Author: Mick Hartley

to deport him not to Zimbabwe but to Malawi. But given the latter’s links with Mugabe’s regime, say his supporters, they might as well sign his death warrant and be done with it. The reason for returning him to Malawi is that he came into Britain on a Malawian passport. That was because Zimbabwe police had his real passport.

MEMRI report on what is, in effect, an Iranian academy for suicide bombers: the subject of this clip from Al-Arabiya TV.

The volunteers said they wanted to carry out martyrdom operations to liberate Islamic lands and stated that so far 40,000 “time bombs” have been recruited.

[S]pokesmen for the organization are trying to emphasize that it is not a government organization and does not have the support of the Iranian government. However, at the same time, they hint at help given to them by the government.

Although Firooz Rajai, one of the leaders of the organization, stated that volunteers have not been sent to carry out missions, the London Arabic-language daily Al-Sharq Al-Awsat reported in June 2004 that a group sent from Iran on a suicide mission to Iraq had apparently been apprehended and handed over to British forces in Iraq.

The interviewees on the program also underlined the “successful” cooperation between the organization and the Palestinian movements Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

Despite the rhetoric of equality, the volunteers appear to be mostly if not all women. “We vow to turn into bombs that will explode at anyone.”

As the commentary says, “they await death with joy and happiness”.

As David Rieff makes clear in this article (via Butterflies and Wheels), the famine that led to Live Aid in 1985 was caused to a significant extent by the brutal collectivisation policy pursued by the Marxist Dergue regime in Ethiopia, “every bit the equal in its radicalism to the policies Stalin pursued in the Ukraine in the 1930s, where, as in Ethiopia, the result was inevitable: famine.”

To this day, Oxfam has not officially retracted the policy of working with the Dergue that it pursued. The most it has ever been willing to do has been to speak out against the “haste, scale and the timing” of the resettlement. Some aid officials went much further in accommodating the regime’s policies. Jack Finucane of the Irish relief NGO Concern hosted a dinner in Addis Ababa in late 1985 for foreign relief workers, attended by Bob Geldof, at which he defended the resettlements. Finucane reportedly demanded that western donor governments stop being so squeamish and put money into the project. […]

With the exception of MSF [Medecins Sans Frontieres], what neither the relief world in general, nor the UN, nor Geldof and his Live Aid team have ever come to terms with is that the Mengistu regime—finally ousted in 1991—also committed mass murder in the resettlement programme in which Live Aid monies were used and in which NGOs that benefited from Live Aid funding were active. The Dergue was in control, and it did with the UN and the NGOs what the Nazis did with the International Committee of the Red Cross: it made them unwilling collaborators

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No, he isn’t the man in the photo, and very likely wasn’t directly involved in the hostage-taking at the US embassy in Tehran, but he was involved in the assassination of three dissident Kurdish leaders in Vienna in 1989. Amir Taheri has the details:

Ahmadinejad was one of two emissaries chosen by Khamenei to meet the Kurds and invite them to return home and work within the framework of the Islamic Republic.

The Kurdish team was led by Abdulrahman Ghassemlou, Secretary General of the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan (DPIK).

It included three members two of whom, Abdullah Qaderi-Azar and Fazel Rassuli died alongside Ghassemlou in the attack. The third Sadeq Sharafkandi escaped only to be murdered, three years later in Berlin, by another hit-squad.

The meeting was held in a hotel room in Vienna and the proceedings were secretly taped by the Kurds. Just days after the tragedy, I was able to listen to some of the three tapes, courtesy of a close associate of Ghassemlou.

My notes of the time show that Ahmadinejad was the key negotiator from Tehran. In one particularly interesting segment there is a debate between Ghassemlou and Ahmadinejad.

The Kurdish leader demands that the Islamic Republic accept the principle of Kurdish autonomy before his party can return to Iran and work within the regime.

Ahmadinejad starts his reply with convoluted references to the “principles of pure Islamic rule” as set out by Ali Ibn Abutalib, the fourth Caliph, and concludes that there could be no autonomy in Islam since all Muslims must live under the same “divine authority.”

He then makes an oblique reference to the fact that Ghassemlou and his party had collaborated with Saddam Hussain during Iraq’s war against Iran, implying that the Kurdish leaders should be glad that they are allowed to return home without facing charges of high treason.

