Author: Mick Hartley

een publicly hanged (warning: gruesome pictures) for their part in the explosions:

The two, Ali Afrawi and Mehdi Navasseri, appeared on state television the night before and “confessed” to having carried out the attack. Televised recanting by political dissidents is regularly aired on Iran’s state-run media and has drawn international condemnation in the past.

One of the two men said that he had been in contact with groups in Britain and Canada who were seeking to destabilise the oil-rich Khuzistan province. […]

A string of top Iranian officials, including hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, have accused Britain of being behind the bombings.

London has repeatedly denied any involvement in the attacks. Dissidents believe the bombings are the work of Iranian intelligence in a bid to smear opposition groups. Iran’s intelligence services have in the past acknowledged that they have carried out bombings and assassinations to tarnish the image of their opponents and brand them as terrorists.

Elsewhere on Iran Focus:

Iran’s State Security Forces attacked female football fans in Tehran on Wednesday after they held a defiant protest against the government decision to ban women from football stadiums.

Dozens of young women, who had bought tickets and hoped to cheer on their national team, were all banned from entering Tehran’s Azadi Stadium. The ban has been in force for years, but a few dozen women have challenged it in recent months. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s hard-line government recently decided to enforce the ban more strongly.

After being refused entry into the stands, the women organised a demonstration outside the stadium and quickly brought to the scene banners which read, “Azadi Stadium: 100,000 men-only arena” and “We also want to cheer on our national team”

They were immediately threatened with arrest by police who had been placed on standby.

Within minutes, the security forces started to attack the teenage girls and young women. They were all forced into a bus and driven away.

The Sudanese defence minister identifies the real problem in Darfur – the media (via):

Sudan’s defence minister expelled foreign media from a news conference on Wednesday and compared them to “terrorists”, saying that they had fabricated the three-year-old conflict in Darfur.

Sudan’s government has intensified a media campaign against foreigners and the United Nations, ahead of a possible decision by the African Union to transfer their forces in the war-torn Darfur region to a U.N. peacekeeping mission.

Khartoum violently opposes U.N. forces being deployed to the western Darfur region, where almost 7,000 African troops are facing funding and logistical difficulties protecting civilians from attacks by militias and rebel forces.

“Any foreign correspondent, from any foreign agency, get out — we don’t want you in here,” said Defence Minister Abdel Rahim Mohamed Hussein. […]

African foreign ministers were due to meet on Friday to decide on a transition to a U.N. force in Darfur, but delayed the meeting a week, which some AU officials said was due to top AU diplomats having other commitments abroad.

But the top U.N. envoy in Sudan, Jan Pronk, said on Tuesday the AU may be having second thoughts about the transfer given Khartoum’s fierce opposition.

He said Sudanese in Khartoum feared fighters from the militant al Qaeda organisation would flood into the country, as they had in Iraq, if a U.N. force including Western contingents was deployed in Darfur.

So the Janjaweed were beyond the control of the Sudanese government (not of course that they were doing anything reprehensible – that’s all a Western fabrication), and now, should UN forces intervene in Darfur, Al Qaeda will be beyond the control of the Sudanese government.

Khartoum hosted Osama bin Laden in the late ’90s, but the Sudanese government has played both sides by supplying America with some intelligence for the war on terror while continuing to raise the Al Qaeda specter as a warning to the West.

Mr Pronk [UN special envoy] said that unlike failed states like Somalia, Sudan’s government has firm control in the country, and that even street demonstrations are orchestrated to the last detail and the crowds “know how far they can go.”

Currently, he added, the climate against the UN in Khartoum “is heating up,” and therefore it would be “foolish not to take such warnings [of Al Qaeda attacks against a UN force] seriously.”

Meanwhile the genocide continues.

al wages, and even classify the goods as made in South Korea:

South Korean managers say privately that North Koreans see only a tiny fraction of the amount stated in glossy handouts given to foreign visitors. Instead, the money goes to the North Korean agency that is responsible for hiring them.

The issue of how much the North Korean workers are paid is, as one manager puts it, “a delicate question” as South Korea negotiates with the United States for a free trade agreement.

Under the agreement, South Korea wants products made here in the Kaesong zone, just across the border from South Korea, to be classified as made in South Korea. The United States insists they’re made in North Korea and beyond the scope of the agreement.

The North, meanwhile, earns some foreign currency while maintaining its inflexible control over its population. (See also here, on a North Korean “labour camp” near Prague.)

