Author: Mick Hartley

This deserves more publicity:

Hundreds of Zimbabwean asylum-seekers held in detention centres have began a hunger strike over Britain’s decision to speed up their removal and send them back to face torture from Robert Mugabe’s regime.

Scores of Zimbabwean refugees have been removed forceably from Britain in the past month at a time when the United Nations has ordered an investigation into President Mugabe’s latest terror operation which has made up to a million people homeless.

Human rights groups and MPs last night demanded that the Home Office stop the deportations. They are urging Tony Blair to discuss the plight of the refugees at next month’s G8 summit at Gleneagles.

The hunger protest was started after Crespen Kulingi, an opposition leader, was told he was to be removed on Saturday. Mr Kulingi, 32, who is a close aid of Morgan Tsvangirai, the leader of the Movement for Democratic Chang (MDC), is in a wheelchair after suffering crippling injuries in detention in Zimbabwe. His supporters last night condemned his imminent deportation in what is Refugee Week.

Refugee Week? Some joke, surely…

The Home Office said: “Regular country assessments are carried out in order to ascertain the current country situation and ensure the safety of returning people to their country of origin who have no legal basis of stay in the United Kingdom.

“In light of this we would not remove anyone to a country where their lives would be in danger. We are returning people to Zimbabwe where it is found to be safe to do so.”

How do they find out if it’s safe to “return” people, as they so innocently put it? Presumably they receive assurances from that nice Mr. Mugabe.

I’m taking a break for a few days. Back Friday.

“

By then we had sat down at the formal dining table, with our backs to Ground Zero a half-mile away and our eyes on the boats on the river below us. My wife and I made abortive attempts at ordinary conversation. We were met with non sequiturs: “The only people who appreciate American foreign policy are poodles.” After further bizarre pronouncements, including a lecture on the illegality of the Holocaust under Nazi law, my wife said that she felt unwell. We gathered our things and left.

What do Dennis Hopper and Brigitte Bardot have in common? It is, apparently, “the ultimate symbol of American individualism”, and now, forty years too late, the Russians can get one:

In Soviet times the iconic motorcycle was a distant dream for Russia’s would-be bikers, hunched in their battered Ladas in the snow. But 14 years after the Soviet collapse, the “chopper”, has finally roared into Moscow.

Today, Harley-Davidson officially opens the doors of its first dealership in Russia since the 1917 Revolution, hoping to harness the spending power of the new Russian rich.

Maxim Belousov, the director of the dealership on the upmarket Kutuzovsky Prospekt in Moscow, said: “For most people here, Harley-Davidson is just a legend. Now they can ride the real bike.”

Who was it said Harleys were motor-bikes for people who don’t like motor-bikes? Or, “Why a Harley-Davidson isn’t a real American motorcycle.”

Simply put, a Harley is God’s way of saying that you have too much money and not enough brains.

atories, thirty fellows of the Royal Society, two of whom are Nobel laureates, accuse it of favouring “desperate headline-seeking” over sound science, to the detriment of public health. “Under the editorship of Richard Horton, the publication of badly conducted and poorly refereed scare stories has had devastating consequences for individual and public health, in the UK and abroad, and carried a high economic cost,” they say.

Favouring “desperate headline-seeking” over sound science? Well who’d have thought?

mory of Ayatollah Khomeini. A large force of Revolutionary Guards and a pervasive religious police stand ready to make good on this grim pledge. But directly underneath these forbidding posters and right under the noses of the morals enforcers, Iranians are buying and selling videos, making and consuming alcohol, tuning in to satellite TV stations, producing subversive films and plays and books, and defying the dress code. All women are supposed to cover all their hair at all times, and to wear a long jacket, or manteau, that covers them from neck to knee. But it’s amazing how enticing the compulsory scarf can be when worn practically on the back of the head and held in place only by hair spray. As for the obligatory manteau, any woman with any fashion sense can cut it to mold an enviable silhouette. I found a bootlegger on my arrival at Tehran’s airport and was offered alcohol on principle in every home I entered—Khomeini’s excepted—even by people who did not drink. Almost every Iranian has a relative overseas and is in regular touch with foreign news and trends. The country is an “as if” society. People live as if they were free, as if they were in the West, as if they had the right to an opinion, or a private life. And they don’t do too badly at it. I have now visited all three of the states that make up the so-called axis of evil. Rough as their regime can certainly be, the citizens of Iran live on a different planet from the wretched, frightened serfs of Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong Il.

manising Mandarin to the old Wade-Giles system, and probably Beijing is nearer to Mandarin pronunciation than Peking – but so what? Peking happens to be far more mellifluous that the ugly Beijing (even more so Canton over Guanghzhou), and it’s what we’ve called the Chinese capital for years, with all the historical accretions to the name that that implies. We don’t worry that what we call Florence is Firenze to Italians, or that Munich is Munchen to Germans. So why have we been bullied into dropping Peking?

t by a horrendous government, what is the cure?

