place for 20 months to strengthen militarily. She also fired interior minister John Amaratunga, who controls the police, and mass communications minister Imthiaz Bakeer Markar, who controls the state-run media. These three were considered the most powerful of Wickremesinghe's ministers.

The president announced the dismissal of the three ministers three days after the Tigers unveiled power-sharing in their formal proposals. She pointed out that she took this step "after careful consideration, in order to prevent further deterioration of the security situation in the country". Kumaratunga was acting on the belief, held by many Sri Lankans, that the peace process has led to a legitimization of the Tigers and their control of large chunks of the country's territory even though the group remains banned in countries from India to the US.

Kumaratunga's drastic move no doubt rattled not only Wickremesinghe, but also some in Washington with whom he was then visiting. "We certainly hope that these political tensions do not delay progress on peace talks ... " one unnamed official said, in a veiled attack on Kumaratunga. Washington made clear at that point whose side it would be on in case a full-fledged power struggle was unleashed in Sri Lanka between the president and the prime minister. The growing US interest in the Sri Lankan peace talks is particularly intriguing as there was no evidence in Sri Lanka of any al-Qaeda involvement, Washington's ostensible priority concern.

Trincomalee to the fore
The revived US interest in Sri Lankan affairs centers, no doubt, on the old Trincomalee port. Trincomalee, located on the northeastern coast of Sri Lanka, has a slightly higher percentage of Tamils than Sinhalese (the majority community) or Muslims. The Tamils, who mostly live in the north and the east, claim they have been discriminated against in job allocation, land use and education by governments run by the majority community.

Trincomalee, meanwhile, is considered by military experts as one of the best deep seat ports in the world. Moreover, it is situated strategically on the sea lanes through which oil is carried from the Middle East to east and far-eastern Asia. According to observers, Trincomalee is a "strategic jewel". For several decades, the Pentagon had shown interest in this port, but during the Ronald Reagan administration interest appeared to have waned.

The recent revival of interest in Trincomalee in the Pentagon can then only be associated with the growing overall US interest in acquiring bases for intervention and rapid deployment for the sake of developing a quick strike capability in the general area. According to anti-imperialist American strategists such as Chalmers Johnson, "once upon a time" you could trace the spread of imperialism by counting up colonies. Says Johnson: "America's version of the colony is the military base. By following the changing politics of global basing, one can learn much about our ever-larger imperial stance and the militarism that grows with it. Militarism and imperialism are Siamese twins joined at the hip. Each thrives off the other."

Visits to Sri Lanka by Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage and ranking US government and military officials in recent times, and the strong statements repeatedly issued by the US ambassador in Sri Lanka, Ashley Wills, are noteworthy.

Is the US seeking a base?
Soon after the ceasefire between Colombo and the Tigers was announced in February 2002, the Straits Times of Singapore put out an article, perhaps to test the Indian reaction. "As rebel fire ceases in Sri Lanka, the United States has been laying the groundwork to deploy its military personnel to the strategically located country. This move will both aid its campaign in Afghanistan and keep New Delhi's growing influence in check," the newspaper reported. "Located between the Middle East and Asia, Sri Lanka could ease the transport of US military ships, troops and equipment. Its port, Trincomalee, is one of the world's deepest natural ports and could serve as a refueling station for the US military."

It has been generally reported that Sri Lanka and the US have been discussing military cooperation for some time now. The two countries have been negotiating an Acquisition and Cross-Service Agreement (ACSA) for several months. The ACSA would allow US forces to procure food, fuel, ammunition and transport in Sri Lanka at the same rates as those paid by Sri Lankan forces.

But the US's move, if there ever was a formal one, was not in any manner challenged by New Delhi. In fact, New Delhi had struck up an excellent relationship, centered around economic and trade issues, with Wickremesinghe, who, to put it mildly, was gung-ho on the peace talks. Signals emanated from New Delhi suggesting that India was watching every move the Norwegians made like a hawk. But at the same time, New Delhi exhibited the utmost caution. Every time the star Norwegian peacemaker, Erik Solheim, visited India, he was cordially received. This despite India's discovery of the paw-marks of the Tigers in India's turbulent northeast, and the Tiger-Naxalite alliance in India's southern states in recent years. In other words, India and the US concurred in seeing that the peace talks succeed.

But Sri Lankan observers point out that India was fully aware of the growing American interest in Trincomalee. It is perhaps for that reason that soon after the Straits Times article appeared, Indian High Commissioner Gopalkrishna Gandhi, along with other embassy officials, paid a visit to the Trincomalee harbor. Gandhi's inspection of the oil tanks located in the harbor was a reminder of the abiding Indian interest in Sri Lanka.