So what’s touted as a breakthrough in North-South relations ends up combining some of the worst aspects of each. Joshua at The Korea Liberator sums it up pretty well:

[T]he theory behind Kaesong is that there is a higher social purpose for this Gulag of Tomorrow, where high tech meets low wage. The idea is that Kaesong’s seductive, corrupting power will be the harbinger of North Korea’s gradual reform toward prosperity, and perhaps even a relative degree of political liberalization. It’s a new variation on an old idea, although it was catchier in the original German: Arbeit Macht Frei.

cess can only lead to a world of domination: man’s domination of woman, the Islamists’ domination of all the others. To counter this, we must assure universal rights to oppressed or discriminated people.

We reject « cultural relativism », which consists in accepting that men and women of Muslim culture should be deprived of the right to equality, freedom and secular values in the name of respect for cultures and traditions. We refuse to renounce our critical spirit out of fear of being accused of “Islamophobia”, an unfortunate concept which confuses criticism of Islam as a religion with stigmatisation of its believers.

We plead for the universality of freedom of expression, so that a critical spirit may be exercised on all continents, against all abuses and all dogmas.

We appeal to democrats and free spirits of all countries that our century should be one of Enlightenment, not of obscurantism.

s, which started as rare mutations, became popular for breeding and numbers increased dramatically, according to the research, published under the aegis of the University of St Andrews.

“Human hair and eye colour are unusually diverse in northern and eastern Europe (and their) origin over a short span of evolutionary time indicates some kind of selection,” says the study by Peter Frost, a Canadian anthropologist. Frost adds that the high death rate among male hunters “increased the pressures of sexual selection on early European women, one possible outcome being an unusual complex of colour traits.” […]

Just how such variety emerged over such a short period of time in one part of the world has long been a mystery. According to the new research, if the changes had occurred by the usual processes of evolution, they would have taken about 850,000 years. But modern humans, emigrating from Africa, reached Europe only 35,000-40,000 years ago.

Instead, Frost attributes the rapid evolution to how they gathered food. In Africa there was less dependence on animals and women were able to collect fruit for themselves. In Europe, by contrast, food gathering was almost exclusively a male hunter’s preserve. The retreating ice sheets left behind a landscape of fertile soil with plenty of grass and moss for herbivorous animals to eat, but few plants edible for humans. Women therefore took on jobs such as building shelters and making clothes while the men went on hunting trips, where the death rate was high.

The increase in competition for males led to rapid change as women struggled to evolve the most alluring qualities. Frost believes his theory is supported by studies which show blonde hair is an indicator for high oestrogen levels in women.

Boy this woman is impressive – Arab-American psychologist Wafa Sultan, interviewed on Al-Jazeera a week ago (clip 1050):

Wafa Sultan: The clash we are witnessing around the world is not a clash of religions, or a clash of civilizations. It is a clash between two opposites, between two eras. It is a clash between a mentality that belongs to the Middle Ages and another mentality that belongs to the 21st century. It is a clash between civilization and backwardness, between the civilized and the primitive, between barbarity and rationality. It is a clash between freedom and oppression, between democracy and dictatorship. It is a clash between human rights, on the one hand, and the violation of these rights, on other hand. It is a clash between those who treat women like beasts, and those who treat them like human beings. What we see today is not a clash of civilizations. Civilizations do not clash, but compete. […]

Dr. Ibrahim Al-Khouli: Are you a heretic?

Wafa Sultan: You can say whatever you like. I am a secular human being who does not believe in the supernatural…

Dr. Ibrahim Al-Khouli: If you are a heretic, there is no point in rebuking you, since you have blasphemed against Islam, the Prophet, and the Koran…

Wafa Sultan: These are personal matters that do not concern you.

For those of us who’ve long thought that the inexorable rise of China as the next economic superpower may not be so inexorable after all, Minxin Pei’s long article “The Dark Side of China’s Rise” provides more ammunition (via AL Daily):

The record of China’s growth over the past two decades has proved pessimists wrong and optimists not optimistic enough. But before we all start learning Chinese and marveling at the accomplishments of the Chinese Communist Party, we might want to pause for a moment. Upon close examination, China’s record loses some of its luster. China’s economic performance since 1979, for example, is actually less impressive than that of its East Asian neighbors, such as Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, during comparable periods of growth. Its banking system, which costs Beijing about 30 percent of annual GDP in bailouts, is saddled with nonperforming loans and is probably the most fragile in Asia. The comparison with India is especially striking. In six major industrial sectors (ranging from autos to telecom), from 1999 to 2003, Indian companies delivered rates of return on investment that were 80 to 200 percent higher than their Chinese counterparts. The often breathless conventional wisdom on China’s economic reform overlooks major flaws that render many predictions about China’s trajectory misleading, if not downright hazardous.

