Zimbabwe’s diamond fields enrich ruling party, report says

Miners in the Marange diamond fields in eastern Zimbabwe in 2006, the year the fields were discovered. The New York Times

by CELIA W. DUGGER, New York Times, June 26, 2009

JOHANNESBURG — Zimbabwe’s military, controlled by President Robert Mugabe’s political party, violently took over diamond fields in Zimbabwe last year and has used the illicit revenues to buy the loyalty of restive soldiers and enrich party leaders, Human Rights Watch charged in a report released Friday.

Tsvangirayi Mukwazhi/Associated Press

Human Rights Watch says the military killed more than 200 miners in the Marange fields.

The party, ZANU-PF, has used the money from diamonds — smuggled out of the country or illegally sold through the Reserve Bank — to reinforce its hold over the security forces, which seemed to be slipping last year as the value of soldiers’ pay collapsed with soaring inflation, Human Rights Watch researchers said.

On Friday, Zimbabwe’s government roundly denied the charges in the report, which cited visits by its researcher to the diamond fields in February and interviews with soldiers, miners and other witnesses.

The information minister, Webster Shamu, of ZANU-PF, said in a telephone interview that the report’s aim was to tarnish the country’s image, block the sale of its diamonds internationally and, “in so doing, deny Zimbabwe much needed foreign currency.”

“The whole report is just not true,” he said.

Last year Zimbabwe’s state media depicted the military blitz, code-named Operation No Return, in the Marange district as a push to restore order in the midst of a lawless diamond rush in the area.

But the Human Rights Watch report charged that the military killed more than 200 miners and used the push to seize the Marange fields.

Some miners died when soldiers opened fire from helicopters with automatic rifles mounted on them, the group said. Many of the dead were taken to the morgue at Mutare General Hospital, or buried in mass graves, the report says.

Army brigades are being rotated into the diamond fields, discovered in 2006, so more soldiers can profit from the illegal trade, the report says.

Villagers from the area, some of them children, are being forced to work in mines controlled by military syndicates and have complained of being harassed, beaten and arrested, the report says.

“It’s a big cash cow for the military and the police, especially since Zimbabwe is virtually bankrupt,” Dewa Mavhinga, the Zimbabwean lawyer who was the main researcher for the report, said in an interview.

Mr. Mugabe, who has ruled for 29 years, is now governing with his rival, Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai, leader of the Movement for Democratic Change, who spent the past three weeks in Western capitals seeking assistance for Zimbabwe’s devastated economy.

President Obama and European heads of state have generally declined to aid Zimbabwe’s government directly, in part because of concerns that it continues to flout the rule of law.

The Human Rights Watch report is the latest sign of growing international concern about charges of killings and human rights abuses in the diamond fields southwest of the city of Mutare.

“While Zimbabwe’s new power-sharing government, formed in February 2009, now lobbies the world for development aid, millions of dollars in potential government revenue are being siphoned off,” the report said.

The World Federation of Diamond Bourses, an umbrella group of 28 bourses in 20 countries, called on its members in April not to trade diamonds that originate in the Marange deposits in Zimbabwe.

“Somewhere along the line, we have to stand up and be counted,” Michael H. Vaughan, the federation’s executive director, said in an interview on Friday.

On Sunday, representatives of the Kimberley Process, an alliance of industry, civic and government officials set up to stop the flow of so-called blood diamonds, will be traveling to Zimbabwe to explore whether the country is complying with the alliance’s standards.

A coalition of nonprofit groups is lobbying to have Zimbabwe suspended from membership in the Kimberley Process. “There’s rampant smuggling out of the country,” said Annie Dunnebacke of Global Witness, one of the nonprofit groups. “The military is profiting from the trade and is directly involved in the sale of the diamonds.”

At a time when Zimbabwe is struggling to pay civil servants and soldiers a stipend of $100 a month, the extra income from diamond mining for soldiers is serving “to mollify a constituency whose loyalty to ZANU-PF, in the context of ongoing political strife, is essential,” the Human Rights Watch report said.

In December, soldiers rioted in Harare, Zimbabwe’s capital, to protest pay that had become virtually worthless as inflation increased to astronomical levels. Analysts and Western diplomats said at the time that Mr. Mugabe might lose his grip on power if he were unable to sustain the patronage he had deployed for decades.

