{jcomments on}OMAR, AGNEWS, BXL, le 28 mai 2010 – RTTNews- May 28, 2010–Police in France have arrested a Rwandan doctor accused of involvement in the 1994 genocide in which hundreds of thousands of people were massacred by Hutu militias in the African country, said officials on Thursday.
BURUNDI :
Burundi: Only 7 candidates for Burundi’s presidential election
Pana /28/05/2010
Bujumbura, Burundi – Only seven candidates met Wednesday’s deadline to file their papers with Burundi’s National Independent Electoral Commission (CENI) for the country’s presidential election scheduled for 28 June, PANA learnt Thursday.
The candidates include incumbent President Pierre Nkurunziza, candidate of the National Council for the Defence of Democracy/Forces of Defence and Democracy (CNDD-FDD), and of Domitien Ndayizeye of the Front for democracy in Burundi (FRODEBU, former ruling party).
Others are the leader of the former rebel National Liberation Forces (FNL), Agathon Rwasa; Yves Sahinguvu of the Unity for National Progress (UPRONA); former journalist Alexis Sinduhije of the Movement for solidariry and Development (MSD); Ms Pascaline Kampayano, the only woman who will represent the Union for Peace and Development (UPD) and Leonard Nyangoma of the National Council for the Defence of Democracy (CNDD).
Analysts said the mandatory deposit of 15 million Burundian francs (about US$15,000) could be a major reason for the withdrawal of the other candidates.
Bujumbura
Burundi’s ruling party wins elections
2010-05-28 / Reuters
Bujumbura – Burundi’s ruling party CNDD-FDD, won the coffee producer’s district elections with 64% of the vote, official returns showed on Friday, a result seen as a sign of stability.
Monday’s vote was the first of a series of votes in which the tiny central African nation will also choose a president on June 28 and representatives to parliament on July 23. District polls often indicate how the rest of the vote will go.
The national independent electoral commission (CENI) said former rebel Forces for National Liberation group (FNL) led by Agathon Rwasa obtained 14.15% of the vote while Uprona finished third with 6.25 percent.
“We call the results provisional just to give time to political parties which have some claims to present them for analysis,” said CENI spokesman Prosper Ntahogwamiye.
“We assume that the vote was free and fair. But any party which protests the results has four days from now to give evidence,” he added after announcing the results to the media.
The opposition immediately rejected the results. In a joint statement, 13 parties said the number of votes was higher than the number of voters in many areas. They said they had seized four ballot boxes hidden in a house.
They demanded the cancellation of the results by the electoral commission to pave way for another election.
The European Union’s observer team said the election met international standards.
A political party that gets over 50 percent of the votes in the communal election in the first round is likely to win presidential and parliamentary votes. President Pierre Nkurunziza will seek re-election, challenged by Rwasa.
The country of 8 million has enjoyed relative peace since the last Hutu rebel group, the Forces for National Liberation laid down arms last year and joined the government.
RWANDA
France Arrests Rwandan Doctor Accused Of Involvement In 1994 Genocide
5/28/2010 /(RTTNews)
Police in France have arrested a Rwandan doctor accused of involvement in the 1994 genocide in which hundreds of thousands of people were massacred by Hutu militias in the African country, said officials on Thursday.
According to officials, Eugene Rwamucyo was arrested on Wednesday in Sannois, northwest of Paris, when he was attending the funeral of a former Rwandan official convicted for war crimes during the genocide.
Rwamucyo’s arrest in France was based on an international warrant issued in 2007 by Rwanda, where he was convicted in absentia in and sentenced to life in prison earlier that year. He was accused of involvement in the massacre of Tutsis in the Butare region of southern Rwanda.
Rwamucyo had been working at a hospital in France’s northern Nord region before being suspended last month. He has denied the accusations, insisting that he was being victimized by the Rwandan government.
However, the Rwandan government welcomed his arrest in France, with the country’s Prosecutor General Martin Ngoga saying on Rwandan radio on Thursday that he thought France’s attitude towards genocide suspects had changed.
“We are pleased,” Ngoga said. “We’ve noticed in the past few days that France is committed to prosecuting alleged ‘genocidaires’ [people who committed genocide] who have taken refuge there.”
In the 1994 Rwandan genocide, over 800,000 minority Tutsis and moderate Hutus were slaughtered in a period of 100 days. The massacre was prompted by the assassination of then Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana, and were finally halted after Tutsi-led militias supporting Rwandan President Paul Kagame ousted the then ruling Hutu government.
The most high profile of the Rwandan genocide cases are tried at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), based in the city of Arusha in northern Tanzania. The tribunal was formed in 1997, and it has convicted over 30 people and acquitted five until date.
Rwamucyo’s arrest on Wednesday came amidst improving relations between France and Rwanda. Relations between the two countries had been strained for years until recently, mostly over the events leading to the 1994 genocide that left hundreds of thousands of people dead in the former French colony. Diplomatic ties between the two countries were resumed only last year.
Rwanda severed its diplomatic ties with France three years ago after a French judge investigating the assassination of President Habyarimana accused Tutsi militia led by Kagame of involvement in the assassination.
The French Judge had issued an indictment against President Paul Kagame and nine of his army commanders in 2006 over the downing of the aircraft. But the indictments have since been discredited, following the retraction of the testimonies made by his main witnesses.
The French judge’s allegation came after Paris launched an investigation into downing of President Habyarimana’s plane, which had a French crew on board when it was shot down. Rwanda, in turn, responded to the French allegation stating that Paris supplied the Hutu rebels with arms during the genocide.
Following the restoration of diplomatic ties between the two countries in December 2009, French President Nicholas Sarkozy visited Rwanda in February, marking the first such visit by a French head-of-state to the former French colony after the 1994 genocide in the African country. The Rwandan President is due to make a return visit to France next week.
by RTT Staff Writer
Leader Of New Opposition Calls Rwanda August Vote “Sham”
By Norman S. Miwambo /blackstarnews.com/May 28, 2010
[Global: Africa]
Rwanda Opposition Head Calls August Vote “Sham”
By Norman S. Miwambo
Even as the U.S. Department of State continues to urge the Kigali regime to lift press restrictions and ensure that the Presidential elections in August be carried out smoothly, the leader of a newly-formed opposition political party says the voting will be a sham unless it’s postponed to address major concerns.
“We are now trying to send our clear message to the international community to support us so that the elections that are supposed,” John Kalulanga, the interim leader of the recently structured Rwanda People Party-Imvura (RPP-Imvura), said in an interview with The Black Star News.
“Many things are happening in Rwanda and not reported at-all because of the media restrictions.” He says his party welcomes Rwandans of all ethnic background.
“Presidential elections are scheduled to be held this year, but opposition parties have been prevented or obstructed from any meaningful participation. Many have been arrested and it seems the government wants a situation where the current president stands un-opposed,” he said.
He says with the spate of recent several bombings in Kigali, the capital, the country is rife with rumors of an impending military takeover. The interview was conducted in London at The Marriott Hotel-London.
An official at the Rwanda embassy in London, who identified himself as David Ruvubi said the ambassador was attending meetings and unavailable to comment. “We have not refused to comment, but we want to read the article first,” he said.
Separately, Andy Laney, a spokesman from the U.S. State Department, told The Black Star News: “We are concerned by the recent actions by the government of Rwanda to restrict freedom of expression in advance of the election. We have relayed our concerns We will continue to urge the government of Rwanda to allow all international and domestic NGOs and media outlets to operate and report freely We urge the government of Rwanda and regional partners to work together to achieve the free, fair
and peaceful elections that the people of Rwanda deserve.”
After being lauded by Western countries shortly after his Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF) seized power in 1994, Rwanda’s president, Paul Kagame, in recent months has been battered with criticism: His government has clamped down on independent media and opposition political figures, preventing political parties to register for the elections. A candidate who is believed to present him with a realistic threat at the polls, Ms. Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza remains under house arrest in Rwanda. The government has claimed she is linked to rebels associated with the 1994 genocide.
Kagame had been credited by Western governments for halting the 1994 killings of an estimated one million Rwandans, mostly of the Tutsi ethnicity. Some critics contend the RPF also committed massacres and have never been brought to account by the Western powers.
Kalulanga, who is also ethnic Tutsi, as with Kagame, also grew up in Uganda, like many Tutsi refugees. He says while Kagame preaches reconciliation, his actions have only increased tensions between Rwanda’s ethnic groups. “There is nothing Mr. Kagame can do for Rwanda even if mandated for another seven years,” Kalulanga said.
“He failed to unite the country for the past 16 years; instead he has divided the people of Rwanda so badly.” Kalulanga adds: “Not everyone who is fleeing Rwanda is a Hutu. Many who are running away are Tutsi because the current regime is repeating the same mistake that led to the 1994 and previous genocides.”
In recent months a top Kagame generals have fled the country. In February this year, a former Army Chief and Ambassador to India, Lt. Gen. Kayumba Nyamwasa fled to South Africa where the government there refused to extradite him. The country’s former spy Chief Patrick Kalegeya fled in 2007.
Kalulanga says President Kagame has become just as intolerant of opposition voices as were previous president, including
Grégoire Kayibanda and Juvénal Habyarimana, whose assassination sparked the mass killings of 1994. Kayibanda was toppled in a coup staged by Habyarimana and died in detention shortly after.
Forcing Rwandans into exile has always led to further conflict Kalulanga said. “Unfortunately President Kagame and his government have made it impossible for us to return home,” he said. “It gives no pleasure at all to put My Kagame in the same basket as My Kayibanda and Mr. Habyarimana, and all other dictators in Africa who have ruined Africa and left a legacy
of shame and permanently engulfed our people in darkness and hopelessness.
This is not too much to ask even at this late stage.”
He claims the best thing Kagame could do for Rwanda to quit politics.“We don’t want to see Kagame going into exile, we want to see him stepping down, he has no fresh ideas for the country.”
He says not only Hutus, the ethnic majority, are discriminated against: “The atmosphere here is not different from that of 16 years ago. Rwanda is a police state where people live in extreme poverty and fear. The state is run like a family business; there is widespread discrimination against Tutsi returnees sometimes based on their country of past asylum.”
Other top Rwandans who have fled since last year include: Theoneste Musindashaka, Senator Stanley Safari, Lt. Col. Sam Baguma, Capt. Eliphaz Ndikuyezu, Capt. Claude Bizimungu, Capt. John Wuwintari, Capt. John-Bosco Muhizi, Capt. Theobal Gakumba, Capt. John Ontabuka and Jean Pierre Kagubare.
Kalulanga said the government classifies anyone who opposes the regime with the 1994 genocide. “There are hundreds of Rwandese fleeing Kagame’s oppressive regime for sanctuaries in neighboring countries and other countries most of whom are in Europe, and US.”
“A climate of paranoia has enveloped the country to an extent neighbors are encouraged to spy on each other, just like members of families are encouraged to do the same,” Kalulanga said. “The media today remain completely muzzled and freedom of expression, a fundamental human right is virtually non-existent.”
President Kagame has denied there is press repression in Rwanda.
Miwambo writes for The Black Star News from Europe
UGANDA
Uganda, Religion and Two Legislations
May 28, 2010/ Maureen Nandini Mitra/thefastertimes.com
Last Monday (May 24) President Barack Obama signed a new law that could help end one of Africa’s longest-running and most brutal insurgencies perpetrated by the cult-like Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), a rebel group originating in northern Uganda that has terrorized central Africa since the late 1980s.
The outfit, that operates mainly in northern Uganda, but also in parts of Sudan, Central African Republic (CAR) and DR Congo, is notorious for mutilating victims and kidnapping children and using them as fighters and sex slaves. The United Nations estimates the group has abducted 20,000 children over the years. The conflict between the rebels and the Ugandan government have led to the deaths of thousands of civilians in northern Uganda and displaced nearly two million, says a Human Rights Watch report.
The group’s leader, Joseph Koney, claims he wants to establish a theocratic state based on to the biblical Ten Commandments (so what if his outfit is violating the Sixth Commandment tens of thousands of times in the process). A self-proclaimed prophet, Koney was indicted for war crimes in 2005 by the International Criminal Court. The LRA and Ugandan government signed a permanent cease-fire in February 2008, but a final peace deal is yet to materialize since Kony keeps failing to attend signing ceremonies.
In December 2008, with funding and planning help from the US, the Ugandan army spearheaded a massive offensive on the LRA’s bases in the jungles of northeast Congo. Kony and his top henchmen escaped the attacks and the LRA is now splintered into small groups spread across CAR and Sudan where it continues to spread terror.
