With the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) engulfed in bloodshed
and terrorism due to the secretive occupation and expansion by the Rwandan
regime of Paul Kagame, Congo's President Joseph Kabila has reportedly requested
an immediate emergency military intervention from Belgium to crush a growing
rebellion sparked by resistance forces in the far western Congo.

A rising alliance calling themselves 'The Resistance Patriots of Dongo'
(Patriotes-Resistants de Dongo) has gained currency and recruits after Congolese
people learned that the Dongo resistance forces were fighting against Rwandan
Tutsi troops in the little frontier town of Dongo.


Rwandan Defense Forces Flown into Western Congo
Defeated; Kabila Regime Under Siege on Multiple Fronts
Written by: Keith Harmon Snow, December 7, 2009

View article with maps at:
http://www.consciousbeingalliance.com/2009/12/belgian-paratroopers-to-crush-risi\
ng-congo-rebellion/

With the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) engulfed in bloodshed
and terrorism due to the secretive occupation and expansion by the Rwandan
regime of Paul Kagame, Congo's President Joseph Kabila has reportedly requested
an immediate emergency military intervention from Belgium to crush a growing
rebellion sparked by resistance forces in the far western Congo.

A rising alliance calling themselves 'The Resistance Patriots of Dongo'
(Patriotes-Resistants de Dongo) has gained currency and recruits after Congolese
people learned that the Dongo resistance forces were fighting against Rwandan
Tutsi troops in the little frontier town of Dongo.

Sources in Congo's capital Kinshasa report that an emergency 'crises' meeting
was convened in Brussels on Friday, November 28, 2009, after a distress call was
sent by Congo-Kinshasa President Hypolitt� Kanambe, known to the western
world by his alias, Joseph Kabila Kabange. According to intelligence sources,
the Belgian military attach� in Kinshasa has been instructed to lay the
groundwork for the arrival of a detachment of elite Belgian Armed Forces (BAF)
paratroopers as soon as possible, before mid-December.

Sources in Kinshasa report that in mid-November President Joseph Kabila secretly
airlifted a battalion of Rwandan Defense Forces (RDF) across Congo to put down
the small rebellion. The operation involved multiple flights in November and was
supported by the United Nations Observes Mission in Congo (MONUC) and the U.S.
Africa Command (AFRICOM). The RDF forces, moved to Congo from Rwanda exclusively
for the operation, were uniformed as FARDC troops.

Pitched battles involving RDF occurred in past weeks on November 22-24 and
November 26-28 in the Dongo region. Along with RDF regulars, MONUC troops from
the supposed international 'peacekeeping' mission have been fighting alongside
Tutsi Rwandan soldiers infiltrated by Rwanda, with the Kabila government's
support, into the national army, the Armed Forces of the DRC (FARDC).

Equateur Province achieved a relative peace by 2004 and the majority of United
Nations Observers Mission to Congo (MONUC) troops pulled out by 2005. Medecins
Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders), the humanitarian organization that
had worked in Equateur Province from 1992, disregarded their own reports about
the state of the health emergency and mortality in Equateur and abandoned the
population in 2006.

On December 2, 2009 the remote strategic airport town of Libenge, near the
Central African Republic, fell to the new rebellion, which is expanding and
spreading with foreign backing. Towns in Equateur Province have been falling one
by one to the rebellion, sending Kinshasa's elites into a scramble on December 3
and President Kabila into a security panic.

Now the entire Congo has been launched into a state of massive fear, warfare and
insecurity--and the house of cards--propped up by western corporations and
military--comes tumbling down.

The international media has completely blacked out this story, reporting only an
ethnic conflict over fishing rights. Faced with almost two months of suppressing
information about the Dongo crisis in Equateur, MONUC is faced with the prospect
of full disclosure--or launching another massive campaign of damage control and
disinformation.

MONUC HIDES EQUATEUR CONFLICT

The Tutsi forces in the FARDC include infiltrated RDF and 'ex-'CNDP forces from
the National Congress for the Defense of the People (CNDP), the extremist
terrorist militia that sprouted out of the Kivu Provinces, but is heavily backed
by Rwanda and infiltrated with thousands of extremist Tutsis.

Thousands of CNDP militia forces were integrated into the FARDC military in
2009, in a strategic maneuver championed by James Kabarebe and Paul Kagame and
their U.S. and U.K. backers. These 'ex-'CNDP wear FARDC uniforms, with some
units commanded by FARDC officers--whose loyalty might first be to Congo, and
not Kabila--while others are commanded by 'ex-'CNDP officers serving Kabila but
loyal to Rwanda.

The CNDP is one of the pivotal causes of the massive destabilization of eastern
Congo, along with the many other Rwandan and Ugandan interests maintained by the
organized crime networks run out of Rwanda (Paul Kagame) and Uganda (Yoweri
Museveni). The formal military integration process involving so-called 'ex'-CNDP
forces is resented by many Congolese and Rwandan people as a logical step in the
secret plan by Tutsi extremist forces to dominate both the Democratic Republic
of Congo and the Great Lakes region.

Rwandan Defense Forces are not exclusively Tutsis, but are controlled and highly
regulated by the secret extremist Tutsi network maintained by Paul Kagame, James
Kabarebe, and others of the 40 top war criminals indicted by the Spanish court
on February 6, 2008. Much ado is made in the international press, based on
propaganda cranked out by the Kigame regime and its supporters that Rwanda's is
a power-sharing government, that Hutu-Tutsi reconciliation has been a huge and
lasting success, and that the RDF and intelligence services are comprised of
non-Tutsi.

Anyone who remotely steps out of line, in or out of Rwanda, will immediately be
targeted, accused of genocide revisionism, negationism or participation in 'the
genocide' itself.

President Kabila reportedly asked Central Africa Republic (C.A.R.) president
Francois Bozize to intervene and flank the resistance forces through the remote
frontier town of Zongo, DRC, also in Equateur Province, across the border from
Bangui, the C.A.R. capital. The two presidents share a common enemy, Jean-Pierre
Bemba and ex-forces of the Movement for the Liberation of Congo (MLC).
Jean-Pierre Bemba is under arrest at the International Criminal Court, thanks to
Boziz� and Kabila, charged with war crimes in C.A.R.

Bozize is occupied with his own insurrections and guerilla insurgencies in
C.A.R., having come to power by force in March 2003 coup d'etat against
Ange-Felix Patasse, C.A.R. president from 1993-2003. Patasse, in exile in Togo,
will clearly be an interested party in the Dongo rebellion, given Kabila's
relations with Bozize. Military and intelligence from France, U.S. and Chad all
meddle in C.A.R.

Kabila is reportedly furious at Congo-Brazzaville and its President
Sassou-Nguesso for allowing veteran rebel guerrillas to attack Congo-Kinshasa on
its western Oubangi River frontier (see map).


AN ALLIANCE ACROSS THE VAST CONGO

The very first military intervention by U.N. Blue Helmets, anywhere, occurred in
the Democratic Republic of Congo during the secession of Katanga Province
(1960-63). The U.N. occupied Congo again in the 'Congo Crises' (1964-66). Both
occupations involved Belgian paratroopers and other western mercenaries. The
Congolese people were shafted.

These illegal foreign occupations by the 'international community'--under the
guise of the United Nations--served to insure western control of the diamond,
copper, uranium and cobalt mines of Katanga and Kasai. Billed as 'peacekeeping'
operations, this misnomer set the stage for present day misunderstanding of the
true MONUC role as an armed combatant protecting the corporate interests or
predatory western capitalism.

Now, fifty years later, following more than a century of
Belgian-Anglo-American-Franco-Israeli big business profits and slavery in
Congo--with ten million deaths under King Leopold (1885-1908), with a brutal
Apartheid dispossession and military occupation under Belgian colonial rule
(1908-1960), with countless deaths under the U.N. occupations of 1960 to 1965,
with tens of millions of deaths under the U.S. client state regime of Joseph
Mobutu (1965-1996), with more than ten million deaths since the Pentagon-backed
invasion of 1996--the Belgians are reportedly again planning to rescue their
military client-partnership in Congo-Kinshasa.

The elite Belgian paratroopers would be deployed first to Bangaboka Airport in
Kisangani, in Congo's eastern Orientale Province.

Kisangani is the site for the V.S. Naipal novel "A Bend in the River and the
proverbial 'heart-of-darkness' outpost where Henry Morton Stanley organized the
genocidal red-rubber and ivory pillage for Belgium's King Leopold. Today,
western-owned plantations and logging companies reap their high profits through
mass slavery of Congolese people in the Kisangani region.

To conceal President Kabila's illegal Belgian intervention from international
public opinion, Brussels, Kinshasa and MONUC plan to dress Belgian paratroopers
as 'peacekeepers' to be deployed out of Kisangani as MONUC 'Blue Helmets' bound
for Equateur and Dongo.

The leaders of the rebellion in western Equateur Province have reportedly forged
an alliance with other disaffected Congo-Kinshasa forces in the eastern Kivu
provinces. This alliance is united against the Kabila regime and its allies,
including MONUC and AFRICOM.

Sources in Kinshasa report that the Patriotic Resistance Forces of Dongo are now
aligned with General Dunia, a Mai Mai leader operating against the joint
operations of the RDF-FARDC-MONUC nexus in the Fizi and Barako areas of South
Kivu.

Joseph Kabila is a black pawn in the great game by white foreigners and
multinational corporations to control and plunder Central Africa. Like Congo's
historic leaders Patrice Lumumba (1925-1961) and his paternal namesake, the
former President Laurent Desir� Kabila (1939-2001), Joseph Kabila would
quickly be assassinated if he diverged from the hidden agenda of western
capital.

Now however, internal hatreds and domestic disaffections threaten Joseph
Kabila's regime.

"What is happening now in Dongo [Equateur] is the beginning of something that no
one will stop," said one Congolese intelligence insider on November 25. "For
sure, Kabila and his friends are sending Rwandan troops to kill people but the
resistance movement says that Dongo will be the tomb of Rwandan troops and the
beginning of the end of Kabila and his supporters. At this time, thousands of
people--young Congolese men, ex-Mobutu fighters, Congolese FARDC--have joined
the movement. I'm very sure that this Dongo movement was prepared for a long
time."


EXTREMIST TUTSIS BLEEDING CONGO DRY

Many Congolese people have long since known that the president of their country
has supported a secret extremist 'Tutsi' alliance that seeks to dominate Central
Africa. His real name is Hypolitte Kanambe, formerly a junior Rwanda Patriotic
Front/Army (RPF/A) officer plucked from the Alliance of Democratic Forces for
the Liberation of Congo-Zaire (AFDL) forces.

It is widely supported that Joseph Kabila reported directly to RPF/A commanders
James Kabarebe and Paul Kagame in the Pentagon-backed AFDL 'rebellion' that
overthrew President Joseph Mobutu in Zaire (Congo-Kinshasa); there are also
claims that Kabila was a soldier in the RPF/A during the multiple genocides
orchestrated by Kagame's extremist Tutsi RPF/A in Rwanda (1990-1994).

"For us Congolese-Zairians, the boy is Rwandan Tutsi," explains Congolese
intellectual Yaa-Lengi Ngemi. "Yes, [the assassinated president] Laurent Kabila
lived in Dar es Salaam and had a business there. Hypollite Kanambe's Tutsi
father was a close friend and business partner of Laurent Kabila."

The term 'extremist Tutsi' applies only to the elite secretive organization,
formerly the Rwandan Patriotic Front/Army (RPF/A) that exists in parallel with
the parliamentary government of Rwanda. While some of the same people occupy
both, the extremist Tutsis came to power through war crimes, crimes against
humanity and genocide in Rwanda from 1990 to 1994, operating a secret terrorist
network.

  After seizing power in July of 1994, the extremist Tutsi network continued to
perpetrate atrocities, including massacres, assassinations, tortures and
disappearances, and the network moved into Congo-Zaire in 1996 and persists in
Rwanda and Congo to this day. The modus operandi of this terrorist structure is
to perpetrate crimes and blames them on the victim populations.

The RPF/A killed everyone in its path, no matter their ethnicity: Hutu, Tutsi,
or minority indigenous Twa people. The so-called 'Tutsi' RPF/A killed Tutsis in
Rwanda during their four year invasion, and afterwards, because Major General
Paul Kagame and General James Kabarebe and their 'exiled' Tutsi conspirators in
Diaspora--dubbed the 'Jews of Africa', a 'people without a homeland'--did not
trust any Tutsis that stayed behind in Rwanda after Hutu President Juvenal
Habyarimana came to power in 1973.

The RPF/A also killed everyone in their path because their plan from the start
was to eliminate as many people as possible, to depopulate Rwanda of the
soon-to-be problematic landowners, businessmen, farmers and peasants--mostly the
majority Hutu population, but also Tutsis--and repopulate Rwanda with Ugandans
and Tutsis who had been living comfortably in Western countries. It was about
big business, corruption and greed.

In the beginning, many Congolese supported President Kanambe, alias Kabila,
ignoring his origins, hoping that he would share power, that he would develop
the Congo, build roads and schools and, especially, that he would forestall and
evict Ugandan and Rwandan agents, provocateurs, mining cartels and war criminals
from the 1996-2001 war years.

In July of 2006, prior to the presidential elections, I traveled on the campaign
trail with President Kabila's sister alias Janet Kabila, around Kinshasa and
into bush towns nearby. The Kabilas doled out cash and propaganda (t-shirts,
caps, flyers, buttons, food, alcohol) and they rallied entire villages with a
five-piece marching band. To the uneducated and impoverished masses of the
interior the Kabilas pledged roads and schools within next three years.

They were the usual empty promises made by the usual empty politicians. The
Congolese people have seen nothing but misery and death delivered from within
and without the vast Congo.

The western media broadcasts the suffering in Congo, but the propaganda is
simplistic disinformation, and the western news [sic] consuming public eats it
up and dismisses the Congo, abandoning the people whose lives are determined in
part by the raw materials stolen from them in a state of war and organized
crime.

High visibility western organizations, in particular the ENOUGH and Raise Hope
For Congo projects and their wealthy backers the International Crisis Group and
Center for American Progress [sic], have lobbied college students and western
governments to action, always pushing for legislation, and licensed by
capitalism and the major mass media to speak as the only bona fide experts on
the Congo, Rwanda, Sudan and Uganda. They also advance military solutions over
diplomatic or other peaceful solutions.

William Jefferson Clinton's former national security insider John Prendergast is
their leading cheerleader. There's a reason Prendergast is all over the news,
appearing at colleges where ENOUGH and Raise Hope's advance publicity includes
expensive color brochures and posters.

"Already the Enough Project, an anti-genocide group based in Washington, and Eve
Ensler, an American playwright who has been supporting Congolese women's
projects for years through the organization V-Day, among others," wrote Jeffrey
Gentleman in the recent New York Times article slamming the Congolese people for
their own suffering, "have been urging Congress to pass legislation that would
bar American companies from buying Congo's 'conflict minerals', which include
gold, tin and coltan, a metallic ore used in many cellphones and laptop
computers. Several bills have been proposed."

John Prendergast was the expert of choice for CBS 60 Minutes' 'Blood Minerals'
broadcast, nationally televised in the United States on November 29, 2009, which
was an advertisement for ENOUGH, the IRC and so-called 'humanitarian'
organizations. These lobby and flak entities are working to displace and
neutralize all true international grass roots efforts to help the Congolese
people take control of their own resources and future, and they cover for hidden
western interests.

Beholden to powerful western corporate interests, the most powerful originating
from Belgium, the United States, Israel, Canada, Britain and Germany, but also
including Australian, Japanese, South African and Dutch interests, the Kabila
regime, backed by the MONUC military occupation and the U.N. Security Council,
has delivered to the Congolese people one disappointment and outrage after
another.

EASTERN CONGO ABOUT TO EXPLODE TOO?

A major source of ongoing conflict in the Kivus, General Bosco Ntaganda was
rewarded in January 2009 for playing along with the Kabila-Kagame-MONUC charade
of 'arresting' CNDP-RDF war criminal General Laurent Nkunda. To their credit,
the U.N. Panel of Experts, in their recently 'leaked' report of November 2009, 
exposed the appointment of General Bosco Ntaganda as CNDP-FARDC commander, which
Kagame and Kabila officially denied.

General Ntanganda commanded CNDP-FARDC units responsible for massive war crimes
under the joint 'Kimia' operations in the Kivus launched with MONUC backing in
January 2009. Ntanganda is an insider and--if arrested and sent to the
supposedly neutral ICC--he is purportedly a huge risk to Paul Kagame, James
Kabarebe, Laurent Nkunda and Joseph Kabila.

The International Criminal Court indicted General Bosco Ntanganda for war crimes
committed in DRC in May 2008. The ICC is a political instrument used to
selectively target certain individuals and militias, while ignoring more
substantial state sanctioned actors like Paul Kagame, James Kabarebe, Yoweri
Museveni or former U.S. national security council member Walter Kansteiner.

Sources on Kinshasa report that General Ntanganda may imminently trigger a new
war between CNDP and FARDC forces in the Kivus, with the blessing of Joseph
Kabila and Paul Kagame, who seek to protect Ntanganda from the ICC.

Given the recent secret infiltrations and sanctioned integrations of CNDP and
RDF into FARDC units during 2008 and 2009, this would create havoc and trigger
immense suffering, on top of the already unprecedented depopulation  of the
Great Lakes' people.

General Ntanganda will likely create a new military faction, sources report, yet
another acronym to confuse obtuse western foreign policy experts--yet another
militia licensed to kill civilians in the soup of bloodshed, depopulation and
impunity.

REGIONAL ALLIANCES AND HATREDS

In the DRC's 'historic' rigged national elections of 2006, formalizing Joseph
Kabila's 'presidency', millions of Congolese people supported MLC rebel leader
Jean-Pierre Bemba, ignoring his murderous tryst with Ugandan strongman Yoweri
Museveni, because they knew Kanambe--alias Joseph Kabila--was Rwandan.

"During the [presidential] election the majority of the Congolese voted for
Bemba," says Congolese human rights activist Yaa-Lengi Ngemi, "even though
Congolese people knew that Bemba also killed Congolese as a stooge of Uganda.
The choice was between a Congolese criminal and a foreigner, a Rwandan criminal.
So they voted for the Congolese criminal, or 'mwana mboka' (native son)..."

The elections rigging in Congo was multi-faceted, with all kinds of
irregularities, and manipulations on all sides. The 'international community'
backed the Kabila win.

Bemba and Kabila unleashed their troops in deadly battles, also targeting
civilians, in Kinshasa in March 2007.

Since 1996 more than 10 million Congolese people have died across the vast
country, with the current death toll in the eastern provinces alone at some 1000
people per day. There are millions of refugees in the Great Lakes member states,
and now more than 92,000 people are uprooted in western Congo due to recent
fighting.

During his brief tenure as president, Joseph Kabila tried to balance out power
interests through a combination of bribery and brute force. He gave Paul
Kagame's gang carte blanche over mining and land in the Kivu provinces.
Extortion, racketeering, open occupations and secret infiltrations of Rwandan
forces became the norm, and persisted in this pattern, to this day.

In western Congo, home to Kinshasa, Kabila gave President Eduardo Dos Santos and
Angola carte blanche over oil concessions in Bas Congo province in exchange for
providing presidential security forces and to counterbalance extremist Tutsi
expansionism out of Rwanda. In March 2009, DRC's oil minister Rene Isekemanga
Nkeka accused Angola of stealing Congo's oil. Many Congolese parliamentarians
resent Kabila's foreign alliances and can no longer be bribed into submission.

The Angolans hate Kagame and the Rwandan Defense Forces (former RPF/A), and vise
versa. The RPF/A teamed up with Angolan UNITA rebels fighting against President
Dos Santos after the Angolans cornered and shamed RPF/A troops in Bas Congo
during the war; the two armies also fought on opposing sides in Congo
(1998-2001).

Angola's Eduardo Dos Santos and Gabon's General Ali Bongo also cooperate with
Congo-Brazzaville President Dennis Sassou-Nguesso. (Gabon's recently deceased
dictator Omar Bongo was Sassou-Nguesso's son-in-law.)

Next door to the vast Congo-Kinshasa, President Dennis Sassou-Nguesso in
Congo-Brazzaville is one of Joseph Kabila's most enduring enemies. The Congo
River separates the two presidents in Brazzaville and Kinshasa, and one of the
Congo's largest tributaries, the Oubangi River, separates DRC's Equateur
province, running its course northeast along the border of Congo-Brazzaville and
then the Central African Republic.

President Sassou-Nguesso was a close ally of Rwanda's former Hutu President
Juvenal Habyarimana, apparently assassinated by the Tutsi extremist RPF/A 'Zero
Network' on April 6, 1994, and he was friend and ally of Joseph Mobutu.

MOBUTU SESE SEKO'S GHOSTS

Brazzaville has harbored Mobutu's ex-Forces Arm�es Za�roises
(ex-FAZ) since 1996-1997, and it harbors Rwandan elements that fled the AFDL
genocide against Hutu refugees in Congo-Zaire (1996-1997). Sources suggest there
are at least 300 ex-MLC and more than 10,000 ex-FAZ troops available for the
Dongo rebellion.

Rwandan refugees in Congo-Brazza include civilian survivors of the 1994 exodus
from Rwanda and the subsequent international war crimes committed by the Paul
Kagame and James Kabarebe and their troops in DRC from 1996-1998. Uganda
People's Defense Forces also helped hunt and massacre Hutu refugees.

Congo-Brazzaville also supports the ex-Rwandan Armed Forces (ex-FAR) and their
allies, the Forces for the Democratic Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), providing a
distant rear base for Congo operations directed at liberating Rwanda from the
extremist Tutsis and the Kagame dictatorship.