Link to article: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/27/world/africa/27zimbabwe.html

Charles M. Blow: Hate in a Cocoon of Silence

Hate in a Cocoon of Silence

Charles M. Blow . Credit Earl Wilson/The New York Times

Graphic

by Charles M. Blow, New York Times, June 12, 2009

We were warned.

An April assessment by the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis said pointedly: “Lone wolves and small terrorist cells embracing violent rightwing extremist ideology are the most dangerous domestic terrorism threat in the United States.”

Slowly, but steadily, these bigots are slithering from beneath their rocks, armed and deadly.

The most recent was an octogenarian-hater named James von Brunn, who, officials said, opened fire this week in the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, killing a security guard.

Just as disturbing as the incidents themselves are the lineups of family, friends and neighbors who emerge to talk about the vitriol they heard and the warning signs they saw. I always want the interviewer to stop and ask them this simple question: “And when he said or did that, how did you respond?”

I would ask: What did you say or do as the shooters retreated into their xenophobic silo and consumed the bile slouching about the Internet? What did you say or do as the darkness in their hearts obscured the light of their reasoning, and the vacuum of hate consumed them?

My suspicion is that far too many do far too little.

While many might say that they would be quick to condemn and excoriate such hatred, they can often passively condone and fail to expostulate the hater when they see it firsthand.

That’s the gist of a January study that was written about in ScienceDaily. It was led by Kerry Kawakami, a psychology professor at York University in Toronto, and it found that although people predicted “that they would be very upset by a racist act and would take action,” their actual reactions were “much more muted.” Why? Because people are “much less willing to pay the emotional cost” of the confrontation than they thought they would be.

The authorities won’t be able to stop every “lone wolf” with a gun and a gripe. But we, as a society, can do a much better job of creating an environment where hateful beliefs are never ignored and suspicious behavior never goes unreported.

In 1963, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote in a letter from a Birmingham jail, “We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people.” That’s still true.

Hateful people are loud — to disguise their cowardice and shame. But good, decent people are by far the majority, and we dare not be silent. There can be no family too close and no friend too dear for hatred to go unchecked. Allowing it to do so diminishes the better, more noble parts of ourselves.

These confrontations won’t be easy, but doing the right thing rarely is. There is someone reading this column who knows someone who could be the next shooter. What will that reader do?

Link to article: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/13/opinion/13blow.html

Peru: death toll reaches 60 -- Asháninka indigenous Indians fighting to prevent confiscation of their lands for logging, Brazil's hydroelectric dams

From Lou Gold's blog: Vision Share

Monday, June 08, 2009

AMAZON ALERT: PERU


Indigenous protesters fighting logging and drilling blocked a road in northern Peru on Friday as police tear gas hung in the air. Photo: Associated Press

[Update 1: Reuters reports that the death toll has risen to more than 60 and that thousands of Indians are still blocking roads. Here's an activist's report about the actions likely this week.]

[Update 2: Simon Romero, reporting for the NY Times, points out that the issue is not only over oil and timber leases. For instance, leaders from the Asháninka indigenous group are trying to derail a plan by Eletrobrás, a company controlled by Brazil’s government, to spend more than $10 billion to build five hydroelectric plants in Peru.]

This morning (Jun 6) I received an email from our dear friend Anjo who is in Peru. She says: "heading into the jungle in a few days. mad stress to get all done. 35 people dead this morning. hundreds wounded. many I know. a curfew. feels like back in Palestine."

Anjo is not exaggerating. Here is some video from May 22, 2009.



According to AMAZON WATCH 25 civilians and 9 police have been killed in the current clashes. Peru's Amazon Indigenous Peoples need you to TAKE ACTION now.



Since April 9th communities throughout the Peruvian Amazon have been protesting new laws that usher in an unprecedented wave of extractive industries into the Amazon Rainforest. President Alan Garcia's government passed these laws under "fast track" authority he had received from the Peruvian congress to make laws to facilitate the Free Trade Agreement with the United States and to make Peru more economically "competitive".

Over 30,000 indigenous people have taken to blockading roads, rivers, and railways to demand the repeal of these new laws that allow oil, mining and logging companies to enter indigenous territories without seeking prior consultation or consent. The protests have led to disruptions of transport as well as the interruption of oil production.

In the early morning of June 5, Peruvian military police staged a violent raid on a group of indigenous people at a peaceful blockade on a road outside of Bagua, in a remote area of northern Peruvian Amazon. Several thousand indigenous peoples were forcibly dispersed by tear gas and real bullets. Initial reports of fatalities include at least eleven indigenous people, along with nine police officers.

