WASHINGTON, Oct 1 (IPS) – Poor countries might need increased grants and an end to lending conditions imposed by public lenders like the World Bank (news – web sites) and IMF (news – web sites) if a proposal to cancel their debts is to really work towards ending poverty, say analysts.

The United States, the most powerful of the Group of Seven (G7) most industrialised countries that control Third World debt and whose governments dominate the executive boards of public lenders, said publicly for the first time Thursday that it is pushing for expanded debt relief for poor countries.

…In 2002, developing countries in Africa, Asia-Pacific, Latin America and the Caribbean received 58 billion dollars in loans and development aid, but paid 324 billion dollars to service debts from old loans, according to the World Bank and IMF.

…Sachs says that asking poor nations to continue to repay their debts so that the World Bank can loan them the same money again or lend it to another impoverished country ”makes no sense.”

”The only thing that makes sense is the net transfer of resources from rich to poor countries, not the transfer of resources from impoverished countries to other impoverished countries,” he added.

…The same sentiment was echoed by Britain’s ‘Economist’ magazine. ”The truth is that poor countries need more resources from the rich,” it said.

”If competition to sound most generous leads rich countries to put more money in the aid pot, then it is worth pursuing. But HIPC debt relief alone is no panacea,” added the magazine.

Full Article:yahoonews.com

‘Generous.’ Yeah right.

by Elaine Sciorino
MSTERDAM, Oct. 1 – There are no minarets at the Ayasofya Mosque in Amsterdam, no marble atrium, no crystal-chandeliered prayer room. The biggest Turkish mosque here operates out of a dark, rusting hulk of a warehouse that was once a car repair and supply service.

It is a place more for meeting than for prayer. It sells subsidized groceries and meals, advertises jobs for pizza makers and factory cleaners, and offers its floors as temporary sleeping space for new migrants. It is, in other words, just the sort of place that makes many Europeans view Turks as truly foreign.

On Wednesday, the 25-member European Union is poised to take a small but important step toward deciding whether Turkey will be the first Muslim country to join its ranks. The organization’s executive committee will vote on a report stating that Turkey has reformed itself enough to merit entry talks.

If the committee’s recommendation is accepted unanimously by the member nations in December, there will begin a negotiating process that could drag on for a decade or more. Even then, it might not gain Turkey full membership in the union, the world’s largest trading bloc.

But just the prospect of admitting a Muslim country of 71 million people – far larger than most members and with a per capita income much lower than any member – has set off a fierce, even ugly, debate over the nature of European identity.

Polls throughout Europe suggest that many share the fear first expressed by former President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing of France that Turkey is not a European country and that Turkish membership would mean “the end of Europe.”

Full Article: NY Times

Europe has always felt the need to define itself according to ‘the other,’ and really since the Crusades the great favorite has been ‘the Orient,’ defined first as the Muslim world, and then as colonial domination expanded, as India and East Asia. The Orientalists even split Egypt off from the rest of Africa. But since they fancied themselves the great definers, even to the point of insisting that only they could make the ‘Orient’ visible to itself, they did not feel they had to pay any attention to geography, much less to the people themselves. The early Orientalists, the linguists and historians, understood that this same Near Eastern Orient was the immediate source of much of their culture, their religious and philosophic and scientific traditions, but they regarded the people themselves as incapable of self-reflection, self-control, and certainly incapable of freedom. They needed the Europeans to mediate their own cultures for them, to bring them to ‘modernity,’ to offer them enlightened models of government. Sound familiar? It’s because exactly the same things were being said about ‘the Arabs’ in 1800 as are being said today, and the beginnings are far earlier in the paranoid condemnation of Mohammed and Islam. The European ‘problem’ with the Muslim Orient has always had to do with religion, and GW Bush is the best representative we have today of that ancient European view.
So this fretting about ‘the end of Europe’ reflects a long tradition of xenophobia and racism. To acknowledge Turkey as part of Europe signals to the Europeans as some disastrous defeat, the Ottomans in Austria all over again. Just check the map: ‘Europe’ is this embattled little white bastion in the far northwest corner of a vast landform that ends at China in the east, and at South Africa. The ferocity, the aggressive attempts to expand its borders, the philosophic and scientific traditions that attempt to prove white superiority, these all stem in large part from the precarious geographical position of Europe. They view the lands and peoples outside their ‘borders’ as one monolithic ‘them’, intent on destruction. For many centuries, they used their words to convince themselves that they had the upper hand: later they used their great volumes of studies and judgements in the service of their aggressive interventions.
Edward Said’s Orientalism is an indispensable text for anyone who wants to get a bigger view of American and US preoccupations. They are bigger, and deeper, than oil and gas.

by Chris McGreal
Israeli tanks and troops yesterday began the largest reoccupation of northern Gaza since the start of the Palestinian uprising four years ago.

Ariel Sharon ordered the tanks in to prevent Hamas from scuppering his plan to withdraw Jewish settlers from the territory and impose an emasculated state on the Palestinians.

The Israeli offensive follows a Hamas rocket attack that killed two small children in the Israeli town of Sderot. Israel radio quoted Mr Sharon as telling his cabinet: “What can we do? The Jews, too, have a right to live. If this entails difficulties for the Palestinians, that is part of the price.”

Hundreds of soldiers backed by about 200 tanks, armoured vehicles and helicopters reoccupied the towns of Beit Lahiya and Beit Hanoun and took control of a 9km-wide area along the border.

The army also strengthened its force in Jabaliya refugee camp, where soldiers faced stiff resistance when they entered the Hamas and Islamic Jihad stronghold on Thursday that left nearly 30 people dead in some of the bloodiest fighting of the intifada.