Thus many Rwandan refugees in Brazzaville are former liberation fighters hostile
to the terrorist Kagame regime for its 'blame-the-victims' inversion of the
Rwanda 'genocide' story and the mass murder of millions of Hutu people from 1990
to the present.

As of 2005, the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) counted some 59,000
Congo-Kinshasa refugees in Congo-Brazzaville and more than 4000 Congo-Kinshasa
refugees in C.A.R.

Sassou-Nguesso, Dos Santos, Ali Bongo and his father Omar, Mobutu,
Habyarimana--all of these current and former Central African regimes align(ed)
themselves with French and Israeli security and intelligence interests--and all
seek to counter balance and limit Tutsi extremist expansionism in Central Africa
backed by the Anglo-American alliance.

Equateur Province is the site of major untapped petroleum reserves. Belgian,
French, Portuguese, German and U.S. families and corporations control vast
tracts of land being denuded by rapacious industrial logging. There are also
western-owned plantations with modern day plantation slavery involving tens of
thousands of Congolese people subject to terrorism by state paramilitary
services.

The outside world hears little or nothing about the western-owned logging and
plantation concessions producing timber, coffee, cocoa, palm oil, and rubber
through modern day slavery. Similarly, the immense untapped petroleum reserves
beneath the Congo River basin and its rainforests in Equateur province remain
undisclosed by western institutions--including World Wildlife Fund (WWF), USAID,
and Care International--involved in possessing and depopulating these rainforest
lands for western corporate interests that benefit through the Kabila regime.

According to Congo researcher David Barouski, cassiterite (tin) mined from the
bloody Kivu provinces in eastern Congo also passes through the networks of the
plantations and logging interests in Equateur and Orientale.

"Outside of Asia, Belgium is the primary importer of Congolese cassiterite.
Sodexmines sells to SDE, located in Brussels and directed by Mr. Edwin Raes. SDE
is a subsidiary of the U.S.-based Elwyn Blattner Group. Mr. Elwyn Blattner, who
hails from Bayonne, N.J, owns several businesses in the Congo through his firm,
African Holding Company of America. They include logging concessions,
transportation, and palm oil plantations. The products [from] these businesses
are also imported by SDE."

The Elwyn Blattner Groupe has supported all sides in Congo's wars, bankrolling
combatants, police, governors and officials who control the geographical areas
where his interests are. The Blattner family--James, Elwyn, Daniel, David--began
and expanded under Mobutu and are entrenched with the Kabila regime.

ASSASSINS TARGET JOSEPH KABILA KANAMBE

Recognizing the growing disaffection amongst his own military and intelligence
services, President Kabila is surrounded by trusted elite Angolan Special
Forces.

Since Joseph Kabila came to power in 2001, the elite Guard R�publicaine
(GR) controlled directly by the President outside the military chain of command
or any civilian or judicial oversight, has been expanded to some 15,000 elite,
heavily armed forces deployed at all strategic locations around the country.
Sources in the intelligence sector in Congo-Kinshasa claim that the GR is
predominantly comprised of elite Angolan Special Forces, with a token number of
Congolese to put a proper face on things.

In 2005, it was reported that Kabila's closest security detail in the
Presidential Guards was a detachment of 50 elite Zimbabwe Defense Forces under
the command of Lt. Colonel Richard Sauta, a 5th dan (rank) Tae Kwan Do expert
trained in North Korea.

Kabila has also reportedly moved all ammunitions depots off Congolese FARDC
military bases in Kinshasa, though Rwandan FARDC ('ex'-CNDP) and Angolan troops
remain heavily armed and supplied.

Angolan troops backed Kabila during the deadly battle for Kinshasa against
Jean-Pierre Bemba and MLC loyalists in March 2007. Enraged by MLC attacks that
claimed some 23 Angolans, including a senior officer, the Angolan forces
ruthlessly retaliated, causing massive civilian casualties thousands of bodies
were collected and dumped in mass graves and in the Congo River. At the time,
President Dos Santos convinced Congo-Brazzaville president Dennis Sassou-Nguesso
to block ex-FAZ troops in Brazzaville from crossing the Congo River to join the
MLC fight.

This time, Sassou-Nguesso has allowed ex-FAZ and ex-MLC to cross the border and
join the Dongo rebellion.

Since March 2007, MLC forces that were captured or surrendered to MONUC after
the deadly battle were detained by MONUC in Kinshasa 'for their own safety'. In
past weeks, Kabila's loyalist forces in Kinshasa seized some of the MLC captives
in military operations described by Kinshasa intelligence insiders as 'staged
assaults.'

Sources claim that MONUC has collaborated with the Kabila security apparatus in
their efforts to seize and eliminate MLC captives. These captives included some
150 former combatants, along with their wives and children. Reports from
Kinshasa suggest that these MLC are being systematically eliminated in what
amount to extrajudicial executions.

"MONUC tried to get these MLC soldiers 'integrated' into the FARDC because they
[MONUC] knew that Kabila would have them [MLC] killed," says an insider in
Kinshasa. "In June, officers from MONUC wanted to transfer the Bemba MLC men in
secret to Kabila. Bemba's men refused and took MONUC soldiers hostage and MONUC
had to negotiate for their release. Now, Kabila's Presidential militia have
forced the door and arrested Bemba soldiers. MONUC seemed to pretend not to know
what was happening. We know that between 80 and 103 people from MLC have been
arrested by the Presidential Guard."

There have been massive arrests and illegal detentions of young men in Kinshasa
and outlying areas in the past month. In the past week, Congolese newspapers
reported that escaped prisoners had been shot. However, sources indicate that
these 'escapees' were killed in prison.

Such actions are routine for the Kinshasa security apparatus. Any time that
Kabila suspects or discovers a coup, street children and young men are rounded
up and detained, often involving intimidation and beatings, by the Presidential
Guard.

Sources in Kinshasa also say that Kabila's forces rounded up scores and possibly
hundreds of young civilian men in Maluku, a former Jean-Pierre Bemba MLC
stronghold some 70 kilometers from Kinshasa. Kabila is worried that an
insurgency against him will come from Maluku.

Kabila has good reason to be alarmed. There have been at least four serious coup
attempts against Kabila over the past two years; two of these occurred in 2009.

One recent unreported coup attempt occurred in Kinshasa on May 18, 2009 at 7:30
pm when Kabila was returning from Mbakana, reported to be the Kabila clan's
privately fortified 'farm' security compound also some 70 kilometers from
Kinshasa.

When the presidential procession set off down the Boulevard de 30 Juin,
Kinshasa's central artery, on May 18 a sniper, lying in ambush, opened fire on
the presidential Mercedes Jeep at the intersection of Wangata Avenue. Kabila had
switched vehicles and was riding in a Nissan Patrol like those used by members
of parliament. Following the attack, Kabila ordered the systematic destruction
of all the public kiosks and pavilions along the Boulevard de 30 Juin, and the
indiscriminate round up and arrest of young men in Kinshasa. The attack
reportedly involved five commandos.

All media inside Congo were forbidden from reporting on the May coup attempt,
reportedly on the personal orders of President Kabila. Several media outlets of
the Congolese Diaspora reported the events. It is also true that 'coups' and
'attacks' in Kinshasa have been staged by the Kabila government and by
opposition as devices to manipulate public opinion or justify retaliatory
action.

In October 12, 2009, Colonel Floribert Bofate Lihamba was arrested in
Lubumbashi, Katanga Province, the heart of Congo's most lucrative western mining
operations, and transferred to a prison in Kinshasa. A top security agent in
President Kabila's Presidential Guard R�publicaine (GR), and a former
member of the Special Presidential Security Group (GSSP) under President Laurent
Kabila, Col. Lihamba is accused of planning a coup d'etat.

On October 21, 2009, President Kabila survived the second most recent attempted
coup d'etat, another recent pivotal event in Congo unreported by the western
press or Congolese media. Informed in advance of the impending attempt on his
life, President Kabila had curtailed all public appearances and was reportedly
again holed up with Angolan troops on his 'farm' security compound outside
Kinshasa.

According to Congolese intelligence sources, ex-Forces Arm�es
Za�roises (ex-FAZ) commandoes crossed the Congo River seeking to
assassinate Kabila. The commandoes all reportedly originate from the Mobutu and
Jean-Pierre Bemba strongholds around Gbadolite , in northwestern Equateur.

The arrested officers include: four Majors (Yogo, Zwafunda, Mokwesa, Ngombo);
five captains (Koli, Nzale, Gbaka, Kongawi, and Salakoso); nine lieutenants
(Libanza, Masisi, Gerembaya, Mbuyi, Ndongala, Ngani, Kpdobere, Nzanzu and Sido);
and four sergeants (Kongo, Dondo, Lisala, and Lite).

"President Kabila is afraid of the ex-FAZ," says one Congolese source. "He is
afraid of Ngbanda."

One of the former President Mobutu's closest advisers, Honor�
Ngbanda--the 'Terminator'--is also rumored to back the uprising in Dongo.
Ngbanda held various positions under Mobutu, including Minster of the Interior,
Ambassador to Israel and Head of the Mobutu's notorious SNIP, the National
Intelligence and Protection Service (Service National d'Intelligence et de
Protection).

Honor� Ngbanda's ties to other Mobutu era big men likely include the
Bongo family (Gabon) and Jewish-American diamond kingpin Maurice Templesman
(United States), whose De Beers-affiliated diamond interests were partially
displaced when the Kabila regime partnered with Israeli businessmen Dan Gertler
and Benny Steinmetz. Gertler and Steinmetz cemented their interests in
Congo-Kinshasa through former U.S. President G.W. Bush and former U.S. State
Department official Jendayi Frazer.

South Africa is home to several former high commanders from the former Mobutu
regime of Zaire. Former Security Police Chief General Kpama Baramoto, former
Special Forces Commander General Ngabale Nzimbi and former Zairean Defense
Minister Admiral Mudima all now reside in South Africa and are clearly
interested in overthrowing Joseph Kabila.

In past weeks, Kabila has attempted to replace Congolese intelligence agents
with Rwandans drawn from the CNDP, the extremist Tutsi terrorist network out of
Rwanda. This has stirred further anger amongst the Congolese members of the
FARDC and the National Intelligence Agency (ANR), Congo-Kinshasa's secret
service.

"The CNDP is a rebellion that Kagame used, and Kabila allowed, to infiltrate
Rwandan soldiers into the Congolese [FARDC] army," reports an intelligence
insider in Kinshasa. "These CNDP are described as Congolese Tutsis but they are
Rwandans. The fact that Kabila tried to replace some members of secret services
and [FARDC] army by people who came from CNDP [provoked] the anger of many in
the Congolese army and intelligence services. Kabila will be captured or killed
very soon. TRUST ME."

RESISTANCE PATRIOTS OF DONGO

In March 2009 the western press reported a 'tribal dispute' and 'ethnic clash
over fishing rights' in the little western Congo outback town of Dongo. The
dispute reportedly began between two different ethnic groups. However, the newly
announced "Resistance Patriots of Dongo" claim that President Kabila's agents
manipulated the parties of the dispute and thereby escalated armed hostilities.

In October 2009 President Kabila and John Numbi--one of his top military
advisers--dispatched FARDC troops under the command of General Benjamin
Alongaboni to Dongo to negotiate peace with resistance forces. General
Alongaboni, a Congolese son hailing from Equateur Province, and the first FARDC
officer on the scene, secured a negotiated peace with Dongo area combatants.

Soon after however, President Kabila sent RDF forces--in FARDC uniforms--who
enraged Congolese in the region and provoked hostilities by killing some local
people and destroying the possibilities of peace negotiations.

The Resistance Patriots of Dongo retaliated and FARDC under the command of
General Alongaboni began defecting.

Now President Kabila is uncertain who is with him and who is against him. All
FARDC troops in the Democratic Republic of Congo are on full security alert,
prevent from leaving the country or taking leaves of absence.

General Benjamin Alongaboni and the few troops that did not defect to the
resistance were moved to nearby Gemena military center where he is currently
under surveillance by President Kabila's security and intelligence operatives.
General Alongaboni is an Adjutant General to Kabila's trusted FARDC insider John
Numbi, formerly the head of FARDC Air Forces and now Inspector General of the
Police National Congolaise (CNP).

Meanwhile, the 'Dongo Crises' has blossomed into a full-blown Congolese
rebellion against international occupation forces and the powerful Kabila-Kagame
clique. Over the past three weeks civilians and former combatants have been
flooding into the remote Dongo region to join a growing rebellion against the
now hated military regime of President Joseph Kabila and his western corporate
business and military partners.

Hundreds of Congolese Armed Forces (FARDC)--of ethnic Congolese origin--have
deserted and joined rebellion ranks with Congolese civilians and various
military elements of past rebellions. The Resistance Patriots of Dongo is
reportedly comprised of Congolese-FARDC deserters, former Forces Arm�es
Za�roises (ex-FAZ), and former MLC rebels.

Thousands of ex-FAZ and elite troops of Mobutu's former Special Presidential
Division (DSP) fled Congo-Kinshasa to Congo-Brazzaville between 1996 and 1998
when the Pentagon-backed insurgency led by Rwanda and Uganda swept across the
Congo (Zaire) and drove out Zaire's long-time strongman Joseph Desire Mobutu.

Sources in Kinshasa say that President Kabila seeks to frame and accuse Mobutu's
former intelligence chief Honor� Ngbanda and ex-MLC leader Jean-Pierre
Bemba, who is already under arrest for war crimes at the International Criminal
Court, in a propaganda ruse to justify the international intervention in
Equateur and legitimize further military aggression by the Kabila-Kagame-MONUC
nexus.

Kabila hopes for strategic gain by claiming that the Dongo uprising is purely an
MLC uprising. By convincing his white international patrons that the MLC is the
problem, Kabila hopes to further purge his government and the country of MLC
supporters.

In September 2009, armed assailants shot up the residences of DRC Minister of
Foreign Affairs Alexis Tambwe Mwamba and another minister, Olivier Kamitatu,
both ex-MLC supporters who have joined Kabila, in a drive by shooting; other
assassination attempts have also been reported.

Sources in Kinshasa say Kabila's security apparatus staged these assassination
attempts to create further international sympathy for Kabila, to discredit the
MLC and manipulate the ICC proceedings against Jean-Pierre Bemba. Officials in
Kinshasa have been threatened in response to fears that Jean-Pierre Bemba will
wiggle and bribe his way out of the ICC war crimes charges and return to Congo.
Given the highly political nature of the already corrupted ICC, the fear is not
unfounded.

President Kagame and President Yoweri Museveni have a long history of
'pseudo-operations' and 'false-flag operations' that blame and punish the
victims after secret operations and atrocities that are actually committed by
disguised RDF and UPDF soldiers.

Joseph Kabila's goal might be to follow the example of his allies, Paul Kagame
and the extremist Tutsis in Rwanda, by blaming all exactions, tortures,
assassinations, massacres and organized plunder of Congo on the Dongo forces who
are today fighting against western imperialism and its agents in Central
Africa--in the person of Joseph Kabila. President Paul Kagame's success in this
conspiracy is evident in the many awards he has received, for his absolute
terrorism in service to western interests, with the coup de gr�ce being
Rwanda's acceptance into the Commonwealth of Nations last week.

Congolese people everywhere were outraged by the eastern Congo FARDC military
operations with RDF and UPDF forces early in 2009, but Kabila and partners
heaped one insult on top of another by airlifting RDF across Congo to the far
western Equateur to attempt to crush the Dongo resistance.

MONUC and AFRICOM supported the RDF airlift operations.

The Kabila government has reportedly agreed to base AFRICOM out of the remote
east-central Congo River city of Kisangani, also the site of a secret U.S.
military-intelligence 'fusion cell' linking Uganda, Rwanda, Congo-K in a
tripartite cooperation agreement focused on minerals and mining.  The details of
the 'base' are unknown, but Kisangani will likely be one of AFRICOM's many
'lily-pad' bases.

AFRICOM LURKING IN THE WINGS

AFRICOM currently has cooperative security location agreements, commonly known
as 'lily pad' operating agreements with a dozen African nations stretching from
Algeria on the Mediterranean to Zambia and Botswana in southern Africa. The U.S.
Seventeenth Air Force's contingency and crisis planning and response team had
already visited four African nations through April 2009 to carry out airfield
surveys, with plans to visit seven more nations by September 30.

In January 2009, AFRICOM delivered four 200 hp Yamaha outboard engines to RDF
marines in Gisenyi, Rwanda. The RDF maritime regiment was formed in 1995--"in
response to Rwanda's genocide," according to AFRICOM, "to control [Rwanda's]
water border with the Democratic Republic of Congo and prevent the infiltration
of genocidal forces from the Congo."

In May 2009, Brigadier General Mike Callan, vice commander of the new AFRICOM
Air Forces AFRICA (U.S. Seventeenth Air Force), met with RDF Chief James
Kabarebe--an internationally indicted war criminal--and Rwandan Air Force
commanders in Kigali for talks focused on turning tiny Rwanda into central and
east Africa's leading 'air hub' for both military and civilian air traffic.

Bound for the Dongo rebellion in mid-November RDF crossed from Gisenyi, Rwanda
to Goma, DRC, and were then flown from Goma to Kamina Air Base in Katanga, a
military transport hub used for the Belgo-American-U.N. mercenary occupations
during the Katanga secession (1960-63) and 'Congo Crises' (1964-67). The RDF
battalion was next flown to Bandundu Province and from there they joined
President Kabila at his 'farm' security compound outside Kinshasa.

The RDF troops were reportedly next moved to the 42-acre campus of the U.S.
Embassy-affiliated American School in Kinshasa (TASOK), near the notorious Camp
Tshatshi military base, and then flown to Gemena airport in Equateur.

The Colonel Tshatshi Military Camp in Kinshasa hosts the defense department and
the Chiefs of Staff central command headquarters of the FARDC. The TASOK campus
was used for RDF troops because they would not be welcome amongst
Congolese-FARDC at Camp Tshatshi.

There were at least three round trips in some legs of the RDF flight plan
reportedly using both MONUC and Hewa Bora Airlines, an airline 70% owned by
Belgian arms trafficker Philippe de Moerloose. In the 'leaked' November 2009
U.N. Panel of Experts Report on Illegal Exploitation in the Congo, Philippe De
Moerloose and Hewa Bora Airlines were named for weapons shipments from Sudan to
Congo in violation of the International Arms Embargo on the DRC.

De Moerloose supplies Kabila with Presidential jets and other toys.

"Nobody in the Congo was aware of this operation except Kabila and John Numbi,"
says one insider in Kinshasa. "Everyone was surprised to see Rwandan troops
enter Kivu [Goma] from Rwanda. When the speaker of the Congolese parliament,
Vital Kamhere, criticized the operation, President Kabila pushed for his
resignation."

Former DRC Air Force Commander John Numbi is reported to be Kabila's main link
to Rwandan military officials Paul Kagame and the indicted war criminal James
Kabarebe. John Numbi, currently the Inspector General of the Congolese National
Police, is a regular visitor to Kigali and described as 'one of Congo's most
dangerous men'.

John Numbi reportedly orchestrated the joint military operations between RDF and
FARDC that began in January 2009. The main overt military campaigns were 'Umoja
Wetu,' a joint operation between FARDC and RDF, and the 'Kimia I' and 'Kimia II'
operations, which were FARDC operations supported by MONUC.

"Just before the joint operation 'Umoja Wetu' [RDF General] James Kabarebe met
Joseph Kabila in Kinshasa, and they have spoken in secret," says one Congolese
insider. "Nobody knows what they talked about. The real story is that Rwanda
took the opportunity to secretly inject at least 4000 and maybe as many as
10,000 Rwandan soldiers into the FARDC army."

Congolese FARDC troops deployed by Kabila to the Dongo area refused to fight and
instead defected to the rebel cause rather than kill their Congolese brothers
and sisters for the private enrichment of foreigners and the pro-Rwanda alliance
of Kabila and Kagame. Thus President Kabila has been forced to deploy to Dongo
only those FARDC units comprised exclusively of 'ex'-CNDP Tutsi units loyal to
Rwanda.

By mid-November 2009 international humanitarian agencies began reporting
thousands of refugees flooding across the Congo River to Congo-Brazzaville, with
54,000 now in Congo-Brazzaville and 38,000 IDPs in Congo by December 1,
according to the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR).

The Resistance Patriots of Dongo are claiming to have inflicted high casualties
on the RDF-MONUC-FARDC forces dispatched to Dongo and surrounding areas. Several
towns have been taken, lost, and retaken in pitched battles against
RDF-MONUC-FARDC forces.

While the conflict in Equateur slowly escalated from March to October, and
deteriorated quickly after that, MONUC's press and information corps have been
mute about the rebellion.

All official channels deny the presence of RDF troops, or that RDF troops fought
in Equateur. Several very small media outlets are also reporting the RDF
presence, their sources appearing to be connected with the Resistance Patriots
of Dongo movement.

MONUC issued one tiny press report on November 26, after resistance forces shot
up a MONUC helicopter that flew to Dongo to resupply the RDF-MONUC-FARDC ground
troops. Five of the 25 to 30 personnel on board were injured, and the pilot took
off and flew the chopper to Congo-Brazza. None of the personnel (or their
nationalities) aboard the MONUC chopper was identified.

A short western media propaganda blurb circulated by Agence France-Presse
attempted to discredit the rebellion and cover for MONUC's involvement in open
military aggression against Congolese people. Titled "Armed group claims firing
at UN chopper in DRC," the AFP blurb also confirmed the Resistance Patriots of
Dongos' strike against a MONUC helicopter.

"In their confused statement," AFP wrote, November 26, 2009, "the
Patriots-Resistance [of Dongo] alleged that Rwandan occupation forces were in
the region and they denounced the 'complicity' of MONUC 'with the Mafia-like
imperialists'."

