Author: Mick Hartley

ore attention is paid to those who die violently than to those who die of disease. In our most recent Congo survey, only 2 percent of the deaths were attributed to the simmering conflict there. The rest resulted from easily preventable and treatable diseases that are the indirect — but no less devastating — result of the strife. Our teams were told that the “excess” Congolese deaths were mainly the result of fever (mostly caused by malaria), diarrhea, malnutrition or respiratory problems. Nearly half of the victims were younger than 5, but they still received almost no attention. The disappearance of 4 million Congolese was well-documented (our study was published in the British medical journal the Lancet), but it was viewed as unheroic, seemingly apolitical and therefore untelevisable.

ndeed, the Chinese go out of their way to ingratiate themselves with dictators such as Mugabe, donating the blue tiles that adorn his new £7m palace in Harare. They have also decided to foot the bill for a large Namibian presidential palace in Windhoek.

The rhetoric of the China-Africa relationship is different, with China claiming to be the champion of all Third World countries, offering them a new relationship that will free them from their dependence on the northern powers of the G8.

They are adept at high-profile gestures such as a donation of four endangered white Siberian tigers to Zimbabwe for a captive breeding programme.

They have also succeeded in getting African states to accept large numbers of Chinese experts and workers as part of their investment packages: 28 “Baoding villages” have been established, each housing up to 2,000 Chinese workers, in various parts of Africa.

In Nigeria, a Chinese-language newspaper now serves 50,000 immigrants. At no stage in Britain’s colonisation of Nigeria did the British numbers reach such a figure. As one opposition figure in Zimbabwe observed: “If the British were our masters yesterday, the Chinese have come and taken their place.”

At grassroots this is highly unpopular. Chinese goods sent to Africa are notorious for their poor quality. None of a shipment of 50 buses to Zimbabwe is still working and an order for 250 more has been suspended.

Of three MA60 passenger jets the Chinese sent to Mugabe, one has never managed to fly, one had to make an emergency landing at Victoria Falls, injuring many passengers, and the third caught fire on take-off in Harare last week. All are now grounded.

Moreover, as Eldred Masunungure, professor of political science at Harare University, puts it: “The resentment of the Chinese is not only widespread, it’s deeply rooted.”

The Chinese are generally viewed as loud, uncouth, prone to spitting and openly derogatory towards Africans. Worse, the copper mines they have opened up in Zambia and Zimbabwe are renowned for low wages, ferocious labour discipline and a sky-high accident rate. “That’s how they run things at home, after all — and on top of that, they despise blacks,” said one Zimbabwean engineer.

As with the ivory traders, many Chinese technical experts develop other ways of making money. In Harare, some are already a force in the drugs trade. In Botswana, Chinese workers brought in by construction companies now own hundreds of shops in the capital, Gaborone. Most worrying of all, however, is the way Chinese imports have largely wiped out budding African industries.

Professor Laurence Schlemmer of Witwatersrand University’s business school in Johannesburg, said: “In effect, China is forcing Africa back into the role of raw material suppliers — undermining its textile industry and importing raw cotton instead.”

Such concerns were raised with President Hu Jintao, who recently toured Africa. But for the moment the tidal wave of Chinese money is carrying all before it. “The Chinese are getting away with claiming that they aren’t like the other colonialists, but Africans aren’t fools,” a South African economist commented. “The Chinese are far more ruthless than the Brits ever were.”

uch that now a very great and notable fraction of the people are gone. . . .

There seemed little reason to debate the nature of the plague: Even the Spanish admitted that European smallpox was the disease that devastated the conquered Aztec empire. Case closed.

Then, four centuries later, Acuña-Soto improbably decided to reopen the investigation. Some key pieces of information—details that had been sitting, ignored, in the archives—just didn’t add up. His studies of ancient documents revealed that the Aztecs were familiar with smallpox, perhaps even before Cortés arrived. They called it zahuatl. Spanish colonists wrote at the time that outbreaks of zahuatl occurred in 1520 and 1531 and, typical of smallpox, lasted about a year. As many as 8 million people died from those outbreaks. But the epidemic that appeared in 1545, followed by another in 1576, seemed to be another disease altogether. The Aztecs called those outbreaks by a separate name, cocolitzli. “For them, cocolitzli was something completely different and far more virulent,” Acuña-Soto says. “Cocolitzli brought incomparable devastation that passed readily from one region to the next and killed quickly.”

After 12 years of research, Acuña-Soto has come to agree with the Aztecs: The cocolitzli plagues of the mid-16th century probably had nothing to do with smallpox. In fact, they probably had little to do with the Spanish invasion. But they probably did have an origin that is worth knowing about in 2006.

John Prendergast, Special Advisor to the President of the International Crisis Group, has just returned from a visit to Eastern Chad (via Coalition for Darfur):

We went into Eastern Chad and we crossed the border into rebel held areas of Darfur as well and both sides of the border, there is clearly an increasing tension as a result of cross border attacks by government of Sudan backed Janjaweed militias and government of Sudan backed Chadian rebels who are attacking across the border with the same kind of impunity, and in some cases the same kind of intention they did when attacking inside Darfur. We are seeing a sort of exporting some of the genocidal counterinsurgency strategies into Chad now, and that was one of the dominant themes. The other dominant theme was how uniformly the refugees and displaced people that we came across were unable to support the current peace agreement that has been signed between the government and one of the rebel factions in Darfur. There is an intense, palpable fear on the part of those who have been rendered homeless by this assault over the last three years, fear of the provision in the agreement that would leave the disarmament of the Janjaweed in the hands of the government of Sudan with no real international verification. In the absence of that, most people would have just said, “We cannot support this, and we have to keep the struggle alive until we get this fundamentally important provision into any kind of a text of an agreement.” It was quite eye opening to see, and people were not brain washed; they knew what was in the agreement and they just chose to say, “We do not want an incomplete peace because it will not bring peace,” and that was fairly uniform up and down the border, all over.

