Author: Mick Hartley

l to all those who have the opportunity to act against such arbitrary acts to express their solidarity with people who to this day live in a state of “unfreedom.” […]

Seemingly unshakable totalitarian monoliths are in fact sometimes as cohesive as proverbial houses of cards, and fall just as quickly. Continuing democratization of the whole region, together with growing dissent inside the country, must eventually have a positive effect. As Aung San Suu Kyi celebrates her 60th birthday, I wish for her that those changes will happen as soon as possible, and that my silly idea — to hand her a rose — becomes a simple and easy thing to do.

On the subject of Aung San Suu Kyi, a letter to the Times from the Warden of St Antony’s College, and the Principal of St Hugh’s College, Oxford:

On June 19 Aung San Suu Kyi, the champion of liberty and democracy in Burma/ Myanmar, will reach the age of 60. By that time she will have spent a total of 3,523 days under house arrest.

Our two colleges have elected her as an honorary Fellow. We have been denied the honour of welcoming her back to Oxford and expressing to her our admiration for her astonishing stamina, courage and commitment to her country’s cause.

She is the brightest light in the gloom of a country governed by a military dictatorship that rejects democracy, the rule of law and human rights. She is one of an illustrious few who have remained faithful to their political creeds and maintained their dignity despite their opponents’ efforts to humiliate them.

Let us hope that she will soon be one of the even smaller group who have survived the ordeal and become democratic leaders of their countries. Let her be the Mandela of Asia.

But that will happen only if the rest of the world puts real pressure on Burma’s current leaders. State sovereignty is not an acceptable excuse for withholding pressure. Let us all find ways of pressurising the dictators in Yangon/Rangoon. Innocent Burmese citizens may suffer as a result of that pressure, but Aung San Suu Kyi and the members of the majority party which she leads have repeatedly said that that price is one the country is ready to pay.

Labour MP Kate Hoey writes from Harare:

In two weeks’ time, at a luxury hotel in Scotland, Tony Blair will sit down to dinner with President Mbeki of South Africa, an unashamed ally and apologist of the monstrous Mugabe regime in Zimbabwe. As the two leaders wine and dine in Gleneagles, Robert Mugabe’s riot police will be engaged on their brutal and systematic mission to destroy the homes and livelihoods of some of the poorest people in Africa.

How can Mr Blair talk blithely of making poverty history when African leaders led by Thabo Mbeki allow such atrocities to continue unchallenged on their doorstep? The South African President must take huge responsibility for the terror and humanitarian disaster which I have seen over the past week in Zimbabwe.

I write this from Harare, my fury overflowing after days of avoiding police roadblocks and witnessing the terrible scenes left behind in towns and villages destroyed by Mugabe’s Operation Murambatsviva, or Drive Out Rubbish, a violent programme that can be likened to Pol Pot’s. This week as we drove towards Killarney, a sprawling settlement on the outskirts of Bulawayo, rumours were spreading that Mugabe’s henchmen were about to extend their crackdown from the vendors and informal traders in the city centre to the outlying settlements.

Sure enough, the roads are full of trucks with units of police and shaven-headed youth militia drafted in to carry out the destruction ordered by Zanu-PF’s high command. My heart pounds as we take diversions to avoid checkpoints and plainclothes agents loitering on the streets. Eventually we gain a vantage point and look down on a grotesque scene of burning houses spread out across the landscape. Plumes of smoke rise from blazing thatch where houses had stood among meagre patches of withered maize stalks. I can see teams of police clubbing the mud walls and throwing corrugated iron sheets to the ground.

That night I am filled with guilt and anger at my utter helplessness, mixed with shame that, although it has provided aid for the people of Zimbabwe, my Government has continued to back the useless “silent diplomacy” of Mr Mbeki. […]

Mr Mbeki’s presence at the G8 summit in July is a reward for promising to tackle Africa’s blight of bad governance, corruption and human rights abuses. Disgracefully, he has rallied most of Africa’s leaders in wilful denial that anything is amiss in Zimbabwe and has repeatedly blocked attempts at the UN to address the country’s appalling human rights record.

Instead of looking forward to a convivial dinner of fine food and wine, Mr Blair should be insisting that the South African President condemns the excesses of Mugabe’s regime. If he won’t, the invitation to the Gleneagles summit should be withdrawn.