"Dongo was attacked on October 29 and 30 by a group from the Lobala community
(also known as the Enyele), which targeted the Bamboma (or Boba) community," the
AFP reported. "Both sides have frequently disputed the fishing resources of the
region. The violence, which has since spread to other villages, left at least
100 dead, mainly in Dongo, who were either hacked with machetes or shot, while a
number drowned trying to cross the Oubangi river, which marks the border with
the Congo Republic [Brazzaville]."

The AFP not only decontextualized the conflict, describing it as purely tribal,
they also framed it as ruthless savage Africans killing with machetes. The MONUC
chopper apparently was attacked on November 26. There was no mention of the
major battles that occurred between foreign forces on November 22-24 or November
26-28.

On December 3, 2009, the Dongo resistance forces intercepted a tugboat pulling
two big barges carrying 2,500 tons of arms and ammunition destined for Dongo
RDF-MONUC-FARDC forces. The commander of the FARDC operations involved in moving
the weapons, Colonel Nyav, was killed during the clashes; Nyav had previously
been commanding RDF-MONUC-FARDC troops at Dongo. The ethnic Congolese FARDC
under Col. Nyav's command jubilantly defected to the resistance after seizing
the boat and weapons.

Also on December 3, the strategic Congolese airport town of Libenge fell into
the hands of the Resistance Patriots of Dongo. The resistance forces now control
the towns of Dongo, Libenge, all the territory located along Oubangi River, the
localities of Bomongo, Kutu, Kungu, Saba-Saba, Buburu and the Catholic mission
of Bokonzi.

The Resistance Patriots of Dongo next plan to take Mbandaka, the major
administrative city on the Congo River--and the end of the line for thousands of
Hutu refugee women and children executed in cold blood by the RPF/A and the AFDL
on the banks of the Congo River there in 1997.

"We take the engagement before God and before all the Congolese to topple the
puppet regime currently in place in Kinshasa," the November 26 resistance
statement added, according to the AFP.

DONGO WAR NOT CONNECTED TO EASTERN CONGO?

"The helicopter was delivering supplies to peacekeepers recently deployed to the
town of Dongo," reported Reuters, basing their "news" report on MONUC  Public
Information Officer Madnodje Mounoubai. Reuters reported "around 20 Ghanaian
peacekeepers" deployed by MONUC in Dongo.

"The fighting is not related to the simmering conflict in the mineral-rich
eastern borderlands," Reuters wrote, "where the army--backed by thousands of
peacekeepers--are attempting to stamp out local, Rwandan, and Ugandan rebels."

On December 3, 2009 Belgian newspapers La Libre Belgique and RTLM reported that
Belgium's Foreign Minister Steven Vanackere and Defense Minister Pieter De Crem
had responded to the communiqu� of  the Resistance Patriots of Dongo,
circulated on the Internet on December 1, which warned Belgium and Kinshasa that
the resistance knew of the secret plan to dispatch paratroopers to Kisangani.
The two Belgian ministries issued a joint communiqu� denying the
operation "with the biggest firmness."

According to Kinshasa sources, the MONUC-uniformed Belgians would be flown from
Kisangani, Orientale Province, to Equateur Probvince's northwestern frontier
city of Gbadolite, the stronghold of former President Mobutu and the Bemba
family, Jean-Pierre and father Saolona (1942-2009), and then to Gemena airport
near Dongo.

Soon after the Resistance Patriots of Dongo forces occupied the frontier city of
Libenge, President Kabila dispatched 600 elite FARDC commandos trained by 60
Belgian Armed Forces instructors in Kindu Province. As of December 5, Libenge
remained under siege, with civilians fleeing to escape the massive battle.

Sources in Kinshasa on December 5 report "massive violent fighting in Libenge
and Gemena areas," involving 1000 Congolese National Police (PNC) and 100
Ghanaian MONUC troops and two MONUC helicopter gunships. MONUC sources in
Kisangani indicate that two additional MONUC helicopter gunships are 'standing
by' for possible immediate deployment to Equateur.

The MONUC 'peacekeeping' in Congo is a one billion dollar a year operation.

The recently 'leaked' United Nations Group of Experts Report provides evidence
of direct PNC involvement in contraband activities involving Rwandan Defense
Forces in eastern Congo. The U.N. experts investigated the frequent and
suspicious undocumented flights of a white Mi-8 helicopter leased on 27 January
2009 to the Congolese National Police through John Numbi, the head of the PNC.
Numbi managed the joint RDF-MONUC-FARDC military operations ('Umoja Wetu') in
eastern DRC begun in January 2009,  along with Major General James Kaberebe, the
army chief of Rwanda.

Written by: Keith Harmon Snow

US Company Helps Fuel Congo War: UN Report

Thursday 03 December 2009

by: Joe Lauria  |  Global Post

From Mother Jones:

http://motherjones.com/environment/2009/11/conservation-indigenous-peoples-enemy\
-no-1

Conservation: Indigenous People's Enemy No. 1?
For centuries we've displaced people to save nature. A huge project in Africa
offers a chance to turn that around.
By Mark Dowie | Wed Nov. 25, 2009 3:00 AM PST


After legendary explorer and ecologist J. Michael Fay completed his remarkable
1,200-mile, 455-day trek across the Congo Basin in 2002, he asked Africa's
longest-serving leader, President El Hadj Omar Bongo of Gabon, to sit down for a
chat. Bongo agreed to meet the world-famous adventurer, and brought his Cabinet
along to listen in. Fay looks like a man who has crossed the heart of Africa
more than once, weather-beaten and wiry, handsome and rugged. But it is his
message and its trenchant delivery that wins over crowds—and politicians.

In the midst of a PowerPoint presentation that included stunning photos of
wildlife in the Basin he believes few humans have ever seen, Fay projected a map
of Gabon featuring forest concessions in red that he predicted would soon be
clearcut by foreign logging [1]companies. Huge red blotches covered most of the
country that hadn't already been cleared for oil fields and manganese mines. The
next slide showed an imaginary, "virtual" Gabon with 13 emerald green patches
scattered about the landscape. These, Fay said, could be national parks that
would protect hundreds of species of flora and fauna from extinction and create
a global magnet for ecotourism [2], at that moment the fastest-growing sector of
the fastest-growing industry in the world. Fay said the parks offered Gabon a
golden opportunity to diversify an economy that had become heavily reliant on
oil, gas, and other dwindling extractive resources.

When Bongo's Minister of Forest Economy, Emile Doumba, expressed an interest in
one of Fay's proposed parks, Bongo shocked both Fay and his Cabinet by saying he
wanted all of them gazetted and opened immediately. He ordered Doumba to produce
13 separate decrees, one for each park, which he agreed to sign that very day.
An ecstatic Fay promised to find the money to manage the new parks. He stressed
that Gabon was about to become the most ecologically significant nation in
Africa, and a world-class experiment in biodiversity preservation. With the
stroke of a dictator's pen, 10 percent of the country's landmass was placed
under protection. "This is one of the most courageous conservation acts in the
last 20 years," declared Dr. Steven Sanderson, president and CEO of the Wildlife
Conservation Society [3] and Michael Fay's boss at the time.

But there was another, more historically significant opportunity facing Gabon
that day, one that Fay merely hinted at in his presentation and Sanderson didn't
mention at all. It was the opportunity their own industry, transnational
conservation, had in Gabon: to do right by the thousands of tribal people living
inside those emerald patches, by allowing them to remain in their homelands and
participate directly in the stewardship and management of the new parks. They
would then not be passive "stakeholders" relocated to the margins of the park,
the typical fate of indigenous peoples who find themselves in conservation "hot
spots," but equal players in the complex and challenging process of defending
biological diversity. The goal of such a policy would be the concurrent
preservation of nature and culture; Gabon just might come to signify a happy
ending of a tense, century-long conflict between global environmentalism and
native people, millions of whom have been displaced [4] from traditional
homelands in the interest of conservation.

It's a century-long story of violence and abuse that began in Yosemite Valley in
the mid 19th century, when the Ahwahneechee band of Miwoks were chased about,
caught on, then forcefully expelled from a landscape they had cultivated for
about 200 generations. Militias like the vicious Mariposa Battalion were sent
into Yosemite to burn acorn caches and rout native people from remote reaches of
the Valley. After the militias came the nature romantics who mythologized the
vacated valley as the wilderness it never was, then lobbied state and federal
governments to create a national park. They got their wish in 1890, and the
remaining Indians were removed from the area, with a few allowed to remain
temporarily, as menial laborers in a segregated village of 20-by-20-foot shacks.

Yosemite's Indian policy spread to Yellowstone, Grand Canyon, Mesa Verde, Mount
Ranier, Zion, Glacier, Everglades, and Olympic National Parks, all of which
expelled thousands of tribal people from their homes and hunting grounds so the
new parks could remain in an undisturbed "state of nature." Three hundred
Shoshone Indians were killed in a single day during the expulsion from
Yellowstone. This was the birth of what would come to be known, worldwide, as
the Yosemite model of wildlife conservation. In Africa it would be renamed
"fortress conservation," and like so many other products from the North, the
model would be exported with vigor to all other continents.

One consequence of creating a few million conservation refugees around the world
has been the emergence of a vast and surprisingly powerful movement of
communities that have proven themselves stewards of nature (otherwise
conservationists would have no interest in their land), but were turned by
circumstance into self-described "enemies of conservation."

In early 2004, a United Nations meeting was convened for the ninth year in a row
to push for passage of a resolution protecting the territorial and human rights
of indigenous peoples. During the meeting, one indigenous delegate rose to state
that extractive industries, while still a serious threat to their welfare and
cultural integrity, were no longer the main antagonist of native cultures. Their
new and biggest enemy, she said, was "conservation." Later that spring, at a
meeting in Vancouver, British Columbia, of the International Forum on Indigenous
Mapping, all 200 delegates signed a declaration stating that "conservation has
become the number one threat to indigenous territories."

Then in February 2008, representatives of the International Indigenous Forum on
Biodiversity (IIFB) walked out of a Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD)
annual meeting, condemning the convention for ignoring their interests. "We
found ourselves marginalized and without opportunity to take the floor and
express our views," read their statement. "None of our recommendations were
included in [the meeting's report]. So we have decided to leave this process…"

These are all rhetorical jabs, of course, and perhaps not entirely accurate or
fair. But they are based on fact and driven by experience, and have shaken the
international conservation community. So have a spate of critical studies and
articles calling international conservationists to task for their historical
mistreatment of indigenous peoples.

Some, but not all, conservation leaders are hearing the indictment and seem open
to exploring a new model of protected area, a new conservation paradigm that
includes native people and local communities as equal players in humanity's
quest to protect wildlife in wild places. Gabon is set to become the world's
test site for the new paradigm, a global laboratory seeking better ways to do
conservation. And indigenous people on every continent are watching closely.

The central strategy of modern transnational conservation relies largely on the
creation of so-called protected areas (PAs) like Gabon's new parks. There are
several categories, ranging from rigid exclusionary "wilderness" zones,
off-limits to all but a few park guards and an occasional scientist, to
community-conserved areas (CCAs) initiated and managed by a local population.
While the categories vary widely in style and purpose, the essential goal is the
same: protect and preserve biological diversity.

From 1900 to 1950, about 600 official protected areas were created worldwide. By
1960 there were almost a thousand. Today there are at least 110,000, and more
are added every month. The size and number of protected areas is a common
benchmark for measuring the success of global conservation.

The total area of land now under protection worldwide has doubled since 1990,
when the World Parks Commission set a goal of protecting 10 percent of the
planet's surface: Today more than 12 percent of all land, a total area of 11.75
million square miles (18.8 million square kilometers), is set aside. That's an
area greater than the entire landmass of Africa and equal to half the planet's
endowment of cultivated land. At first glance, such a degree of land
conservation seems undeniably good, an enormous achievement in doing the right
thing for our planet. But the record is less impressive when you consider the
social, economic, and cultural impact of the system.

About half the land selected for protection by the global conservation
establishment over the past century was either occupied or regularly used by
indigenous peoples. In the Americas that number is more than 80 percent. In
Guyana, of the 10 new areas gazetted for protection, native people currently
occupy 8. And in Chad, which during the 1990s increased protected areas from 1
to 9.1 percent of its national land, all of that newly protected land was
previously occupied by what are now an estimated 600,000 displaced people.

No country I could find besides Chad and India, which officially admits to about
100,000 people displaced for conservation (a number that is almost certainly
deflated), is counting this growing new class of refugee. Worldwide estimates
range from 5 million to tens of millions of refugees created since Yosemite
Valley was first gazetted for protection. Charles Geisler, a rural sociologist
at Cornell University who has been studying the problem for decades, believes
that since the beginning of the colonial era in Africa there could have been as
many as 14 million on that continent alone. The true figure, if it were ever
known, would depend on the semantics of words like displacement and refugee,
over which parties on all sides of the issue argue endlessly.

However, the point is not the exact number of people who have lost their
homeland to conservation. It is that these refugees, however defined, exist in
large numbers on every continent but Antarctica, banished from lands they
thrived on, often for thousands of years, in ways that even some of the
conservationists who looked aside while evictions took place have since admitted
were sustainable.

Which leads to another complaint heard at one international meeting after
another: Relocation often occurs with the tacit approval of one or more of the
five largest conservation organizations—The Nature Conservancy (TNC),
Conservation International (CI), the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), the
African Wildlife Foundation [5](AWF), and the Wildlife Conservation Society
(WCS)—which collectively have been nicknamed the BINGOs (Big International NGOs)
by indigenous leaders. All except the Nature Conservancy have offices in Gabon,
and they are to divide up management responsibilities for the country's new
parks.

Keeping his promise to President Bongo, Michael Fay returned to the US and began
the arduous process of raising the millions that would be needed to turn "paper
parks" into real parks and keep them safe from poachers and prospectors—about
$50 million was his guess. As an inveterate and well-known conservation
lobbyist, with connections to powerful fixers like Gabon's registered foreign
agent, David Barron, and top officials in the State Department, Fay managed to
get the attention of key congressmen, most notably Ed Royce, the chairman of the
House International Relations Subcommittee on Africa. In 2003, Royce scheduled
Fay to testify about his amazing voyage and seek support for protected areas in
the Congo Basin, which, Fay would emphasize, hosts a tropical forest second only
in size to the Amazon Basin.

"We have an historic opportunity here," Fay told the legislators, "to create
what will be one of the world's most important national park systems covering
over 25 million acres in one of the richest areas for biodiversity on the
planet. But we have an opportunity to do much more, really. We have an
opportunity to shift how entire landscapes are developed and to assure that
future generations can sustain and enhance their lives."

Those were encouraging words to Gabon's tribal citizens, the Bakas, Babongo,
Akula, Bakoya, and Fang, all of whom are painfully aware of how their
counterparts have been treated by conservation projects elsewhere in Africa. Fay
went on to speak of "maximizing benefits for local people."

But then Fay made a revealing observation about American history. "I believe
that Teddy Roosevelt had it right," he said. "In 1907, when the United States
was at the stage in its development not dissimilar to the Congo Basin
today…President Roosevelt made the creation of 230 million acres of protected
areas the cornerstone of [his domestic policy]…My work in the Congo Basin has
been basically to try to bring this US model to Africa."

While he was singing the praises of "wise use" Teddy Roosevelt also proclaimed
that "the rude, fierce settler who drives the savage from the land lays all
civilized mankind under a debt to him… It is of incalculable importance that
America, Australia, and Siberia should pass out of the hands of their red,
black, and yellow aboriginal owners and become the heritage of the dominant
world races."

Is this really the legacy American conservationists wish to be spreading about
the world? And is the Northern method of protecting biological diversity, with
its paternalistic view of nature and condescending view of traditional
knowledge, appropriate to the rest of the planet? Does it even work? A planet
tipping into ecological chaos, with more than 40,000 plant and animal species
facing extinction and 60 percent of the ecosystem services that support us
failing, suggests that what we've been doing may not have been working so well
after all. Perhaps a new strategy is called for.

Omar Bongo died in June of this year, leaving uncertain the leadership of his
country and the fate of the parks he created. The entire Gabonese Parks system
has recently been placed under the leadership of Lee White, the British head of
the Wildlife Conservation Society. White is currently supporting Omar Bongo's
son Ali as the "green presidential candidate." White also makes no secret of his
intention "to establish and sustain Gabon as a new unique global destination for
African rainforest tourism." What role the parks' natives will play in that
industry has yet to be determined.

From Mother Jones:

http://motherjones.com/environment/2009/11/gms-money-trees

GM's Money Trees
People with some of the world's smallest carbon footprints are being
displaced—so their forests can become offsets.
By Mark Schapiro | November/December 2009 Issue

I am standing in the shadow of General Motors [1]' $1 tree. It's a native
guaricica, with pale white bark and a spreading crown that looms about 40 feet
above my head. Hanging from its trunk is a small plaque that identifies it as
tree No. 129. I've come here, to the verdant chaos of Brazil's Atlantic forest,
to understand the far-reaching and politically explosive controversies taking
shape in diplomatic corridors thousands of miles away over the fate of trees
like this one.

No. 129 stands in the heart of the Cachoeira reserve in the state of Paraná—one
of the last slivers of a forest that once blanketed much of the country's
southeastern coast. Just 7 percent of the Atlantic forest remains, but it is
still one of the Earth's richest centers of biodiversity, home to a wealth of
plants and creatures comparable to the Amazon's. On the way here, our group—led
by Ricardo Miranda de Britez and his team of forestry experts from the Brazilian
conservation group Society for Wildlife Research and Environmental Education [2]
(SPVS)—walked past clusters of yellow-and-white orchids, stepped over the
footprints of an ocelot, kept an eye out for the endangered golden lion tamarin,
and were bitten by, it seems, every one of the thousands of species of insects
native to the area.

But our journey is not focused on the rare creatures in the forest. It's about
the forest itself—the trees that are our partners in respiration, inhaling
carbon dioxide, exhaling oxygen, and storing the carbon in their trunks and
leaves. That simple process makes them one of Earth's most potent bulwarks
against climate change (a.k.a. a "carbon sink"); but when they are cut and
burned, all that stored carbon is released into the atmosphere. Already, some 32
million acres of tropical rainforest are destroyed each year, an amount of land
equivalent to the state of Mississippi's; deforestation [3], according to the
United Nations, is responsible for roughly one-fifth of all greenhouse gas
emissions.

What will it cost to keep those trees standing? And who's going to pay for it?
The challenge of assigning precise values to an increasingly rare commodity—wild
trees—and indeed the question of whether they are a commodity at all, is one of
the most hotly contested in the climate world.

IT WAS AN unusual deal that landed tree No. 129 at the center of the debate.
Between 2000 and 2002, the US-based Nature Conservancy [4] struck an alliance
with three of the planet's leading carbon emitters: General Motors, Chevron [5],
and American Electric Power [6]. Together the corporations gave the
environmental group $18 million to purchase 50,000 acres of Brazilian Atlantic
forest, much of which had been degraded by grazing. Three reserves were created:
Serra do Itaqui, financed with $5 million from AEP; Morro da Mina, paid for with
$3 million from Chevron; and Cachoeira, underwritten by $10 million from GM.
(GM's role in the project survived the company's bankruptcy, which means that
No. 129 is now partially owned by you and me.) SVPS was brought in to manage the
reserves, which together form one contiguous forest known as the Guaraqueçaba
Environmental Protection Area [7]. You'll see Guaraqueçaba promoted on the
Nature Conservancy's website as an example of corporate partnerships that make
"an invaluable contribution to the preservation of the planet's biodiversity."
What you won't see is what the companies get out of the deal: the potentially
lucrative rights to the carbon sequestered in the trees.

At tree No. 129, de Britez takes out a tape measure and unspools it around the
trunk. We're at one of the 190 carbon dioxide measuring stations—each a group of
trees with numbered plaques—scattered around the Guaraqueçaba forest.
Documenting the bulk of the reserve's trees is an ongoing enterprise, like
tracking tagged whales.

"We measure the biomass of these trees and their carbon sequestration," de
Britez says as a ranger picks up the other end of the tape measure and writes
down No. 129's stats. It's 3 feet in diameter and about 45 feet tall. He
estimates the carbon it contains at 95 kilograms—just under one-tenth of a ton.
At $10 a ton, the upper end of the range at which carbon offsets trade in the
US, No. 129 is worth about $1. Scale up to the two to three tons of carbon per
acre that de Britez estimates across the 50,000-acre reserve, and the potential
payoff, in addition to the public relations value, comes into focus.

The trees in the Cachoeira reserve could never offset even a fraction of GM's
total carbon footprint—a single Hummer [8] H2 (which the company started
producing the same year it signed on to the Guaraqueçaba project) would require
about 50 trees to offset. But the Nature Conservancy and its partners aimed to
use the Brazilian reserves as a test case for preserving forests via corporate
carbon credits. "The investors wanted to be pioneers in the carbon-sink field,"
de Britez explains. "They had in mind to start working on this before other
companies."

All three companies, as it happens, had aggressively lobbied the Clinton
administration against signing the 1997 Kyoto climate accord and stayed mum when
President Bush withdrew from it. But they hedged their bets, figuring that the
Brazilian forests could be turned into offsets to sell in places (like Europe)
where Kyoto's emission limits did apply, or could be held in reserve in case the
US ever established its own limits.

By the time the companies were ready to begin preparing their credits for sale,
however, the UN had refused to allow "avoided deforestation" projects—those that
buy forestland and then promise not to cut the trees—as an offset for industries
seeking to buy their way out of emission limits. Credits generated from projects
like Guaraqueçaba were excluded from the international carbon market launched by
Kyoto, a market that now accounts for more than $126 billion in offset
transactions. The offsets could be sold, however, in the United States, where
the $700 million domestic carbon offset market is unregulated (and where prices
are generally half those of Kyoto-regulated offsets).