News from the outback:

Palaeontologists digging in northern Australia have found fossil evidence of several new species – including a “killer kangaroo”.
The flesh-eating marsupial would have lived between 10 and 20 million years ago, scientists say.

The research team has also unearthed evidence of a large carnivorous bird dubbed the “demon duck of doom”.

The dig site in Queensland has yielded remains of at least 20 previously unknown creatures….

Professor Mike Archer said the dig had turned up “truly extraordinary material”.

He said the killer kangaroos would not have been like the creatures of today.

“There were meat-eating kangaroos with long fangs, and galloping kangaroos with long forearms, which could not hop,” he told The Australian newspaper.

Meat-eating…long fangs and forearms…couldn’t hop. When is a kangaroo not a kangaroo?

It starts with Afghanistan. To my mind, Afghanistan is central to the history of the Left, and to the history of the world, since the 1980s. It is to the early 21st century, to the years we’re now living through, what the Spanish Civil War was to Europe in the mid and late 20th century. It was the kitchen in which the contradictions of the contemporary world, and many of the violent evils of the century, were cooked and then spread out. Just as Italian and German fascism trained in Spain for the broader conquest of Europe and the Mediterranean,the militant jihadi Islamists, of whom bin Laden was a part, received their training, their primal experiences, in Afghanistan. They have been carrying out this broad jihad across the Middle East and elsewhere ever since, including, of course, the attacks of September 11th. You cannot understand this unless you go back to Afghanistan in the 1980s.

But who was responsible? Pakistani intelligence, Saudi Arabia and the United States. Read Bob Woodward’s book on Casey, The Veil, or Steven Cole’s book on Afghanistan, Ghost Wars. The U.S. was deeply implicated. My view is that anybody who could not see that issue then, or in retrospect, is objectively on the Right. And I think Tariq is objectively on the Right. He’s colluded with the most reactionary forces in the region, first in Afghanistan and now in Iraq. He has given his rhetorical support to the Sunni insurgency in Iraq—who have no interest in democracy or in progress for the people of Iraq whatsoever, whether it’s the Baathists, with their record of 30 years of dictatorship, or the foreign Sunnis with their own authoritarian project. The position of the New Left Review is that the future of humanity lies in the back streets of Fallujah.

Julie Flint on the uselessness of the African Union, as the Darfur conflict enters a new phase:

An attack on the North Darfur village of Bir Maza last weekend bore all the hallmarks of the war the Sudanese government and the Janjaweed militias have waged for the past three years against the Darfur rebel movements and the civilians accused of supporting them: a ground offensive by regular and militia forces, aerial support from helicopter gunships, murder, and rape. But the government’s partner in crime in Bir Maza was not the Janjaweed. It was Khartoum’s new partner in peace – the faction of the rebel Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) led by Minni Minawi.

With the conclusion of the Darfur Peace Agreement (DPA) on May 5, the conflict in Darfur has entered a phase even more cynical than that which preceded it: The two signatories of the DPA, whom few Darfurians trust, are attempting to force their “peace” on reluctant civilians and in so doing to eliminate all opposition, armed and otherwise, to their dominion.

Senior United Nations officials in Sudan are privately expressing “great concern” about the government-Minawi alliance, which threatens to be the end of the infant DPA and the beginning of a new war in Darfur. But the African Union (AU), which sponsored the peace process and whose troops are (in theory) keeping the peace in Darfur, has said nothing – even though there is evidence that Khartoum disguised one of its own helicopters as an AU chopper and used it to ferry supplies into Bir Maza and to airlift its wounded out.

The AU’s silence is eloquent testimony to the paralysis that has afflicted it, under the wholly inadequate leadership of Baba Kingibe, ever since the DPA was signed in Abuja. This silence will return to haunt it. In Darfur today, an increasing number of people believe the AU is taking sides – and, in their opinion, the wrong side. […]

After so many mistakes, and so much inaction for so long, there is no easy solution. More force – whether in the shape of a NATO force or another foreign army – will only add fuel to the fire in Darfur. A UN force to replace the present AU mission is rejected, with increasing conviction, by the Sudanese government. Without a change of heart in Khartoum, UN peacekeepers would have to fight their way into Darfur. The lesson of Abuja is inescapable now: There is no quick fix, and no lasting peace that is not both consensual and comprehensive.

aped.

In the meantime we wait in vain for even the remotest spark of outrage in the Muslim world about what’s happening in Darfur.

em. They understand that most American politicians are no longer zealous about spreading democracy, and they think that investing in the modernization of the Arabs and in helping them to establish democracy is a waste of money, time, and effort – since Arab soil produces only Islamists or dictatorial regimes.

“Therefore, the Arab governments are impatiently awaiting the day when they can reap the fruits of the policy of evasion and delay, which they have adopted in the past few years to parry the calls for reform. They hope that things will return to normal and that they will once again [be free to] impose their hold on their societies.”

Britain’s Hindu population want to be known as, um, Hindus:

Hindus living in Britain do not want to be described as “Asian”, according to a big study of the community.

Instead, they want to be known as British Indian, Hindu — or even Desi, a Hindi word growing in popularity with the young that means being rooted in one’s home country. At the time of the 2001 Census the Hindu population in Britain had reached nearly 550,000.

The report, Connecting British Hindus, to be published in the Commons today, was funded by the Government and carried out by the Runnymede Trust and the Hindu Forum.

It found concern about a “general assumption” that any brown-skinned Asian person was Muslim and shows that Hindus feel neglected, marginalised and misunderstood.