One result of Gandhi's trip to Trincomalee is an Indo-Sri Lankan agreement to lease part of the Ceylon Petroleum Corporation's 99 oil tanks, each with a capacity of 100,000 tonnes, to the Indian Oil Corp. The deal was signed in New Delhi in June, 2002. The deal was not adequately analyzed at the time, but it could be Kumaratunga's way of keeping India in Trincomalee and fending off the US pressure. The other major commercial establishments already in the city are a flour mill owned by Prima Ceylon, a subsidiary of Prima Singapore, and the Tokyo Cement Co plant, a subsidiary of Japan's Mitsui.

India alerted
What drew the attention of Indian authorities to developments surrounding the ceasefire agreement was the report they received from former Sri Lankan foreign minister Lakshman Kadirgamar during a visit last August to New Delhi to "alert and sensitize" Indian leaders about the "grave situation" on the island.

The former Sri Lankan foreign minister, who is now a senior adviser to Kumaratunga, pointed out during extensive discussions with Indian National Security Adviser Brajesh Mishra, External Affairs Minister Yashwant Sinha, Finance Minister Jaswant Singh, former foreign secretary Kanwal Sibal and Congress leader K Natwar Singh, that the Tamil Tiger guerrillas have tightened their stranglehold over the strategic eastern port of Trincomalee, taking advantage of the ceasefire. Armed with a map of the harbor and the LTTE camps and bases that have sprung up around it, Kadirgamar also provided Indian leaders with details of preparations being made by the Tigers to seize control of Trincomalee port at any moment. This revelation startled the Indian officials, who made it clear that the development was of concern to New Delhi. Kadirgamar did not make a similar pilgrimage to either Oslo or Washington.

Interestingly, the ill-fated Indo-Sri Lanka Accord of 1987 contains an annexure stating: "Trincomalee or any other port in Sri Lanka will not be made available to military use by any country in a manner prejudicial to India's interests." Further that "the work of restoring and operating the Trincomalee oil tank farm will be undertaken as a joint venture between India and Sri Lanka."

In early January, when Kumaratunga was in Islamabad attending the South Asian Association of Regional Countries (SAARC) summit, she told reporters that Sri Lanka is ready to work out a defense pact with India. Within days, a defense team from Sri Lanka arrived in New Delhi to work out the details. It is yet to be seen how the defense pact gets formulated and until such time as it is made public, it is unlikely that Washington will respond one way or the other.

The LTTE has already expressed serious concern over the envisaged Indo-Sri Lankan Defense Agreement, arguing that it could have far-reaching negative consequences for the current peace process, sources told TamilNet on January 19. Anton Balasingham, the chief negotiator and political strategist of the LTTE, has also reportedly conveyed his organizations' objections to the government of India.

The same Balasingham told the Norwegians that the proposed defense agreement between New Delhi and Colombo might upset the balance of forces to the disadvantage of the LTTE. What "balance of power" Balasingham is referring to is difficult to fathom, unless he is still thinking of an independent Tamil nation.

How solid is the ceasefire?
The peace talks have been stalled since early November as the power struggle between Kumaratunga and Wickremesinghe heated up in Colombo. Kumaratunga has further increased tensions by bringing her political party, the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP), and the pro-socialist Sinhala party, the Janatha Vimukti Peramuna (JVP), together. Sri Lankan observers say that this alliance is a clear parting of the ways between Kumaratunga and the Wickremesinghe-led United National Front (UNF) government.

The SLFP-JVP alliance has rightly pointed out that the February 2002 ceasefire agreement gave away too much to the LTTE. At the same time, the LTTE has all the reasons to consider the SLFP-JVP alliance as a move directed against the continuation of peace talks. The JVP is against devolution and believes the ethnic conflict should be resolved only by administrative decentralization. Kumaratunga, on the other hand, is the only Sinhala leader to have unilaterally put on the table a far-reaching devolution package to resolve the conflict as early as 1995. The JVP's condition for the short-lived alliance it had with the PA in 2001 was a freeze on plans for devolution. While no such condition was mentioned in forming the alliance this time, the SLFP-JVP "memorandum of understanding" clearly states their differences on the devolution issue. The SLFP-JVP combine says it believes in a "negotiated settlement" to the ethnic conflict.

The declaration of the SLFP-JVP alliance is an indication that Kumaratunga is considering an early parliamentary election to break the cohabitation deadlock between her and the UNF government. In reaching an understanding with the JVP, Kumaratunga, who has sidled quite close to New Delhi in recent months, has linked the political fortunes of the PA, of which the SLFP is the main constituent, with a party that was once virulently anti-India and heavily dominated by anti-Tamil, Sinhala chauvinists.

Kumaratunga had hinted at snap polls at the beginning of the year when she said her party is ready to face the electorate at any time. Washington has indicated that it does not encourage a snap poll. There is no doubt that New Delhi does not want a snap poll to take place right now. Kumaratunga sent Economic Reforms Minister Milinda Moragoda as her emissary to India on January 23 to discuss the island's worsening political crisis and the troubled peace process against a backdrop of new proposals to resolve the tug-of-war, officials said. She held talks with Sinha and Mishra over the weekend.