The new US legislation, called “The Lord’s Resistance Army Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery Act of 2009” states that it’s US policy to support multilateral (military, diplomatic and humanitarian) efforts “to protect civilians from the Lord’s Resistance Army, to apprehend or remove Joseph Kony and his top commanders from the battlefield … and to disarm and demobilize the remaining LRA fighters.”
The Act, which is being hailed as the most-widely cosponsored legislation on sub-Saharan Africa in recent times, also calls on the US to support economic recovery and transitional justice efforts in Uganda. Heartening news indeed.
However, mention of justice efforts in Uganda got me thinking of another faith-based conflict that’s turning into a matter of life and death in this landlocked African nation. Gay rights.
My friend Nina Goodby, who’s studying journalism at UC Berkeley, traveled to Kampala in March to film a short documentary on the Ugandan government’s controversial homosexuality bill. The anachronistic bill calls for life imprisonment for anyone convicted of gay sex and even death penalty under certain circumstances. It would also require gays and lesbians to be reported to the authorities.
Ugandan human rights activists say the proposed legislation was partly financed by some American churches and directly influenced by three high-profile American evangelists who, at a conference in Kampala last year, declared that homosexuality was a curable habit.
Initially, it seemed like the bill was assured passage as it was broadly supported in Uganda. But international outrage forced Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni to set up a special committee to examine the bill. Earlier this month, the committee concluded the proposed legislation was unconstitutional and recommended the bill be withdrawn. That’s yet to happen.
Meanwhile, activists site the bill as evidence of how America’s Christian Right has fanned homophobia in Africa (Earlier this week a gay couple in Malawi were sentenced to 14 years in prison). Tarso Luis Ramos, executive director of Political Research Associates, a progressive think tank that monitors the US political right’s activities summed it up perfectly while talking to The Times
“Just as the United States and other northern societies routinely dump our outlawed or expired chemicals, pharmaceuticals, machinery, and cultural detritus on African and other Third World countries, we now export a political discourse and public policies our own society has discarded as outdated and dangerous.”
It’s sad how often the US manages to help and hinder at the same time.
Ugandan anti-gay bill creator wallows in the filth of his own homophobia
Alvin McEwen/ www.huffingtonpost.com/ Posted: May 28, 2010
It has been said that sometimes you have to let purveyors of ignorance and hate speak freely because sooner or later they tend to damage their own cause.
This saying should be remembered when listening to an interview with MP David Bahati, the creator of that awful anti-gay Ugandan bill.
The interview is courtesy of outtakes from the Current TV’s Vanguard documentary Missionaries of Hate which looked at how this bill came into being. Bahati was interviewed by reporter Mariana van Zeller.
Among other comments, Bahati claims that evangelicals in America have given him private support for his efforts, although he doesn’t tell who these folks are.
Bahati also says he has no compunctions in making family members suffer because of the bill and that Uganda is “leading the way” in this issue.
Don’t let anyone fool you. Behind Bahati’s self-righteous veneer is pure hatred.
Partial transcript:
van Zeller: Do you think there are other people in America such as Rick Warren who deep inside back this bill, support this bill but are now coming out and rejecting it?
Bahati: The many friends that we have, especially evangelicals in America, when we speak to them privately they do support us. They encourage us, but they are in a society that is very hostile. And we appreciate that and we say do what you think is right for your conscience. But remember at the same time remember we are engaged in a spiritual battle. We are engaged in a very difficult battle and it is important that you come out clearly. But we accept that they are in a bit of a hostile environment because America has… so of the many leaders in America been blackmailed by pro-gay communities. But we have support in America. There are people who support what we are engaged in. Many, many Americans don’t accept homosexuality as a human right, who take it as sin. They know it.
But how we treat these homosexuals is a matter that all of us disagree. There are those who think we should appreciate them, be tolerant of them. But for us we are saying, no we shouldn’t. We should call sin, sin because we cannot relate the Bible.
van Zeller: How powerful do you think this “gay agenda” as you call it, how powerful do you think it is?
Bahati: Well in terms of resources, in terms of propaganda, resource in terms of money, they are very, very, very powerful. And we know that what we are against us a spiritual battle in a way, and we know that our commander is God. So we think at the end of the day, we are more powerful than them. People who believe in heterosexual family, people who believe in God are more in the world than those who don’t believe in God. And so we think they are powerful, they have their resources, they have money, they are using public relations funds to realize, to work with the media to put a negative propaganda around this one, but at the end of the day I think the people of Uganda, the resolve of the people of Uganda has remained very firm and we think that God is using this small bill to shake the foundations of sin around the world. And also we think that God may be using this country, Uganda, to provide leadership in the area of moral issues where actually the world needs it most.
van Zeller: Many people say that the visit of three American Evangelicals to Uganda back in March and the conference that was held here was the main catalyst for this bill.
Bahati: Well, I think that that is in a way to be a bit insulting our country, that you’re suggesting that Ugandans cannot think for themselves. They cannot try to address the issues they are faced with. And it is somehow… refreshes the memories of colonialism, so it is something that is very disturbing.
van Zeller: What would you, what do you think you would do if you found out that one of your relatives is a homosexual?
Bahati: If I knew that my brother and my relative is a homosexual, and the laws of Uganda require that if I know that I should report to police, then I would really respect the law of the country and report him or her to police.
van Zeller: Even if that meant that he would have to spend the rest of his life in prison?
Bahati: Yes, because I know if he was kept around he would be doing something bad to our society.
van Zeller: So you think that other countries would use this bill as an example of something they should follow as well?
Bahati: I think this is in a way providing leadership in the world where it is needed most, especially where the moral values are really decayed.
WB to lend Uganda $1.97bn over 5 years
Friday, May 28, 2010/ reuters
KAMPALA: The World Bank (WB) has offered Uganda $1.97 billion in concessional loans over the next five years to help finance the country’s newly-launched National Development Plan, the World Bank said. East Africa’s third largest economy has been praised for weathering the impact of the global economic slowdown and maintaining a relatively strong growth momentum. “The International Development Association will commit an estimated $1.97 billion to support development projects and programs in Uganda,” said the statement which was seen by Reuters on Thursday. The development plan was launched in April and its implementation will cost an estimated 50 trillion.
Health group: Donor cuts hurting Africa AIDS fight
By DONNA BRYSON (AP) /28052010
JOHANNESBURG — Doctors are being forced to turn away people with HIV/AIDS — meaning they will fall ill and almost certainly die — in eight African countries as donors cut funding amid the global economic meltdown, an aid group said Thursday.
Medecins Sans Frontieres, or Doctors Without Borders, called on rich countries to fulfill their obligations to poorer nations, saying the funding cuts threaten to unravel years of progress on the continent hardest hit by AIDS.
The MSF study looked at AIDS programs in Congo, Kenya, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, South Africa, Uganda and Zimbabwe, and found the effects of funding cuts widespread.
In Kenya, clinics fear running out of money. Health policy makers in Mozambique and Uganda say they can’t afford to follow international standards for when treatment should be started.
Dr. Eric Goemaere, medical coordinator in South Africa for MSF, said donors were citing the global recession as a reason for cutbacks. But he said that was no excuse for backing off on commitments to step up the fight against AIDS.
Margie Hardman, founder of a clinic in an impoverished area of eastern South Africa that cares for some 2,000 AIDS patients, told MSF that U.S.-funded donors have told her to stop enrolling new patients.
“We had to turn these patients away and refer them to local government hospitals or clinics,” Hardman said.
MSF found in other countries, people were turned away because the clinics did not have enough medication.
Jimmy Gideyi, an AIDS activist from Kenya who joined MSF officials at Thursday’s news conference in South Africa, said he was too weak to work when he started AIDS drugs six years ago. He quickly gained strength, and the 55-year-old widower was able to raise his three sons delivering food aid and doing other jobs for the United Nations.
Now, he said, he worries about the future for his sons, aged 26, 24 and 10.
“Suppose one of them contracts HIV,” he said. “Will he be able to access quality HIV to treatment? Or will he be left to die?”
MSF said the Global Fund to fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria — a major, independent supporter of AIDS programs around the world — was under pressure from the wealthy governments that fund it to cut back. The fund’s budget for the next three years will be determined at meetings in October.
Stefan Emblad who coordinates fundraising for the Global Fund, said countries were still making “extraordinary efforts” to maintain and even increase AIDS funding.
But he added: “I don’t want to gloss over the situation.”
Emblad, speaking to The Associated Press Thursday from his headquarters in Geneva, said even if the Global Fund gets maximum funding at the October meetings, the world will still be far from the goal of providing AIDS drugs to everyone who needs them. “That’s the sad truth of the situation,” he said.
South Africa last year embarked on an ambitious anti-AIDS drive that includes earlier and expanded treatment for those with HIV. That was in line with recommendations the U.N. health agency made last year that doctors start HIV patients on drugs when their level of CD4 cells is about 350. This year, the British medical journal The Lancet reported on a study that shows early treatment lessens the chances of those with HIV passing the virus on to their partners.
South Africa, a nation of about 50 million, has an estimated 5.7 million people infected with HIV, more than any other country. Expanding treatment here will stretch human and capital resources.
When South Africa announced its new AIDS policy, the United States said it was giving an additional $120 million over two years for AIDS treatment drugs in response to a plea from President Jacob Zuma.
South Africa is the largest recipient of funds from the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. The program, known as PEPFAR, is a major funder of AIDS programs around the world.
But internationally, MSF said PEPFAR’s budget has been flatlined — meaning no decreases, but no increases either at a time of increasing need.
Eric Goosby, head of PEPFAR, said in a statement to The Associated Press that the budget had increased, but marginally, from $6.8 billion in 2010 to “nearly” $7 billion for 2011.
“At the same time, HIV/AIDS is a global responsibility, and the U.S. is actively engaging with other donors around creating a response that is truly global,” Goosby said.
Goosby said the number of people PEPFAR directly supports on treatment increased from 1.6 million to nearly 2.5 million in 2009, alone.
“The metric for success is not dollars spent, but actual lives saved,” he said.
Trivani Foundation and Empowerment Project Hold Charity Event to Benefit Ugandan Widows
www.mmdnewswire.com/May 28, 2010
Springville, UT (MMD Newswire) May 27, 2010 — The Empowerment Project, a Ugandan charity, sold hundreds of unique, hand-made, paper-bead necklaces at Kilby Court’s Salty Streets Flea Market in Salt Lake City, Utah with proceeds going to support widowed women and children of the war-torn region of Kaberamaido, Uganda.
The widows’ project has been supported by Trivani Foundation, the philanthropic arm of network marketing company Trivani International. http://trivanifieldnotes.wordpress.com/2010/04/29/empowerment_project/.
In Uganda, thousands of men have died as a result of civil wars and the AIDS epidemic. Under traditional Uganda law, widows have no property rights or claims on their husbands’ families for support. They are often left destitute and outcast.
A remarkable group of Ugandan widows have banded together and, with support from Trivani Foundation, have undertaken a necklace enterprise. These lovely bead necklaces are the result of vocational training provided by the Empowerment Project and Trivani Foundation, which cultivated in these women the skills needed to make thousands of necklaces in fabulous colors and styles.
“We’re incredibly excited about what this sale means to the widows of Kaberamaido, many of whom have spent years struggling to support their children, secure shelter, and even just track down food or water for their families,” says Leslie DeeAnn Mower , owner and co-founder of Trivani International http://www.trivani.com/. “It’s amazing to know that these beads were not only made by the very women struggling, but that sales from these beautiful treasures will help these same women support their own children, take in other children when parents fall ill, and even start successful microenterprises like a ground nut business.”
The Ugandan widows’ microenterprises are just one part of the Trivani Foundation’s global efforts to provide support to impoverished villages beyond just a one-time donation of aid. Trivani has humanitarian initiatives in Nepal, Cambodia, Mexico, the Philippines, Kenya, and Uganda. Trivani’s projects have included everything from school desks in Africa to cleft palate surgeries in the Philippines. Trivani also supports literacy initiatives in the U.S.
Trivani Foundation’s humanitarian work is funded by Trivani International, the world’s first purpose-driven network marketing company. Trivani International markets a line of eco-friendly, toxin-free personal care and nutritional products. A significant portion of the sales revenue is used to support the foundation’s work around the world.
“I’m extremely proud, as a Trivani seller, to know that the money I earn from sales is honestly helping make the world a better place,” says Vickie Queen. “As an American who can barely fathom the pain and suffering the women and children of Uganda have been through, I’m happy to, at the very least, provide some measure of comfort to their lives.”