Omar at Iraq the Model is none too impressed with the Beeb and its One Day in Iraq feature:

Ten days ago I was contacted by someone called Sarah Brown from the BBC; she had explained to me their team’s desire to interview me via phone and e mail as part of a program they were producing. The program was named “One Day in Iraq” which I thought would really represent a day in Iraq.

So, after several e mails were exchanged to confirm a date and time for the interview, they asked me to do another interview for a side program about Iraqi blogs.

On the 7th of June I received a phone call from them and we started doing the interview. The line was bad so we had to try several times before we were able to get a good line.
I was asked about what was my day like and I told them the story of that day from the time I woke up at 7am till the moment I picked up the phone. As a matter of fact, my day wasn’t a special one; I took the bus to central Baghdad then changed buses to get to the clinic where I work at in a southern suburb of Baghdad then after doing the usual daily work at the clinic I went with 2 of my friends and Mohammed to have drinks and lunch in one of our favorite restaurants. […]

Obviously the BBC found my day too boring to be reported especially when it comes from an Iraqi in Baghdad so they chose to turn 180 degrees and report a comment from someone stationed 10,000 miles away from Baghdad to get the a good view about “One Day in Iraq”!

No offense to the bloggers who participated in the show as they have the right to say whatever they like and to speak to whomever they like but I feel very disappointed by what the involved BBC staff did.

Moreover, I sent the BBC person who contacted me an e mail at an earlier time asking them to send me the links that lead to the story where my interview was supposed to be found but guess what? I got no response from them at all and they didn’t even send a message to say “sorry but we couldn’t use your story and here is why”.

And this is so impolite especially after I was answering 4 or 5 e mails a day to them when they were preparing for their show.
Maybe they were expecting me to lie to them and make my day less boring and more appealing to them by talking about a car bomb or adding some whining to have my comments posted on their website but you know what? I don’t care because I told the truth which they apparently don’t like to hear and that’s their problem now.
I guess that I was too hopeful to have expected much from networks like the BBC that are so drowned in their bias.

African leaders are happy after Mbeki sacked his deputy:

South African President Thabo Mbeki has been praised in South Africa and abroad for sacking his deputy, Jacob Zuma.

Mr Mbeki acted after the trial of Mr Zuma’s financial adviser, Schabir Shaik, appeared to implicate the deputy president in corruption.

The president’s announcement has been welcomed as a signal of Africa’s determination to fight corruption.

Mr Zuma was once seen as the heir apparent to the presidency, and remains a popular figure.

“In a young democracy like ours, it’s all about setting solid precedents that will stand our society in good stead decades and even generations from now,” The Star newspaper said in its Wednesday editorial.

“President Thabo Mbeki, by dismissing his deputy Jacob Zuma, put another important building block in place,” the editorial continued.

Governments elsewhere in Africa welcomed Mr Mbeki’s announcement as pointing the way forward for the continent.

“It is a very important move which shows we realise some of our pitfalls and we will not wait on US President [George W] Bush and British Prime Minister [Tony] Blair to tell us what should be done for us to get more aid,” Zambian Finance Minister Ng’andu Magande told Reuters news agency.

Kenyan Planning and National Development Minister Peter Anyang Nyongo said “Thabo Mbeki has clearly demonstrated that nobody is too high up in the official hierarchy of power not to be subjected to the rule of law”.

Meanwhile, in Zimbabwe….

I recommended “The Aquariums of Pyongyang” a year ago. Turns out that Bush is a fan as well:

President Bush met privately yesterday with a well-known North Korean defector who spent 10 years in a prison camp and has since become an outspoken critic of his homeland’s government, a move that could provoke Pyongyang just as it was reviving stalled nuclear talks.

Bush invited Kang Chol Hwan, a journalist and director of the Democracy Network Against North Korean Gulag, to visit with him in the Oval Office and recount his tale of suffering in North Korea, where he was arrested in 1977 at age 9 and had to eat rats, cockroaches and snakes to survive. The White House did not list the meeting on the president’s public schedule, but a spokesman later confirmed it.

According to aides, Bush has been fascinated with Kang’s story ever since he began reading the former prisoner’s book, “The Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in a North Korean Gulag,” published in English in 2001. Bush has recommended the book to senior White House and Bush administration officials, who have been poring through it lately as well

.

