Author: Mick Hartley

Amir Taheri on why Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai is demanding that the US forge a long-term defense relationship with his newly liberated nation:

[W]hy a long-term military link with the United States? Because Afghanistan is located in a rough neighborhood where despotic regimes hold sway.

These regimes regard a democratic Afghanistan, as much as a democratic Iraq, as an existential threat. What would Iranians and their Arab neighbors think of their despotic regimes if the Afghans — who have always been dismissed as rustics, if not outright barbarians — are allowed to choose their own government and determine its policies through free elections?

Later this year, Afghanistan and Iraq will hold general elections in which dozens of political parties representing all the shades of the political spectrum will take part. In June’s Iranian presidential election, however, only candidates approved by the “Supreme Guide” will be allowed to stand, while all political parties remain banned.

Iran is not alone among Afghanistan’s neighbors to fear democratization in that country. Turkmenistan is suffocating under President Safar-Murad Niyazov’s medieval personality cult. Uzbekistan is a classic dictatorship built around President Islam Karimov. China is one of the world’s last remaining Communist regimes. Tajikistan, where an alliance of neo-Communists and Islamists holds power, may be less repressive but is no more democratic. And Pakistan, where political parties are theoretically allowed while their leaders are exiled, is yet to emerge from its tradition of see-sawing between democracy and military rule.

Nice letter in the Times:

Sir, “I am a Liberal Democrat because . . . I have a passion for civil liberties and social justice” (Mr Nick Perry’s letter, April 21). But not in Iraq.

te the stern ban, Internet chat-rooms and literary circles are abuzz with talk about the book and speculation that Serve the People will soon be published overseas.

ent adopted an amended penal code making it a criminal offence to promote the idea that genocide had happened. In February the award-winning Turkish novelist, Orhan Pamuk, told a Swiss newspaper that “one million Armenians were killed in Turkey”, prompting one governor to order his books to be burnt.

I finally caught up with Scars of Evolution part 2: well worth a listen if the Aquatic Ape Hypothesis interests you, and still available here. The programme concentrated on three arguments:

1) Brain size: the remarkable growth in our ancestors’ brain size strongly suggests a diet rich in the necessary nutrients, notably omega-3 fatty acids and iodine, which are available in abundance in a marine environment.

2) Breathing: for land mammals, including all other primates, breathing is like heart rate, something outside voluntary control. For fully aquatic mammals like dolphins and whales, breathing is entirely under conscious control (they sleep a half-brain at a time so they can keep coming up for air). For us, it’s mostly unconscious but can be controlled voluntarily: a necessary adaptation for a semi-aquatic life, and of course for speech.

3) The Vernix: we’re the only primates to be born covered in a waxy substance known as the Vernix caseosa. Useful for when you’re born in the water. It turns out seals may have something similar.

Well, I’m convinced, but Jim Moore has said he’ll be putting up a rebuttal on his anti-AAT website.

Invade Taiwan? Pas de probleme!

French prime minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin has said Paris will continue to push for the lifting of the European Union’s arms embargo on China.
Mr Raffarin was speaking at the start of a three-day visit to China.

He also said France had no objection to China’s anti-secession law, authorising the use of force against Taiwan should it move to declare independence.

Some EU states have recently voiced concern on the issue after China passed the controversial law in March.

Mr Raffarin – together with his Chinese counterpart Wen Jiabao – also attended a ceremony where Chinese airline companies signed orders worth about $3.2bn (£1.7bn) for 30 European Airbus aircraft.

Mr Raffarin said he saw no reason for the EU to delay lifting the arms embargo imposed against China after Beijing’s crackdown on pro-democracy rallies in Tiananmen Square in 1989.

He described the ban as “unfair, outdated and discriminatory”.

le, which stands about one metre (three feet) high and holds six wooden cups on a wooden tray.

Another striking present is a fiercely anti-US painting from former Cambodian king Norodom Sihanouk that was given to Kim Il-Sung in 1970.

The painting shows brooms labelled with the French names of China, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam and Korea sweeping a US soldier, who is tumbling upside down and screaming in agony with a US flag in tatters next to him.

Libyan leader Moamer Kadhafi gave a metre-long golden sword in 1986 and former Tanzanian president Julius Nyerere in 1969 delivered a live zebra, a photo of which hangs in one of the exhibition’s long hallways.