About Trivani International
Trivani is the world’s first Purpose Marketing® company, using the power and profit of network marketing to provide ongoing humanitarian aid around the world. Trivani’s unique business model consists of two distinct but closely intertwined entities: Trivani International and the Trivani Foundation. This business model helps Trivani fulfill its humanitarian goals through three main missions: Purpose, Health, and Prosperity.
Persons interested in learning more about the company can go to www.trivani.com. Persons interested in the Trivani Foundation, a non-profit organization, and its humanitarian projects can go to www.trivanifoundation.org.
Leslie DeeAnn Mower is available for media interviews and special speaking engagements.
TANZANIA:
CONGO RDC :
Africa: Africom and the ICC – Enforcing International Justice in Continent?
Samar Al-Bulushi and Adam Branch/PAMBAZUKA NEWS/allafrica.com/28 May 2010
Nearly eight years since its establishment in July 2002, and with its first major review conference just around the corner, the International Criminal Court (ICC) faces a number of challenges.
The fact that it has prosecuted only Africans has provoked charges of neocolonialism and racism; its decision to indict certain actors and not others has triggered suspicion of the court’s susceptibility to power politics; and its interventions into ongoing armed conflicts have elicited accusations that the ICC is pursuing its own brand of justice at the cost of enflaming war and disregarding the interests of victims.[1] Each of these concerns is likely to provoke heated discussions at the review conference in Kampala next week.
But there is another aspect of the court’s role in Africa that will require scrutiny going forward: enforcement. Lacking its own enforcement mechanism, the court relies upon cooperating states to execute its arrest warrants. The ICC has found, however, that many states, even if willing to cooperate, often lack the capacity to execute warrants, especially in cases of ongoing conflict or when suspects can cross international borders. Moreover, the African Union (AU) has rejected the ICC’s arrest warrant for its most high-profile target, Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, and ICC supporters worry that the AU will continue to challenge the court’s authority, especially when the court targets African leaders. The court today thus faces an enforcement crisis: out of 13 arrest warrants issued, only four suspects are in custody. Apparently, having concluded that African states are either unwilling or unable to act quickly or forcefully enough to apprehend suspects, the court has begun to seek support from the one country that has shown itself willing and able to wield military force across the globe: the United States.
The ICC’s Office of the Prosecutor is leading this effort. In June 2009 at a public event in the US, Chief Prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo declared the need for ‘special forces’ with ‘rare and expensive capabilities that regional armies don’t have’, and said that ‘coalitions of the willing’, led by the US, were needed to enforce ICC arrest warrants. More recently, Special Adviser to the Prosecutor Béatrice Le Fraper du Hellen declared to CNN, ‘We have our shopping list ready of requests for assistance from the US government’, which, she asserted, ‘has to lead on one particular issue: the arrest of sought war criminals. President al-Bashir, Joseph Kony in Uganda, Bosco Ntaganda, the “Terminator in Congo” — all those people have arrest warrants against them, arrest warrants issued by the ICC judges, and they need to be arrested now.’ She said that the ICC needed American ‘operational support’ for the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Uganda and the Central African Republic (CAR) ‘to assist them in mounting an operation to arrest him [Kony]. They have the will–so it’s a totally legitimate operation, politically, legally–but they need this kind of assistance. And the US has to be the leader.'[2]
The ICC’s entreaties are a response to an apparent re-assessment of US-ICC relations undertaken by the Obama administration and to the inception of a new US policy of pragmatic, ad hoc engagement with the court. Indeed, in recent months, the US government has declared its interest in working more closely with the ICC – not with the intent of becoming a party to the Rome Statute (the ICC treaty), but to help execute arrest warrants. In late March, Stephen Rapp, US ambassador-at-large for war crimes, stated that: ‘The United States is prepared to listen and to work with the ICC and go through requests that the prosecutor has.’ He continued: ‘There may be obstacles under our law. But we’re prepared to do what we can to bring justice to the victims in the Democratic Republic of Congo, in Uganda, and Sudan and in the Central African Republic.'[3]
And State Department Legal Adviser Harold Hongju Koh declared in March that the US is seeking cooperation with the court as a non-state party observer: ‘The Obama Administration has been actively looking at ways that the US can, consistent with US law, assist the ICC in fulfilling its historic charge of providing justice to those who have endured crimes of epic savagery… We would like to meet with the Prosecutor at the ICC to examine whether there are specific ways that the United States might be able to support the particular prosecutions that are already underway.'[4] A recent Council on Foreign Relations report echoed these sentiments, recommending that the Obama administration not ratify the ICC treaty, but ‘consider boosting its cooperation with the court in such areas as training, funding, the sharing of intelligence and evidence and the apprehension of suspects’.[5]
This proposed alliance between the US military and the ICC has elicited little reaction from the human rights community despite the devastating consequences it may produce. At heart is the question of what it will mean for justice and the rule of law if the ICC comes to rely heavily on the military capacity of a single state – a state with its own military agenda and interests in Africa – as its enforcement arm, in particular when that state declares itself above the very law it claims to enforce. The ICC appears to be trading its independence in return for access to coercive force, a Faustian bargain that will be made at the price of the court’s legitimacy, impartiality and legality, and the Western human rights community seems to be accepting this bargain as a necessary price to pay to encourage any US engagement with the court. But the price paid by the ICC will be trivial compared to the very dangerous possibility that this alliance could help justify and expand US militarisation in Africa, in particular in conjunction with AFRICOM (Africa Command), at a dramatic cost to peace and justice in the continent.
US INTERESTS IN THE ICC
US overtures for pragmatic engagement with the ICC in Africa should be understood in the context of increased US military engagement in Africa, particularly the new military command for the continent, AFRICOM. Since the US announced the creation of AFRICOM in 2007, activists have sounded alarm bells about its implications. Recalling the Cold War legacy of intervention that contributed to the militarisation of African states and the funding of proxy forces, they are concerned that AFRICOM will serve as a vehicle to expand the ‘war on terror’ into Africa, to secure US access to Africa’s oil and to challenge China’s increasing commercial and political influence. They cite dwindling development aid as contrasted with massive increases in foreign military financing via AFRICOM as evidence of the US government’s prioritiation of narrow security interests over democracy, the rule of law and African interests more broadly.[6] Gender rights activists have highlighted the potential for AFRICOM to undermine efforts to demilitarise African communities, particularly those emerging from conflict.[7] Considering the US track record of destructive interventions in Africa during the Cold War and the US military’s disregard for international law in Iraq and Afghanistan, Africans have reason to be wary of greater US military involvement on their soil. The possibility that AFRICOM might add justice enforcement to its repertoire is therefore a genuinely troubling development, and the ICC risks becoming the latest pawn of US military strategy on the continent.
For one, just as the US invokes counter-terrorism as a basis for military assistance to African states, it may come to use international justice enforcement to ju
stify increased militarisation of select African armies. This fits well with AFRICOM’s general strategy: in place of direct intervention (which would trigger unwanted scrutiny), the US prefers to rely on proxies to carry out its military agenda.[8] As the US attempts to expand its sphere of influence in Africa through local ‘partners’, the ICC may inadvertently justify the militarisation of African states in the name of international law enforcement. History provides a chilling lesson in the impact of US military aid to Africa – more than US$1.5 billion worth of weapons were transferred to the continent during the Cold War,[9] most of it to authoritarian and repressive regimes whose legacies are painfully felt in ongoing cycles of violence and instability in many African countries.[10]
Secondly, ICC arrest warrants could provide the US with justification for the direct use of military force where desired. In the words of the prosecutor’s special advisor, the ICC offers a convenient way to make military action (such as the pursuit of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA)) ‘a totally legitimate operation, politically, legally’, without having to overcome the political and legal obstacles in the way of Security Council authorisation for the use of force. Like the impunity that characterised the US and UN ‘humanitarian’ intervention in Somalia in the 1990s,[11] political and human destruction wreaked by US military actions under ICC cover will be dismissed as ‘collateral damage’ in the name of international law enforcement. It is probably safe to predict that the US will avoid ICC scrutiny for any use of military force as long as the ICC depends upon US military capacity.
And US allies in Africa could enjoy similar impunity thanks to the Bush-era bilateral immunity agreements guaranteeing US citizens protection from ICC prosecution and, in some cases, guaranteeing that the US would not hand over individuals from those African countries to the court. An April 2010 Congressional Research Service report on AFRICOM confirms that the Obama administration has no intention of reversing these immunity agreements.[12]
Instead of bringing the US back within international law, the proposed US ‘engagement’ with the ICC would thus allow the US to declare itself above international law while using international law for its own interests. The human rights community must not be complicit in this charade and must hold the US and the ICC to account.
POLITICISATION OF THE ICC
If the ICC partners with US military power, the politicised ‘justice’ that the ICC effects will not only create a geography of impunity in Africa, but will also lead to increased accusations of partiality against the court. And it is hard to imagine that the ICC, in its reliance on US enforcement capacity, would be able to avoid politicisation and not fall into the trap of prosecuting only those the US is willing to capture, regardless of crimes committed.
The vast discretion afforded to the Office of the Prosecutor by the Rome Statute and the lack of transparency that characterises the prosecutor’s decisions as to whom to prosecute and why is unlikely to provide any check on this type of politicisation. Luis Moreno-Ocampo has shown himself willing to take full advantage of the discretion provided him, practicing immense selectivity in his investigations and prosecutions. Even if the prosecutor were to try to prosecute US allies, the US could exert its influence by threatening to revoke funding or support for the court or by interfering with its internal workings. US meddling in supposedly independent international criminal tribunals has been documented elsewhere, including having Carla del Ponte removed from her position as prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in 2003 when she sought to investigate the US-allied Rwandan government for war crimes.[13] If the ICC is seen as working hand-in-glove with US interests in Africa, its legitimacy may end up fatally damaged.
EXPANSION OF AFRICOM
The appointment of AFRICOM as the ICC’s police officer in Africa may, along with providing cover for US military operations and for the militarisation of African states involved in ICC enforcement operations, also help establish a long-term US military presence on the continent. After US forces have set up bases or surveillance centres as part of a law enforcement operation, it will be easy for that military presence to remain long after the actual ‘enforcement’ operation has ended. Once US drones are circling overhead hunting ICC suspects, these drones could easily keep circling, collecting intelligence and carrying out ‘targeted assassinations’ when required.
One recent incident may provide a taste for what is to come through an AFRICOM-ICC alliance. In December 2008, a military operation coined ‘Operation Lightning Thunder’ was carried out principally by the Ugandan military with training and financial support from AFRICOM against the rebel Lord’s Resistance Army, the top commanders of which have outstanding ICC arrest warrants against them. The operation failed to capture the LRA leadership, however, and led to over 1,000 civilian deaths and the displacement of up to 200,000 Congolese.[14]
Despite the devastating consequences of that operation for civilians, the US Congress recently passed legislation authorising intensified US-led military action in the region ‘to apprehend or otherwise remove Joseph Kony and his top commanders from the battlefield’. The legislation includes no commitment to upholding the ICC’s arrest warrants, but Senator Russ Feingold, a co-sponsor and vocal advocate of the bill, stated that the effort to stop the LRA is ‘exactly the kind of thing in which AFRICOM should be engaged’.[15] In its latest report on the LRA, the International Crisis Group supported the bill and called for long-term US military engagement in the region: ‘Uganda and the US should see that getting rid of Kony may win them praise and be politically valuable, but removing the LRA requires going further. They should prepare now to continue operations after Kony is caught or killed,’ with mechanisms to ‘review the operation every four months to assess civilian casualties and increase civilian protection measures accordingly,’ signalling the projection of a long-term US military deployment in the region, a deployment justified originally as part of an effort to apprehend the LRA leadership.[16]
The presence of US military on African soil raises a number of concerns for those communities where they are deployed. Former US Army Colonel Ann Wright warned against deploying US soldiers in the Democratic Republic of Congo, citing the high number of rape and violent sexual assault cases in the US military and by US military personnel against women and girls in areas around US military bases.[17] As she stated, ‘If the women of the Congo should Google, “US military – sexual assault and rape”, I suspect they will decline the offer of assistance from the African Command.’
Similarly, given the massive civilian devastation wreaked by recent US military interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, it is likely that most Africans would say ‘no thank you’ to the offers of justice from the barrel of American guns. This is especially the case given that many of these law enforcement operations may be carried out not by uniformed US soldiers, but by US-contracted private security firms who anticipate a boom in business thanks to AFRICOM.[18] Given the near total lack of accountability that private contractors have enjoyed in Iraq and Afghanistan, this should also give human rights and peace advocates considerable pause for thought.