At least five Palestinians were killed in Israeli rocket strikes on Jabaliya yesterday. An Israeli missile killed two Hamas fighters on a motorbike. A second rocket left three people dead, apparently all civilians, near a school.

The Palestinian prime minister, Ahmed Qureia, called the Israeli offensive “state terror” and called for international intervention.

Full Article: Guardian UK

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) – The U.N. Security Council voted unanimously on Friday to send another 5,900 peacekeepers to the Congo, less than half of what U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan had requested.

The U.N. mission in the vast Democratic Republic of the Congo now has a ceiling of 10,800 troops and police. Annan had wanted to add another 13,100 troops but the United States, which pays more than 25 percent of the cost, scaled down the numbers.

Expressing dismay, Annan told the 15-nation council after the vote that U.N. officials would have to review the scope of their plans, particularly in reinforcing the peace process in Kinshasa, capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

“I continue to believe that the total military and police strength recommended in my (report) is the minimum required to effectively meet the current challenges in the DRC,” Annan said.

But with demand for U.N. peacekeepers soaring, the Bush administration pushed hard for cuts, and approved troops only for Congo’s volatile eastern regions, along the border with Rwanda, Burundi, Tanzania and Uganda. France and Britain then agreed to the compromise.

After Annan spoke, U.S. representative Stuart Holliday said the increase in troops met the “missions’s current needs.”

He also said it was his understanding that the peacekeepers, which do not include American personnel, would not cooperate with the Hague-based International Criminal Court or the United States would ask for some money back.

Full Article:Reuters

by Diana Jean Schemo
WASHINGTON, Sept. 30 – In June 1976, three months after the military seized power in Buenos Aires, Henry A. Kissinger, then secretary of state, learned that the American ambassador, Robert C. Hill, had just cautioned the country’s new government over its wholesale violations of human rights. Mr. Kissinger was unhappy with the warning.

“In what way is it compatible with my policy?” he asked his top official for Latin America, Harry W. Shlaudeman.

“It is not,” Mr. Shlaudeman replied.

“How did it happen?” Mr. Kissinger asked.

“I will make sure it doesn’t happen again,” Mr. Shlaudeman promised.

“If that doesn’t happen again, something else will,” Mr. Kissinger persisted and then asked who had given the ambassador the instruction to lodge his complaint. “I want to know who did this and consider having him transferred.”

The exchange comes from 3,216 transcripts of telephone conversations, released some 27 years after Mr. Kissinger stepped down as secretary of state in 1977. The transcripts, obtained by the nonprofit National Security Archive, appear to document in the most explicit fashion yet a reluctance on the part of Mr. Kissinger to criticize directly the military governments in Chile and Argentina, and a behind-the-scenes hostility toward forceful demands from United States diplomats that the dictators uphold civil liberties and human rights as they eliminated leftist insurgents and, more broadly, political opponents.

Mr. Kissinger was traveling and could not be reached for comment.

Full Article: NY Times

by Ian Fisher
ROME, Oct. 1 – One of the two Italian aid workers freed after three weeks in captivity in Iraq said the fight against American troops and their allies there was not terrorism but legitimate resistance to occupation.

“I distinguish between terrorism and resistance,” the woman, Simona Torretta, told an Italian daily newspaper, Corriere della Sera, in an interview published Friday. “The guerrilla war is justified, but I am against the kidnapping of civilians.”

Ms. Torretta and Simona Pari, both 29, were welcomed home on Tuesday with great fanfare by a nation distraught at their kidnapping and horrified that even aid workers opposed to the war could be targets for kidnapping.

In the interview, Ms. Torretta said she believed that she and her colleague were released because they were able to convince their captors that they were opposed to the war and that they helped ordinary Iraqis.

She added, “This was a very religious and very political group, and at the end it was convinced that we were not enemies.”

Ms. Torretta said she did not know anything about reports, denied by the government here though widespread in the Italian news media, that $1 million had been paid to the kidnappers. “If a ransom was paid, I am very sorry,” she said. “But I know nothing about it.”

Ms. Torretta, who had worked in Iraq since 1997, repeated her call for Italy to pull its 3,000 troops from Iraq, and said that neither the election called for January nor the interim government of Prime Minister Ayad Allawi was legitimate. Dr. Allawi’s government, she said, is “a puppet in the hands of the Americans.”

Since their release, both the women have said they wanted to return to Iraq. In the interview, Ms. Torretta said she would not do so anytime soon. “I have to wait until the end of the American occupation,” she said.

NY Times

by Greg Palast
Our President told the debate audience, “You cannot lead if you send mexxed missiges.” I certainly hope not.

But that’s exactly what we got. You watch our President, the nervous hand-hiding, the compulsive water-glass-fondling, the panicked I-wish-I-had-a-whiskey look, and you think, “My god, this is the guy who’s supposed to save us from al Qaeda.”

And how are we going to win the War on Terror, Mr. President? “First of all, of course I know Osama bin Laden attacked us. I know that,” he said. Well, that’s a start, I suppose.

But it doesn’t have to stay this way. This is America, home of the brave and where, I remember from school, we could vote for president and the votes would count. So we looked to the tall man next to him to show us the way out.

In Iraq, “We don’t have enough troops there,” said the tall one. Really, Senator? We should send MORE? Not exactly: Mr. Tall’s got a plan to get our troops out. He’ll have a big meeting of “allies,” and after he talks with them, they will all jump up and volunteer to send THEIR kids to Fallujah. France and Indonesia and Kuwait can’t wait to ship in soldiers and extra body bags. Right. We love you, John, but there’s no band of Hobbits coming to the rescue — that’s just a movie.

Full Article: commondreams.org