Manyu Chang, a forest scientist who is the coordinator for climate policy for
the state of Paraná, explained the problem with avoided-deforestation credits to
me at her office in the state capital of Curitiba. For starters, she said,
trees—living beings, after all—are far less predictable than, say, windmills.
They are subject to the vagaries of fires and disease, both of which are
increasing due to climate change. Each species absorbs carbon at different rates
depending on factors like the altitude, soil, and weather. Then there's the
problem of "leakage"—when deforestation simply shifts from protected zones to
unprotected ones, creating no overall emissions reduction. And finally, the UN
did not want to open the door to a perverse sort of extortion: A country could
threaten to open its lands to logging unless it was paid to not do so.

More fundamentally, Chang notes, when companies create reserves on already
forested lands, their contribution to the fight against climate change is
limited: "Do they get the credit for simply enhancing what was there already?"
José Miguez, one of Brazil's top climate officials, told me that during the
Kyoto talks his government opposed using its forests to enable northern
industries to pollute more. "The forest is there," he said. "You can't guarantee
it will absorb extra carbon. The General Motors plan gives a false image to the
public in the United States. For us, they are pretending to combat climate
change."

THERE IS ANOTHER vexing question inherent in preserving forests: What happens to
the people who use the land? Efforts to protect biodiversity in the dwindling
wildlands of the world have increasingly run into a discomfiting tension between
the impulse toward absolute preservation and the needs of people—many of them
indigenous—who have lived sustainably in forestlands for decades or centuries.
Such tensions are playing out in the new economics of carbon offsets.

With a preserve designed in large part to safeguard stored carbon, a new set of
imperatives comes into play. Turning trees into carbon credits requires knowing
how to extrapolate from carbon measurements, like the ones of tree No. 129, to
determine a forest's potential as a carbon sink. It requires knowing as
precisely as possible how many trees there are and of what size—which means
minimizing the unpredictable activities of human beings, as small scale as they
might be.

For many generations, the Guaraqueçaba forest was home to the Guarani Indians,
but their dominion waned as the Brazilian government encouraged subsistence
farmers to settle and clear the land. Today the two populations coexist, living
alongside the reserves or in communities nearby and relying on what remains of
the forest for everything from food to building materials. There are more than a
dozen villages around the three reserves, linked by dirt roads and river
tributaries traveled by canoe. Most are home to just a few dozen people living
in structures of wood and reeds. Jonas de Souza is a 33-year-old farmer who grew
up a quarter of a mile from the forest that is now part of the GM-funded
Cachoeira reserve. His family grows bananas, cocoa, and coffee on a small plot.
He remembers hunting for small prey—roast paca, a large rodent, is a local
delicacy—and collecting seeds and hearts of palm. But now, signs have gone up at
the edge of the forest: No hunting, fishing, or removal of vegetation. A state
police force, the Força Verde, or Green Police, patrols the three reserves, as
well as a larger state-sanctioned preservation area, to enforce the
restrictions.

"Now," says de Souza, "I don't have the right to go out and do what I used to do
when I was 12, 14, 15 years old. I'd grab my fishing rod and get a fish to bring
to my family or to feed myself. You don't have the right to walk into the forest
to go and cut a heart of palm to eat. I'll get arrested and I'll be called a
thief."

De Souza says he's found numerous relics of the Guarani—pipes, an axe, pottery,
and burial items. The forest is valuable today, he notes, because his community
and those who were here before them have taken good care of it. "We have been
here, and still the forests haven't disappeared. Still the rivers aren't
contaminated. Still the biodiversity isn't extinct."

One of the goals of the Green Police is to prevent large-scale poaching,
particularly of the endangered and highly valuable hearts of palm, as well as
exotic primates and birds. Yet officers cited few arrests of individuals linked
to major logging, palmito, or wildlife-smuggling enterprises when I joined them
on patrol. Many of their enforcement efforts have focused on local people
cutting a single palm for its succulent heart—or collecting wood to build their
homes. "They're afraid of us," said Captain Lestechen, a patrol leader, as a
group of young boys sitting on a bench eating a heart of palm quickly scattered
at the approach of the Força Verde jeep.

Visiting the villages without the Força in tow, I heard numerous stories of
people being harassed, arrested, and shot at while looking for food, wood, or
reeds. Antonio Alves, a 35-year-old farmer and carpenter—we spoke as he carved a
15-foot log canoe—said he was arrested this year for chopping down a tree to fix
his mother's home in Quara Quara.

It's a stretch to call Quara Quara a village: It's a cluster of five cabins
perched at the end of a small, silted waterway. The only way in is by canoe.
Three of the homes have been abandoned—the residents left, Alves said, because
they could no longer hunt and gather food in the forest. After his arrest, Alves
spent 11 days in jail in Antonina, a one-hour canoe ride away. The lawyer
defending him at trial, pro bono, was the town's mayor, Carlos Machado. Sitting
in his expansive office in the town's colonial-era city hall, Machado told me
that he's represented a string of people like Alves, villagers hauled into court
on charges of violating the strict prohibitions in the reserves.

"I know he didn't go cut that tree down to speculate on the wood," Machado said.
"It's one thing, the wood seller who is destroying [the forest]—this is very
different from a caboclo [farmer] who cuts down a tree to build a fence." These
distinctions, he said, have been missing from the policies created by the
reserves and enforced by the Força Verde (whose officers have received training
from SPVS, the Nature Conservancy's Brazilian partner). Machado has noticed a
stream of migrants from the backwoods to his town, which is buckling under the
strain. "Antonina is a small town that has few resources for generating income,
few possibilities for people who come from the rural zone without skills and
without the defenses to live in the urban environment. They stay in the
outskirts of town, in the mangrove swamps, in irregular, inhospitable
situations. It creates a lot of social problems for us...Through those
conservation projects, they created a poverty belt around our town." The
migrants also move west to Curitiba, said Machado, where they're often steered
into prostitution or the drug trade.

By excluding villagers from the forests, says Jutta Kill, a researcher with the
Forests and the European Union Resource Network [9] who has spent months
interviewing locals about the project, the reserves are pulling out the
communities' lifeline. "In this area," she says, "everyone is cash poor but no
one goes hungry. If you take the forest away, you take away everything. The
preservation projects here are designed to generate offsets for the largest
polluters, and they're doing it by cutting off people from the land." Few of the
people here have motors on their boats, she notes; even fewer own cars. People
with some of the smallest carbon footprints on Earth are being displaced by
companies with some of the biggest.

Back in Curitiba, Chang, the state forestry expert, told me that the
conservation groups were trying to create a "zero disturbance" environment in
their forests. "Maybe that's a little obsolete," she said. "Maybe you [should]
have 90 percent conservation, not 100 percent. That way you could include the
community of people who live there." But that could undermine a system based on
assigning a stable, reliable, and tradable value to a living ecosystem.

"The carbon idea is not really tangible to people in the community," Miguel
Calmon, the Nature Conservancy's director of forests and climate in Latin
America, acknowledges. Calmon says the conservation groups initially sponsored
training programs for local community members in alternate sources of
income—cultivating honeybees, organic bananas, local crafts—but the money ran
out. Now, he says, the rules are clear: "You can't go into these private
reserves. That land is not their land anyway. If you used to go [into the
forest] from your house across the road, now you can't. That land is already
owned."

The supply of forests for offsetting pollution in developed countries is,
potentially, almost infinite. There are an estimated 90 billion tons of carbon
in Brazil's forests alone, and billions of tons more are sequestered in
Indonesia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, and
other nations with substantial tropical forests, which are considered the most
vulnerable to deforestation. The world has a major stake in keeping all that
carbon where it is. The question now being debated in Washington and Copenhagen
is whether the fate of the forests—and their people—will rest on the ability of
industries to pay for preserving distant trees rather than reducing emissions
closer to home.

Angola's new conflict: Who gets the oil?
Energy Daily
by Staff Writers
Luanda, Angola (UPI) Dec 2, 2009
Ref:
http://www.energy-daily.com/reports/Angolas_new_conflict_Who_gets_the_oil_999.ht\
ml


Angola, the arena for a Cold War conflict between the United States and the
Soviet Union, is now caught up in a new battle -- for its oil.

The West African state is now the continent's major producer, having eclipsed
troubled Nigeria, and the Americans see it as a vital energy source in the years
to come. So does China.

During the Cold War, the United States sought to depose the Soviet-backed rulers
of the former Portuguese colony and supported their main foe, Jonas Savimbi,
leader of the UNITA movement. The country's 27-year civil war ended in 2002.

Now Washington seeks to cozy up to Angola's president and wartime leader, Jose
Dos Santos, who for three decades has headed a notoriously corrupt regime.

As with many other African states caught up in the oil boom, Angola's oil
transactions and revenues, which account for 80 percent to 90 percent of export
earnings, are kept secret through the state-owned oil corporation, Sonangol.

In recent years, China, which cares little about corruption or the excesses of
dictatorial regimes, has engaged in massive investment in mineral-rich Africa to
secure access to the raw materials it needs to feed its ever-expanding economy.

Beijing has provided more than $24 billion in loans to African states where its
oil companies and industrial giants are operating, mainly providing
infrastructure projects that are intended to improve the extraction and
transportation of oil and other resources.

China is by far the leading buyer of Angolan oil, operating through Sonangol.

But the Americans, who for decades ignored Africa, are striving to catch up so
they can get their hands on the vast new oil fields being found across West
Africa and off its coast.

The U.S. presence has been enshrined in the newly established Africa Command, a
military organization headquartered in Stuttgart, Germany, that many believe was
created to extend U.S. military power on the continent to protect future oil
supplies.

With the Middle East in constant turmoil, the Americans are dealing with regimes
widely considered unsavory, such as that in Luanda, to secure access to the
region's oil wealth.

That's been the name of the game for decades. But the relationship between the
West and African dictators who are enriching themselves from the big-power
stampede for their countries' oil may be changing.

How that might influence events is not clear. But a series of high-profile
corruption trials in France, a consequence of President Nicolas Sarkozy's
anti-graft drive, have already exposed the seamier side of Paris' dealings with
African states, some of them former French colonies.

In October, an appeal court halted a judicial probe of palatial homes and other
assets in France owned by the strongman presidents of three oil-producing
states, Gabon, the Republic of Congo and Equatorial Guinea
, who had been accused of pillaging their impoverished nations while holding
power by force.

U.S. officials envision 25 percent to 30 percent of U.S. oil imports coming from
Africa by 2015, up to a third more than the current level, primarily from
Nigeria and Angola.

Khadija Sharife, a visiting scholar at the U.S. Center for Civil Society, wrote
recently in Foreign Policy in Focus that Nigeria and Angola are "two primary
beneficiaries of the African Growth and Opportunity Act, along with Chad, yet
another petro-state government by lifetime dictator Idriss Deby. ...

"The United States is making other inroads in Angola in agriculture, economic
reform and healthcare. One example includes Angola's partnership with USAID,
which uses aid to promote U.S. multinationals like Chevron and technologies such
as genetically modified organisms."

Now, the rivalry between China and the United States is becoming more
complicated because the Luanda regime is being caught up in a dispute with two
of its neighbors, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Congo-Brazzaville, over
ownership of large offshore oil reserves.

The DRC has accused Angola, which helped it militarily during the 1998-2003
civil war in the Congo, of seizing part of the continental shelf claimed by
Kinshasa. These zones are being drilled by U.S. giants Chevron Texaco and Exxon
Mobil.

For its part, Congo-Brazzaville insists that two other blocks claimed by Angola
and being drilled by BP of Britain and Total of France belong to it.

from the Eagle Watch #16


Trenton Air Base Expansion and the Besieged Tyendinaga Mohawks
Over $125million spent for October alone
November 3, 2009


The colonialists must now regret their role in establishing the Mohawk community
at Tyendinaga over two hundred years ago. (Culbertson Tract)  They wanted to use
the Mohawks who had been their allies against the French in the 1700's and later
in the War of 1812 against the Americans.  Now Mohawks are in the way and just
won't go away.  In fact, Haudenosaunee people at Tyendinaga want all their land
back for their growing community.


The colonial thieves have been gradually stealing the land at Tyendinaga, even
to the point of carrying it out in truckloads of aggregate.  It was never theirs
in the first place.  Lake Ontario is part of traditional Haudenosaunee
territory. Now the war mongers plan to expand nearby Trenton Air Force Base. 
They want the last bit of land for their military personnel housing on the
beautiful and strategic Bay of Quinte where over 2,500 Mohawks live.


Our Mohawk relatives at Tyendinaga are besieged and targeted by colonial
psychological warfare.  Things seem quiet for now but that can be the worst
thing when crooks are making back room deals to sell out the people.  When will
Chief Don Maracle try to bring in the porta prison again?  Has a deal been made
over water treatment?  It's the old dirty colonial trick of divide and conquer.


Defence Construction Canada DCC awarded over $126.9 million in October alone for
construction at Trenton military base.  This is a huge increase over previous
months when the totals for the entire Canadian military were less. They intend
to double the present size of the Trenton air base, adding the JTF2 Special
Operations and possibly even setting up a NATO base.   Who knows what new wars
they plan to wage around the world?


Christian Paradis, Minister of Public Works and Government Services signs the
cheques for the military construction contracts.


Two contracts, one to Bird Construction of Etobicoke for $84.7million and one to
Pomerleau Inc. of Ottawa for $40.5million make up the bulk of the month's
expenditures.  Bird Construction, a huge general contractor, is supposed to
start immediately building a maintenance hangar for the globemaster jets that
carry soldiers and equipment to the Afghan and other war zones.  Pomerleau Inc.
is to build an "air mobility training centre" for the new Hercules transport
fleet.  Two other multimillion dollar projects are expected to begin soon along
with several smaller projects.  It won't be quiet at Tyendinaga for much longer!


Bird Construction started out in Saskatchewan working for the military expansion
prior to WWII while the Trenton base was built in 1933 for the same purpose.
Bird does all aspects of construction all across the land now.  They use a lot
of concrete, smothering Mother Earth wherever they can. They do work for
Syncrude, Petro Canada and Suncor.  They're up to their dirty stinking armpits
in the oil sands.  They also build water treatment plants and reservoirs,
schools, hospitals, malls and prisons.


Bird Consruction Income Fund boasted their $84.7million contract at Trenton all
over the financial rags.  Stocks in their company trade on the Toronto Stock
Exchange under the symbol, BDT.UN.  Anyone with money can invest in building up
the Canadian war machine. Bird's sales went from $88 million in 1988 to over
$500 million in 2006. They have since doubled their sales with construction
revenue down by 9.8% to $444.3 million for the six months ended June 30, 2009
compared to $492.5 million for the same period in 2008.  In 1998 the company's
first U.S. office was opened in Seattle, Washington. Those unemployed auto
workers might get a job mixing and hauling concrete for Bird.


Bird is also building an Air Operations Centre at North Bay, Ontario, the only
Canadian surveillance centre in the North American Air Defence NORAD System. 
It's a secure location which houses classified surveillance equipment.  They got
$22.6 million for that contract.  They don't take jobs under $1million.


The maintenance hangar being built by Bird at Trenton is for the jumbo jet
Globemasters that move equipment and soldiers to wars around the world.  The
total cost is estimated at $122.6 million and will include a 2nd hangar for the
big airships. Canada has four globemasters while the US has 187 with plans to
build 15 more at a cost of $2.95billion by 2010.  Boeing makes these planes and
sold four to Australia, six to Britain and possibly three to NATO.  Boeing works
with the four air forces under the C-17 Globemaster Sustainment Partnership. 
It's $$billions$$!!!  Do they plan to work on the US planes at Trenton too? (see
endnotes for specs on the big ship).


Just think of all the people who could be fed, housed, educated and healed with
all this money being spent on war mongering!!


Pomerleau Inc. based in Ville de Saint-Georges, Quebec with offices in Quebec
City, Montreal, Ottawa and Halifax, is a similar giant in the construction
business.  They build schools, office buildings, shopping malls, hotels,
apartment buildings and research facilities like CITEC, Saint-Laurent Technoparc
dedicated to pure research; Héma-Quebec Research Centre in Sainte-Foy, Quebec, a
medical research centre for transfusion and transplant technologies; Laval
Hospital aka the Quebec University Cardiology and Pulmonology Institute; Merck
Frosst - laboratories, phase I (surgery) and phase II (pharmacology); National
Research Council of Canada Aluminium Technology Centre (NRCC-ATC), University of
Quebec, Chicoutimi; National Research Council of Canada, Institute for Aerospace
Research, Aerospace Manufacturing Technology Centre, University of Montreal
Campus and Agriculture Canada's Potato Research Centre, Fredericton, New
Brunswick.  It develops new cultivars and technologies for growing, handling and
using potatoes. It also maintains a national potato gene bank and performs
research on soil enhancement and conservation.


Like Bird, Pomerleau build water treatment facilities like the Ravensview Water
Pollution Control Plant at Kingston, Ontario.  Their annual sales are about
$750million.


The "air mobility training centre" being built by Pomerleau is for the C-130J
Hercules fleet.  These are the main transport planes for moving war equipment
and soldiers.  Canada has 27 Hercules and is now upgrading to the new model.  In
January 2008, Canada placed an order for 17 new Hercs, C-130J aircraft from
Lockheed Martin, the manufacturer. First deliveries are planned for the end of
2010.  The planes are built in Marietta, Georgia. Lockheed Martin plans to sell
hundreds more of them so that perpetual war can be waged all over the world. 
Somebody is trying to build a global empire. (see endnotes for more details)


The way we understand it, according to Natural or Indigenous Law and the Great
Law of Peace, women have a responsibility and a right to monitor the military
and its activities.


Women give birth to babies, feeling the pangs of labour.  Women make the self
sacrifice as we patiently nurture life.  Women raise the children so we know how
much energy goes into bringing one child to become an adult.  We don't like to
see lives thrown away.  We don't like to see needless suffering.


When women's concerns are ignored, men's war games tend to get out of hand.  In
the "western society" that has overwhelmed Turtle Island and influenced our
Indigenous cultures, women's role is disrespected, disregarded and suppressed. 
Though feminism has "liberated" women so they can walk about half naked and have
many careers, it has not empowered women to prevent war's destruction.  When
Mothers' Day was first celebrated, it was women marching and protesting the loss
of their sons, brothers, husbands and fathers during WWI.


According to Nishnaabe ways, the Drum is a gift that women gave to men so they
could express themselves in a constructive way.  The beat of the drum helps
reconnect men to the heartbeat of Mother Earth.  The sundance teaches men to
understand the pain that women experience.  The colonial intent to conquer
Nature is impossible and dangerous.  In spite of space travel, the planet Earth
is our only sustenance and home.  Our Indigenous ties to the land are our
essential hope for future generations.  We will stand firm!


KITTOH


We welcome your feedback!  Forward, post and consider printing for your
cyberphobic friends and relatives.  <kittoh@...>


Notes
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-investor/markets/stocks/news/?q=BDT.UN-T
http://www.trentonian.ca/ArticleDisplay.aspx?e=2141708



Some of the big wigs at Bird:
Paul Charette, Chair of the Board of Trustees of Bird Construction Income Fund
and Chair of the Board of Bird Construction Company Limited;
Paul Raboud, President and Chief Executive Officer, also on the boards at Bird;
Stephen Entwistle Chief Financial Officer and Assistant Secretary.  He's the
money manager who worked in the natural gas sector.


Bird Construction Income Fund
5403 Eglinton Avenue West
Toronto Ontario M9C 5K6
Phone: (416) 620-7122 Fax: (416) 620-1516
corporate.info@...


The trustees are J.R. Bird, J.J. Buchanan, P.A. Charette, D.G. Doyle, J.U.
Joseph, P.R. Raboud, and A.C. Thorsteinson.  We don't know who any of these
vampires are.  There appears to be an awful lot of them profiting from war!


The Globemaster
"The C-17 measures 174 feet long (53 meters) with a wingspan of 169 feet, 10
inches (51.75 meters) and is powered by four, fully reversible, Federal Aviation
Administration-certified F117-PW-100 engines (the military designation for the
commercial Pratt & Whitney PW2040).


Maximum payload capacity of the C-17 is 170,900 pounds (77,519 kilograms), and
its maximum gross takeoff weight is 585,000 pounds (265,352 kilograms). With a
payload of 160,000 pounds (80 tons, or 72,575 kilograms) and an initial cruise
altitude of 28,000 feet (8,534 meters), the C-17 has an un-refueled range of
approximately 2,400 nautical miles."


The C-17 can also airdrop 102 paratroopers and equipment, and its design allows
it to operate through small, austere airfields. The C-17 can take off and land
on runways as short as 3,000 feet (914 meters) and only 90 feet wide (27.4
meters). Even on such narrow runways, the C-17 can turn around using a
three-point star turn and its backing capability. Its cruise speed is
approximately 450 knots (0.74 Mach). Given the C-130 Hercules' 20-ton limit, and
the need for heavier vehicles in order to achieve survivability on the
battlefield, the C-17s have been pressed into more extensive flying duties that
include forward airfields as well as hubs. The result is a level of flight hours
that remain above USAF projections, and are likely to continue doing so. Some
estimates say the effect on the USA's C-17 fleet will be to shorten the planes'
expected lifespan by 5 years.


The Globemaster is operated by a crew of three.


http://www.airforce-technology.com/projects/c17/


Pomerleau Inc.
www.pomerleau.ca
mc.dubeault@...
hpi@...
info@...


Pomerleau Inc., Ottawa
220­343 Preston Street
Ottawa (Ontario)  K1S 1N4
Phone: 613.244.4323  Fax: 613.244.4327


Pomerleau HQ, Saint-Georges
521, 6th Avenue, Ville de Saint-Georges (Quebec)  G5Y 0H1
Phone: 418.228.6688  Fax: 418.228.3524


Pomerleau Inc. is a privately owned company.  The principal owners are Hervé
Pomerleau, Pierre Pomerleau and Francis Pomerleau.  Pierre is the
president & Chief Executive Officer,   Bernard St-Louis is Executive Vice
President and Chief Operating Officer and Francis Pomerleau is Sr. Vice
President - Ontario & Western Canada.