Finally, regardless of how the proposed cooperation works out in practice, there is the underlying issue that, for people in many areas of the world, the idea that US military force is the chosen instrument of global justice makes a mockery of the violence and devastation they have suffered at the hands of US military intervention. The ICC’s pander
ing to the US military is an insult to all those in the US and around the world struggling to hold the US military and its mercenaries accountable. The quest for global accountability will only become more difficult if the US military is appointed by the ICC as the chosen agent of global justice instead of being a force that itself needs to be held accountable.
PRESERVING THE RULE OF LAW
In order to ensure that any future ICC-US cooperation builds, rather than undermines, the rule of law, human rights activists, in particular at the ICC Review Conference, have a right and responsibility to make several demands:
– First, that the US sign and ratify the Rome Statute as a signal of its commitment to the rule of law
– Second, that all US-initiated bilateral immunity agreements be nullified
– Third, that if the ICC works with the US while the US is not a state party, it should do so in an open, transparent and accountable manner.
Most important, it is up to all human rights and peace advocates to make clear that we will not allow the enforcement of international justice to be used as a cover for US militarisation of Africa and for the dangerous expansion of AFRICOM in the continent.
Samar Al-Bulushi is an independent researcher examining the influence of external actors on peace and justice debates in Africa. Adam Branch is assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at San Diego State University.
NOTES
[1] See for example: Mary Kimany, ‘International Criminal Court: Justice or Racial Double Standards?’ Afrik.com, 16 December 2009 available hereat ; Hama Tuma, ‘ICC and Omar Bashir no friends of Ethiopia…Contempt for Africa or Justice Served?’ Afrik.com, 9 March 2009 available at http://en.afrik.com/rejoinder15397.html; Adam Branch, ‘Uganda’s Civil War and the Politics of ICC Intervention,’ Ethics and International Affairs, 2007, available at http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/~abranch/Publications/index_pub.html; Mayank Bubna, ‘The ICC’s Role in Sudan: Peace versus Justice,’ Eurasia Review, 28 April 2010, available here.
[2] George Lerner, ‘Ambassador: US moving to support international court,’ CNN US on-line, www.cnn.com/2010/US/03/24/us.global.justice
[3] George Lerner, ‘Ambassador: US moving to support international court,’ CNN US on-line, www.cnn.com/2010/US/03/24/us.global.justice
[4] Harold Hongju Koh, ‘The Obama Administration and International Law,’ Keynote Speech at the Annual Meeting of the American Society of International Law, 26 March 2010. http://www.state.gov/s/l/releases/remarks/139119.htm
[5] Vijay Padmanabhan, From Rome to Kampala: The US Approach to the 2010 International Criminal Court Review Conference. Council on Foreign Relations Special Report No. 55, April 2010.
[6] See for example, ‘African Voices on AFRICOM,’ at
http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/47047 See also A. Sarjoh Bah and Kwesi Aning, ‘US Peace Operations Policy in Africa: From ACRI to AFRICOM,’ International Peacekeeping, 2008. See also Daniel Volman and Beth Tuckey, ‘Militarizing Africa (Again),’ Foreign Policy in Focus, 20 February 2008 at http://www.fpif.org/articles/militarizing_africa_again
KENYA :
Kenya: Counry and the ICC – Court of Last Hope?
Dana Wagner/PAMBAZUKA NEWS/allafrica.com/28 May 2010
Luis Moreno-Ocampo’s arrival on 8 May and five-day visit to Nairobi came and passed quietly. It was documented by soft clicks of media cameras and by sharp but measured musing of social commentators. There was no civil unrest to challenge the tour and not even a visible protest in a capital that just two years ago was ripped open with street-level violence.
Without incident Moreno-Ocampo, prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), reportedly met with victims, witnesses and suspects, and wooed a watchful press.
Before the prosecutor’s arrival, opposition to the ICC in Kenya played out in an alleged government plot to block the prosecutor’s visit that quickly flopped. During the tour it was through an inquisitive media at a handful of press conferences that questioning the ICC presence was again dragged into discourse – because it hadn’t been there for a while.
The ICC investigation to pursue justice for the victims of the 2007-08 post-election violence – violence that left 1,220 dead, thousands more injured and over 350,000 people forcibly displaced, according to the Office of the Prosecutor – is now accepted as the crucial next step and better than any domestic option, says L. Muthoni Wanyeki, executive director of the Kenya Human Rights Commission.
ICC involvement, reluctantly, is dogma for getting something done.
‘At this point the ICC is the only option,’ Wanyeki says. ‘In our case it’s a court of last resort.’
Current Kenyan solutions to investigate post-election violence in addition to the ICC are the Special Tribunal, born from recommendation by the Waki Commission, and the Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission (TJRC).
The start-up of both these institutions has been riddled with funding problems and other political setbacks, including the contested appointment of Bethuel Kiplagat as chair of the TJRC, which resulted in one commissioner stepping down on principle after Kiplagat refused a request by colleagues for his own resignation. Kiplagat is now facing a potential sub-inquiry into his political history – as a high-ranking official under the former president, Daniel Arap Moi – which has essentially rendered the beleaguered commission defunct.
The Special Tribunal too has been unable to reach a foothold after an attempt to establish it with the Constitution of Kenya (Amendment) Bill 2009 by Mutula Kilonzo, the minister of justice and constitutional affairs, was blocked in Parliament.
‘There’s now overwhelming support within Kenya for the ICC – I think that’s based on a lack of alternatives,’ says Lionel Nichols, administrative manager of the Oxford Transitional Justice Research Group (OTJR).
Because of the idling TJRC and the Special Tribunal in parliamentary limbo, Nichols says that ‘for many Kenyans the ICC is their only hope’.
‘WE’RE NOT A FAILED STATE’
The start of atonement-seeking and the first initiative of juridical inquiry into post-election violence – the Waki Commission, headed by Justice Philip Waki – was not characterised by resigned support for ICC participation in Kenya’s problems.
After the Waki Commission put forward its recommendation for an investigative tribunal, support for a solely Kenyan solution was at least alive, if not widespread.
‘What was originally proposed [by the Waki Commission] would have been the best option, but the bill failed and at that point it was clear there was not enough will on the political side,’ Wanyeki says.
Nichols underscores the lack of political will to establish an effective and probing body like the tribunal, as expected suspects are high rankers in the political class in both the (President Mwai) Kibaki and (Prime Minister Raila) Odinga camps.
Not surprisingly then, initial criticism against involving the ICC as an external and international institution was levelled by both civil society and government.
The government’s position was and is still that an in-country process is the better solution, says Alfred Mutua, a government spokesperson.
‘Kenya should be able to take care of its own problems,’ Mutua says. ‘We understand the lack of faith by some because of politicization … but we’re not a failed state.’
When asked why the government wasn’t following through with funding for one home-grown option, the TJRC, Mutua affirms it has been allocated money but ‘that doesn’t mean it’s available on the spot’.
Kenya’s inability to conduct an independent, internal investigation is stunting the growth of its judicial institutions by simply not using and strengthening them, says Stella Ndirangu, a legal officer at the Kenyan Section of the International Commission of Jurists.
Transitional justice is being put on the shelf while the ICC steps in.
And as the ICC steps in, the proceedings are stepping out. The prosecutor will present his case in court in The Hague, the Netherlands. This creates a logistical barrier for victim participation in the trial.
The victims have steadily organised themselves into a determined lobby, Wainaina says, but their participation will be extremely limited by distance, whereas a Nairobi court proceeding would have cemented victims as a physical part of the process.
Critics also took aim at the ICC for making Kenya the fifth African investigation in the court’s short history. The unflattering continental focus won the ICC its share of criticism, and so too did Moreno-Ocampo’s own credibility as prosecutor, shaken by his record in office.
OPPOSITION DRIES UP
Attempts to stave off Moreno-Ocampo and his international mandate with an effective domestic response failed. The step that sealed ICC involvement was when the conflict’s technical arbiter, former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, gave the symbolic nod by handing over a list of suspects drafted by the Waki Commission to Moreno-Ocampo.
The move came after an already extended deadline set by the Waki Commission to establish a tribunal had expired, and by that time the opposed had become the exasperated supporters.
‘The government failed to set up the Tribunal, so [the ICC go-ahead] was an indictment of the Kenyan leadership,’ says Ndung’u Wainaina, executive director of the International Center for Policy and Conflict (ICPC).
Wainaina is a reluctant supporter.
‘Kenya failed its own national proceedings. This is an option this country drove itself into.’
The failed tribunal and current state of the TJRC is proof that accountability for the violence is not a government priority, Wainaina says.
‘The Kenyan government at any one time was never genuine about prosecuting the masterminds,’ he says.
The lack of commitment and serious intention to prosecute by the political elite secured support for the ICC. At this point, to dump international involvement and leave justice to a government with a deplorable reputation for accountability would be an endorsement of impunity, Wainaina says.
But the ICC alone cannot ensure blanket accountability for the people who incited mass killing and violence; Moreno-Ocampo has resolved to pursue the most responsible and has narrowed his mandate to prosecute six accused. Wainaina warns that without a concurrent domestic process to the ICC investigation, which at most will hold six people criminally accountable, there is a risk of an ‘impunity gap’.
THE LOCAL AGREEMENT
Kenya’s illegitimate criminal justice system has been highlighted by the ICC entrance.
‘It’s a very serious indictment of Kenya’s criminal system,’ Wainaina says, including ordinary criminal courts and the High
Court. ‘There has to be a tremendous overhaul.’
The best complement to the ICC investigation to ensure accountability and victim participation, and to revamp the domestic criminal process, is to establish the Special Tribunal, Ndirangu says. Alone, the ICC cannot battle impunity.
The TJRC is not an alternative to domestic prosecutions either, as the cabinet suggested in a 30 July 2009 ruling, Nichols says.
‘The victims are demanding there be a justice component at home, and not just truth-seeking,’ Ndirangu says.
Nichols echoes the need for the Special Tribunal but warns – as Kenyans have already witnessed – that its establishment will continue to be slowed by domestic politics.
Dana Wagner is a recent journalism and political science graduate from Carleton University.
ANGOLA :
In offshore drilling freeze, rumblings of a new era for oil industry
www.csmonitor.com/By Mark Clayton, Staff writer/2010/0528
The six-month moratorium on new deepwater offshore drilling announced by President Obama Thursday isn’t likely to have a big impact on the oil industry – unless it’s a sign of things to come.
In itself, President Obama’s decision to impose a six-month pause on offshore oil leasing, announced Thursday, is unlikely to have any great impact on US oil supplies or prices in the short run.
But within the oil industry, there is some concern that this offshore drilling moratorium could be the beginning of a new oil regime, with significantly tougher regulations to follow, as Mr. Obama promised.
US companies still see the Gulf of Mexico as their backyard with a stable, relatively predictable political and regulatory regime. But if new strictures on the oil industry are seen as being too reactionary, the move could in the long run drive companies to less tightly regulated places like Angola in their search for the next big discoveries. That could mean a loss of jobs in Gulf states and possibly weaken US energy security.
“This could be a speed bump, or it could be the beginning of a transition toward long-term decline in US oil production,” says David Pumphrey, an energy analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “It could put us in the position of importing more oil and possibly facing slightly higher oil prices in future because less non-OPEC oil is moving into the marketplace.”
Obama’s announcement Thursday marks a reversal of significant chunks of the offshore exploration plan he forwarded in March. On Thursday, he said he would:
Suspend planned exploration of two locations off Alaska’s northern coast.
Cancel August lease sales in the western Gulf as well as a proposed lease sale 50 miles off the coast of Virginia.
Continue for six months an existing moratorium on any new permits to drill new deepwater wells in the Gulf and other areas of the outer continental shelf.
Suspend action at 33 deepwater exploratory wells being drilled in the Gulf until investigations are complete on the causes of the Gulf spill.
The president said to reporters that he had erred in one major respect when he planned for more offshore oil exploration in March: “I was wrong in my belief that the oil companies had their act together when it came to [handling] worst-case scenarios.”
Calling oil industry connections with federal regulators at the Minerals Management Service “cozy and corrupt,” Obama said he plans to unveil “aggressive new operating standards and requirements” for the offshore oil industry. The new rules are expected to be influenced by the recommendations of a presidential commission on offshore drilling regulation co-chaired by Democrat Bob Graham, former US senator and governor of Florida, and by Republican William Reilly, co-chair of the National Commission on Energy Policy and administrator of the US Environmental Protection Agency under former president George H. W. Bush.
On Wall Street, the announcement brought into question whether the valuable deepwater oil and gas leases would remain valuable.