We need you to immediately TAKE ACTION adding your voice in solidarity with thousands of indigenous people. Send a letter today to the Garcia Administration demanding and end to the violent repression and respect for the constitutionally guaranteed rights of indigenous peoples.

As one of the Earth's largest tropical rainforests, the Amazon plays a critical role in safeguarding the global climate. Its destruction releases massive amounts of global warming gases into the atmosphere, worsening climate change. Indigenous peoples are the guardians of the Amazon rainforest. They need your support.

There's more from AmazonWatch and an excellent roundup at DailyKos that covers how US Free Trade agreements have been contributing to the problem.

Link to Lou Gold's blog: http://lougold.blogspot.com/2009/06/amazon-alert-peru-indigenous-protesters_6404.html

Japanese & American donate to Caritas International for the flood victims in northern and northeastern Brazil -- Learn how!

From Laurie Dougherty in Massachusetts:

An advantage of Caritas International is that you can donate online with any credit card -you don't have to fool with bank wire transfers. And as Suya pointed out there is now an option on the online donation form to earmark the donation for the Brazil flood (this option was not yet there last evening when I became aware of Caritas involvement).

From the press release on Brazil at this link, click the black box "Support our work in Brazil" (or go to to Donate Now, select Emergency Response Fund, check "emergencies," open the drop down list and select Brazil Flood).

http://www.caritas.org/newsroom/press_releases/PressRelease28_05_09.html

I will also donate 100 EUR which at the moment is US$138.78. (A donation of US$100 would be 72.06 EUR.) This currency converter may not be the exact "official" exchange rate, but we use this at work to get a good approximation.

http://www.oanda.com/convert/classic

I will also spread the word among contacts at work -- we have a large Latin American program and several Brazilians on staff.

Laurie

Caritas - the charitable arm of the Catholic Church - is appealing for contributions to provide assistance to flooded areas in northeastern Brazil

Caritas - the charitable arm of the Catholic Church - is appealing for contributions to provide assistance to flooded areas in the northeast of Brazil

Caritas Brazil issued an appeal a couple of weeks ago requesting contributions that can be made through several bank accounts in Brazil (contributions from out of the country would need to be wired to the banks, most likely): http://www.caritas.org/newsroom/press_releases/BrazilFlood.html

Caritas International, based in the Vatican, issued an appeal today to raise US$1.1 million for Brazil flood victims. Contributions can be made online with any credit card (as well as by check or wire transfer). The press release describes the kind of relief intended.
http://www.caritas.org/newsroom/press_releases/PressRelease28_05_09.html

The Caritas website says donations can be earmarked for a specific emergency, but the Brazil floods are not on the list of choices on the online donation form.

Contact: Michelle Hough Tel. 39-06-69879721, 39-334-2344136 or hough@caritas.va

Currency converter (Euros to other currencies): http://www.oanda.com/convert/classic

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5ilY_qkKl2-BGIiWlR2wcN2DCykcAD98FF8V82


http://internationalrivers.org/en/blog/glenn-switkes/fatalities-northeast-brazilian-dam-bursts

Many thanks to Laurie Dougherty, in Massachusetts, for the information in this post.

Cruz Vermelha do Brasil: Como fazer doações p/ os atingidos das enchentes do Norte e Nordeste

Veja como fazer doações para o Nordeste

Cruz Vermelha (para todos o atingidos do Nordeste)

Unibanco
Agência 0472
Conta 235.000-8

Defesa Civil do Piauí

Banco do Brasil
Agência 3791-5
Conta 2004-4

Ceará / Campanha Força Solidária

Caixa Econômica Federal
Agência 3281
Operação 003
Conta 300-1

Banco do Brasil
Agência 3515-7
Conta corrente 11024-8

Banco do Nordeste do Brasil
Agência 016
Conta corrente 29393-8

SOS Maranhão

Caixa Econômica Federal
Agência 0027
Conta corrente 1000-2
Operação 006

Banco do Brasil
Agência 2954-8
Conta corrente 2222-5.

Fonte: Folha Online

Link: http://www.gp1.com.br/noticias/mais-de-350-mil-pessoas-deixam-suas-casas-por-causa-das-chuvas-no-brasil-confira-79983.asp

Many thanks to Suya Yamazaki, in Japan, for getting me headed down this road to information for donations.

Maureen Dowd: Rogue Diva of Doom (Dick Cheney, in case you were wondering)

Rogue Diva of Doom

Maureen Dowd. Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times.