Since the SLFP-JVP alliance has been announced, the Tigers have warned at least twice that the ceasefire could break down. Sri Lanka's Tamil Tiger rebels have increased their numbers of child soldiers in spite of a ceasefire, the United Nations reports. The BBC's Frances Harrison in Colombo says there is a real possibility that the child soldiers may fight again. Sri Lankan newspapers report major rallies in the Tamil-dominated districts in northern and eastern Sri Lanka as an indication that the Tamils are preparing for confrontation once again.
- posted by dhamaka @ 7:38 AM

 
Pakistan loses ground in Afghanistan

By Syed Saleem Shahzad

ISLAMABAD - As the Taliban prepare for a crucial phase of their struggle against foreign troops in Afghanistan, a prelude for the final "spring offensive", the resistance movement has lost its support from Pakistan's establishment, under pressure from the United States.

The resistance, meanwhile, under a new commander, is regrouping in the remote Khyber Agency region of Pakistan, using the infrastructure of people and fortifications laid by Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda several years ago.

Asia Times Online has learned from insiders within the security administration of President General Pervez Musharraf in Islamabad that strategists have bowed to pressure from Washington, and will end all covert support for the resistance in Afghanistan.

Up to now, Pakistan has aided some commanders in Afghanistan belonging to the Hizb-i-Islami Afghanistan (HIA) of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the veteran mujahideen leader now largely responsible for orchestrating the Afghan resistance.

Pakistan's purpose was not so much to damage US interests, but to establish a counter-force to the growing pro-India presence along the Afghani border areas with Pakistan. Pakistan's support, though limited, did, nevertheless, work against the interests of the US. As a result, US intelligence tracked HIA recruiting offices in Pakistani cities such as Karachi and Peshawar, and pointed to various locations in Pakistan where HIA volunteers were being given training, money and arms. And for example, legendary Afghan commander Jalaluddin Haqqani ( who joined the Taliban and became a minister and who is now the main force behind the resistance in Khost and Paktia) visited Miran Shah in Pakistan several times, but authorities turned a blind eye.

Confronted with this, and coming at a time of revelations of some Pakistani scientists being accused of nuclear proliferation to Iran, among other countries, Islamabad had little option but to pledge to pull out all of its operators and their proxy networks from Afghanistan.

Musharraf, did, however, apparently manage to extract a concession from the US that coalition troops would increase their presence in Afghanistan in areas where warlords are hand-in-glove with the Indian establishment. For example, Pakistan wants more International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) troops in Jalalabad and Kandahar, where warlords associated with the anti-Pakistan former Shura-i-Nazaar and the Northern Alliance are active. The US leads a 12,000-person force in Afghanistan.

Carry on in the Khyber
These developments come as the Taliban step up their struggle to include more suicide attacks. Asia Times Online was first publication to report this strategy (Taliban raise the stakes - Oct 30, 2003). These attacks are the prelude to a broader struggle that will start in spring in which the Taliban will attempt to retake the major cities in Afghanistan that they held before being ousted by the US in late 2001.

One British soldier of the ISAF was killed on Wednesday morning and three of his comrades wounded in a car bomb attack on an eastern Kabul highway. The attack occurred just a day after a Canadian peacekeeper lost his life and three others were injured in a suicide bomb attack in southern Kabul area. About 10 civilians, including a French aid worker, were also wounded in the two attacks.

In the latest unrest, an explosion near an ammunition dump in southern Afghanistan on Thursday killed seven US soldiers and wounded three other soldiers and an interpreter. The US Army central command said that the soldiers were working near an arms cache in the southern province of Ghazni. The cause of the blast is unclear.

For some time the US has focused on South Waziristan Agency in Pakistan as a hotbed of the resistance, where guerrillas hide and receive support from the local population between raids in Afghanistan. As a result, at US instigation, the Pakistan army has undertaken a number of missions to the region, but to date without major success in tracking down resistance ringleaders.

Now, though, it emerges that the real center of resistance action is the remote Khyber Agency in North West Frontier Province. Two mountainous areas here, Tera and Moro, which lie on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, have no roads and the local population is almost 100 percent behind bin Laden and the Taliban. Some years ago, bin Laden had a network of tunnels and underground bunkers built here, which the resistance is now using as hideaways and for the storage of supplies and ammunition as a source of most supply lines into Afghanistan.

Obviously, this region is known to both the US and Pakistani authorities - the problem is dealing with it. Clearly, the US cannot utilize its massive air strength in Pakistan as it did in ousting the Taliban from Kabul. And due to the terrain - and the completely hostile population - the Pakistani army is in no position to make an offensive of any significance. The use of helicopters would also be hazardous as they would have to fly low in the valleys, opening themselves up for ground-to-air missile attacks.

According to Taliban sources, the resistance for the spring offensive is now under the command of Mullah Sabir Momin of Orugzan province. The battle lines are drawn.
- posted by dhamaka @ 7:33 AM