“All these companies’ share prices have taken a hit because many have very valuable leases in the Gulf, and the long-term fate of these leases – and whether they will ever drill in them – is now up in the air,” says Amy Myers Jaffe, a research fellow at Rice University’s Baker Institute. “What the president’s announcement has accentuated for the industry in a very concrete way, is that the industry is only as safe as the practice standards of the weakest link.”
It’s not yet clear how the president’s moves will impact energy legislation stalled in the US Senate. Sen. John Kerry (D) of Massachusetts portrayed the accident as yet another reason why Congress needs to endorse climate-energy legislation he supports.
But he also has said that the bill may be dead for this legislative season. That bill would have expanded offshore drilling – a key bargaining chip to win Republican votes.
Environmentalists were enthused by the president’s announcements, but cautious about the long term, calling for more study before drilling in the Arctic Ocean.
“No new oil leasing, exploration, or production should take place until the president’s independent commission completes its process and reforms are implemented,” Marilyn Heiman, director of the Pew Environment Group’s US Arctic Program said in a statement.
To Ms. Jaffe of Rice University, the major issue is that the industry must develop new technology for dealing with deepwater blowouts – otherwise the future there could be limited.
“It’s all well and good to say the focus is prevention, which is where the industry has been,” she notes. “But there’s human error, too – and the consequences simply cannot be that you damage an entire coastline of a state.”
Angola tackles money laundering
May 28 2010/www.iol.co.za/Reuters
Luanda – Angola approved a law on Thursday to tackle money laundering and the financing of terrorism, months after it was accused of not complying with international rules on the issues.
The bill, unanimously approved by parliament, aims to fill a gap in Angolan legislation on money laundering after the nation emerged from a 27-year civil war in 2002 to rival Nigeria as Africa’s biggest oil producer.
“The world today needs transparency in the financial and commercial transactions,” according to a copy of the text. The law carries prison sentences of up to 24 years for money laundering and terrorism financing.
The Paris-based Financial Action Task Force, which comprises governments and regional groups, named countries including Angola, North Korea and Ethiopia in February for not complying with international regulations on the two crimes.
Angola was ranked among the world’s 18 most corrupt nations in a 2009 Transparency International Index. –
SOUTH AFRICA:
AFRICA / AU :
Fund cuts hurt AIDS fight in Africa
Associated Press / May 28, 2010
JOHANNESBURG — Doctors are being forced to turn away people with HIV/AIDS in eight African countries as donors cut funding amid the global economic crisis, an aid group said yesterday.
Medecins Sans Frontieres, or Doctors Without Borders, said the patients being rejected will fall ill and almost certainly die without treatment.
The group called on rich countries to fulfill their obligations to poorer nations, saying the funding cuts threaten to unravel years of progress on the continent hardest hit by AIDS.
The MSF study looked at AIDS programs in Congo, Kenya, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, South Africa, Uganda, and Zimbabwe, and found the effects of funding cuts widespread.
MSF said the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria — a major, independent supporter of AIDS programs around the world — was under pressure from the wealthy governments that pay for it to cut back.
The President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, a US program that is a major funder of AIDS programs around the world, has had its budget nearly frozen at a time of increasing need, MSF said.
UN experts: Congo rebels illegally impose taxes
By EDITH M. LEDERER (AP)/28052010
UNITED NATIONS — Rebel groups in eastern Congo are illegally imposing taxes on trucks and pedestrians and receiving local, regional and international support in violation of U.N. sanctions, U.N. experts said Thursday.
In an interim report circulated to the Security Council, the five-member panel said it also obtained documented evidence of fraudulent “United Nations certificates” being forged to facilitate the sale of Congolese gold to buyers in Africa. The panel said it referred the matter to the U.N.’s internal investigation body.
The experts also cited credible information suggesting that new political and military organizations may soon emerge from the shifting alliances in volatile eastern Congo, “creating renewed risk of regional political interference from armed groups.”
Their report was issued ahead of a council vote Friday that will extend the 20,000-strong U.N. peacekeeping mission in Congo for a year but withdraw up to 2,000 troops by the end of June, far fewer than Congo’s government wanted. Protecting civilians will remain the force’s primary mandate followed by strengthening and reforming Congo’s security and judicial institutions.
Congo’s President Joseph Kabila called for the U.N. force — the largest in the world — to leave before September 2011 so the country could “fly with its own wings.”
But U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said last month he wanted to ensure that military operations against rebels in eastern Congo are successfully completed, that well-trained and equipped Congolese army units can take over the U.N. force’s security role and protect the population, and that the government extends its authority in areas freed from armed groups before the U.N. peacekeepers depart.
Ban recommended in his report to the council that the withdrawal start with up to 2,000 troops leaving peaceful areas of the central African nation by June 30, the 50th anniversary of Congo’s independence.
The final draft of the resolution expected to be adopted Friday, which was obtained by The Associated Press, says the future configuration of the force should be determined by the situation on the ground and the three objectives outlined by the secretary-general. It says the council will keep the strength of the force “under continuous review” on the basis of assessments by Ban and the Congolese government.
The resolution would change the name of the force from the United Nations Organization Mission in Congo, or MONUC, to the United Nations Organization Stabilization Mission in Congo, or MONUSCO, to reflect that the country “is now entering a new phase of its transition toward peace consolidation.”
Congo was engulfed in civil wars from 1996-2002, drawing in half a dozen nations and leading to deployment of the U.N. force in 1999 to support implementation of a cease-fire that was repeatedly broken. Following a 2002 agreement that ended much of the fighting, U.N. peacekeepers have supported Congo’s reunification and its first democratic elections in more than four decades in 2006, which Kabila won.
Kabila’s government, however, has since struggled to assert its control in the east and has had difficulty building effective institutions and integrating former fighters into a national army.
The report Thursday by the expert panel monitoring an arms embargo against the rebels and other U.N. sanctions details the continuing military activity by a number of rebel groups in the east.
The experts said the National Council for the Defense of the People, or CNDP, continues to exercise “de facto control of North Kivu, and to a lesser extent South Kivu,” despite political and military agreements signed in 2009 with the government. CNDP units integrated into the Congolese army also “continue to respond to the parallel chain of command of Gen. Bosco Ntaganda, a sanctioned individual who is also under an International Criminal Court indictment” for war crimes, they said.
Despite a communique in March from the CNDP’s new president announcing the lifting of all its illegal barriers and taxes, the panel said it has received “credible testimonies that CNDP taxation mechanisms continue to operate along commercial routes … and among the local population living in areas under their control.” The U.N. peacekeeping force reports that trucks transiting Kitchanga are charged $100-150 at illegal roadblocks and pedestrians are charged 500 Congolese francs, the panel said.
“For those who attempt to evade the tax and are caught doing so, the charge is tripled,” they said.
The experts also said they learned from interviews with former combatants with the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda, or FDLR, which was founded by the same men who led the 1994 genocide in neighboring Rwanda, that recruitment and training of new combatants is continuing, despite efforts to disarm the fighters.
The panel “is aware of extensive local, regional and international support networks providing political and material support to FDLR” and several other groups in violation of U.N. sanctions, the report said.
Bashir faces handcuffs in SA, says Zuma
May 28 2010 /www.iol.co.za/- Sapa
Cape Town – South African President Jacob Zuma on Thursday gave the clearest indication yet that Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir will be arrested in terms of international law if he travels to South Africa.
Bashir, who became the first sitting head of state to be indicted by the International Criminal Court in March last year, now has an ICC warrant of arrest hanging over him for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Darfur.
During question time in the National Assembly, Zuma was asked whether Bashir would be arrested if he set foot in South Africa.
“South Africa respects the international law and certainly we are signatories [to the Statute of the International Criminal Court in The Hague] and we abide by the law,” Zuma replied.
“Secondly, we reconcile our participation in the process while the leader of that country [Sudan] has the warrant of arrest, on the basis of the African Union (AU) decision.”
“The AU took a very deliberate decision and requested the international court to postpone the action against Bashir, given the fact that we’re dealing with a situation of violence, that if it acted immediately, it could reverse the situation in Sudan.
“That was done collectively by the African leaders and the message was sent. It was correct to do so, because our view was that if you did that, that situation could have got worse.
“That’s what the AU has said. The AU has not said we must not arrest Bashir.
“It looked at the situation and felt it was necessary to move cautiously on this matter. That’s what we’ve done. And that’s why we’re reconciling the two points,” he said.
Pressed again whether Bashir would or would not be arrested if he entered South Africa, in view of the fact all African heads of state had been invited to the opening of the 2010 Fifa World Cup on June 11, Zuma responded in similar fashion.
“In my response, that’s the first thing I answered. I answered very clearly that South Africa respects the international law. And that answers the question,” he said.
UN /ONU :
Doubts over Chad force’s ability to protect civilians after UN exit
JODY CLARKE in N’djamena/The Irish Times/Friday, May 28, 2010
A UN official has warned that Chad could become a “ Sopranos -style free for all” when UN troops leave the country later this year.
Speaking on condition of anonymity, he said the decision by the United Nations Security Council to withdraw the 4,375-strong UN peacekeeping force, including members of the Irish Defence Forces, could lead to a bidding war for protection duties between local Chadian commanders.
Given that the various forces have more loyalty to their commanders than to the state, the region could again be plunged into anarchy as bands of commercially minded military commanders seek to make as much as possible.
“They are already charging 5,000 CFA (€8) a day plus food and fuel,” he says. If Minurcat (UN Mission in the Central African Republic and Chad) leave, government forces could become more interested in bidding for this work than protecting vulnerable civilians.
Doubts persist over the capability of Chadian government forces to protect vulnerable civilians living in camps in the east of the country. Desertification is forcing more people south, putting pressure on existing humanitarian hubs.
UN peacekeepers were deployed in 2009 to protect hundreds of thousands of displaced Chadians and refugees from the Sudanese province of Darfur.
However, following this week’s decision by the security council, a Chadian-run police force, the Détachement Intégré de Sécurité (DIS), will assume full responsibility for protecting refugees and the internally displaced in the country.
Amnesty International has warned that the move could leave large numbers of “vulnerable” people at risk but UN secretary general Ban Ki moon welcomed it, saying “the Chadian government assumes full responsibility for protecting civilians under international norms”.
The move, adopted unanimously by resolution at the security council, will initially cut the military component of Minurcat from 3,300 to 2,200 troops (1,900 in Chad and 300 in the Central African Republic), with the aim being to hand over responsibility for people in camps to the Chad government and DIS.
However, according to several analysts, the DIS is so poorly equipped that it will be unable to provide protection to the 250,000 refugees and 180,000 internally displaced people in the country. Vehicles donated to the forces lie idle in military camps because there are not enough qualified drivers to operate them, while police officers charged with protecting civilians in camps are trained in just eight weeks.
In a presentation before the security council this month, Chad’s defence chief Gen Dagache said Chad now had the capacity to provide its sovereign responsibility in the area of security and the protection of civilians.
But doubts persist, a situation which is not helped by the fact that a lack of oversight at Minurcat has meant that the DIS has received more credit than it is due.
A report by the UN secretary general last month stated that the DIS is supposed to have conducted 5,194 day and night patrols around refugee camps between November 2009 and March 21st, 2010.
However, according to sources within the UN, given the strength and number of serviceable vehicles available to the DIS, this figure is nowhere near possible. According to the UN sources, any attempt to investigate the accuracy of the figures in the secretary general’s report were frustrated.
Responding to concerns that the DIS was incapable of providing security, John Holmes, under-secretary-general for Humanitarian Affairs, admitted that the Chadian state had severe limits. “There are a lot of people running around with guns. It is an easy way of making a living and humanitarians are often the targets.”
In an interview with The Irish Times in the capital N’djamena on Tuesday, he said that despite the limits, what was important now was that the Chadian security services were seen to work.
While he would have preferred that Minurcat and Irish forces stayed “it is clear now that they will have to withdraw. So it is very important that countries direct their efforts to helping the Chadian security services become as effective as possible”.
UN experts say NKorea is exporting nuke technology
By EDITH M. LEDERER (AP) /28052010
UNITED NATIONS — North Korea is exporting nuclear and ballistic missile technology and using multiple intermediaries, shell companies and overseas criminal networks to circumvent U.N. sanctions, U.N. experts said in a report obtained by The Associated Press.
The seven-member panel monitoring the implementation of sanctions against North Korea said its research indicates that Pyongyang is involved in banned nuclear and ballistic activities in Iran, Syria and Myanmar. It called for further study of these suspected activities and urged all countries to try to prevent them.