Roger Pomerleau is MP for Drummond, Quebec.  There are over 1,500 telephone
listings for Pomerleau in Quebec.  What are the odds that Roger is related to
Pierre??


Hercules
The Hercules is operated by a crew of three.


http://www.airforce.forces.gc.ca/v2/equip/cc130/index-eng.asp
"The CC-130 Hercules is a four-engine fixed-wing turboprop aircraft that can
carry up to 90 combat troops. It is used for a wide range of missions, including
troop transport, tactical airlift (both palletized and vehicular cargo), search
and rescue (SAR), air-to-air refueling (AAR), and aircrew training. It can carry
more than 17,000 kilograms (about 38,000 pounds) of fuel for tactical AAR. The
Hercules can transfer 450 to 900 kilograms (about 1,000 to 2,000 pounds or 454
to 910 litres) of fuel per minute, and refuels the CF-18 Hornet fighter aircraft
in less than five minutes.


The Hercules has a maximum range of 7,222 kilometres (4,488 statute miles) and a
cruising speed of 556 km/h (345 mph). It is capable of short takeoffs and
landings (STOL) on unprepared runways.


The Hercules is used all over the world in war zones.  It is currently used by
NATO in the escalating war on Afghanistan.


Hundreds more of the upgraded version are being built with new customers like
Norway, India, Qatar, Iraq, Israel and Oman joining the club.  The UK,
Australia, Italy, Denmark and Kuwait have recently received some.  Since 1954,
over 2,300 Hercules have been built for 67 countries. The US is getting dozens
more of which 14 will be based in Ramstein, Germany.


Lockheed Martin boasts 2008 sales of $42.7 billion.  Other companies involved in
the Hercules production are BAE Systems, Northrop-Grumman, Honeywell, Elbit
(Israeli), CMC of Canada, Allison and Lucas Aerospace.


Some other countries who have Hercs are the Netherlands, Belgium, Greece,
Indonesia, Spain, Sweden and New Zealand.


http://www.worldwide-military.com/Military%20Aircraft/Tactical%20Transport/C-130\
_algemene_info_english.htm


Related:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=15880
US Workers Starved Into Service


CORRECTION:  In the Eagle Watch #15, we made an error in the 3rd paragraph.  The
figures for US highway deaths and flu deaths are reversed.  It should read
18,000 highway deaths per year and about 100 flu deaths per day.  An astute
reader sent us this information:
"More people die each month on American roads than were killed in the September
11 attacks, but where is the war on cars?"
From:
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/articl\
e5278712.ece


And for the flu deaths in America:
"Death rate extrapolations for USA for Flu: 63,729 per year, 5,310 per month,
1,225 per week, 174 per day, 7 per hour, 0 per minute, 0 per second. Note: this
automatic extrapolation calculation uses the deaths statistic: 63,730 annual
deaths for influenza and pneumonia (NVSR Sep 2001); estimated 20,000 deaths from
flu (NIAID) "
From: http://www.wrongdiagnosis.com/f/flu/deaths.htm

List-Id: <eaglewatch.npogroups.org>
List-Archive: <http://npogroups.org/lists/arc/eaglewatch>
List-Subscribe: <mailto:sympa@...?subject=subscribe%20eaglewatch>

Below is a copy of the press release regarding a new report by Survival
International (SI) about the impact global warming "mitigation measures" are
having on tribal peoples around the world. This report is being released prior
to the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, Dec. 7-18, 2009.

Here's a link to the PDF copy of the report, which I highly recommend:
http://assets.survivalinternational.org/documents/132/survival_climate_change_re\
port_english.pdf

Here's a link to the related media kit, which includes quotes and video
interviews:
http://www.survivalinternational.org/news/kits/climatechange


- - - - - - - - - -


http://www.survivalinternational.org/news/5273

`Moves to stop global warming are devastating tribal people', says new report
22 November

Measures to stop global warming risk being as harmful to tribal peoples as
climate change itself, according to a new report from Survival.

The report, `The most inconvenient truth of all: climate change and indigenous
people', sets out four key `mitigation measures' that threaten tribal people:

1. Biofuels: promoted as an alternative, `green' source of energy to fossil
fuels, much of the land allocated to grow them is the ancestral land of tribal
people. If biofuels expansion continues as planned, millions of indigenous
people worldwide stand to lose their land and livelihoods.

2. Hydro-electric power: A new boom in dam construction in the name of combating
climate change is driving thousands of tribal people from their homes.

3. Forest conservation: Kenya's Ogiek hunter-gatherers are being forced from the
forests they have lived in for hundreds of years to `reverse the ravages' of
global warming.

4. Carbon offsetting: Tribal peoples' forests now have a monetary value in the
booming `carbon credits' market. Indigenous people say this will lead to forced
evictions and the `theft of our land'.

The report calls for tribal people to be fully involved in decisions that affect
them, and for their land ownership rights to be upheld.

Survival Director Stephen Corry said today, `This report highlights `the most
inconvenient truth of all' – that the world's tribal people, who have done the
least to cause climate change and are most affected by it, are now having their
rights violated and land devastated in the name of attempts to stop it. Hiding
behind the global push to prevent climate change, governments and companies are
mounting a massive land grab. As usual, where money and vast profits are at
stake, the world's indigenous people are being shamefully swept aside.'

Activists Target "World of Coca-Cola"

Tuesday 24 November 2009

by: Matthew Cardinale  |  Inter Press Service

Sinhala encroachers deny Tamil owners land
TamilNet, Sunday, 01 November 2009
Ref: http://www.tamilnet.com/art.html?catid=13&artid=30543

"More than 1,486 Tamil families are unable to peacefully resettle in their homes
in Trincomalee, Vavuniya and Batticaloa due to unlawful and widespread
occupation of state land by members of the majority community," Sri Lanka's
weekly, The Nation said, according information from Tamil National Alliance
leader, Rajavarothiam Sampanthan and member of parliament, Packiyaselvam
Ariyanethiran.

"There are more than 500 families of the majority community who have set up
houses and are cultivating paddy in areas that were previously occupied by
Tamils before the war intensified," the paper said quoting Packiyaselvam
Ariyanethiran.

"I wrote to the President over this issue on September 16 requesting a probe and
a peaceful solution. The President in response to my letter had written to the
Government Agents [in Vavuniya, Trincomalee and Batticaloa] on October 26 asking
for a thorough report on the situation. I believe the GAs are yet to make their
official statement on the matter. However, once the holidays are over, I wish to
meet them and inquire of what they plan to do," Ariyanethiran added, the paper
further said.

The paper wrote in the story quoting Sampanthan as saying, "that members of the
minority Tamil community comprising of 1,486 families lawfully owning
residential property and plantation land within the Grama Sevaka Divisions of
Sampur East, Sampur West, Koonutheevu, Navaratnepuram, Soodaikuda,
Kakathkaraichanan and Sampurkali have been unable to return because the said
places have been declared High Security Zones. All temples and schools that
existed in the areas have been demolished as well."

[end]


Colombo announces new phase of 'IDP management'
[TamilNet, Sunday, 22 November 2009,
Ref: http://www.tamilnet.com/art.html?catid=13&artid=30655

Sri Lankan president Mahinda Rajapaksa's brother and advisor Basil Rajapaksa MP
on Saturday announced that the Tamils held in the 'Internal Displacement Person'
(IDP) camps of Vavuniyaa would be free, starting from December 01, to go and
live wherever they want to or to choose whether they want to continue to remain
inside the camps. Tamil sources in Vavuniyaa view the announcement with
scepticism describing it as an 'election gimmick' while expressing fear of
increased disappearances and militarisation of the Tamil homeland.

Earlier, only the elderly persons were allowed to leave the camps through
sponsorship apart from those who were re-located.

The announcement of Basil comes as Rajapaksa government is trying to woo the
Tamil voters of the North and East in the forthcoming elections.

Meanwhile, senior government officers in Vavuniyaa said there was no proper plan
of resettlement in Vavuniyaa, expressing fear that the Sri Lankan forces would
step up checking and harassments in the town, which would be overcrowded with
IDPs.

Heavy Sri Lankan military fortifications have been set up in the townships of
Vanni where all symbols of the once LTTE administered de-facto state have been
wiped out.

In the meantime, the SLA has been erecting several mini-camps in the interior
areas of Jaffna peninsula. The SLA in Jaffna is also busy strengthening the
security measures of the frontiers of its High Security Zones.

IDPs are regularly harassed by the Sri Lankan forces in every part of the Tamil
regions of the North and East of the island.

I guess EU-history never forget his own past...

ancient memories

EU gets Belgian president and British foreign minister
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/nov/19/eu-president-foreign-minister-ashton1

Berlin Conference (1884)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_Conference_%281884%29

Leopold II - the king of Belgium - the history of european colonization of Africa
Le roi blanc, le caoutchouc rouge, la mort noire
http://suburbanstudio.org/node/13
Documentaire de Peter Bate
Belgique, 2004, 1h30mn
ARTE/ZDF

2009
Fortress EUROPE gets Belgian president and British foreign minister

Unsettling Revelations Regarding US Lease of Colombian Military Bases

Monday 16 November 2009

by: Christina Esquivel  |  Council on Hemispheric Affairs

a legacy of corruption, which itself could be argued has been a legacy of
colonialism....

Kenya evicts thousands of forest squatters in attempt to save Rift valley

Tourism, tea and energy industries threatened after a quarter of huge Mau
forest destroyed in 20 years

by  Xan Rice in Nairobi
The Guardian, Wednesday 18 November 2009
Ref:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/nov/18/kenya-forest-squatters-evicted

Several thousand people who had settled illegally in Kenya's most
important forest have left their homes at the beginning of an eviction
plan designed to end rampant environmental degradation in the Rift valley.

Security officers this week entered the Mau forest, the country's largest water
catchment basin, in the first stage of a government operation that will
eventually see up to 30,000 families leave. More than a quarter of the
400,000-hectare forest has been lost because of human activity over the past 20
years, threatening Kenya's crucial tourism, tea and energy sectors and the
livelihoods of millions of people reliant on the Mau ecosystem.

"We have no time to waste here," said Christian Lambrechts, a United
Nations environment programme expert seconded to the government's Mau
Secretariat. "The ecological services must be restored."

The dozen or so rivers that originate in the montane forest complex feed the
Masai Mara Reserve and Lake Victoria, as well as the lush tea fields of Kericho.
But in recent years the river flows have decreased or stopped during the dry
season. At Lake Nakuru, Kenya's most visited national park, wildlife officials
were forced to pump in water to supply the animals this summer when all the
feeder rivers dried up.

A serious drought that has led to water and power shortages across the
country was a contributing factor. But human destruction of the once-thick Mau
Forest, which has caused its aquifer levels to fall significantly and seen soil
erosion increase, played a major part. At its root, as so often happens in
Kenya, is politics and corruption. Before the 1990s, the forest was a protected
area. But then senior officials in President Daniel arap Moi's government
grabbed large plots of the highly fertile land for themselves – Moi still owns a
large tea farm in the Mau – profiting from the timber they cleared. They also
removed protection from other parts of the forest where thousands of their
supporters were allowed to settle and begin farming. Many of the plots were
subdivided and then illegally sold
on, sometimes to unwitting buyers.

Amid warnings that the entire ecosystem in the Rift valley and western
Kenya was in danger due to the rapid deforestation, Kenya's government has made
saving the Mau its number one environmental priority. A task force formed by the
prime minister, Raila Odinga, last year recommended that all settlers in the
forest be removed and that cleared areas be rehabilitated through mass tree
planting. Only genuine titleholders – many of the titles in circulation are
fictitious – are to be considered for compensation.

Some politicians from Moi's Kalenjin ethnic group, among them large
beneficiaries of the land grab, have opposed the plan, describing it as an
attack on their community. They have demanded alternative land for the nearly
1,700 families – about 8,000 people – identified as illegal squatters without
title who are being targeted in the first phase of the operation. About 3,500 of
them had left the Mau by this morning after being served with eviction notices.
Some have complained they have nowhere else to go.

The next round of relocations, due in the next few months, will focus on those
people with some sort of title to the land. The trickiest part will be dealing
with the large landowners, including the politicians, who are unlikely to give
up their farms without a fight.

It is likely that some forest dwellers, including a few thousand members of the
Ogiek ethnic group who have lived in the Mau for generations, will be allowed to
remain.

Protests against India land bill
BBC News Online
Wednesday, 18 November 2009
Ref: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/8365655.stm

Hundreds of farmers have gathered on the outskirts of India's capital Delhi to
protest against plans to amend a controversial land acquisition law.

Farmers say changing the 115-year-old act will make it easier for farm land to
be used by industry.

The issue of land acquisition is a very sensitive one, with 65% of India's
population dependent on farming.

The government says the changes will improve the way the law works and hopes
farmers can be "partners" in its plans.

'Provision misused'

The three-day protest is supported by campaign groups from 15 Indian states.

"The Land Acquisition (Amendment) Bill, 2009, which the government has proposed
will further relax all provisions which will lead to an easier acquisition of
land by the authorities," says Madhuresh who works for Sangharsh, an umbrella of
150 groups participating in the protests.

According to the Land Acquisition Act of 1894, the government can take over any
private land for a "public purpose".

Campaigners say the authorities have often used the provision "to deprive the
poor of the meagre resources of livelihood, render the agriculturists landless
and to take away the rights traditionally exercised by communities over all
natural resources".

In recent years, the government has acquired land sometimes only for the benefit
of private corporations and commercial interests and profits, the campaigners
allege.

Governments have acquired large tracts of land to set up special economic zones
(SEZs) which they say will generate hundreds of thousands of jobs and bring in
new earnings.

But critics say this amounts to a land grab, because of a lack of transparency
and corruption in government.

'Last resort'

In recent years attempts by authorities to acquire farm land have led to violent
protests.

Last year, violent protests led to Tata Motors moving car production from the
town of Singur in West Bengal state.

And in October last year, farmers in Raigad in the western state of Maharashtra
voted against a proposed SEZ by Reliance Industries.

On Tuesday, the government said states should view using farm land for
industrial projects as "a last resort". It wants waste land to be used instead,
where possible.

Commerce and Industry Minister Anand Sharma told state governments to ensure
that farmers did not suffer due to industrialisation.

"Farmers should not be victims of industrialisation. They should be partners in
the process," he told state industry ministers in Delhi.

SA 'to miss land reform deadline'
BBC News Online
Wednesday, 4 November 2009
Ref: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/8341836.stm

South Africa will miss a 2014 deadline to redistribute a third of the country's
farmland from white farmers to the black majority, officials say.

Thozi Gwanya, from the land reform department, told the BBC the deadline had
been pushed back to 2025 because of a lack of funds.

He said more than $9.6bn (£5.8bn) was needed to buy the remaining land.

So far more than five million hectares have been distributed and about 20
million hectares remain to be bought.

At the end of apartheid in 1994 almost 90% of land was owned by the white
community, who made up less than 10% of the population.

'Social time bomb'

Mr Gwanya said South Africa's constitution stipulated that land had to be bought
from the current landowners, but the current economic crisis meant the
government had to postpone its plans.

He ruled out seizing land in order to fast-track the process.

"It has never been our programme to just seize land," he told the BBC's Network
Africa programme.

"Appropriation will be used in the event that there is no co-operation by the
current landowners, so far we have got a very positive support from most of the
white farmers."

But the Confederation of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) said land
redistribution was one of the main demands of the liberation struggle and rich
taxpayers should pay more to meet the deadline.

"An entire generation would have passed before we see this being implemented and
that isn't good enough," Cosatu's spokesman Patrick Craven told the BBC.

"We're sitting on a social time bomb," he said, adding that the recent township
demonstrations over poor services were a warning.

"Those are linked to the land question. The fact that people are forced to move
into cities to squatter camps... creates those kind of tensions.

"It would be far far better if they could make a living in the rural areas - the
main reason they can't is the skewed land ownership pattern which still exists
in rural areas."

Land reform is a sensitive issue in South Africa and has been brought into sharp
focus by the decline of agriculture in neighbouring Zimbabwe, where many white
commercial farmers have been violently evicted.

Earlier this year, the government warned that it would take over any allocated
land that was not being used effectively.

While last month, farmers' union Agri SA signed a deal to lease 200,000 hectares
of land in the Republic of Congo as it said the government's land policy was
forcing white farmers to seek land abroad.

Dying For OIL…..Unicol Corporation Feeding On Blood!
October 27, 2009 · 2 Comments
By Salim Muwakkil
Ref:
http://centurean2.wordpress.com/2009/10/27/dying-for-oil-unicol-corporation-feed\
ing-on-blood/

Chicago Tribune
March 18, 2002

An ongoing source of frustration and anger for many Americans is the lack of
support the war on terrorism has received abroad. Other nations are considerably
less enthusiastic about our use of "daisy cutter" and "thermobaric" bombs than
we think they should be. Why is that? One reason is their media. Stories
alleging imperial and commercial motives for the war on terrorism are rife.
Outside this country, there is a widespread belief that U.S. military
deployments in Central Asia mostly are about oil. An article in the Guardian of
London headlined, "A pro-western regime in Kabul should give the U.S. an Afghan
route for Caspian oil," foreshadowed the kind of skeptical coverage the U.S. war
now receives in many countries.

"The invasion of Afghanistan is certainly a campaign against terrorism," wrote
author George Monbiot in the Oct. 22, 2001, piece, "but it may also be a late
colonial adventure." He wrote that the U.S. oil company Unocal Corp. had been
negotiating with the Taliban since 1995 to build "oil and gas pipelines from
Turkmenistan, through Afghanistan and into Pakistani ports on the Arabian sea."
He cited Ahmed Rashid's authoritative book "Taliban, Militant Islam, Oil and
Fundamentalism in Central Asia" as a source for this information.

Rashid, who has reported on Afghan wars for more than 20 years as a
correspondent for the Eastern Economic Review and the Daily Telegraph, carefully
documents in his book how the U.S. and Pakistan helped install the Taliban in
hopes of bringing stability to the war-ravaged region and making it safer for
the pipeline project. Unocal pulled out of the deal after the 1998 terrorist
attacks on U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were linked to terrorists based
in Afghanistan.

"The war against terrorism is a fraud," exclaimed John Pilger in an Oct. 29
commentary in the British-based Mirror. Pilger, the publication's former chief
foreign correspondent, wrote, "Bush's concealed agenda is to exploit the oil and
gas reserves in the Caspian basin, the greatest source of untapped fossil fuel
on earth."

These harsh assessments are not just those of embittered ideologues. They are
common fare. "Just as the Gulf War in 1991 was about oil, the new conflict in
South and Central Asia is no less about access to the region's abundant
petroleum resources," writes Ranjit Devraj in the Hong Kong-based Asia Times, a
business-oriented publication.

A popular French book titled "Bin Laden, the Forbidden Truth," which alleges
that the Bush administration blocked investigations of Osama bin Laden while it
bargained for him with the Taliban in exchange for political recognition and
economic aid, is guiding much of the recent European coverage.

Written by Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquie, the book adds another
plank to the argument that America's major objective was to gain access to the
region's oil and gas reserves. According to the book, the Bush administration
began to negotiate with the Taliban immediately after coming into power. The
parties talked for many months before reaching an impasse in August 2001.

The terrorist acts of Sept. 11, though tragic, provided the Bush administration
a legitimate reason to invade Afghanistan, oust the recalcitrant Taliban and,
coincidentally, smooth the way for the pipeline. To make things even smoother,
the U.S. engineered the rise to power of two former Unocal employees: Hamid
Karzai, the new interim president of Afghanistan, and Zalmay Khalizad, the Bush
administration's Afghanistan envoy.

"Osama bin Laden did not comprehend that his actions serve American interests,"
writes Uri Averny, in a Feb. 14 column in the daily Ma'ariv in Israel. Averny, a
former member of the Israeli Knesset and a noted peace activist, added, "If I
were a believer in conspiracy theory, I would think that bin Laden is an
American agent. Not being one I can only wonder at the coincidence."

Averny argues that the war on terrorism provides a perfect pretext for America's
imperial interests. "If one looks at the map of the big American bases created
for the war, one is struck by the fact that they are completely identical to the
route of the projected oil pipeline to the Indian Ocean."

The Asia Times reported in January that the U.S. is developing "a network of
multiple Caspian pipelines," and that people close to the Bush administration
stand to benefit.

For example, the proposed Baku-Ceyhan pipeline, linking Azerbaijan through
Georgia to Turkey, is represented by the law firm Baker & Botts. The principal
attorney is James Baker, former secretary of state and chief spokesman for the
Bush campaign in the Florida vote controversy.

In 1997, the now disgraced Enron Corp. conducted the feasibility study for the
$2.5 billion Trans-Caspian pipeline being built under a joint venture between
Turkmenistan, Bechtel Corp. and General Electric, the article noted. There are
many other connections, too numerous to recount here. No wonder the rest of the
world is a bit skeptical about our war on evildoers.

OXFAM study: disastrous consequences of multinational retail investments for
people in India

Originally sent out by: knut.unger@...

OXFAM Germany today presented a report about the destructive
consequences of the growing invasion of retail multis like Wal Mart,
Tesco, Cerrafour, Metro etc. into the  Indian retail maraktes, which so far has
been dominated by small and local business. In India so far only 1 % of the food
gets sold in supermarekts.

Millions of jobs are under threed. Espeacially small shops, street
vendours and small farmers will be affected.

The liberalization of foreign investments in retail is one the conflicts in
ongoing negotiations on free trade agrements between India and the EU.

OXFAM demands a stop of these negotiations as longs as the negotiated
texts have not been published and the social and ecological development in India
has not been ensured.