A guide who took a group of foreign journalists through the exhibition recently said Kim Jong-Il continues to receive about 2,000 gifts each year.

However the days of national leaders raining presents on him and his father appear to have ended with the fall of the Iron Curtain in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Vast rooms showcasing gifts from 2003 and 2004 reveal an undoubtedly expensive array of presents that include carved blocks of jade, computers, furniture and gold-plated mobile phones, but most are from Chinese and South Korean business people and companies.

One display from the 2004 room hints at desperation – a rug with Kim Jong-Il’s face hangs on a wall next to a plaque that says: “From a citizen of Uzbekistan”.

Nevertheless, the exhibition hall remains an integral vehicle in maintaining the personality cults of the Kims, who have been relentlessly portrayed for decades as near God-like heroes of the nation.

Foreign visitors to the exhibition are not spared from paying their respects to Kim Il-Sung, with government minders bringing them to a room where they are greeted by a disturbingly realistic wax figure of a smiling Kim Il-Sung.

One of the minders asks scruffy journalists to tuck their clothes in, then ushers them to within a couple of metres of Kim with a quiet order: “Please bow before him”.

Is there an Ivor Cutler revival going on? There’s a post at Metafilter on the man, he featured in a BBC4 programme last week, and Alex Kapranos of Franz Ferdinand writes about him as some kind of inspiration. I don’t know. I saw him back in the Seventies when he was supporting…well, to be honest I don’t remember who he was supporting. I even met him briefly when he came into the record shop I was working at, in Camden Town. Everyone loved him then, and it seems that everyone loves him now. An all-purpose cosy loveable eccentric with a lilting Scottish brogue. Alex Kapranos describes a typical gig:

I remember going to see him in Glasgow. It was an artsy kind of event – one of those gigs that are heavily funded by the Arts Council. The audience was incredibly reverential. They just seemed to be hanging on every word. This was fair enough, as he was pretty good. But it also meant they were laughing at everything he said. At one point he remarked: “You think that everything I say is funny just because I’ve got a funny voice.”

Personally I think there’s a fine line between surrealism and whimsy, and Cutler is over on the whimsy side, but good luck to him.

Another chapter in the heroic struggle of the Iraqi resistance against the imperialist occupying forces:

More than 50 bodies have been discovered in the Tigris river south of Baghdad, Iraqi President Jalal Talabani has announced. They are believed to be those of Shia Muslim hostages who had been seized in the town of Madain by Sunni militants.

Iraqi forces raided Madain earlier this week after reports that hostages had been taken, but found nothing….

Police officers quoted by the AFP news agency said the bodies found in the Tigris included those of women and children.

p>”He asked me what my name was, and I answered [Khaled]. He said: ‘Wonder of wonders, [like the name of the Muslim commander] Khaled bin Al-Walid. And where do you live? And how old are you?’ I said to myself: ‘He is asking how old I am in order to be sure my blood is suitable for the deed. He placed his hand on my head and asked: ‘Khaled my son, do you know how to light a fire?’ Another wave of terror swept over me. Would he cook me over a fire? He said: ‘Show me how you light the fire in the stove.’ I took a match, and lit the stove with shaking hand.

“This man, one of the people of the Torah, the Talmud, and the Mishna, kissed me on the head and led me to a room with an antique cupboard. He opened one of the drawers, took out a handful of chocolate, and filled my pockets. He led me, completely amazed, to the door, opened the door, and bid farewell, blessing me, wishing me a long life, and adding: ‘Give regards to your father.’

“I left, astounded, and hurried home like somebody who has awakened from a strange dream. I told the story to my father and brothers, and they laughed at me, and said: ‘It is the Sabbath. The Jews are forbidden to light fire on the Sabbath. The poor old man was thirsty for a cup of tea.’

“We shared the chocolate, and I spent the rest of the week counting the days until the Sabbath, and then until the Sabbath after that and the one after that. Every Sabbath I went to that same alley, hoping that the white-haired old man would open the door and that I would light his fire, and he would fill my pockets with chocolate. But the door never opened again, and those ancient features, from Biblical times, did not reappear. Recently I have been thinking about knocking on the door and asking: ‘My uncle, Abu Sasson, do you need anybody to light your fire?’”

In 1948 there were 150,000 Jews in Baghdad. Today there are 21.