He also warns Ghassemlou to be on guard against attempts by the Soviet Union to incite Iranian minorities to secession.

The third tape ends with the sound of shots as if fired by handguns plus cries of confusion by the victims. Ahmadinejad’s voice can also be heard shouting: “That way, that way!” presumably, warning the attackers not to shoot him by mistake.

Did Ahmadinejad know about the plot to kill the Kurds or did he go to Vienna believing that he was to negotiate Ghassemlou’s return to Iran? There is no satisfactory answer.

This is remarkable:

President Bush yesterday challenged EU leaders to scrap massive subsidies paid to their farmers, saying free trade with Africa would eliminate the need for Third World aid.

Mr Bush, on the eve of the G8 summit in Gleneagles, said that Europe paid “tremendous” agricultural subsidies, and that the US was ready to drop its own payouts to American farmers if Europe had the courage to do the same.

Mr Bush’s challenge — in an interview with Sir Trevor McDonald to be screened by ITV tonight — is likely to be rejected not only by France and Germany, but by many in his own country. But it appeared to be a bold rhetorical step by his Administration to get the world’s richest nations away from talk of aid and toward free-market solutions in the quest to alleviate poverty in Africa.

Asked directly if America would drop its subsidy system if the EU abandoned the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), Mr Bush said: “Absolutely. And I think we have an obligation to work together to do that.

“Because if we do achieve this business of free trade, and if markets in the West are opened up to countries in Africa, they could be so successful, they could eliminate the need for aid. The benefits that have come from opening up markets — our markets to them and their markets to us — far outweigh the benefits of aid.”

Interestingly, the BBC report on the same interview relegates this offer to a couple of paragraphs at the end, the main subject being – oh dear – Bush ruling out US backing for any Kyoto-style deal on climate change at the G8 summit.

The Guardian, of course, has its own take:

George Bush sounds a warning today to those hoping for a significant deal on Africa and climate change at Wednesday’s G8 summit, making clear that when he arrives at Gleneagles he will dedicate his efforts to putting America’s interests first.

The president will adopt a stance starkly at odds with the idealism professed by the performers at Saturday’s Live 8 concerts around the world and their television audience of 2 billion.

Then, near the end of the article:

Mr Bush also said that the rich world had an “obligation” to make trade fairer, but made it clear he would not slash farming subsidies unless the European Union did the same.

What a bastard, eh?

led from the dock one official thought that Usher had been given bail, and he took his chance to escape.

He says that for much of the past three weeks he has lived in the bush, scavenging for food, until a school friend took him in. “If I am captured again they will kill me for sure,” he said. “I believe Tony Blair and his ministers cannot know what is happening here or they would not send people back. My only hope now is to somehow get across the border.”

labour; those canny or rich enough to escape the draft can be more profitable still. Only a small minority of 18-27-year-olds (9%, says the defence ministry, though this is disputed) actually serve their two years. The rest are exempted on medical grounds, or receive educational deferments which bring huge bribes for doctors and universities….

This shameless travesty has huge costs. Conscripts are generally poor, ill-educated, and sometimes already alcoholic and malnourished.

Nick Cohen on Zimbabwean asylum-seekers:

All the fuss about New Labour temporarily suspending the deportation of Zimbabweans for fear of spoiling this weekend’s euphoric self-satisfaction missed the point that the government has done its best to stop all refugees from Zimbabwe getting to Britain in the first place by imposing visa controls.

I asked Sarah Harland of the British Zimbabwe Association to name one opponent of Mugabe who had been granted a visa. She laughed. The whole point of visas is to stop refugees. The more wounds you can show, the faster you are shown the high commission’s door.

Zimbabweans go to Malawi and South Africa. The few with the money and inclination buy fake passports and rely on people smugglers to find a way into Britain. They’ve no choice, but their desperation means that a government that has driven them into the arms of people smugglers can maintain they’re con-artists using criminal gangs who aren’t really Zimbabweans.

‘People were claiming to be from Zimbabwe and turning out to be from somewhere else,’ said Tony Blair last week, while former Foreign Secretary Robin Cook went on Radio 4 to denounce the people smugglers. They sounded like Dr Frankenstein railing against his monster.