"To Checkout, Please!
The new propensity to consume and booming markets in India: What can
happen, if supermarket chains expand rapidly after liberalization of the retail
sector


Marita Wiggerthale
Report, commissioned by Oxfam Germany, 2009

In India, the IT revolution is set to be followed by a revolution in
retailing. Since early 2000, the international retail conglomerates have set
their sights on the Indian retail market. In 2005, the country, for the first
time, reached top position in the ranking of the most attractive target markets.

The METRO Group had already recognised the potential of the Indian
market earlier. It established itself with its Cash and Carry wholesale markets
in 2003 as the first international retail corporation in the country. Following
Britain’s Spencer’s and South Africa’s Shoprite, Wal-Mart and Tesco are expected
to enter the market in 2009. The Rewe Group is also eyeing the Indian market as
part of its “vision for the future”.
"
... more at:
http://www.oxfam.de/download/to_checkout_please.pdf


Full Greman report at:
> http://www.oxfam.de/a_611_presse.asp?id=436

Casualties of the `Bloodless' Coup
No matter what prominent U.S. apologists say, the military takeover of Honduras
was—and is—violent and unjust,

by Jeremy Kryt
Ref: http://inthesetimes.com/article/5084/casualties_of_the_bloodless_coup

TEGUCIGALPA, HONDURAS—Many apologists for the thuggish takeover of the elected
government in Honduras still claim that what happened last June 28 was a
"bloodless" coup. In a Wall Street Journal editorial on October 10, U.S. Senator
Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) went one step further, denying there even is a political
crisis here, and referring to the ousting of President Mel Zelaya as a "supposed
military `coup.'"

But the hundreds of peaceful demonstrators who have been brutally beaten since
the putsch might disagree with adjectives like "supposed" and "bloodless." As
might the family of Jairo Sanchez, the most recent victim of
government-sponsored violence, who after weeks of drifting in and out of
consciousness, died in the capital on Monday, October 19.

According to the report prepared by the Committee for the Families of the
Disappeared in Honduras (COFADEH), Sanchez, a 38-year-old husband and father,
was shot in the face during a police raid against unarmed marchers on September
30. Three other peaceful demonstrators were critically wounded in the same
attack. Apparently none of this well-documented violence made an impression on
DeMint. The senator recently returned from a brief visit to Tegucigalpa, were
he'd been the guest of the same political elites who worked with the military to
orchestrate the putsch. "As all strong democracies do after cleansing
themselves, Honduras has moved on," DeMint opined.

During his visit, Honduras was under martial law, independent media were
shuttered and police and soldiers attacked peaceful protestors just blocks from
the Senator's hotel. Yet upon returning home, DeMint reported "there is no chaos
there," that like the coup itself, this is all merely "supposed."

Honduras was plunged into this "supposed" chaos last summer, when soldiers
exiled Zelaya and presented a false letter of abdication to Congress on national
television. In the same ceremony, far-right political veteran Roberto Micheletti
was installed as a puppet to head the civilian government.

Since then, riot police and soldiers have shown an increasing willingness to use
violence against anyone who publicly opposes the coup. Truncheons, tear gas,
rubber bullets and even live rounds are frequently employed to disperse peaceful
demonstrations. COFADEH estimates that since the coup, 17 people have died at
the hands of authorities.

DeMint, however, made no mention of such casualties in his editorial. Nor did he
reference the political scandal his Honduran junket had caused back home. In
order to show his support for the coup regime, DeMint had defied direct orders
from John Kerry, head of the Foreign Relations Committee. Because Kerry refused
to authorize the trip, the senator flew to Honduras in a military jet sent by
the Pentagon, causing crucial Foreign Relations Committee meetings to be
cancelled in his absence.

But that wouldn't be the first time the South Carolina Republican has been the
source of a political log-jam. DeMint—who was ranked by the National Journal as
the most conservative of all U.S. Senators in both 2007 and 2008—is also holding
up crucial votes on Obama's picks for assistant secretary of state for western
hemisphere affairs (Arturo Valenzuela) and ambassador to Brazil (Thomas A.
Shannon Jr.).
`Armed against the unarmed'

During a recent interview, COFADEH Director Bertha Oliva said, "[The
authorities] are killing people…and it is selective. They are targeting the
leaders of the resistance, just as they did in the 80s… And they can control the
media, to help them accomplish whatever they intend."

Oliva said Zelaya had initiated some modern social reforms in Honduras, like
raising the minimum wage, initiating social security and passing laws to
conserve natural resources. But such bold moves threatened the power structure
for the nation's wealthiest families and the military. When the
rancher-turned-president vowed to let the people vote on a referendum for broad
constitutional reforms, troops seized Zelaya in his pajamas, hustling him out of
the country at gunpoint.

"This is a struggle of the armed, against the unarmed," said Oliva, when we met
in her downtown office, which was recently shelled with tear gas by police. "But
the Resistance will not give up its peaceful principals."

Zelaya returned to the capital in a surprise move on September 21, but remains
holed up in the Brazilian Embassy, under threat of arrest and surrounded by
hundreds of troops. In addition to union leader Sanchez, others killed by
authorities since Zelaya's return include a 67-yeaar-old man, a newly-wed girl,
a school teacher and a nurse. And that's just in the last month.

"[The de facto government] ignores these casualties, because they would like to
say that the Resistance does not exist," Oliva said. "But they will not be able
to say it for much longer."

`Slaves to a piece of paper'

The coup-plotters in Honduras claim they acted to prevent Zelaya from extending
his time in office and becoming a despot like Hugo Chavez. In his editorial for
the Journal, DeMint also defended the legality of their actions, citing an
August briefing from the Law Library of [U.S.] Congress.

In fact, the law library report (PDF file) makes clear that the Honduran
military's decision to exile Zelaya was "in direct violation of the Article 102
of [their] Constitution."

DeMint also accuses Zelaya of defying the Honduran Supreme Court regarding the
much-disputed constitutional referendum. But such accusations must be viewed in
context. The Library of Congress brief says that when the Supreme Court first
outlawed the referendum, Zelaya was willing to play along. He obliged the Court
by suggesting a nonbinding poll so that, in the words of the report, "The
Honduran people could express their opinion" on Constitutional reforms.

But the Supreme Court ruled even a simple poll to be inexplicably illegal. The
judicial branch of the Honduran government was preventing a plebiscite, one of
the basic tools of transparent, isocratic government.

The Court's injunctions were increasingly repressive, obviously designed to
thwart much-needed reforms. According to Oliva, Zelaya was simply answering
public demand by agreeing to a referendum on the Constitution. "In the current
system, everything is rigged for the interests of the wealthy," Oliva said.
"Zelaya wanted to give the people a voice."

DeMint, echoing the junta itself, claims that the nonbinding poll on political
reforms would have somehow allowed Zelaya to extend his time as president. In
fact, the proposed ballot question made no mention of term limits, and Zelaya
was not even running in the upcoming elections.

"They are usurpers," Oliva said. "The only way they can hold onto power is by
spreading lies and fear."

Dr. Valerio Gutierrez, Secretary of State under current de facto leader Roberto
Micheletti, said in a recent interview that Zelaya had tried to subvert the
authority of Congress and the Supreme Court, thus legalizing his own deposition.
Yet Gutierrez admitted that "many people in Honduras want to change the
constitution" and that this could be a good idea "if the majority voted for it."
If such a vote is not allowed, said Gutierrez, the people would be little more
than "slaves to a piece of paper."
Constitutional contention

Near the close of his Wall Street Journal article, DeMint praises the Honduran
Constitution, and likens its framers to our own Founding Fathers. But several
legal experts I've spoken to in Tegucigalpa, including Honduran Congressman
Marvin Ponce, admit that their national charter is deeply flawed, describing it
as `draconian' and `outdated.'

The Honduran Constitution was written in 1982 under the auspices of Policarpo
Paz Garcia, the last military junta to rule this beautiful but impoverished
country.

"It does not include rights for women, or for minorities, and it lends itself to
exploitation by the elite sectors of society," said Ponce, who recently had his
arm broken in three places when soldiers attacked him during a peaceful
demonstration.

But in his editorial for the Journal, DeMint insisted on the connection between
America's own patriotic heritage and the current peasant-killing,
media-censoring de facto regime in Honduras. The Senator wrote that the
Micheletti government had comported itself, "as our own Founding Fathers would
have hoped."

When I asked Oliva why she thought powerful U.S. politicians like DeMint were
backing the coup in Honduras, she answered using the Spanish word "golpista."
Golpista translates literally as "putschist" – although today in Honduras, it
has taken on a meaning closer to the English word "fascist."

"There are golpistas everywhere in the world," she said. "Not just in Honduras.
It is a mindset. An ideology. Of course they would stick together."
[end]

Jeremy Kryt is a graduate of the Indiana University School of Journalism and the
University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. He has been reporting from Honduras since
August, and his coverage of the crisis there has appeared in The Earth Island
Journal, Alternet and The Narco News Bulletin, among other publications.

Seeing The Wood For The Trees
Palestine Monitor
26 October 2009
Ref: http://www.palestinemonitor.org/spip/spip.php?article1144

The olive harvest has become synonymous with settler violence. The 2008 harvest
saw a record high for attacks on Palestinian farmers and their land, capping a
succession of increases. Violence on that scale has not materialised this
harvest, which has instead been defined by its use as a political football.
Propaganda from parties on both sides of the wall has distorted the facts on the
ground. Such tactics do worse than cheapen the suffering of victims. They have
further damaged the already fragile economy of Palestine's most valuable
commodity.

In recent weeks there have been numerous reports of mass tree burning,
particularly in the farms around Nablus. The Palestinian Authority official for
settlement activity - Ghassan Daglas - announced the destruction of 150 trees in
Burin, a hub of carnage last year. Similar and larger figures came out of the
villages of Laben, Al Sawya and Deir Ammar, by Daglas' statistics making 3,400
trees destroyed in 2009. PGFTU (Palestine General Federation of Trade Union)
spokesmen alleged "thousands of trees burning in Jamain". The official line is
one of large-scale destruction.

This is not a view shared by farmers in the region. Issam Sheddahah, a lifelong
resident of Burin and a former victim of settler violence expressed surprise at
these figures. "Last year they (settlers) burned many trees, but this year so
far it has been quiet." Abu Hassan, whose farm lies closer to the infamous
settlement of of Itzhar agreed, "No settlers have attacked us in this harvest".
Al Sawya, further south from Nablus, also contradicted official reports. Farmers
there claimed "good relations" with the surrounding settlers, continuing to
harvest within 100 yards of settlements. What evidence there was for vandalism
lay deep in the security zone, where Palestinians have no access. Fares, a
member of Al-Mubadara and steering committee leader for Al Sawya suggested "the
farmers are scared to talk about the settlers", but conceded the harvest had
been unusually peaceful. "I think it is a reaction to the Goldstone Report. The
Knesset has a lot of communication with settlements and they tell them not to
make trouble."

The fact of the security zones is reason enough for Palestinian outrage. In Al
Sawya 40% of farmland falls under military control. The size and location of
these zones, permanently off limits to villagers, is solely determined by the
IDF (Israel Defense Forces). They often dwarf the actual settlement, giving vast
tracts of resource-rich land to the settlers. Their borders fluctuate, so that
private land can be swallowed up at any time. The lack of laws to govern
security zones is costing farmers far more than burned trees. In the last two
weeks Burin has also seen people arrested without charge and cars torched by
settlers, but neither has received the publicity which surrounds the harvest.

In the fourth consecutive year of drought, the harvest can ill afford the
effects of scare tactics, demand has outstripped supply to the point that a
litre of olive oil now sells for around 40 shekels a litre, double what it cost
two years ago. In many cases impoverished farmers have been forced to abandon
their land, no longer able to extract a living from their produce. International
involvement has provided some relief, in manpower and technology, but this too
has been jeopardised.

Last week Palestinian radio announced the Israeli Government was in the act of
passing a law, banning international volunteers from Area C farms. It was
reported that any international found there faced arrest and deportation, while
the host family would be fined 6,000 shekels ($1,500). There has been not a
single instance of this `law' being exercised, but significantly less volunteers
are participating in the harvest. Bridget, campaign co-ordinator for ISM
(International Solidarity Movement), leads groups around the Nablus area farms.
"Nobody's been arrested and I think they're basically scare stories. These
stories are always exaggerated and they prevent farmers from getting the help
they need. " Publicising the myth of deportation has served only Israeli
interests, reducing the scrutiny and pressure on their policies by scaring off
the witnesses. An anonymous source within the PA acknowledged that the
consequences could be severe; "many farmers will not harvest without an
international presence."

The wide circulation of these stories seems at best irresponsible. At worst they
are a cynical attempt to manipulate a crisis, a tactic best left to Israeli
propaganda. For their part, Israel have publicly acknowledged their
responsibility to control settlers by installing IDF troops around harvest
sites. This allows them to closely monitor farmers and volunteers, while
outwardly appearing to be there as protection. Bridget of ISM does not
appreciate their presence; "We have a lot of problems with the military throwing
their weight around. They just like to move and harass us. I can't think of a
time when they were helpful." In fact they have used their proximity to conduct
mass arrests in the nearby villages, with six seized in Burin without charge.
Restraining settlers has never been an Israeli priority and there have been many
instances of farmers being attacked despite the presence of IDF forces.
Empowering soldiers to genuinely protect Palestinians would mark a dramatic
change in policy and loyalty, too dramatic to be anything more than lip service.
But if, as seems likely, central government is playing a role in discouraging
settlers from violence, we may be seeing signs of a less hawkish approach from a
Knesset still squirming under the Goldstone microscope.

Palestinian spin doctors must avoid a PR war with Israel. Despite the lack of
violence, security and movement restrictions are strangling Palestinian farmers
and the olive oil industry as a whole. The facts are all in their favour,
without needing to risk international sympathies by mimicking Israeli tactics of
misinformation. Reduced violence this harvest-time is to be celebrated as a
triumph of legitimate pressure on Israel, rather than used as an invitation to
dangerous hyperbole.

An Interview with Economist Ethan Kaplan
Challenging the Dollar Dictatorship

By NIKOLAS KOZLOFF, Counterpunch
Date: October 23-25, 2009
Ref: http://www.counterpunch.org/kozloff10232009.html

Last week, representatives of the Bolivarian Alternative of the Americas (known
by its Spanish acronym ALBA) met in the Bolivian city of Cochabamba to discuss
the future evolution of the trade bloc, designed to promote complementarity and
reciprocity amongst left-leaning regimes in the region such as Cuba, Venezuela,
Bolivia, Nicaragua and Ecuador. Since its inception in 2004, ALBA has carried
out important exchanges of goods and services; for example Venezuela has
exported subsidized oil to Cuba and receives Cuban medical assistance in return.
However, some wonder whether ALBA is practical or can help to foster real
economic development for the region's poor.

ALBA leaders however say it's time to place such doubts aside. Last week in
Cochabamba they declared their historic adoption of a common currency called the
Unified System of Compensation of Reciprocal Payments or SUCRE in Spanish. Named
after Antonio José de Sucre, a military general and hero of the wars of
independence against Spain, the Sucre is to be gradually substituted for the
U.S. dollar in terms of commercial exchange between ALBA member nations.

According to the new Cochabamba agreement, ALBA countries will make deposits in
their respective currencies to an ALBA bank headquartered in Caracas. The Sucre
will act as a payment compensation mechanism and allow ALBA nations to reconcile
accounts when they carry out commercial transactions in local currency. It's a
kind of barter exchange system: if Venezuela for example buys textiles from
Bolivia and owes the Andean nation a certain quantity of money, then this will
be compensated in kind with other imported goods such as asphalt. The difference
in cost will be reconciled by central banks located within respective ALBA
countries which handle the Sucre. Payment requests meanwhile will be processed
electronically between ALBA members via an ALBA bank.

Creation of the Sucre then will not lead to a new physical currency being
issued. The Sucre will not have any intrinsic value but will have parity in
relation to the U.S. dollar, the euro or Japanese yen. By early 2010, ALBA
countries hope to start using the "virtual" currency, with future plans to
convert it into a hard currency. Eventually, at some future yet undefined date,
ALBA members hope to establish a unified regional currency which Bolivia has
suggested could be named "Pacha" for the Quechua Indian word for Earth.

Recently, I sat down with Ethan Kaplan, a visiting Professor at Columbia
University's Center for Global Thought and Department of Economics. Kaplan, a
former economic advisor to the Venezuelan National Assembly, discussed the
economic and political implications of the Sucre.

NK: ALBA leaders say creating the Sucre is necessary so as to defray the
regional effects of the world economic crisis. By substituting their trade in
dollars with the new alternative currency, ALBA members hope to protect
themselves from future financial downturns. How well do you think this will
work?

EK: There's a lot of evidence that currency unification leads to greater trade
and hence there would probably be more intra-regional trade under the Sucre. The
Sucre could make ALBA nations less subject to international financial crises
outside of their group, but we need to remember that these countries have a lot
of crises themselves. If ALBA nations make it harder for capital to leave their
currency area, then they will have less to do with the broader international
economy. A lot of recessions are induced by international financial crises, so
if ALBA doesn't have much to do with that international system and ALBA
countries have a stable monetary system themselves, they could avoid some degree
of financial crisis. However, I doubt that the Sucre will protect ALBA.
Consider: ALBA is a small area economically. ALBA members will still trade
heavily with the outside world. Obviously ALBA nations and the Sucre are not
like the EU and the euro. Moreover, transmission of economic crises is more
based upon trade in assets than trade in goods. My guess is that having a larger
currency area shouldn't dramatically change the demand for dollar-denominated,
yen-denominated, or Euro-denominated assets. Capital controls would much more
effectively accomplish that.

To be honest I'm more optimistic about the Sucre as a means of fostering
economic growth and achieving better prices as opposed to protecting ALBA
nations from financial crises. Consider: right now, ALBA nations have low
tariffs on U.S. goods like cars which can come into their countries relatively
cheaply. So, ALBA countries are not going to start their own domestic car
industry. In the 1960s Brazil experimented with this somewhat and had a well
functioning car industry for a while. However, they later eliminated trading
protections and the industry went belly up. Since ALBA represents a decent sized
group of countries which would be fostering trade amongst themselves, there
would be some scope for industrial diversification and ALBA nations might
produce some things that they would normally get from the United States. By
adopting a new currency, ALBA nations get slightly greater leverage to slap
tariffs on U.S. goods so as to protect infant industries which the left wing
group of countries seeks to encourage.

NK: There's a very pronounced political dimension to the Sucre: Hugo Chávez has
remarked that the Sucre "will help us to overthrow the dictatorship of the
dollar." Yet, ALBA nations are rather insignificant economically at the global
level. What are your thoughts?

EK: I think that's correct --- I don't think the adoption of the Sucre or Pacha
for that matter will have much of an economic impact on the United States. It
probably will have a greater economic impact on ALBA nations by fostering import
substitution and industry as opposed to pursuing a course of commodity exports.
Here's another benefit of a common currency: right now a lot of countries spend
a lot of money buying dollar assets because they're afraid of a speculative
attack on their currency. One solution to this is to institute capital controls
which the International Monetary Fund doesn't particularly like. A successful
currency union could make ALBA nations less subject to speculation and as a
result these countries would be less concerned about their exchange rate
relative to the U.S. dollar. As a result, ALBA nations would benefit as they
wouldn't have to invest so much in low-yield dollar assets. Still if speculators
can force the bank of England to lose almost 100 billion pounds in one day back
in 1992, my guess is that the Pacha will not be immune to speculative attack.

NK: ALBA was originally set up to counter the FTAA or Free Trade Area of the
Americas, the corporately –friendly free trade scheme sponsored by Bill Clinton
and George Bush. Venezuela's Hugo Chávez on the other hand says that the
adoption of the Sucre constitutes a system of "fair trade" which will distance
Latin American countries from "hegemonic capitalism," "the neo-liberal
dictatorship" and the "dictatorship of transnational companies." The Sucre,
Chávez adds, "will be much more than a currency." According to him, the Sucre
system will have four component parts: the Regional Monetary Council, the Sucre
currency itself, the Central Clearing House, and a regional reserve and
emergency fund. How significant a break does this represent with the go-go free
trading past?

EK: If the Sucre agreement winds up fostering closer economic integration along
the lines of the EU and not NAFTA, then the new ALBA currency could wind up
resulting in more fair trade as opposed to exploitative trade. Here's another
way the Sucre could represent a plus: normally multinationals go to Venezuela or
Ecuador and set up their own companies which get all kinds of tax breaks and
make profits off exports. Those profits are then repatriated to the United
States. If there's a common currency however, those profits would probably stay
in the local region. So, a new currency might promote fair trade as well as fair
investment.

NK: On the face of it the idea of the Sucre is reminiscent of the euro, another
regional currency which recently came into effect. Yet, the Sucre would seem to
be more unique in that it has been promoted as a common ideological project
amongst left-leaning nations. Is there any historic precedent for such an idea?

EK: I'm not aware of any currency that's been promoted on the basis of shared
ideology, certainly not any left wing ideology…

NK: What about the ruble?

EK: That's a good point. The Soviets exported the ruble to all of their
satellite areas. But for the Soviets, the ruble on its own wasn't such a
decisive factor as there was already a centrally planned government which
decided what the satellite countries would produce as well as what price they
would trade at. In other words, given that the Soviet Union could already decide
the relative prices of all goods, an exchange rate was relatively redundant. So,
in terms of ALBA countries I think the benefits of a shared currency are higher
because you have different governments as opposed to Moscow calling the shots.

NK: Ecuadoran President Rafael Correa, himself an economist, hopes that the
Sucre and the implementation of the new "virtual monetary system" could
accelerate commerce between nations. Eventually, he hopes, such a system could
be extended to all countries in Latin America and use of dollars would be
reduced greatly. How likely is this to occur?