• Read All Comments (89) »

by Maureen Dowd, New York Times, May 12, 2009

When Bush 41 was ramping up to the Gulf War, assembling a coalition to fight Saddam, Jimmy Carter sent a letter to members of the U.N. Security Council urging them not to rush into conflict without further exploring a negotiated solution.

The first President Bush and other Republicans in Washington considered this treasonous, a former president trying to thwart a sitting one, lobbying foreign diplomats to oppose his own country on a war resolution. In 2002, when Bush Junior was ramping up to his war against Saddam, Al Gore made a speech trying to slow down that war resolution, pointing out that pivoting from Osama to Saddam for no reason, initiating “pre-emptive” war, and blowing off our allies would undermine the war on terror.

Charles Krauthammer called Gore’s speech “a disgrace.” Michael Kelly, his fellow Washington Post columnist, called it “vile” and “contemptible.” Newt Gingrich said that the former vice president asserting that W. was making America less safe was “well outside the mark of an appropriate debate.”

“I think the president should be doing what he thinks is best as commander in chief,” Gingrich said flatly. Now, however, Gingrich backs Dick Cheney when he asserts that President Obama has made America less safe.

Asked by Bob Schieffer on Sunday how America could torture when it made a mockery of our ideals, Cheney blithely gave an answer that surely would have been labeled treasonous by Rush Limbaugh, if a Democratic ex-vice president had said it about a Republican president.

“Well, then you’d have to say that, in effect, we’re prepared to sacrifice American lives rather than run an intelligent interrogation program that would provide us the information we need to protect America,” Doomsday Dick said.

Cheney has replaced Sarah Palin as Rogue Diva. Just as Jeb Bush and other Republicans are trying to get kinder and gentler, Cheney has popped out of his dungeon, scary organ music blaring, to carry on his nasty campaign of fear and loathing.

The man who never talked is now the man who won’t shut up. The man who wouldn’t list his office in the federal jobs directory, who had the vice president’s residence blocked on Google Earth, who went to the Supreme Court to keep from revealing which energy executives helped him write the nation’s energy policy, is now endlessly yelping about how President Obama is holding back documents that should be made public.

Cheney, who had five deferments himself to get out of going to Vietnam, would rather follow a blowhard entertainer who has had three divorces and a drug problem (who also avoided Vietnam) than a four-star general who spent his life serving his country.

“Bush 41 cares about decorum and protocol,” said an official in Bush I. “I’m sure he doesn’t appreciate Cheney acting out. He is giving the whole party a black eye just as Jeb is out there trying to renew the party.”

Cheney unleashed, egged on by the combative Lynne and Liz, is pretty much the same as Cheney underground: He’s batty, and he thinks he was the president.

W. admired Cheney’s brass (he used another word) but grew increasingly skeptical of him, the more he learned about foreign policy himself, and the more he got pulled into a diplomatic mode by Condi in the second term. There were even reports of W. doing a funny Cheney imitation and that it dawned on him that Cheney and Rummy represented a scofflaw, paranoid Nixon cell within his White House.

“Toward the end, 43 was just as confused as anybody about what makes Cheney tick,” said a Bush family loyalist.

Cheney’s numskull ideas — he still loves torture (dubbed “13th-century” stuff by Bob Woodward), Gitmo and scaring the bejesus out of Americans — are not only fixed, they’re jejune.

He has no coherent foreign policy viewpoint. He still doesn’t fathom that his brutish invasion of Iraq unbalanced that part of the world, empowered Iran and was a force multiplier for Muslims who hate America. He left our ports unsecured, our food supply unsafe, the Taliban rising and Osama on the loose. No matter if or when terrorists attack here — and they’re on their own timetable, not a partisan red/blue state timetable — Cheney will be deemed the primary one who made America more vulnerable.

W.’s dark surrogate father is trying to pull the G.O.P. into a black hole of zealotry, just as the sensible brother who lost his future to the scamp brother is trying to get his career back on track.

When Cheney was in the first Bush administration, he was odd man out. Poppy, James Baker, Brent Scowcroft and Colin Powell corralled Cheney’s “Genghis Khan” side, as it was known, and his “rough streak.” Cheney didn’t care for Powell even then.

But with W., “Back Seat” — Cheney’s Secret Service name in the Ford administration — clambered up front. Then he totaled the car. And no amount of yapping on TV is going to change that when history is written.