Behind the glowing headlines are fundamental frailties rooted in the Chinese neo-Leninist state. Unlike Maoism, neo-Leninism blends one-party rule and state control of key sectors of the economy with partial market reforms and an end to self-imposed isolation from the world economy. The Maoist state preached egalitarianism and relied on the loyalty of workers and peasants. The neo-Leninist state practices elitism, draws its support from technocrats, the military, and the police, and co-opts new social elites (professionals and private entrepreneurs) and foreign capital—all vilified under Maoism. Neo-Leninism has rendered the ruling Chinese Communist Party more resilient but has also generated self-destructive forces.

To most Western observers, China’s economic success obscures the predatory characteristics of its neo-Leninist state. But Beijing’s brand of authoritarian politics is spawning a dangerous mix of crony capitalism, rampant corruption, and widening inequality. Dreams that the country’s economic liberalization will someday lead to political reform remain distant. Indeed, if current trends continue, China’s political system is more likely to experience decay than democracy. It’s true that China’s recent economic achievements have given the party a new vibrancy. Yet the very policies that the party adopted to generate high economic growth are compounding the political and social ills that threaten its long-term survival.

Sadly this doesn’t appear to be a spoof (via Tim Blair):

Extremists have been blamed after a cartoon featuring the prophet Mohammed with a bomb in his turban was put up in a housing office in Oldham.

The cartoon, which has sparked protests from Muslims worldwide since it was published in a Danish newspaper last year, appeared at First Choice Homes.

Managers acted quickly to remove it and have begun an inquiry.

Oldham was hit by race riots in 2001 when youths from the mainly Muslim Asian community fought white youths.

A number of measures have since been carried out in an effort to improve race relations in the town.

First Choice Homes – which runs the town’s council housing – said the matter had been reported to police.

Steve Yorke, its Director of Management and Operations, said many staff had been offended by the cartoon.

“They were upset and angry but it’s our job to demonstrate to all staff that we will not tolerate offensive literature, we will not tolerate posters of this kind which are designed to divide our staff and set staff against each other in whatever way shape or form,” he said. […]

Greater Manchester Police said they were treating the incident “extremely seriously” and were worried the incident could affect “community cohesion”.

A spokeswoman said: “Greater Manchester Police treat any incitement of racial hatred extremely seriously and robustly investigate any such incidents that are reported to us.

“We will not tolerate any acts of racial discrimination and are committed to working with local communities to tackle any issues that may arise.”

The police are treating this “extremely seriously”? Incitement to racial hatred?? A cartoon???

Meanwhile, elsewhere in Sudan:

A Sudanese man has been forced to take a goat as his “wife”, after he was caught having sex with the animal.

The goat’s owner, Mr Alifi, said he surprised the man with his goat and took him to a council of elders.

They ordered the man, Mr Tombe, to pay a dowry of 15,000 Sudanese dinars ($50) to Mr Alifi.

“We have given him the goat, and as far as we know they are still together,” Mr Alifi said.

Mr Alifi, Hai Malakal in Upper Nile State, told the Juba Post newspaper that he heard a loud noise around midnight on 13 February and immediately rushed outside to find Mr Tombe with his goat.

“When I asked him: ‘What are you doing there?’, he fell off the back of the goat, so I captured and tied him up”.

Mr Alifi then called elders to decide how to deal with the case.

“They said I should not take him to the police, but rather let him pay a dowry for my goat because he used it as his wife,” Mr Alifi told the newspaper.

Sudan Watch take a break from the boring stuff about Darfur to concentrate on more exciting topics: bashing America.

Some statements by Westerners, who appear to want peace for Sudan, beggar belief. Here’s one relating to Darfur, from an opinion piece authored by two Americans, John Prendergast and film actor Don Cheadle:

“The United States has to lead the diplomacy in the United Nations – especially with China and Russia. And the Europeans must pony up more money.”

American diplomacy eh? I’ve seen Chinese pottery older than America. There would be no African Union if it weren’t for the European Union’s initiative and funding to enable Africans to apply solutions to African problems.

I’ve seen Chinese pottery older than America. Heh – that’s telling ’em! And thank God for the EU, enabling Africans to solve those African problems themselves, as they’ve done with such success in Darfur – and, um, Chad.

The next Sudan Watch post? A subject of vital importance to the Darfur victims: the Archbishop of York’s statement on Guantanamo Bay.