The 47-page report, obtained late Thursday by AP, and a lengthy annex document sanctions violations reported by U.N. member states, including four cases involving arms exports and two seizures of luxury goods by Italy — two yachts and high-end recording and video equipment. The report also details the broad range of techniques that North Korea is using to try to evade sanctions imposed by the U.N. Security Council after its two nuclear tests in 2006 and 2009.
Council diplomats discussed the report by the experts from Britain, Japan, the United States, France, South Korea, Russia and China at a closed-door meeting on Thursday.
Its release happened to coincide with heightened tensions between North Korea and South Korea over the March sinking of a South Korean navy ship which killed 46 sailors. The council is waiting for South Korea to decide what action it wants the U.N.’s most powerful body to take in response to the sinking, which a multinational investigation determined was caused by a North Korean torpedo.
The panel of experts said there is general agreement that the U.N. embargoes on nuclear and ballistic missile related items and technology, on arms exports and imports except light weapons, and on luxury goods, are having an impact.
But it said the list of eight entities and five individuals currently subject to an asset freeze and travel ban seriously understates those known to be engaged in banned activities and called for additional names to be added. It noted that North Korea moved quickly to have other companies take over activities of the eight banned entities.
The experts said an analysis of the four North Korean attempts to illegally export arms revealed that Pyongyang used “a number of masking techniques” to avoid sanctions. They include providing false descriptions and mislabeling of the contents of shipping containers, falsifying the manifest and information about the origin and destination of the goods, “and use of multiple layers of intermediaries, shell companies, and financial institutions,” the panel said.
It noted that a chartered jet intercepted in Thailand in December carrying 35 tons of conventional weapons including surface-to-air missiles from North Korea was owned by a company in the United Arab Emirates, registered in Georgia, leased to a shell company registered in New Zealand and then chartered to another shell company registered in Hong Kong — which may have been an attempt to mask its destination.
North Korea is also concealing arms exports by shipping components in kits for assembly overseas, the experts said.
As one example, the panel said it learned after North Korean military equipment
was seized at Durban harbor in South Africa that scores of technicians from the North had gone to the Republic of Congo, where the equipment was to have been assembled.
The experts called for “extra vigilance” at the first overseas port handling North Korean cargo and close monitoring of airplanes flying from the North, saying Pyongyang is believed to use air cargo “to handle high valued and sensitive arms exports.”
While North Korea maintains a wide network of trade offices which do legitimate business as well as most of the country’s illicit trade and covert acquisitions, the panel said Pyongyang “has also established links with overseas criminal networks to carry out these activities, including the transportation and distribution of illicit and smuggled cargoes.”
This may also include goods related to weapons of mass destruction and arms, it added.
Under council resolutions, all countries are required to submit reports on what they are doing to implement sanctions but as of April 30 the panel said it had still not heard from 112 of the 192 U.N. member states — including 51 in Africa, 28 in Asia, and 25 in Latin America and the Caribbean.
While no country reported on nuclear or ballistic missile-related imports or exports from North Korea since the second sanctions resolution was adopted last June, the panel said it reviewed several U.S. and French government assessments, reports from the International Atomic Energy Agency, research papers and media reports indicating Pyongyang’s continuing involvement in such activities.
These reports indicate North Korea “has continued to provide missiles, components, and technology to certain countries including Iran and Syria … (and) has provided assistance for a nuclear program in Syria, including the design and construction of a thermal reactor at Dair Alzour,” the panel said.
Syria denied the allegations in a letter to the IAEA, but the U.N. nuclear agency is still trying to obtain reports on the site and its activities, the panel said.
The experts said they are also looking into “suspicious activity in Myanmar,” including activities of Namchongang Trading, one of the companies subject to U.N. sanctions, and reports that Japan in June 2009 arrested three individuals for attempting to illegally export a magnetometer — which measures magnetic fields — to Myanmar via Malaysia allegedly under the direction of a company known to be associated with illicit procurement for North Korea’s nuclear and military programs. The company was not identified.
UN agency against HIV voices concern over conviction of Malawian gay couple
www.un.org/28 May 2010
27 May 2010 – The head of the United Nations agency fighting HIV/AIDS has expressed concern over the recent conviction in Malawi of a gay couple and their sentencing to 14 years in jail, warning that it could undermine health-care efforts aimed at helping people living with the disease.
Michel Sidibé, Executive Director of the Joint UN Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), said on Tuesday that the conviction of Steven Monjeza and Tiwonge Chimbalanga earlier this month for “indecent practices between males” and “unnatural offences” had worrying health, societal, cultural and human rights ramifications.
“Evidence from several countries in Africa shows a significant number of new HIV infections occurring among sex workers, people who use drugs and men who have sex with men,” said Mr. Sidibé.
“Opening a societal dialogue on these sensitive and critical issues is the only way to guarantee access to health services and restore dignity to all.”
Mr. Sidibé and Michel Kazatchkine, the Executive Director of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, made a joint official visit to Malawi this week to see first-hand the country’s efforts to tackle the HIV/AIDS pandemic.
They held talks in the capital, Lilongwe, with Malawi’s President Bingu wa Mutharika, who is also the current Chairperson of the African Union (AU), and raised the issue of the convictions of Mr. Monjeza and Mr. Chimbalanga.
Mr. Mutharika said he was confident that the cultural, religious and legal dimensions of the debate generated by the couple’s case would lead to a positive outcome, according to a press release issued by UNAIDS.
Mr. Sidibé and Professor Kazatchkine also discussed the broader Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), the set of anti-poverty targets with a 2015 deadline, with Mr. Mutharika. They commended the President and his country for their efforts to try to attain the MDGs and combat AIDS.
UN asks for agreement on nuclear disarmament
2010-05-28/IANS/ sify.com
With one day left before a month-long nuclear review conference ends Friday, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon urged the participants to agree on nuclear disarmament as expected by the world.
‘There is too much at stake for the conference to repeat the failure of 2005,’ Ban said in a letter to the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty meeting at UN headquarters in New York.
Ban urged the parties to break deadlocks over nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation efforts. The every-five-year conference ended in disaster in 2005 when the United States led the charge against Iran’s nuclear activities and the conference ended without a statement.
The 189 NPT signatories were to issue a final declaration Friday, which in its draft form calls for a timeline for the elimination of all nuclear weapons in the possession of the world’s five recognized nuclear powers: the United States, Russia, China, France and Britain.
The five powers have so far not agreed on a clear timeline even though they agree to rid the world of nuclear weapons.
‘Now is the time for the delegations to be pragmatic and coalesce around solutions that will advance the interest of the whole community of nations,’ Ban said.
He called for adopting a document that will further strengthen nuclear non-proliferation and lead to nuclear disarmament.
The draft supports a conference in 2012 leading to a long-proposed nuclear-weapons free Middle East. The date was accepted by Arab governments for the first time, after years of pushing for the proposal.
The proposed 30-page draft was presented Monday night to NPT signatories and will likely be amended before Friday. It was drafted by Philippine Ambassador Libran Cabactulan, who chaired the review debate and tried to reflect the differences among participants.
Participants said the decision for a 2010 Middle East conference – under UN auspices – was by itself an achievement by the NPT signatories because it would bring together all nations in the Middle East, including Israel and Iran.
Israel has never admitted it has nuclear weapons, as alleged by Arab governments. The British Guardian newspaper published this week declassified South African documents claiming to show Israel offered to sell nuclear warheads to South Africa’s former apartheid regime.
The Middle East zone was first proposed at the NPT review conference in 1995. The draft calls for the appointment of a special envoy to lead talks and to report on progress between now and 2015, the next NPT review conference.
The 118 nations of the Non-Aligned Movement have been pressuring the NPT for a time-bound framework for nuclear disarmament, which runs counter to what the five nuclear powers want to do. Those powers can agree to the elimination of nuclear weapons but without a timeline.
The draft offers a plan of action, which included a reaffirmation of ‘the unequivocal undertaking of the nuclear weapon states to accomplish the total elimination of their nuclear arsenals leading to nuclear disarmament’.
The draft calls for further efforts ‘to verifiably reduce all types of nuclear weapons, deployed and non-deployed’, which would include tactical, non-strategic, weapons.
During closed-door debate, representatives of the five nuclear powers also opposed a separate international convention that would demand nuclear disarmament.
The draft calls for the UN secretary general to hold ‘open-ended high-level discussion to take stock and agree on a roadmap for the complete elimination of nuclear weapons, including by means of a universal legal instrument’.
Western governments attending the NPT conference also gave full support to the role of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), in particular to enforcing a protocol which allows IAEA inspectors intrusive access to information and nuclear facilities of NPT signatories.
Non-aligned countries object to the intrusive access, and insist that the access is only a voluntary arrangement.
Three other countries – India, Pakistan and North Korea – have exploded nuclear devices. India and Pakistan never joined the NPT, while North Korea remains an NPT member although it has verbally withdrawn without filing official notice.
USA :
Insimbi, Metorex, MiX, Tongaat: South Africa Equity Preview
May 28, 2010/By Janice Kew/Bloomberg
May 28 (Bloomberg) — The following is a list of companies whose shares may have unusual price changes in South Africa. Stock symbols are in parentheses after company names and prices are from the last close.
South Africa’s FTSE/JSE Africa All Share Index gained for a second day, climbing 402.23, or 1.5 percent, to 27,449.74.
Insimbi Refractory & Alloy Supplies Ltd. (ISB SJ): The foundry-supplies company reports annual earnings. Insimbi said May 19 that earnings per share for the year through Feb. 28 are expected to be 4.12 cents, compared to 19.87 cents a year earlier. The stock was unchanged at 40 cents.
Metorex Ltd. (MTX SJ): The copper mining company will release a presentation following its latest visit to Democratic Republic of Congo. Metorex advanced 3 cents, or 0.8 percent, to 3.64 rand.
MiX Telematics Ltd. (MIX SJ): The company that installs devices used to track stolen vehicles said annual earnings per share will be between 4 percent and 7 percent lower. MiX rose 10 cents, or 9.1 percent, to 1.20 rand.
Tongaat-Hulett Ltd. (TON SJ): The sugar producer said 15- month net income through March rose to 2.9 billion rand, from 2.66 billion rand for the comparable period a year earlier. The shares gained 1 rand, or 1 percent, to 97.41 rand.
Shares or American depositary receipts of the following South African companies closed as follows:
Anglo American Plc (AAUKY US) rose 7.3 percent to $19.65. AngloGold Ashanti Ltd. (AU US) added 0.4 percent to $42.45. BHP Billiton Ltd. (BBL US) advanced 8.3 percent to $56.91. DRDGold Ltd. (DROOY US) gained 0.2 percent to $4.61. Gold Fields Ltd. (GFI US) increased 2.5 percent to $13.80. Harmony Gold Mining Co. (HMY US) gained 0.3 percent to $9.71. Impala Platinum Holdings (IMPUY US) jumped 9.2 percent to $25.78. Sappi Ltd. (SPP US) climbed 6.6 percent to $3.88. Sasol Ltd. (SSL US) rose 6 percent to $36.73.
–With assistance from Nicky Smith in Johannesburg. Editors: Ana Monteiro, Vernon Wessels.
Pres. Johnson–Sirleaf at White House: Obama Reassures Liberians of Support
(May 28, 2010)/ By: Gardea V. Woodson /www.theliberianjournal.com
(L-R) Sirleaf and Obama
President Barack Obama has reassured Liberians that the US is going to remain a constant friend and partner to Liberia as the West African nation strives to ensure the role of law and good governance.
Speaking today in the Oval Office at the White House when he received in audience President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, President Obama spoke of the Liberian President’s personal commitment to the role of law, and said she has made strides in reforming the judicial system.
“In all these endeavors, Liberians should be made to understand that the US is going to remain a constant friend and partner in these efforts,” President Obama noted. He also said the US is working with Liberia in initiatives that will ensure greater food security, health, and education.
President Obama also said there has been an extraordinary cooperation between the two countries on the issues of counter-terrorism as well as drug trafficking on the Western Coast of Africa, where international drug traffickers often find as a haven to operate with impunity.
On the 2011 Legislative and Presidential elections in Liberia, President Obama commended President Sirleaf’s commitment to democracy and the role of law, saying as part of the Liberian leader’s legacy she will continue to usher in a sense that democracy is the regular way to do business in the country. He said based on Liberia’s example, Guinea, Niger and Cote D’ivoire would see Liberia as a model for democracy and the role of law.
On his admiration for President Sirleaf, President Obama said he has admired the Liberian President for many years, and recalled her address to the US Congress Joint Session when he served as a senator.