Link to column: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/13/opinion/13dowd.html

Maureen Dowd: The Final Frontier -- Put Aside Logic

THE FINAL FRONTIER: Put Aside Logic

by Maureen Dowd, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, published May 9, 2009

Maureen Dowd (Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times)

Credit: Shan Carter.

I dreamed that Spock saved our planet, The Daily Planet of journalism.

Instead of swooping in to figure out the dimensionality and logarithms to rescue the world from red matter, as Spock does in J. J. Abrams’s dazzling new “Star Trek,” I imagined Spock rescuing read matter for the world.

Newspapers are an “endangered species,” as John Kerry called us in a Senate hearing last week, just as the Vulcans are in the new prequel.

I know Barack Spock likes newspapers. An aide told me during the campaign that Mr. Obama would get cranky if he didn’t have some time set aside during the day to read The New York Times.

And it was clear from his very first news conference, when I began covering his long-shot bid for the White House and he began referring to stories he had read in The Times, that Mr. Obama’s supple mind was nourished by news and books. You knew he would never inspire alarm as W. did, that if Condi walked too far away or his notes blew off the lectern, he’d be utterly lost.

Once, during his campaign trip to Europe, Mr. Obama told me that he had briefly sold subscriptions to The New York Times when he was at Columbia University to help pay for school, but confessed he wasn’t very good at it.

I said that if he won the presidency, he’d be pretty busy, but that maybe he could find time to sell a few more subscriptions. It would really help us out in the current business crunch.

He gave me that wry Spock look.

In the “Star Trek” prequel, Spock’s father tells him, “You will always be a child of two worlds,” urging him not to keep such a tight vise on his emotions. And Spandexy Old Spock, known as Spock Prime, tells his younger self: “Put aside logic. Do what feels right.”

Mr. Obama is also a control freak who learned to temper, if not purge, all emotion. But as a young man of mixed blood, he was more adept than Young Spock at learning to adjust his two sides to charm both worlds, and to balance his cerebral air with his talent for evoking intense emotion.

Just as President Spock pledged to make hope and government cool again, Mr. Abrams said he wanted his movie to make optimism cool again.

Commanding his own unwieldy starship of blended species, with Cheney, Limbaugh and other pitiless Borg aliens firing phasers from all sides, Mr. Obama has certainly invoked Mr. Spock’s Vulcan philosophy of “Infinite diversity in infinite combinations.” And he even recruited some impulsive Rahmulen muscle for his Utopia.

Many other corporations are being coddled by the president. But, as Robert Gibbs correctly pointed out the other day, a government beam-up for newspapers is not logical.

One of the things Young Spock has to learn in the movie is the difference between what is morally praiseworthy and what is morally obligatory. Newspapers do a praiseworthy job of trying to keep the dark side at bay, by shining sun on it. But society may not consider us obligatory, as we’re finding out.

Senator Kerry’s hearing tried to determine, in a metaphor that was whipped to death, whether there was any way to shut the barn door now that the ink-stained horse has gotten out into the virtual pasture (making readers pay for content now that they’ve gotten used to getting it free online).

David Simon, the creator of “The Wire,” who worked for 13 years as a Baltimore Sun reporter, testified that “high-end journalism is dying,” and when that happens, and no one is manning the cop shops and zoning boards, America will enter “a halcyon era for state and local political corruption.”

He said he thought the horse could be lured back into the barn. “I work in television now,” he said, “and no American, for the first 30 years of television, paid anything for their rabbit ears. Now they pay $60, $70 a month for better content.”

Newspapers no longer know how to live long and prosper. It’s enough to make a Vulcan weep.

Kirk out.

Link to article: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/10/opinion/10dowd.html

Susan Boyle sings "My Heart Will Go On" from the movie "Titanic" -- on the Larry King Live Show, CNN, April 2009

Susan Boyle sings "My Heart Will Go On" from the movie "Titanic" -- during her interview on the Larry King Live show on CNN on April x, 2009.

Susan Boyle sings "Cry Me A River" in 1999, and "I Dreamed a Dream" during Britain's Got Talent, April 2009

"Cry Me a River" sung by Susan Boyle in 1999.

Below, a link to her incredible and uplifting rendition of "I Dreamed A Dream" on April, 2009, in the first round of the Britain's Got Talent contest. The video will be posted when it is available again for embedding -- at the moment, too many people are trying to watch it -- more than 32 million people so far in only about a week!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lp0IWv8QZY