EK: I think if the Sucre, or the Pacha as the case may be, were extended to all
of Latin America this would reduce the use of the dollar and this would have an
impact on the United States, particularly if Mexico joined the Sucre. Let's face
it though: Mexico is going to be reluctant to do that. To be honest, we don't
even know if the countries that have currently signed up for the Sucre will
continue to stay on it. What would happen if a right wing government came to
power in one of the ALBA nations? If one ALBA country on the Sucre has an
economic downturn and wants to pursue a monetary policy that will help to reduce
unemployment, this could lead to inflation in another ALBA nation, which in turn
could spark political conflict. For the time being the ALBA nations have
relatively similar political ideologies and they could set up some kind of
political institution to govern the currency board. But, if one of the ALBA
nations became right wing I don't know what would happen.

In addition to disagreements over monetary policy, there might also be conflicts
over fiscal policy. One way for the government to get out of debt is by printing
money to pay off the debt. This causes inflation. This is a very typical pattern
in Latin America. So, if one ALBA country decides it wants to inflate its debt
away and another country in the currency union doesn't like that idea, then this
could give rise to political conflict. A country finding itself in dire economic
straits may need to create inflation because otherwise it would go bankrupt.
Other countries within ALBA meanwhile won't want one of their members to go
bankrupt which could result in a potential currency attack on the entire region.
Here's the key point though: ALBA countries that are not experiencing economic
pain may want to dictate how much debt their fellow member can hold as a
percentage of GDP. If you want to join the EU, you must have a certain debt to
GDP ratio. How will the ALBA nations bargain this out? These are vexing
questions. Plus, if you really want to have an economic impact on the United
States and the dollar you'd have to involve Brazil, Argentina and Mexico and
it's difficult to see that happening.

NK: Speaking of which, Chávez has invited Argentina to join in the Sucre, and
over the past few years Venezuela and Argentina have cultivated an unprecedented
geopolitical alliance which is based on shared ideological affinities. Do you
think that if Argentina joined that there could be a ripple effect and other
countries might be encouraged to join? Some might say that if Brazil, the true
economic juggernaut in the region, fails to join that such a currency might lack
credibility.

EK: Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, the current President of Argentina, is not
super popular. She and her husband [former president Néstor Kirchner] had this
idea of alternating power so they wouldn't hit the wall on term limit
restrictions. In light of recent parliamentary elections which resulted in
electoral defeat for the Peronist party, it's not clear whether the Kirchners
can stay in power. If they don't stay in power you can forget the idea of
Argentina ever joining the Sucre. My guess is that even if they do, it's an
unlikely scenario for Argentina.

NK: Some might say that from the very outset the Sucre won't have much clout.
Bolivia exports most of its goods to other Andean nations such as Peru and
Colombia which do not participate in ALBA. Nicaragua meanwhile exports most of
its products not to fellow ALBA nations but to other Central American nations,
the United States and Europe where the dollar and euro are paramount in
commercial transactions. What are your thoughts?

EK: That's true. But similarly a lot of countries in the EU don't just trade
amongst themselves but also with the UK, Switzerland and the United States. So,
I don't see that as being a huge barrier. In the case of Nicaragua it could be a
little weird since the Central American nation doesn't do that much business
with other ALBA nations. So, there may not be a lot of benefits but conversely
getting on the Sucre might imply little financial and political risk.

However, once the currency goes from being "virtual" to real and ALBA nations
ditch their own currencies for the Pacha these costs may go up as I explained
earlier. The bottom line is that as long as ALBA countries are not trading
amongst themselves that's Ok: if it's a virtual currency like the Sucre they
still maintain their exchange rates with the other countries. Once they swap
their currencies entirely however they're forced to have the same exchange rate
as other ALBA countries. Normally, if Nicaragua had a lot of inflation it would
want to devalue relative to its other trading partners in Central America. But
in the new milieu, Nicaragua wouldn't be able to do that. This could really wind
up hurting its exports.

NK: What types of protections would you advise for the ALBA nations moving
forward?

EK: My concern would be defending the incipient currency from speculative
attacks. There's a very easy way to prevent this: you need to implement currency
controls. In other words, don't let people take money out of the currency except
for trade-related actions and do not allow any speculation. There's no way for
ALBA to move ahead with a currency union without acting on currency controls.
The International Monetary Fund won't be too happy about that but I don't think
these left wing countries care about the IMF anyway.

NK: The situation in Ecuador is positively ironic. Up until recently the Andean
nation's currency was called the Sucre, which it then ditched for the U.S.
dollar. Now Ecuador is going back to another Sucre. How do you think life will
change for Ecuador and Ecuadorans as the country moves to the Sucre as opposed
to the dollar which had been embraced by the country's economic elite?

EK: First of all, let's look at some of the costs of using the U.S. dollar. When
the U.S. inflates currency and prints dollars to pay off debt, that's a tax
because prices go up and the value of money goes down. Who pays that inflation
tax? In part it's the Ecuadoran people who hold dollars. Who benefits? The U.S.
government as it gets to pay off its debt. So, these financial crises devalue
Ecuadoran money.

But now the new Sucre monetary board, or eventually the Pacha board, could
redistribute money between countries as opposed to having it filter back to the
United States. Also, once Ecuador goes on the Pacha it'll be easier for the
Andean nation to adjust its exchange rate than it would under the dollar. As
long as Ecuador sticks to the dollar, it'll be beholden to whatever U.S.
monetary policy happens to be. Once Ecuador's in the ALBA currency union it has
a voice and can have a much greater impact to shape its own finances.

There are other political benefits to not being on the U.S. dollar. Take for
example the case of Panama. When George H.W. Bush wanted to get rid of military
strongman Manuel Noriega, he banned the export of U.S. dollars to Panama which
caused a recession. That leverage is still there potentially with Ecuador.
George W. Bush never entertained the possibility of putting the squeeze on
Ecuador as he was distracted in other parts of the world. But, under other
circumstances the United States might have exerted pressure.

Despite all these problems, there are some benefits to having ties to the U.S.
dollar. If you're on the dollar this leads to stability in price levels which
could be lost once Ecuador joins a new currency.

NK: One key question will be whether private sector exporters in ALBA nations
will have confidence in the new Sucre for it is they who dominate international
trade. What are your thoughts?

EK: If the private sector is forced to trade in the Sucre or not trade, then
they'll use it…

NK: In all of these countries like Ecuador and Venezuela, it's precisely the
right opposed to leftist governments which is controlling the exports …

EK: You could wind up with a strange situation in which the exporters are
skittish about the new currency and either reduce exports or send their goods to
non-ALBA countries like Colombia. In that case, the new currency union would not
foster more intra-ALBA trade but the total opposite. If there's greater state
control over exports, as in the Venezuelan oil industry, this all becomes a moot
question.

NK: Professor Kaplan, thank you very much.

EK: Thank you.

Ethan Kaplan is a visiting Professor at the Center for Global Thought and the
Economics Department at Columbia University.

Nikolas Kozloff is the author of Revolution! South America and the Rise of the
New Left (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2008) Follow his blog at
senorchichero.blogspot.com

Sri Lanka's internally displaced - A view framed by barbed wire
The fate of a quarter of a million interned Tamils is poisoning Sri Lanka's
hopes of ethnic reconciliation

Oct 1st 2009 | THAMPALAGAMA
The Economist
(Photo & map can be viewed on weblink)
Ref:
http://www.economist.com/world/asia/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14564948&fsrc=rss


KANCHANA asks to go by a false name, but seems self-assured for a teenager. And
no wonder. Her experience of Sri Lanka's civil war, which ended in May after a
seaside slaughter of the leaders of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE)
and at least 8,000 people taken hostage by them, would put years on anyone.

For five years she was marooned in the Tigers' northern fief. Kanchana and her
sister had left their village in Thampalagama, an area in the east more loosely
controlled by the LTTE, for a holiday with a brother living there. But their
travel passes were lost and without these the Tigers let no children of fighting
age leave them. In 2007, as the army advanced, the Tigers recruited her brother
and sister.

The advancing troops reached Kanchana last April. All belonged to Sri Lanka's
Sinhalese majority. Yet they did not rape her as she had been led to expect.
Instead they shared their thin rations with her. But then came three-and-half
months interned in Vavuniya. Over 260,000 Tamil refugees were crammed into 16
camps there, with poor food, overflowing toilets and, last month, flooding in
which at least five drowned. One sibling was imprisoned among 11,000 former
Tiger cadres. The other is probably dead.

A cousin of Kanchana's, his wife and three children were killed, with about 20
others, when an army shell hit their makeshift bunker. That was the main cause
of the civilian slaughter, though the Tigers also killed refugees, both in
crossfire and deliberately, to stop them escaping. Her best friend, of the same
age, and really called Kanchana, was killed after the LTTE gave her a gun and
sent her to the front.

Now back in her village in Thampalagama, the surviving "Kanchana" was among the
first refugees to be released, in August. With them the truth of the bloody end
to Sri Lanka's 26-year war, which the government of President Mahinda Rajapaksa
has tried to hide by bullying journalists and reporting "zero civilian
casualties", is coming out—at an awkward moment. The government faces
human-rights probes from both America and the European Union. The EU's, to
inform a decision on whether to reissue a valuable trade concession to Sri
Lanka, said human-rights violations made it ineligible.

Kanchana and her local women friends could have added testimony. Sitting
together in a small red-tiled shack, one says her 25-year-old son has
disappeared, like hundreds of Tamil youths in the past three years. Only the
word of a local Hindu astrologer gives hope he is alive. Another's nephew was
imprisoned and tortured for a month by pro-government thugs. He is now crippled.
A third sent her 21-year-old son for his safety to Colombo. He has been in
prison there for nearly two years without charge. Since the government ordered
the International Committee of the Red Cross to quit eastern Sri Lanka in July,
the women say they have had no one to petition for their sons. "Who will listen
to our grief? Who will bring back our children?"

Evidence of reconciliation between Tamils and the Sinhalese-dominated
government, which the president has promised, is hard to find. The government is
trying to recruit more Tamil policemen. But such measures look paltry against an
internment policy that the EU's report calls a "novel form of unacknowledged
detention". The government justifies it by citing two reasonable fears: that
surviving Tigers will regroup, and that mined areas of the north are unsafe for
locals to return to. Yet the government has made only creeping efforts to
identify those it could safely release—perhaps a majority of those detained.
Such failings suggest that it sees them all as potential enemies.

Under pressure from Western governments, which pay for most of the camps' food,
Mr Rajapaksa promised that 70-80% would be freed by the year's end. That was
three months ago. Some 20,000 have since been let out, by the government's
perhaps ambitious estimate. Most were the old, the sick or pregnant women, or
Hindu priests and stray easterners like Kanchana. Indeed, she was lucky: some
who returned to the east later have been detained in ill-prepared schools and
temples.

Monsoon rains are expected this month to flood around 25% of Vavuniya's main
camps, so 100,000 of the 220,000 people there need shifting. The government says
67,000 can go to their home areas in the east and to other places outside the
LTTE's heartland, like Jaffna and Mannar—even if they may be redetained there.
And it plans to release around 30,000 of the disabled, sick and pregnant and
their dependants to host families. But there is no immediate prospect of returns
to the Tigers' strongholds of Kilinochchi and Mullaitivu. Mr Rajapaksa's target
may therefore be unfeasible. With local and foreign aid groups already reluctant
to support the new makeshift camps, arguments loom.

Encouraged by the government, thousands of Sinhalese are meanwhile flocking to
the east to reclaim land from which the LTTE chased them or their parents. This
risks causing conflict with Tamils and Muslims now farming the land—and
reinforces the Tamil belief that the government means to "Sinhalise" the north
and east.

In Irakandy, a short drive from Trincomalee, 1,050 Sinhalese, representing over
350 families, have gathered to reclaim land from which 80 families were driven
in 1985. Many of those now living on it have documents supporting claims to have
bought the leaseholds to the land. Yet the incomers, under army protection in a
nearby community centre, are confident that their ancestral lands and more will
be given to them. Priyantha Malvangoda, a well-dressed businessman from Colombo,
says he and six siblings are all staking claims, his father having been driven
from a nearby one-acre farm in 1985. "All of us need some land."

This is worrying. So long as Tamils feel abused by a racist Sinhalese state, the
conflict may resume. Economic development of their shattered regions, which the
government is planning, is unlikely to change that. Hence the government's
continued war-footing—but this is in turn also reinforcing Tamil grievances.

Foreign criticism is not going to make the government change. It gets little
bilateral support from Western countries, instead relying on those unfazed by
its abuses, such as Iran, which last month renewed a four-month, interest-free
oil credit. Indeed, criticism helps rally Sinhalese nationalists against the
government's new big foe, Western imperialists. On the EU trade privileges, a
letter-writer to the Daily Mirror newspaper warns Western countries that they
will suffer "just like in Iraq and Afghanistan" for offending Sri Lanka.

Nor is Sri Lanka's democracy likely to come to Tamils' aid, despite general
elections due by next May and a presidential poll expected shortly before it. Mr
Rajapaksa has recently tried to mend fences with Tamil opposition politicians.
But he looks poised for a thumping victory even without Tamil support.

Book Review: ISLAND OF SHAME
The Secret History of the US Military Base on Diego Garcia
by David Vine
Princeton University Press
259 pages; $29.95



Diego Garcia's sordid tale
by Latha Jishnu, Business Standard
New Delhi October 09, 2009
Ref: http://www.business-standard.com/india/storypage.php?autono=372701

Diego Garcia used to be in the news in the 1970s when India and a handful of
like-minded countries would periodically protest against the US military
build-up in the India Ocean island. There was nothing much that could be done
when Britain allowed its colonial possession to be used as a staging post by the
Americans. No one, simply no one, spoke about the fate of the islanders, known
as Chagossians, who were summarily deported from their island haven to slums in
Mauritius without any compensation or warning.

One morning they were told that they could no longer stay on their idyllic Diego
Garcia because it had been sold; other Chagossians, who were elsewhere, were
simply told they could not return. The Chagossians numbered a little over 2,000
and they did not have the means then to make their cause public. The few who
were allowed to enter the UK did menial jobs around Crawley airport, while their
fellow islanders in Mauritius suffered from abject poverty and from sagren—deep
melancholy caused by homesickness and displacement that took quite a few lives.

The horrors of the forcible expulsion of the indigenous people in the late 1960s
have now been exposed in this painstaking book by anthropologist David Vine, who
teaches at American University in Washington. Vine's scholarship is infused with
a world view that was partly shaped by his experiences of life with the
Chagossians. The academic, funded by lawyers who are now fighting a class action
suit in the US, spent seven months living with the exiles in their shanty homes
in Mauritius and Seychelles, learnt their dialects and pieced together their
stories of exile and tragedy. In the US, he spoke to dozens of serving and
retired officials from the departments of Defence and State and the US Navy to
complete this sordid tale of neo-imperialism.

It is the story of the old colonial power, Britain, handing over one of its
remote territories to the new in complete disregard of humanitarian
considerations in order to hang on to the coattails of its richer and powerful
ally. In return for a write-off of $14 million it owed Washington for the
Polaris missile, London handed over Diego Garcia to the US in the state it
wanted: empty of all human habitation. To this end, the UK stopped supplies of
food and medicine to the islanders, making their expulsion a fait accompli. And
to hush the demands of Mauritius, which was claiming the Chagos archipelago—a
group of 64 small coral islands in the remotest depths of the Indian Ocean—as
their own, Britain offered it a $3-million sweetener and a difficult choice:
give up the islands or independence. Mauritius accepted, and thus was the
birthright of the Chagossians sold without their knowledge. And, consequently,
an idyllic island turned into a deadly military base.

For the US, it is the single most important military facility from which it
controls half of Africa, southern side of Asia and Eurasia. It is critical to
controlling not just the Persian Gulf but the world, as American military expert
John Pike states. It bristles with formidable hardware ranging from an armada of
two dozen massive cargo ships to stealth bombers and nuclear bombers, which were
used to invade Iraq and Afghanistan.

It also houses a top-secret CIA prison where terror suspects are interrogated
and tortured, according to former US army generals and a report of the Council
of Europe. Diego Garcia is admittedly more secretive than Guantanamo Bay and is
strictly off-limits to journalists and all international observers, including
the ICRC. In such a context, how do the lives of a few thousand indigenous
people matter?

Island of Shame is not just a gut-wrenching account of how a tropical paradise
of powder-white beaches and palm fronds was turned into a massive launch pad for
America's military expansionist programme. A large chunk of the book is devoted
to how the Chagossians came to build their complex but happy society in the
islands and the resulting tragedy of their displacement. Above all, Vine is a
top flight researcher. He manages to trace the story to Stuart Barber, a US Navy
planner behind America's plan to set up bases in remote islands as part of, what
he calls, its Strategic Island Concept.

The book also busts the myth that the US, unlike the imperialists of yore, does
not use brute force for conquest of land or to dispossess people. Here's one
small incident from the occupation of Diego Garcia. "Just before the last
deportations, British Agents and US troops on Diego Garcia herded the
Chagossians' pet dogs into sealed sheds and gassed and burned them in front of
their traumatised owners…"

We owe Vine a great debt for shining his light on this island of horrors.
[end]
*************************************************************


Human Rights Watch and Minority Rights Group Intervention in Chagos Islanders v
UK in the European Court of Human Rights
June 19, 2009; SUBMISSIONS ON BEHALF OF THE INTERVENERS - HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH &
MINORITY RIGHTS GROUP INTERNATIONAL:
http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2009/10/02/chagos-islanders-v-united-kingdom

'India follows Sri Lanka in waging civil war'
TamilNet, Thursday, 08 October 2009
Ref: http://www.tamilnet.com/art.html?catid=79&artid=30395

India, in consultation with US counter-insurgency forces, is planning an
unprecedented military offensive against ultra-Marxist rebels that is going to
hit mainly the Adivasi (indigenous) peoples of India in the states of Andra
Predesh, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Orissa, West Bengal and Maharashtra, warns a
protest document drafted by Arundhati Roy and a group of progressive
intellectuals. India plans to deploy its paramilitary forces, anti-rebel
militias organized and funded by government agencies and possibly Indian Armed
Forces including the Air Force in this war, the stated objective of which is to
`liberate' areas under the influence of Maoist rebels, but the real aim is to
exploit land and resources of the deprived people, the document points out.

In a letter addressed to the Prime Minister of India, the group of eminent
persons said, "Such a military campaign will endanger the lives and livelihoods
of millions of the poorest people living in those areas, resulting in massive
displacement, destitution and human rights violation of ordinary citizens."

"The geographical terrain, where the government's military offensive is planned
to be carried out, is very rich in natural resources like minerals, forest
wealth and water, and has been the target of large scale appropriation by
several corporations."

The government's offensive is an attempt to crush popular resistances in order
to facilitate the entry and operation of these corporations and to pave the way
for unbridled exploitation of the natural resources and the people of these
regions, the letter pointed out.

"Instead of addressing the source of the problem, the Indian state has decided
to launch a military offensive to deal with this problem: kill the poor and not
the poverty, seems to be the implicit slogan of the Indian government," accuses
the letter, adding that "it would deliver a crippling blow to Indian democracy
if the government tries to subjugate its own people militarily without
addressing their grievances."

Alleging that the government responses have already created civil war like
situation in parts of Chhattisgargh and West Bengal, the group of intellectuals
asked the government to immediately withdraw military operations as it has the
"potential for triggering a civil war."

In a separate background note, the document emphasized three dimensions of the
crisis: (a) the development failure of the post-colonial Indian state, (b) the
continued existence and often exacerbation of the structural violence faced by
the poor and marginalized, and (c) the full-scale assault on the meagre resource
base of the peasantry and the tribal (indigenous people) in the name of
"development".

The document brought out some of the statistics of development failure:

80 percent of households have no access to safe drinking water. 77 percent spend
less than 20 rupees a day. Only 42 percent houses have electricity. 93 percent
of the work force (58 percent in agricultural sector) is of informal workers,
lacking any employment security, work security and social security. Close to 60
percent of rural households are effectively landless. Between 1997 and 2007,
182,936 farmers committed suicide.

"Poor and vulnerable" increased from 811 million in 1999-00 to 836 million in
2004-05.

The millionaire population in India grew in 2007 by 22.6 per cent from the
previous year, which is higher than in any other country in the world.

Further analysis culled out from the document:

In this sea of poverty and misery, there are two sections of the population that
are much worse off than the rest: the Scheduled Caste (SC) and Scheduled Tribes
(ST) population.

There are two dimensions of structural violence against them: (a) oppression,
humiliation and discrimination along the lines of caste and ethnicity and (b)
regular harassment, violence and torture by arms of the State.

For the SC and ST population, therefore, the violence of poverty, hunger and
abysmal living conditions has been complemented and worsened by the structural
violence that they encounter daily.

While the SC and ST population together account for close to a quarter of the
Indian population, they are the overwhelming majority in the areas where the
Indian government proposes to carry out its military offensive against alleged
Maoist rebels. This, then, is the social background of the current conflict.

Third comes the unprecedented attack on the access of the marginalized and poor
to common property resources.

Whatever little access the poor had to forests, land, rivers, common pastures,
village tanks and other common property resources to cushion their inevitable
slide into poverty and immiserization has come under increasing attack by the
Indian state in the guise of so-called development projects.

Despite numerous protests from people and warnings from academics, the Indian
State has gone ahead with the establishment of 531 Special Economic Zones
(SEZs).

They require a large and compact tract of land, and thus inevitably mean the
loss of land, and thus livelihood, by the peasantry.

Around 60 million people have faced displacement between 1947 and 2004; this
process of displacement has involved about 25 million hectares of land, which
includes 7 million hectares of forests and 6 million hectares of other common
property resources. How many of these displaced people have been resettled? Only
one in every three.