And we have Kang’s account of the meeting, translated at The Marmot’s Hole:

President Bush’s first question was, “If you were the President of the U.S., what would you do about North Korea?” When I thought about it later, he had asked the most important question first, and I was surprised by it. I told him the opinions of several high-ranking North Korean defectors I had met and my own opinions. “If I were U.S. president, I would first convince China – as difficult as it may be – to stop forcefully repatriating North Korean defectors, and secondly, I would cooperate with the international community to work to close North Korea’s prison camps. I would resolve the nuclear issue after solving these two issues first.” After I had said this, I explained, “This is because the North Korean nuclear issue is an important issue in international relations, but from the position of residents in North Korea, the human rights issue is more important than the nuclear issue.”

President Bush said, “I sympathize [with that position]… I will work to improve human rights in North Korea, and in order to do this, I will have many people read your books.” He said, “I think the North Korean human rights issue is very important, but it appears people around me are still unfamiliar with the situation.”

idates is more restrictive than ever. The Council, for instance, disqualified two well-known reformists, former minister of higher education Mostafa Moin and Vice President Mohsen Mehralizadeh. On May 23, on the instructions of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, the Guardian Council qualified Moin and Mehralizadeh. All candidates who hold distinctly alternative political viewpoints to those of the ruling elite, including all women candidates, remained disqualified. […]

In sum, Iran’s election laws make meaningful participation of all Iranians in the political process impossible. Iran’s elections will be meaningful and in accordance with international human rights standards only when both of these fundamental structural issues—discriminatory election laws and the Guardian Council’s arbitrary powers of exclusion—are addressed.

Mukhtaran under house arrest – to stop her from speaking out. In phone conversations in the last few days, she said that when she tried to step outside, police pointed their guns at her. To silence her, the police cut off her land line.

After she had been detained, a court ordered her attackers released, putting her life in jeopardy. That happened on a Friday afternoon, when the courts do not normally operate, and apparently was a warning to Ms. Mukhtaran to shut up. Instead, Ms. Mukhtaran continued her protests by cellphone. But at dawn yesterday the police bustled her off, and there’s been no word from her since. Her cellphone doesn’t answer.

Asma Jahangir, a Pakistani lawyer who is head of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, said she had learned that Ms. Mukhtaran was taken to Islamabad, furiously berated and told that President Pervez Musharraf was very angry with her. She was led sobbing to detention at a secret location. She is barred from contacting anyone, including her lawyer.

“She’s in their custody, in illegal custody,” Ms. Jahangir said. “They have gone completely crazy.”

Even if Ms. Mukhtaran were released, airports have been alerted to bar her from leaving the country. According to Dawn, a Karachi newspaper, the government took this step, “fearing that she might malign Pakistan’s image.”

Update: more on this in the Guardian.

is antifeminist, everywhere it is authoritarian, and everywhere it is intolerant of other religions and other interpretations of Islam.”

“These conservative, reactionary movements,” Anderson says, “may be in conflict with a conservative Bush administration — but that doesn’t make them any less conservative or reactionary. The debate on Foucault helps to throw all this into high relief.”

Abd Al-Aziz, however, appearing on Saudi Iqra TV, it’s business as usual:

Host: “You mean to say that the World Council of Churches delegated the mission of Christianizing of the world to the US.”

Abd Al-Aziz: “Yes. And how could the US win legitimacy for this without anyone saying that they are perpetrating massacres and waging a Crusader war? It fabricated the 9/11 show. I call it a fabrication because much has been written on this. We are also to blame. Why do we accept a single perspective? Countless books were written, some of which were even translated into Arabic, like Thierry Meyssan’s 9/11 – The Appalling Fraud and Pentagate. “Pentagate” like Watergate… He brings documents to prove that the method used in destroying the three (sic) towers was “controlled demolition.

“This is an architectural engineering theory, which was invented by the Americans. They teach it in their universities. They make movies and documentaries about it. They incorporated it in movie scenarios and then carried it out in real life. Why do we accept this?”

Host: “My God, doctor. This is unbelievable! You’re saying that this destruction…”

Abd Al-Aziz: “…was a controlled demolition. The building collapsed in its place, without hitting a single building to its left or right. The three towers fell in place.”

Host: “In the same method they use in movies and plays?”

Abd Al-Aziz: “Yes, Exactly like that. That is how the US won international legitimacy. You could sense the (9/11) operation was pre-planned because many things were revealed in the days that followed. For example 4,000 Jews caught influenza on that exact day. They set a timer, and all 4,000…”

Host: “By God, you crack me up! They all set a timer and got influenza on the same day. So the building was completely empty of Jews.”

Yet another debunking of the Lancet “100,000” deaths study (via Davidsmedienkritik, where there’s a lengthy update worth reading).