I don’t know what to say about Live8, beyond a distaste for the spectacle of some of the world’s largest egos congratulating themselves on what wonderful people they are. Jeff Jarvis has some links of a generally sceptical nature, including this, from an African in London:

They will be marching to display the rude health of their souls and to confirm their power and magnanimity over the huddled, miserable wretches of Africa. The monies that they give, no doubt in the billions of dollars, will be used to maintain and extend a vast system of spiritual and material privilege. Every dollar shall confirm their superiority and the inverse inferiority of the African. And of course because they are a pragmatic people, each dollar shall be used to employ that army of aid workers who would otherwise be flipping burgers or working in retail. Statistics will be thrown about with wild abandon. Eyes will get misty at the thought of ‘30,000 children dying everyday of extreme poverty’. Pledges will be made by mouths set grimly in the emotion of the moment. The rhetoric will be high flown and every speech will include words like Humanity, Universal, We, Justice, Suffering, History, Community, Brotherhood…

These words will be used to strip Africans of their problems in the name of brotherhood. Geldof and company will lay claim to the very last thing so many Africans own: our problems. And it will be terrible and evil beyond imagining for owning your problem is at the heart of what it is to be human. It is when we wrestle and suffer and triumph over our problems that we are most human, but this alas is not to be if the soul stealers on show succeed. I do not want anyone to suffer needlessly. I would prefer everyone to live in a democratic, prosperous community that knows no war or want. But these are conditions that must be battled and struggled for; they have never arrived as a gift from a stranger. And all those who promise them have always turned out to be thieves or murderers if not both. Geldof and the Live8, the G8, these governments and the eager little, statistic spouting NGO types are thieves of African humanity.

on of the now-divided Korean Peninsula under the unfettered “independent, socialist” rule of the Pyongyang regime–in other words, unconditional annexation of present-day South Korea and liquidation of the government of the Republic of Korea (ROK) so that Kim Jong-il and company might exercise total command over the entire Korean race (minjok in Korean).

If that sounds preposterous and utterly impracticable to us, understand that things look very different from Pyongyang. North Korean statecraft has been predicated on that very vision for over half a century. To this day, the Sunshine Policy and all the rest notwithstanding, Pyongyang grants diplomatic status to only one “government mission” from Seoul: the legation of the so-called National Democratic Front of South Korea (Hanminjon), an invented resistance group supposedly based in the South that regularly uses North Korean airwaves to denounce the Republic of Korea as an illegitimate colonial police state.

The second purpose is to settle a historical grievance, namely the failure of the famous June 1950 surprise attack against South Korea–an assault that might well have unified all of Korea on Pyongyang’s terms but for America’s unexpected military intervention in defense of the ROK. In Pyongyang’s telling, it is only American imperialism that has permitted an otherwise rotten, unstable and irredeemable ROK government to survive since 1950. The total-mobilization war state that Pyongyang has painfully erected over the decades (at the cost of, inter alia, the North Korean famine of the 1990s) is a response to this grievance and an instrument for fulfilling this vision.

The third purpose is to conduct a war, and that war is not some future theoretical contingency. Rather, in the view of North Korean leaders, their country is at war today, here and now. This may help to explain why the DPRK, with its population of more than twenty million, has for years fielded an army of a million-plus soldiers, a military force that currently ranks as the world’s fourth largest–larger even than Russia’s. Although we are sometimes inattentive to it, the historical fact is that the Korean War’s battles were only halted through a cease-fire agreement, the Armistice of 1953. There has never been a peace treaty bringing the hostilities to a formal and conclusive end. The Korean War is, from the DPRK’s standpoint, an ongoing war–and North Korea’s leadership is committed to an eventual, unconditional victory in that war, however long that may take and however much that may cost. […]

There is no indication, incidentally, that North Korean decision-makers view WMD as “special weapons” to be held in reserve. On the contrary, missiles and nuclear devices seem to figure integrally in North Korean official thinking and are already being used on a regular basis in North Korean statecraft, as the government’s ongoing forays in “blackmail diplomacy” attest. Moreover, despite North Korea’s emphasis on race doctrine, there is no indication whatsoever that North Korean leadership would hesitate to use such weapons on minjok in South Korea. Pyongyang did not blink at starving perhaps one million of its own people for reasons of state in the 1990s. It regards the South Korean state as a cancerous monstrosity, and those who support it as corrupt and worthless national traitors.