President Obama attributed Liberia emergence from a “difficult period” in her history to the heroism and courage of President Sirleaf, stressing that her personal story obviously is an extraordinary one, citing her imprisonment as a political prisoner to becoming Africa ‘s first female president.
He also said over the last several years, the US government has seen President Sirleaf continuous determination to give a full account of the tragedies that took place in Liberia, and refocus the country on development and tackle corruption.
Concluding, the American President said he will be with President Sirleaf on every step of the way as she makes Liberian children to rise again.
In response, Mrs. Sirleaf thanked President Obama for the audience to meet with her, especially to discuss progress she has made since 2006 when she took over the leadership of the war-ravaged country.
She recalled that when she ascended to the presidency in Liberia, the country was plagued with lack of basic social services, but said in fulfillment of her campaign pledge to make Liberia rise again, her government has made progress in providing basic services and rebuild infrastructure, including schools, roads, water, electricity, health, among others, which the people have been denied over two decades.
She informed President Obama that Liberia has also made tremendous progress in the areas of the role of law and good governance, and that all the basic fundamental of freedoms are being adhered to.
Another area of improvement, President Sirleaf said, includes the security sector reform, which received support from the US government. She also spoke of the agricultural, forestry and mining sectors as giving boost to the economy, and tackling the country’s debts.
“I come today, on behalf of the Liberian people, to say that we have made a lot of progress in these commitments. We’ve been able to maintain peace. For seven years now, and I say that today, that our children who are in first grade don’t know what is gun. And that’s progress,” President Sirleaf informed President Obama.
However, President Sirleaf said Liberia still faces enormous challenges including brain drain. She thanked the American President for extending the Deferred Enforced Departure, also known as DED, for another 18 months, and said Liberia lacks the capacity to absorb all of its citizens who are in foreign parts.
President Sirleaf:“I want you to know that the United States has been a great partner to us. We could not have achieved the progress that we have had if we had not had the support in those initial days when we were just scrambling and looking for the ways to be able to go forward. The U.S. was there as a great partner”.
CANADA :
Canada’s prosperity shows way for summit
May 28, 2010/www.busrep.co.za/By Donwald Pressly
Toronto and the wonderful lake land area of Muskoka in the province of Ontario, which will host the Group of Eight (G8) and Group of 20 (G20) summits at the end of June, are a testimony to the success of a free enterprise economy.
Underpinning this economy, Canada has a political system that has seen regular changes of government. Each of the country’s 10 provinces is completely different. Quebec, of course, is terribly French. Ontario is more English.
But Toronto, the commercial capital, is a wonderful mix of 6 million people, most of them of British or Irish extraction, but cosmopolitan infusions from its large Chinese, Italian and Greek communities.
There are an estimated 80 000 South Africans here as well. Toronto takes in an average of 500 new immigrants a day, 100 of whom are from China.
The country is larger than the US, but it has only about 30 million people. So they are thinly spread out, although about a third of them live in Ontario. The road system is superb and the tap water drinkable.
There is a state health system that looks after all citizens and a retirement benefit system to which all people belong. Canada’s pension plan apparently pays out nearly C$1 000 – about R7 300 – a month to those who are low income earners.
Those who are part of the obligatory retirement benefit system receive benefits relative to the length and level of payment into the system during their working life.
The country has very low debt and budget deficit levels. Tax levels are the lowest in the Group of Seven nations.
Although Canada lost 400 000 jobs during the recession, about 300 000 have already been regained in manufacturing.
Industry Minister Tony Clement and International Trade Minister Peter van Loan stressed how important Canada felt about the G20 countries – including South Africa – being committed to prudent fiscal and economic policies.
They shot down US President Barack Obama’s idea of a bank tax to fund bailouts of failing banks in the future. Banks who wished to take risks would know that they could fall back on bailouts. Prudent banking practices would be punished.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Van Loan and Clement all emphasised the need to protect free trade – and reject being drawn into protectionism by fears of the recession and a double dip recovery – and reducing budget deficits and debts.
They could speak with a certain amount of authority: not a single Canadian bank had to be bailed out by the state.
While Van Loan, Clement and Harper all voiced sweet sounds about fast-tracking aid to developing states, including Africa, Bono and Bob Geldof are pushing the G8 to provide the sums they promised in 2005.
About 60 percent of the aid – which was meant to have doubled – has fed through, but Geldof says politicians have made “almost a sacred promise” to the poor. It was a promise from the powerful to the weak, Geldof told the Globe and Mail.
It seems as if Africa’s interests will be more successfully punted by the rock stars.
AP tally: 1,000th US military death in Afghan war
By ROBERT H. REID (AP)/28052010
KABUL, Afghanistan — The U.S. military suffered its 1,000th death of the Afghan war Friday, according to an Associated Press count, when NATO reported a service member was killed by a roadside bomb in southern Afghanistan.
A NATO statement did not identify the victim’s name or nationality, but U.S. spokesman Col. Wayne Shanks said the service member was American.
The Associated Press bases its tally on U.S. Defense Department reports of deaths suffered as a direct result of the Afghan conflict, including personnel assigned to units in Afghanistan, Pakistan or Uzbekistan.
Other news organizations count deaths suffered by service members assigned elsewhere as part of Operation Enduring Freedom, which includes operations in the Philippines, the Horn of Africa and at the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
The NATO statement gave no details of the bombing Friday, nor did it specify where the attack occurred. U.S., NATO and Afghan forces are gearing up for a major operation in the south in a bid to shore up government control of Kandahar, the biggest city in southern Afghanistan and the Taliban’s former headquarters.
The list of American service members killed in combat in Afghanistan begins with Sgt. 1st Class Nathan Ross Chapman of San Antonio, Texas. The 31-year-old career Special forces soldier was ambushed on Jan. 4, 2002, after attending a meeting with Afghan leaders in Khost province. He left a wife and two children. The base where a suicide bomber killed seven CIA employees in December bears his name.
The latest death was reported just ahead of the Memorial Day weekend in the United States when Americans honor their dead in all the nation’s wars.
Elsewhere, Afghan officials said they still had no confirmation of reports that a Pakistani Taliban leader who spearheaded the takeover of Pakistan’s Swat Valley three years ago was killed this week in a fierce battle with Afghan forces in remote eastern Afghanistan.
Hundreds of militants have been trying since Sunday to seize control of the Barg-e-Matal district of Nuristan province along the Pakistani border and fighting continued in the area Friday, provincial officials said.
Villagers who took part in the fighting reported that they had killed the Taliban commander, Maulana Fazlullah, along with six of his fighters during a strong insurgent attack Wednesday, according to Gen. Mohammad Zaman Mamozai, commander for Afghan border police in eastern Afghanistan.
Nuristan police Chief Mohammad Qasim said authorities were unable to confirm the death of Fazlullah, who gained prominence in 2007 as the “Radio Mullah” for his vehemently anti-Western sermons on local radio stations in the Swat Valley. The former mountain resort area fell under Taliban control until Pakistani forces drove them out last year.
In Pakistan, Maulana Faqir Mohammed, the Taliban chief in the Bajur area, told The Associated Press by phone that Fazlullah had gone to Nuristan with his fighters.
“We are trying to contact him,” he said. “We believe that he is safe and he has not been killed.”
Another Taliban commander in Bajur, Asad Ullah, insisted that Fazlullah was alive.
“Maulana Fazlullah was the guest of Taliban in Nuristan, and we don’t think he can be killed so easily,” he said.
The Afghan Interior Ministry said one police officer had also been killed in the Nuristan fighting. Officials said about 500 Pakistani Taliban were involved in the siege.
The insurgents first attacked the district government building on Sunday. Provincial police chief Gen. Mohammad Qasim Jangulbagh said local residents joined the fight against the Taliban because they heard Fazlullah had issued a fatwa, or religious command, to kill those who supported the government.
Nuristan is a rugged, mountainous province whose people have a reputation for fierce resistance to outsiders.
Associated Press writers Habib Khan in Bajur, Pakistan, Munir Ahmed in Islamabad and Amir Shah and Heidi Vogt in Kabul contributed to this report.
AUSTRALIA :
Updated Quarter-End Portfolio Data Now Available for BlackRock Closed-End Funds
May 28, 2010/www.marketwatch.com
NEW YORK, May 27, 2010 (BUSINESS WIRE) — BlackRock, Inc. today announced that quarter-end portfolio data for its closed-end funds, as of March 31, 2010, is now available to the public on BlackRock’s website at www.blackrock.com.
About BlackRock
BlackRock is a leader in investment management, risk management and advisory services for institutional and retail clients worldwide. At March 31, 2010, BlackRock’s AUM was $3.364 trillion. BlackRock offers products that span the risk spectrum to meet clients’ needs, including active, enhanced and index strategies across markets and asset classes. Products are offered in a variety of structures including separate accounts, mutual funds, iShares(R) (exchange traded funds), and other pooled investment vehicles. BlackRock also offers risk management, advisory and enterprise investment system services to a broad base of institutional investors through BlackRock Solutions(R). Headquartered in New York City, as of March 31, 2010, the firm has approximately 8,500 employees in 24 countries and a major presence in key global markets, including North and South America, Europe, Asia, Australia and the Middle East and Africa. For additional information, please visit the firm’s website at www.blackrock.com.
SOURCE: BlackRock Closed-End Funds
BlackRock Closed-End Funds
1-800-882-0052
Pawar under pressure to support Howard
www.asianage.com/May 28th, 2010
May 28th, 2010 — BIPIN DANI With Agency Inputs | pune
With the cricket boards of South Africa and Zimbabawe rejecting the nomination of former Australian Prime Minister John Howard for the ICC vice-president’s post, pressure is mounting on India to take a stand one way or the other.
According to Dubai-based sources, Cricket Australia, New Zealand Cricket and England and Wales Cricket Board have put pressure on Pawar to ensure that Howard’s nomination is not rejected.
“If Howard’s nomination, put forward jointly by CA and NZC, is not acceptable by few cricket boards namely Cricket South Africa and Zimbabwe Cricket, it may be perhaps for the first time in the ICC’s history, there could be a vote to not allow Pawar to become the president next month,” a source said.
South Africa and Zimbabwe are leading a move to prevent Howard from being nominated to a post from where he will, in two years time, graduate to heading the ICC.
ICC president David Morgan is scheduled on Thursday to meet Sharad Pawar, who takes over the presidency next month, and is expected to convey the wishes of the several board directors.
Pawar is understood to have been unhappy with the nomination of another politician, that too, of the stature of Howard.
Howard has preferred to stay mum over the possible rejection of his nomination. “Howard is not making any comments on the matter,” his secretary Ruth Gibson said from Sydney.
Lanka blow for Howard
Howard’s dreams of becoming ICC president in 2012 received another blow with Sri Lanka joining Zimbabwe and South Africa in resisting his nomination.
Sri Lanka Cricket’s interim committee chairman Somachandra de Silva said SLC would not support anyone without a cricket background.
EUROPE :
CHINA :
Amnesty for Kim Jong-il
By Henry Seggerman/ www.koreatimes.co.kr/05-28-2010
Among the mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers and wives of the 46 South Korean sailors killed by a North Korean torpedo, some may wish that Kim Jong-il be tried and executed for this crime. That is a most natural feeling.
North Koreans who have suffered forced abortions and seen their own children tortured to death in North Korean gulags may have similar feelings. There would be nothing abnormal in that.
Like it or not, retribution is normal in our world. When Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands, England retaliated, killing 649 Argentine soldiers and sailors, and retaking the islands. When al-Qaida blew up two U.S. embassies in Africa, the U.S. retaliated against al-Qaida camps in Afghanistan and one of its factories in the Sudan.
However, South Korea will not retaliate against the North Korea for its murder of the 46 sailors. There will be no trial, there will be no execution of Kim, for this or any of his many crimes. NATO will not free an enslaved people, as it did in Afghanistan. Instead, it will be the other NATO (“No Action, Talk Only”). Here is the latest Talk Only from Thursday’s headline: “South Korea demands a ‘stern’ global response.”
And what kind of “stern response” can those bereaved mothers and fathers expect? Kim Yong-hyun, professor of North Korean studies at Dongguk University, said, “Any more U.N. sanctions will be symbolic at best, given North Korea is already under sanctions.”
Symbolic sanctions? Why? It is because North Korea has enjoyed complete leverage over South Korea for 50 years. North Korea has 11,000 heavy artillery pieces, plus hundreds of missiles, pointed at Seoul. North Korea could kill one million Seoul residents in three or four hours.