Thus, there is every reason for people not to believe the government's claims
that those displaced from their land will be, in any meaningful sense,
resettled. This is one of the most basic reasons for the opposition to
displacement and dispossession.

In almost all cases the affected people try to ventilate their grievances using
peaceful means of protest; they take our processions, they sit on
demonstrations, they submit petitions. The response of the State is remarkably
consistent in all these cases: it cracks down on the peaceful protestors, sends
in armed goons to attack the people, slaps false charges against the leaders and
arrests them and often also resorts to police firing and violence to terrorize
the people.

It is, thus, the action of the State that blocks-off all forms of democratic
protest and forces the poor and dispossessed to take up arms to defend their
rights, the document said.

However, the Indian Establishment is inspired by the experience of the war it
abetted against Eezham Tamils in Sri Lanka, points out academic circles in
Bangalore, citing how the Establishment was able to engineer media, politicians
and naïve intellectuals and was able to ignore public uprising in Tamil Nadu.

************************************************************


How Violent Can Democracies Be and Still be termed Democracy?
by: Murli Natrajan on October 7th, 2009
TikkunDailyBlog
Ref:
http://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/2009/10/07/how-violent-can-democracies-be-and-\
still-be-termed-democracy/

The following is an informational analysis put out by a group of concerned
activists and academics from India who have been working in solidarity with
peoples' movements in India (See their website at www.sanhati.com). I am
reproducing it here for public information purposes. The issue touches upon the
image of India's democracy which has often been qualified with the adjectives
"vibrant," "largest" and "working" by many, well-intentioned and reasonably
well-informed individuals and groups. Without denying the existence of something
like it, it would be useful to consider the following facts alongside the above
claims. As I read this, I remembered the famous essay in 1971 by Dom Herder
Camara titled "Spiral of Violence" written in the context of violence (of
poverty, of resistance to impoverishment, and of state assault on resisting
peoples) in the northeastern part of Brazil.
Peace,
Murli


From sanhati:

As you may have probably heard, the Indian government has declared that it is
preparing to launch an unprecedented military offensive in the huge forested
regions of central India, populated by millions of indigenous tribes (adivasis),
for stamping out an alleged Maoist insurgency based among this indigenous
population. We feel that this will be a democratic and humanitarian disaster and
will facilitate the exploitation of these areas by large corporations. We are
contacting you with a request to endorse a statement (see below) against this
proposed military action.

The statement has been drafted/endorsed by progressive intellectuals like
Arundhati Roy, Sandeep Pandey, Amit Bhaduri, Manoranjan Mohanty, Sumanta
Banerjee, Gautam Navlakha, Prashant Bhushan and others in India and all of us
think that your endorsement will lend it more weight and make the voice of
democratic protest stronger. Our collective has taken the initiative to
coordinate this effort.

Along with the statement, we are also attaching below a background note,
prepared by our collective, which provides a perspective to the current
situation.

Please let us know by October 8, 2009 whether you would like to endorse this
statement, by replying to the following email address – sanhatiindia@...

We plan to send this endorsed statement to the Indian and
international media in our effort to build public opinion against this
disastrous move of the Indian government.

Looking forward to your reply,
with best regards,
Sanhati Collective

****************************************

'India follows Sri Lanka in waging civil war'
TamilNet, Thursday, 08 October 2009
Ref: http://www.tamilnet.com/art.html?catid=79&artid=30395

India, in consultation with US counter-insurgency forces, is planning an
unprecedented military offensive against ultra-Marxist rebels that is going to
hit mainly the Adivasi (indigenous) peoples of India in the states of Andra
Predesh, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Orissa, West Bengal and Maharashtra, warns a
protest document drafted by Arundhati Roy and a group of progressive
intellectuals. India plans to deploy its paramilitary forces, anti-rebel
militias organized and funded by government agencies and possibly Indian Armed
Forces including the Air Force in this war, the stated objective of which is to
`liberate' areas under the influence of Maoist rebels, but the real aim is to
exploit land and resources of the deprived people, the document points out.

In a letter addressed to the Prime Minister of India, the group of eminent
persons said, "Such a military campaign will endanger the lives and livelihoods
of millions of the poorest people living in those areas, resulting in massive
displacement, destitution and human rights violation of ordinary citizens."

"The geographical terrain, where the government's military offensive is planned
to be carried out, is very rich in natural resources like minerals, forest
wealth and water, and has been the target of large scale appropriation by
several corporations."

The government's offensive is an attempt to crush popular resistances in order
to facilitate the entry and operation of these corporations and to pave the way
for unbridled exploitation of the natural resources and the people of these
regions, the letter pointed out.

"Instead of addressing the source of the problem, the Indian state has decided
to launch a military offensive to deal with this problem: kill the poor and not
the poverty, seems to be the implicit slogan of the Indian government," accuses
the letter, adding that "it would deliver a crippling blow to Indian democracy
if the government tries to subjugate its own people militarily without
addressing their grievances."

Alleging that the government responses have already created civil war like
situation in parts of Chhattisgargh and West Bengal, the group of intellectuals
asked the government to immediately withdraw military operations as it has the
"potential for triggering a civil war."

In a separate background note, the document emphasized three dimensions of the
crisis: (a) the development failure of the post-colonial Indian state, (b) the
continued existence and often exacerbation of the structural violence faced by
the poor and marginalized, and (c) the full-scale assault on the meagre resource
base of the peasantry and the tribal (indigenous people) in the name of
"development".

The document brought out some of the statistics of development failure:

80 percent of households have no access to safe drinking water. 77 percent spend
less than 20 rupees a day. Only 42 percent houses have electricity. 93 percent
of the work force (58 percent in agricultural sector) is of informal workers,
lacking any employment security, work security and social security. Close to 60
percent of rural households are effectively landless. Between 1997 and 2007,
182,936 farmers committed suicide.

"Poor and vulnerable" increased from 811 million in 1999-00 to 836 million in
2004-05.

The millionaire population in India grew in 2007 by 22.6 per cent from the
previous year, which is higher than in any other country in the world.

Further analysis culled out from the document:

In this sea of poverty and misery, there are two sections of the population that
are much worse off than the rest: the Scheduled Caste (SC) and Scheduled Tribes
(ST) population.

There are two dimensions of structural violence against them: (a) oppression,
humiliation and discrimination along the lines of caste and ethnicity and (b)
regular harassment, violence and torture by arms of the State.

For the SC and ST population, therefore, the violence of poverty, hunger and
abysmal living conditions has been complemented and worsened by the structural
violence that they encounter daily.

While the SC and ST population together account for close to a quarter of the
Indian population, they are the overwhelming majority in the areas where the
Indian government proposes to carry out its military offensive against alleged
Maoist rebels. This, then, is the social background of the current conflict.

Third comes the unprecedented attack on the access of the marginalized and poor
to common property resources.

Whatever little access the poor had to forests, land, rivers, common pastures,
village tanks and other common property resources to cushion their inevitable
slide into poverty and immiserization has come under increasing attack by the
Indian state in the guise of so-called development projects.

Despite numerous protests from people and warnings from academics, the Indian
State has gone ahead with the establishment of 531 Special Economic Zones
(SEZs).

They require a large and compact tract of land, and thus inevitably mean the
loss of land, and thus livelihood, by the peasantry.

Around 60 million people have faced displacement between 1947 and 2004; this
process of displacement has involved about 25 million hectares of land, which
includes 7 million hectares of forests and 6 million hectares of other common
property resources. How many of these displaced people have been resettled? Only
one in every three.

Thus, there is every reason for people not to believe the government's claims
that those displaced from their land will be, in any meaningful sense,
resettled. This is one of the most basic reasons for the opposition to
displacement and dispossession.

In almost all cases the affected people try to ventilate their grievances using
peaceful means of protest; they take our processions, they sit on
demonstrations, they submit petitions. The response of the State is remarkably
consistent in all these cases: it cracks down on the peaceful protestors, sends
in armed goons to attack the people, slaps false charges against the leaders and
arrests them and often also resorts to police firing and violence to terrorize
the people.

It is, thus, the action of the State that blocks-off all forms of democratic
protest and forces the poor and dispossessed to take up arms to defend their
rights, the document said.

However, the Indian Establishment is inspired by the experience of the war it
abetted against Eezham Tamils in Sri Lanka, points out academic circles in
Bangalore, citing how the Establishment was able to engineer media, politicians
and naïve intellectuals and was able to ignore public uprising in Tamil Nadu.

Vedanta Resources is a multinational mining company, listed on the London Stock
Exchange whose spectacular rise involves violating Environmental Laws, Human
Rights Abuse, Financial scams & Political corruption in Zambia, Armenia, India
and other countries where it exploits poorly regulated mining enclaves. Recently
Vedanta has announced plans to start mining in the Niyamgiri hills of Orissa,
India from October 2009 and it aims to increase operations by 6 fold by 2011.
Vedanta's mining in Orissa will have a devastating impact on the fragile
Ecosystem of this fertile and vitally important forested mountainous region and
the state of Orissa in general. It will lead to a Cultural Genocide of the
ancient tribal civilization of the Dongria Kondh and Majhi Kondh tribes, who
have lived ecologically sustainable & self sufficient lives for centuries in
these mountains. Vedanta's mining will also lead to severely toxic pollution,
diseases, terminal illnesses, destruction of endangered wildlife, damage to the
wild elephant population, devastation of crops and arable land and the poisoning
and drying up of rivers and streams, which will have catastrophic effects on
tens of thousands of people for whom these rivers are crucial lifelines in
Kalahandi, one of the most drought prone regions of India.

The Global Campaign against Vedanta Resources plc is spread over several
countries and includes over 150 solidarity groups, Grassroots movements, NGOs,
activists, intellectuals, academics, students and professionals.


GLOBAL CAMPAIGN AGAINST VEDANTA
contacts:
Samarendra Das- sdasorisa@..., sdasorisa@...
Felix Padel- felixorisa@...
Chanda Asani (Kashipur Solidarity Group)- chanda_asani@...
Sachin Masurkar (Kashipur Solidarity Group)- sachinam_sai@...
Phone- (+ 91)9869324085
Agrotosh Mookerjee- whatculture@...
Phone- (+44) 07528435541
Miriam Rose- welliebird7@...


From the South Asia Solidarity Group:
On the 23 September 2009, more than a hundred people lost their lives in one of
the worst accidents in India's recent construction history at a power plant
being commissioned by the Vedanta-controlled Bharat Aluminium Company (Balco) in
Chhattisgarh state. In India, health and safety rules are routinely flouted,
even so, this was one of the worst accidents in recent history. While a
state-level inquiry was launched, Balco officials fled Chhattisgarh leaving
local people rescuing the survivors. Meanwhile Vedanta officials in London
ascribed it all to `bad weather'.

In fact, Vedanta  and its subsidiaries are routinely implicated in  death and
destruction in other parts of India too,  most notably in the state of Orissa
state where their mining activities are causing:
- The drying up of streams and major rivers, which are the lifeline for tens of
thousands of people leading to unprecedented environmental disasters in drought
and famine prone districts
- The pollution of fertile agricultural lands and  contamination of drinking
water sources in vast areas
- The destruction of the Niyamgiri hills – known as the most beautiful mountains
in India - which  will wipe out the ancient civilization of the Dongria Kondh
adivasi community who regard the Niyam Dongar mountain and forests of the area
as their Gods.
- Mass Unemployment and Destitution as farmers, fishing communities and forest
dwellers are being displaced and abandoned in shanty-towns.
- The destruction of the social structure in the areas where the company and its
subsidiaries are involved leading to a sharp rise in illegal liquor shops,
fraudulent money-lenders, domestic abuse and suicides.


Tribe wants newly elected politicians to 'keep their word'

Indian mountain people fight court decision to let a UK company mine bauxite on
their ancient land

by Emily Dugan
Sunday, 17 May 2009
The Independent
Ref:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/tribe-wants-newly-elected-politicia\
\
ns-to-keep-their-word-1686285.html

An Indian tribe which has lost its five-year battle to save its sacred home from
destruction by a British FTSE-100 mining company earlier this month, only
discovered its fate on Friday. The Dongria Kondh have been living for centuries
on the remote Niyamgiri Mountain in eastern India, worshipping the hill god
Niyam Raja and living off the land. But an Indian Supreme Court ruling means
that Vedanta, a mining company owned by the London-based Indian billionaire Anil
Agarwal, can begin mining on the mountain.

Vedanta's subsidiary, Sterlite, has been given permission to begin mining
bauxite, the most important aluminium ore, on land considered sacred by the
tribe. Previous studies by academics, government bodies and charities have shown
that an open-pit mine would destroy the habitat that has been its home for
generations, destroy the forest, and cause water sources to dry up, threatening
endangered animals and ecosystems.

For the people of Niyamgiri, which is situated deep in the state of Orissa, this
represents a devastating blow as they rely on the land for food, culture and
medicine. Kumti Majhi, a leader for the Niyamgiri people, said: "We cannot live
without our god mountain and the forest, and we will continue our peaceful
struggle. It is a life and death battle and the Dongria Kondh people are united
on this."

The Kondh's shock at the news that their battle is lost has been compounded by a
lack of warning from the government. The tribespeople allege that until the
charity ActionAid contacted them on Friday, they had no knowledge of their fate.
"It has happened in a very underhand way," said Mr Majhi.

The plight of the people at Niyamgiri has been a cause célèbre among
conservationists around the world for nearly half a decade. It seems now that
their concern has done little to stop mining in this fragile ecosystem.

"This ruling will mean the complete destruction of the tribal groups – there's
no doubt about it", said Babu Mathew, ActionAid's director in India. But he said
he still held hopes that political changes following yesterday's election result
could spell hope for the future. "The newly elected candidates canvassed on the
fact that they would help the tribal people, so we will try and get them to keep
their word."

A spokesman for Vedanta said: "This has been a long, democratic process. The
Supreme Court has given its permission and identified a number of commitments
for us to meet to help the community. We are very happy to go ahead with the
project on that basis."

Nigerian militant leaders surrender weapons under amnesty
by Joel Olatunde Agoi, Nigeria
Irish Examiner
Monday, October 05, 2009
Ref:
http://www.irishexaminer.com/world/nigerian-militant-leaders-surrender-weapons-u\
nder-amnesty-102529.html


THREE top Nigerian militant leaders in the volatile oil hub of the Niger Delta
gave up their weapons along with thousands of fighters on Saturday under a
government amnesty.

A senior commander of the main armed group, MEND, surrendered his weapons in the
oil city of Port Harcourt, on the eve of the expiry date of the amnesty extended
to rebels who have wrought havoc on Nigeria's oil industry inrecent years.

"I, Farah Dagogo, overall field commander for the Movement for the Emancipation
of the Niger Delta (MEND), accept together with field commanders in Rivers
state, the presidential offer of amnesty to militants who lay down their
weapons.

"We are surrendering all weapons under our direct control," Dagogo said in a
statement.

Another militant leader, Ateke Tom, and around 5,000 militants disarmed at a
beach ceremony in the same city.

A third top militant leader, Government Ekpemupolo, popularly known asTompolo,
accepted the amnesty offer during a meeting with Nigerian President Umaru
Yar'Adua late Saturday.

In accepting the amnesty, Tompolo promised Yar'Adua his support "to achieve the
dreams of this country".

Tompolo was the third key militant leader linked to MEND to take up the
government offer for unconditional pardon in a bid to end the unrest in the oil
producing region.

With militant attacks knocking Nigeria from its position as Africa's top oil
exporter – daily production has slid to 1.7 million barrels per day from 2.6
million in January 2006, Yar'Adua announced in June the amnesty offer.

The militants, which took up arms in 2006, claimed they are fighting for a
fairer distribution of the nation's oil wealth for the impoverished people of
the Niger Delta, where most of the oil is drilled but which has seen little
money from the country's top export earner.

Along with the amnesty, the government has pledged to develop the Niger Delta
region.

"We will do all within our powers to ensure that our land shall be a source of
peace and development, and not a cause for crisis . . . That our waters and oil
shall be a blessing and not a curse," said Yar'Adua.

The government said the amnesty was open to around 10,000 rebels.

The amnesty deadline was yesterday, and Defence Minister Godwin Abbe made an
11th-hour appeal for militants to give up arms before midnight.

MEND, which has dismissed the amnesty as a charade, said it has replaced its
military command.

"All commanders have been replaced . . . and the next phase of our campaign will
commence soon," MEND said in a statement.

Its leader, Henry Okah, who was freed in July as part of a government amnesty
deal offered to the rebels after treason charges against him were dropped, said
unrest was likely to continue in the region after the amnesty deadline expires
because the root cause of the violence had not been addressed.

Earlier this week MEND named a team of mediators, including prominent writer and
Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka, to open talks with the authorities.

Laying down his arms, Tom, the leader of the Niger Delta Vigilante, an ethnic
Ijaw militia group, warned that his fighters would resume attacks if authorities
fail to make good on their pledge to develop the region.

"If they refuse to develop our region we will go back to the creeks," warned Tom
at the ceremony in Port Harcourt, the main city in the Niger Delta, where
militants have staged frequent attacks against oil installations.

Some of Tom's fighters, sporting white T-shirts bearing his portrait, carried
banners saying, "Thanks for amnesty but remember your pledge", and "You can take
the arms but the struggle continues".



This story appeared in the printed version of the Irish Examiner Monday, October
05, 2009

Zuma highlights key priorities for developing countries
by Tshepo Ikaneng
SABC News, September 27th 2009
Ref:
http://www.sabcnews.com/portal/site/SABCNews/menuitem.5c4f8fe7ee929f602ea12ea167\
4daeb9/?vgnextoid=1e432cd050af3210VgnVCM10000077d4ea9bRCRD&vgnextfmt=default

South African President Jacob Zuma says strengthening good governance, promoting
regional economic co-operation and preventing the illegal exploitation of
resources remain key priorities for developing countries. He was addressing the
Africa-South America summit on the island of Margarita in Venezuela.

The gathering which will end today is aimed at strengthening co-operation
between developing nations of the south. Zuma says although both continents are
rich in mineral and natural resources, no progress has been made to harness them
to address socio-economic challenges.

"Historically, Africa has always shared a deep and rich engagement with
countries of South America. We are both among the richest continents in terms of
natural resources, and among the poorest continents in terms of socio-economic
development. Our continents can work together to usher in a new era of
empowerment and prosperity," Zuma said.

"In a world which boasts breathtaking advances in science, technology, industry
and wealth accumulation, we still have massive poverty and obscene inequality.
We therefore have a great responsibility to make this ASA partnership beneficial
for all our people," he added.


Chavez, Gaddafi push Africa-South America unity

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and Libya's Muammar Gaddafi urged African and
South American leaders yesterday to strive for a new world order countering
Western economic dominance. They spoke on the first day of a 28-nation summit
that was long on idealistic speeches but short on concrete steps beyond an
agreement to set up a development bank for South America with $7 billion in
start-up capital.

"This is the beginning of the salvation of our people," Chavez said in a speech
welcoming his guests to the Caribbean island of Margarita.  He said the meeting,
coming just after the UN General Assembly in New York and the G-20 summit in
Pittsburgh, would help the mainly poor nations rely less on Europe and the
United States.

"The 21st century won't be a bipolar world, it won't be unipolar. It will be
multipolar. Africa will be an important geographic, economic and social pole.
And South America will be too," Chavez said. The leftist leader has governed for
more than 10 years and says he wants to remain in office for decades more to
turn the OPEC nation into a socialist state. He casts himself as at the front of
a global, "anti-imperialist" movement.

Gaddafi, who is celebrating four decades in office and had a white limousine
flown to Venezuela to meet him at the airport, echoed his host's message. "The
world isn't the five countries on the UN Security Council," he said. "The
world's powers want to continue to hold on to their power. When they had the
chance to help us, they treated us like animals, destroyed our land. Now we have
to fight to build our own power."

Other leaders, from influential developing nations like Brazil and South Africa,
also gave sweeping, critical summaries of global problems, though in less
radical terms.  The leaders are expected to sign a document on Sunday urging
global bodies like the United Nations and World Bank to give poor countries more
clout. – Additional reporting by Reuters

Seven South American nations on Saturday 26th Sept signed an agreement to create
a 'Bank of the South' with startup capital of $20 billion.

this email contains:
1). "Chavez announces creation of South Bank" - Xinhua News Agency
&
2). "Bank of South to Grow to $20 Billion Capital, Rodriguez Says " -
Bloomberg.com
********************************************************

1).
Chavez announces creation of South Bank
www.chinaview.cn   27/09/2009
Ref: http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2009-09/27/content_12114800.htm

PORLAMAR, Venezuela, Sept. 26 (Xinhua) -- Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez
announced Saturday the creation of the South Bank with a capital of 20 billion
U.S. dollars to benefit South American and African countries.

     He made the announcement at the Second Summit of Africa-South America, which
began Saturday with the participation of delegates from 61 countries in the two
regions.

     Under the theme "Closing the gap, opening up opportunities", the summit is
aimed at boosting the cooperation of the participant countries, facing the food,
financial, economic and environmental crisis, and strengthening agreements and
plans of action started in 2006 at the first Summit, held in Abuja, Nigeria.
**************************************************

2).
Bank of South to Grow to $20 Billion Capital, Rodriguez Says
by Daniel Cancel and Steven Bodzin
Bloomberg.com
Ref: http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601086&sid=a2Mky9Oiyzis

Sept. 27 (Bloomberg) -- The Bank of the South, a project- finance bank of South
American countries, will start with $7 billion in capital and will grow to $20
billion, Venezuelan Finance Minister Ali Rodriguez said.

The bank will get $2 billion each from Venezuela, Brazil and Argentina and the
remainder will come from other member countries, Rodriguez said. All members
will have equal voting rights, he said.

To contact the reporter on this story: Steven Bodzin in Caracas at
sbodzin@....