The only way to rescue the people of North Korea from obscene poverty and hardship is to let the world know the real state of this country. In the fall of 2000, using the unprecedented freedom granted me when I was awarded the Friendship Medal, I guided a group of journalists around Pyongyang who had arrived to accompany Madeleine Albright, then Secretary of State. While traveling on a highway north of the capital, we came across a soldier lying dead in the middle of the road. Over the objections of my government minder, we stopped to investigate. The signs that the soldier had been tortured were obvious.

In response, I handed over a statement of humanitarian principles to the North Korean government. My government minder at that time—who had been given the responsibility of controlling my activities closely—was abruptly exchanged. I never saw him or his family again.

My behavior offended the party leaders, who of course prevented me from attending at any more hospitals. My car was sabotaged, and finally I was forced to leave the country. Against the wishes of the North Korean authorities, I went directly to Seoul instead of going home to Germany, where I spoke to international journalists.

I interviewed hundreds of North Korean defectors at the Chinese-North Korean border and elsewhere, in order to learn more about the cruel realities of life in their home country. Former prisoners of North Korean concentration camps told me about mass executions, torture, rape, murder, and other crimes against humanity—all performed as punishment for “anti-state criminal acts.”

The international community, working closely with the media, must put serious pressure on the North Korean regime to open up to the outside world and save the lives of their ordinary citizens. As a German born after World War II, I know all too well the guilt of my grandparents’ generation for remaining silent while the Nazis committed indescribable crimes. I believe it is my duty as a human being to expose the crimes and tyranny of the North Korean regime.

thousands of acres of grey concrete rubble where homes and small businesses stood, and created a vast tide of refugees seeking shelter and food.

In Hatcliffe, a squatter camp in north Harare, the police destroyed not only a Catholic refuge for Aids orphans, a secondary school and a World Bank-funded public lavatory, but on Wednesday, under the grim eye of two local imams, they completed the destruction a Sunni mosque.

Mussa Mukwinda, 81, the secretary of the Hatcliffe Islamic Organisation, is sleeping in the nearby bush. “The police said, ‘we do what we want to do’. Sick people, children have no blankets, no food.”

The Mugabe regime has provided no temporary accommodation or assistance to the victims of the mass demolitions. Everyone has been told to go to the rural areas that are now enduring their third year of famine. {…]

Augustine Chihuri, the Police Commissioner, said yesterday that Operation Murambatsvina was meant to “clean the country of the crawling mass of maggots bent on destroying the economy”. He thanked the people who had their homes destroyed “for not going wild during the exercise”.

igger child,” telling a jail psychologist she hoped to ignite a race war.

But as the San Francisco Chronicle reported, Cromer’s attorney argued that “his client killed because she is consumed by schizophrenic paranoia —not hate for blacks.” Or as the lawyer put it, “This case does not involve racism; it involves insanity.” To help undermine this claim, the prosecutor enlisted the assistance of Szasz, the iconoclastic psychiatrist famous for rejecting the insanity defense, involuntary commitment, and the very concept of mental illness. At the trial, Szasz explained the difference between a medical diagnosis and a psychiatric diagnosis: “Medical diagnoses deal with objective and demonstrable lesions of the body, broken bones, diseased livers, kidneys, and so on. Psychiatric diagnoses deal with behaviors that human beings display, and they have to be interpreted in moral, cultural, and legal terms and, therefore, different interpreters will arrive at different judgments.” He pointed out that “homosexuality was recognized as a mental disease until a few years ago” and that smoking, previously considered a habit, had recently been classified as a mental disorder.

Asked “what [Cromer] was suffering from, if anything,” on the day of the murder, Szasz offered the following opinion based on her records: “She was suffering from the consequences of having lived a life very badly, very stupidly, very evilly.…From the time of her teens, for reasons which I don’t know…whatever she [has] done, she has done very badly. She was a bad student.…She was a bad wife. She was a bad mother. She was a bad employee insofar as she was employable. Then she started to engage [in taking] illegal drugs, then she escalated to illegal assault, and finally she committed this murder.…Life is a task. You either cope with it or it gets you.…If you do not know how to build, you can always destroy.”

Szasz did not really try to explain why Cromer killed Reginald. Indeed, the main strength of his testimony was his acknowledgment of how difficult it is to get inside the head of a criminal—or anyone else. Cromer was the way she was and did the things she did “for reasons I don’t know.” By contrast, the defense experts confidently asserted that her crime was caused by a mental illness.

In Szasz Under Fire, a new collection of exchanges with his critics, Szasz, a Reason contributing editor and an emeritus professor of psychiatry at the SUNY Upstate Medical University in Syracuse, explains why, unlike the defense experts, he did not conduct a “psychiatric examination” of Cromer. “I regard the practice as the epitome of junk science and refuse to participate in it,” he writes. Not only is there “no objective test for mental illness,” but psychiatrists are supposed to determine a defendant’s state of mind at the time of the crime by talking to him many months later, a pretense Szasz considers “prima facie absurd.” This was one of the main points he made in his testimony, which was condemned by psychiatrists outraged that he had dared to question the premises of their profession. The jurors, who convicted Cromer, apparently agreed with Szasz about the reliability of psychiatric testimony.