This is why South Korea will not ever be able to retaliate against the torpedo attack. This is why South Korea also did not retaliate after North Korea shot down Korean Air flight 858, killing 115 civilians. Incidentally, that attack was ordered by Kim personally to impress his dad.
My best guess is that the torpedo attack was like the murder of Park Wang-ja (Remember her?) at Mt. Geumgang, the act of a single soldier not thinking clearly. But this hardly lets Kim off the hook.
What country does have leverage over North Korea?
China is the largest investor and trading partner for the North. This year, China tripled its free or subsidized grain shipments to North Korea. And, the New York Times reported, “North Korea depends on China for up to 90 percent of its oil supplies, much of which is sold on credit or for bartered goods, according to Chinese energy experts. Any sustained reduction could cripple its isolated and struggling economy.”
For its entire history, North Korea has been completely reliant on other countries, first, the Soviet Union, and now China. So, the U.N. should waste no more time with “symbolic sanctions.” A China oil cutoff is much easier and it’s already proven to work fast.
In fact, why don’t they just boil the six-party talks down to one-party talks, as in China just telling North Korea what to do, or they’ll cut off the 90 percent oil giveaway? This would save the other five a lot of time and pointless travel expenses.
The Chinese leadership must be sick and tired of Kim Jong-il. As a nation, China seeks to gain the world’s respect through explosive economic growth and dramatic improvements in the lives of its people.
But the Chinese are repeatedly embarrassed by their demented, Hennessy-swilling, mass murdering next-door neighbor ― who happens to be latched onto their oil teat for 90 percent of his country’s desperate fuel needs. For China, North Korea’s torpedo murders are much more embarrassing than its laughable nuclear program, because they are so ugly, so despicable.
Aware of their “one-party talks” leverage over North Korea, the Chinese certainly must be considering various endgames for the Kim dynasty right now. I’ll take the liberty of suggesting one here. Why doesn’t China organize a Velvet Reunification between North and South Korea?
Tell the North the oil, grain, power, fertilizer shipments are over as of right now. Give Kim and his various spawns 30 days to get out of Dodge. Offer them amnesty in some far-off location. This got Idi Amin out of Uganda, perhaps it can work for Kim Jong-il.
Bloodthirsty mass murderers like Idi Amin and Pol Pot got off scot-free when their regimes were changed, because halting mass murder was more pressing to the world community than seeing one man hang. Kim Jong-il has a lot more leverage than Idi Amin and Pol Pot, so we have to accept the fact that he may end up evading the gallows.
China can save money and avoid instability in its Northeast if it pursues reunification rather than absorbing a North Korean region as it did with Hong Kong, Tibet, etc. If you dangle in front of North Koreans near the Chinese border the joys of reunification, fewer will flee into China. Besides, aren’t many North Korean women being kidnapped into sex slavery by local Chinese vultures?
In a post-Kim North Korea, the smartest thing would be to disable its military threat, but use its extensive upper ranks to help in the transition. They are better-educated and better-fed than the average North Korean and will be essential in the vast infrastructure rebuilding to come.
There’s this endless and quite nonsensical military chess game going on between China and the U.S. which is not based in any reality. For example, we all know there will be Red Chinese boots on the ground in Taiwan soon and that U.S. troops in South Korea aren’t going to stop them.
So, to sweeten the deal with China and keep remaining North Korean army brass from getting jumpy, South Korea could ask its American friends to shift their troops over to Japan for 5-10 years, as a purely cosmetic gesture, to dispel any concern reunified Korea is a U.S. puppet regime. (It’s not.) After reunification, the U.S. troops will have little purpose, anyway. I don’t even know what real purpose they serve there now, given a one-million-strong North Korean army.
So, those are my suggestions to the Chinese leadership. China has witnessed monumental changes throughout the communist world over the last 25 years. Many of these changes in Europe and Central Asia happened suddenly, unpredictably. North Korea is a failed state on every level imaginable, perhaps teetering at the edge of its own unpredictable cliff.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, China has propped up and sustained this fictional fantasy of a nation. Isn’t it time for China to step in and stop the madness?
If China brought peace and stability to the Korean Peninsula, surely it would earn the respect of the entire world. China will be the No. 1 economy in the world two decades from now. In that context, shouldn’t it want to solve this relatively small problem, rather than perpetuate it?
Henry Seggerman is the portfolio manager of Korea International Investment Holdings. He is also a regular contributor to The Korea Times. The views expressed in the above article are the author’s own and do not reflect the editorial policy of The Korea Times.
INDIA :
India among ‘key centres of influence’ in Obama security strategy
www.hindustantimes.com/Indo-Asian News Service/ May 28, 2010
Washington,
Recognising India as one of the “key centres of influence” along with China and Russia, President Barack Obama’s new National Security Strategy reaffirms “building a strategic partnership” with India as “one of the defining partnerships of the 21st century.”
Faced with “the emergence of new challenges and the shortcomings of the international system” the US “must focus American engagement on strengthening international institutions and galvanizing the collective action that can serve common interests,” says the strategy unveiled on Thursday.
The 52-page document identifies these issues as combating violent extremism; stopping the spread of nuclear weapons and securing nuclear materials; achieving balanced and sustainable economic growth; and forging cooperative solutions to the threat of climate change, armed conflict, and pandemic disease.
“The starting point for that collective action will be our engagement with other countries,” it says “so that we can cooperate on issues of bilateral and global concern, with the recognition that power, in an interconnected world, is no longer a zero sum game.”
The cornerstone of this engagement is the relationship between the United States and its “close friends and allies in Europe, Asia, the Americas, and the Middle East-ties which are rooted in shared interests and shared values, and which serve our mutual security and the broader security and prosperity of the world.”
“We are working to build deeper and more effective partnerships with other key centres of influence – including China, India, and Russia, as well as increasingly influential nations such as Brazil, South Africa, and Indonesia,” says the strategy.
Explaining the strategy at the Brookings Institute, a Washington think tank, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said, “deepening our engagement with key countries like Russia, China, India and others gives us a better understanding and also to our counterparts.”
The upcoming strategic dialogue with India “is the first time ever we’ve had a ministerial strategic dialogue,” she said noting “there have been interactions, of course, at many levels.”
“But we want to develop connections not only between high-ranking diplomats, but also between people working on higher education, people working on clean water, people working on women’s empowerment. And that is exactly what we intend to do.”
Obama’s National Security Advisor General James L. Jones too pointed to the strategy’s focus on “expanding cooperation with 21st century centres of influence such as Russia, with which we have reset relations.
“India, with which our growing relationship will be one of the defining partnerships of the 21st century. And China, with which we have forged a Strategic and Economic Dialogue to advance mutual interest on areas such as global economic recovery and non-proliferation,” he said at a briefing for the foreign media.
Jones said the strategy “embraces the 21st century power dynamics and the first deliberate strategy for building constructive ties with emerging centres of influence, including by elevating the role of the G-20, including India, as the focal point for international economic cooperation.
“The US and India launched a Strategic Dialogue to build a broad-based and multi-layered Strategic Partnership that will strengthen bilateral ties,” the strategy notes.
The two countries also completed negotiations last year on an agreement to govern the reprocessing of US-origin spent nuclear fuel.
“Efforts have intensified and been formalised regarding counter-terrorism cooperation to enhance the security of both our countries, especially after the tragic Mumbai attack.”
“The US-India CEOs Forum was revived and expanded to bolster business investment and ties in both countries and together we launched a Green Partnership to strengthen US-India cooperation on clean energy, climate change, and food security.”
Bharti seeks funds for Zain buyout: report
India Infoline News Service / May 28, 2010
Bharti would be required to pay another US$700mn to the seller after a year, while taking a load of US$1.7bn debt associated with the African assets
Bharti Airtel reportedly said it was seeking funds from its bankers to pay for the acquisition of Zain’s African operations, the deal for which was negotiated by the company earlier in the year.
According to reports, Bharti was closer to concluding the US$10.7bn deal.Earlier to teh company’s announcement on March 30, 2010 regarding the proposed acquisition of Zain Africa BV, Bharti Airtel reports that it has initiated the funds drawdown for the completion of the said transaction.Bharti is also in the process of raising funds for the 3G spectrum allocation, which it won in the recent auction.
Earlier in March, Bharti Airtel tied up US$8.3bn with a clutch of foreign banks and State Bank of India to fund the acquisition of Zain telecom’s African assets. On completion, Bharti would be required to pay another US$700mn to the seller after a year, while taking a load of US$1.7bn debt associated with the African assets, said a financial daily.
Chatty Farmers Help Suzuki India as GM Enters Cities (Update1)
May 28, 2010/By Vipin V. Nair/Bloomberg
May 28 (Bloomberg) — Maruti Suzuki India Ltd. salesman Ram Krishna Upadhyaya goes to a farmers’ market three times a week to find out who has had a good crop and can afford a new car.
“Many people think that the rich only live in cities, but there are lots of people with enough money to buy a car in villages,” Upadhyaya, 33, said in Mankapur, 400 miles southeast of New Delhi. “Also, there’s no competition to sell a car in rural areas.”
India’s largest carmaker more than doubled rural sales last year as Upadhyaya and 4,000 other agents used a personal touch in villages where televisions and newspapers are a rarity. The Suzuki Motor Corp. unit has built a network targeting India’s at least 700 million rural residents as General Motors Co., Volkswagen AG and Tata Motors Ltd. challenge its grip on cities.
“It’s a huge competitive advantage for Maruti,” said Juergen Maier, who helps manage 1.1 billion euros ($1.4 billion) of assets, including Indian stocks, at Raiffeisen Capital Management in Vienna. “Rural markets are difficult to enter as you need the volumes to attract dealers, so it will take some time for new players to get there.”
India’s nationwide auto sales increased 25 percent to 1.53 million in the year ended March, with New Delhi-based Maruti accounting for half the market. Sales may reach 3 million units by 2015, according to the government.
No Ties
Maruti increased the proportion of sales it got from rural areas to 16.5 percent in the year ended March from 3.5 percent two years earlier by reaching out to villagers who hadn’t previously considered owning a car, said Mayank Pareek, managing executive officer in charge of marketing and sales. About half of India’s more than 600,000 villages didn’t have all-weather roads as recently as five years ago, he said.
“We found that many people in villages don’t feel comfortable going to an air-conditioned showroom and talking to a salesman wearing a tie,” he said. “We have seen only the tip of the iceberg” in terms of rural sales.
Maruti fell 0.4 percent to 1,232.75 rupees at 9:58 a.m. in Mumbai trading today. The stock has declined 21 percent this year.
“Build India”
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is boosting spending on agriculture and rural infrastructure under the “Build India” campaign, designed to create jobs and improve living standards. In China, gov
ernment efforts including vehicle subsidies helped rural auto sales growth outpace urban areas for the first time last year, according to the nation’s commerce ministry. China passed the U.S. as the world’s largest auto market in 2009.
Maruti has 812 dealers across India, who can operate more than one outlet. Upadhyaya runs a small showroom near Mankapur and also displays cars under a tent each week at the farmers’ market. He sells about 10 cars a month, he said by phone. Sugarcane farmer Karta Ram Paswan bought an air-conditioned Maruti Alto hatchback, costing from 269,713 rupees ($5,700), after Upadhyaya invited him to view cars at the market and helped arrange financing.
“I know the salesman quite well and he has promised to look after any problems,” Paswan, 25, said by phone. “I’ve never heard of Volkswagen or General Motors.”
Tata, GM
Maruti faces rising competition, including from Tata, which is working through 100,000 advance orders for the 123,360 rupee Nano, the world’s cheapest car. Other automakers are also pushing into rural markets amid increasing competition in Mumbai, New Delhi and other cities.
GM plans to have 300 dealerships and a similar number of service outlets in India by the end of the year, up from around 200, said Karl Slym, the head of its local operations. The company expects to open 60 percent of new dealers in towns of 500,000 people or less, he said.
Particularly in small towns, the carmaker wants dealers who are “connected locally,” he said.
Ford Motor Co. has invested $950 million in a factory in Chennai and introduced the 350,000 rupee Figo this year. It also opened 28 facilities in 24 cities on a single day in February. It aims to have 200 dealerships and service stations by end of the year, from 164 in 97 cities now.
“Other manufacturers are playing catch up,” said John Bonnell, Asia-Pacific director of forecasting at JD Power & Associates. Maruti is “in a strong position and will do well over time.”
–With assistance from Liza Lin in Singapore and Subramaniam Sharma in New Delhi. Editors: Anand Krishnamoorthy, Neil Denslow.
BRASIL:
EN BREF, CE 28 mai 2010 … AGNEWS / OMAR, BXL,28/05/2010
