Hu Jintao's 8-country trip

China gaining foothold in Africa

Barrister Harun ur Rashid

Chinese President Hu Jintao's visit to African countries during the first week of February started with red carpet strolls, factory visits and displays of colourful African dance and music. The visit took him to 8 countries, namely, Cameroon, Liberia, Sudan, Zambia, Namibia, South Africa, Mozambique and the Seychelles.
   This visit appears to be a follow-up of the Beijing Summit of African leaders where 48 heads of state/government participated in last November. During the summit, Hu pledged to double aid to Africa by 2009 and create an investment fund of US$5 billion in the next three years.
   It is reported that by the end of 2006, China has already invested nearly $8 billion in Africa, mainly for extracting minerals and oil to fuel its booming economy and during this trip Hu brought with him more loans and an army of Chinese 130 investors.
   Most of the African leaders say that Chinese leaders treat them with respect and understand the social and political environment they deal with, as opposed to many Western donors.
   During his12-day tour President Hu has pledged the following:
   Cameroon: China cancelled Cameroon's debt, pledged $100 million in grants and soft loans and signed agreements to build two schools and a hospital.
   Liberia: China signed a memo. Canceling all debts and announced a tax exemption on all Liberian exports to China.
   Sudan: Signed seven documents on economic and technological cooperation and cancelled debts.
   Zambia: Chinese President inaugurated the Zambia-China Economic and Trade Cooperation Zone, including a massive mining partnership in the country's copper belt, to spur development in the smelting, construction, home-appliance and food-processing industries.
   Namibia: China signed a $139 million soft loan, a grant, and dozens of scholarships. China made a four-point proposal to boost political and cultural ties between the two nations.
   South Africa: In his first visit Hu pledged a "new strategic partnership" including opening the Chinese market to local fruit exports and assistance to South African development programme.
   Mozambique: Hu announced the cancellation of US$15 million debt Mozambique owes to China.
   Seychelles: This 110-island archipelago in the Indian Ocean is of strategic importance to oil routes and military bases. China attaches great importance to it. He announced grants and soft loans for the island.
   New partnership: African leaders do not want Chinese investment a "colonial relationship". After the industrial revolution, Asia and Africa became more important as exploitative markets for the West. Manufactured goods flooded these countries, destroying local industries. For example, British rulers cut off the hands of artisans of Jamdanee saree in Dhaka for their textile market in the country. The bottom line is that Asia and Africa were subordinated economically to the needs of the West.
   African leaders hold the view that they have fought for their independence and sovereignty. During the colonial rule, Africans were deprived of ownership of land. They claim resources of African countries were looted and inequitable access to opportunity was at the heart of poverty, food insecurity and lack of development.
   Against the background, African leaders desire to set the parameters of the relationship and know what they are getting out of it. They want China more sympathetic to African needs than the West. Africa does not need just money or somebody to build infrastructure projects. They want a mutually fruitful sustained relationship and that is up to the Africans to get what they want from China.
   What Africans want, differs from country to country. For example, in Sudan, leaders sought more investment in the oil industry and refining. In South Africa, business and political leaders are eager to access their products to China's market. Zambia wants bigger cuts in the profits from mining to increase better wages for workers.
   African countries do not want to be exploited by China as did the West in the past. During the days of globalization of economy, they want a human face of it. Although economic globalization tends to increase prosperity, without careful management it brings inequality among citizens, wealth being concentrated on a few.
   Critics see Chinese investment as a means of expropriating natural resources of African countries by drawing them into debt, encouraging use of labour with meager wages and accelerating environmental degradation.
   Chinese assistance is of great help provided African leaders devise their own strategy of development and growth. The economic growth must aim for (a) opportunity, (b) empowerment and (c) economic security, of people, allowing them to acquire assets such as land, and education.
   Rich countries such as China cannot escape from their responsibility in promoting economic development in poorer countries. Both rich and poor countries have to work together to banish poverty and make the 21st century one of hope and real opportunity. The world cannot be an island of opulence for a few countries in an ocean of poverty of many countries. It will lead to instability, conflict and chaos in the world order.

^ TOP OF THIS PAGE ^ MAIN PAGE

Poison-spewing Bible of Hindu fascism

I. K. Shukla

Golwalkar's We or Our Nationhood Defined: A Critique by Shamsul Islam: Pharos Media and Publishing Pvt Ltd, New Delhi, 2006, pp 162, Rs.120.
   Why has this Bible of Hindutwa or Hindu fascism -- first published in 1939, succeeded by four reprints until 1947 -- been withdrawn from RSS shelves and made unavailable to the general public?
   Why has its authorship been denied, fudged over, and brazenly lied about in a concerted manner, among others including the author, by Lalchand K. Advani, Atal B. Vajpeyi, and David Frawley, who outdid all with three big lies in just two sentences: 1. Golwalkar just translated it, 2. in 1938, and 3. "it was only part of the general literature of the times that he was examining." This book answers these questions and unravels the mystery.
   How fanatically vicious Golwalkar was in laying down his version of Mein Kampf informs this major handbook of Hindu fascism wherein he strips himself for condemnation and revulsion as an evil ogre of Dark ages. The long and well-researched introduction by Prof. Islam in itself has become an invaluable asset for serious researchers, scholarly academics, and committed activists.
   
   CIA agents, three evils
   Prof. Islam deserves kudos for retrieving Golwalkar's poison-spewing book, always revered by RSS and its affiliates, and widely regarded as the Bible of Hindutwa fascists, among others, by two CIA agents close to them -- Jean A. Curran (author of Militant Hinduism in Indian Politics: A Study of the RSS, 1951) and Craig Baxter (author of The Jana Sangh: A Biography of an Indian Political Party, 1969).
   An aside for relieving the tediousness is in order. How shallow was Golwalkar becomes clear from his mention of names of historical importance in the field of literature: Sharatchandra Chakrawarti, and Babu Premchand (p. 42). I had never known of them. Golwalkar had casually heard these names and embellished them with his imagination. This imagination is at full play in his understanding, skewed and sickly, of history, human civilisation, culture, and modern polity. No wonder, only such a person could call Hindutwa "anadi" (without a beginning, beyond history, and pre-historical). His repeated use of the word "scientific" is comic and contemptible, and his exhilaration at Fatherland is a slavish adoption of the German word Vaterland with all its concomitant evils fleshing it out.
   This unabashed and implacable devotee of three evil M's - Manu, Mill (James, East India Company's employee, hack historian, who partitioned Indian History into three periods: Hindu, Muslim, British, 1817, - not Christian -), and Mussolini, besides Hitler, regarded them all as great regenerators and benefactors of mankind!
   
   Racial hatred
   The riddle is why the Hindutwa luminaries and lumpens who have always venerated this Bible of Hindu fascism are fighting shy of it at present. Not that they have abjured its ideology of racial hatred and violence against non-Hindus, of ethnic extremism and bloody purge, of India as the fatherland of Hindus only, once more adumbrated without any remission in Golwalkar's later book Bunch of Thoughts. The reason for this coyness and concealment is a mix of cowardice and criminality that have distinguished the bloody enterprise of the Hindutwa cult since its inception. It has vindicated its assassination of Gandhi on January 1948 by a recurrent series of mass slaughters since 1992 of Muslims, Christians, and others it decreed to be non-Hindu.
   In Gandhi's murder the involvement of RSS became too evident, too undeniable for it to escape unscathed. Hence, a new political creature of Hindu communalism, Jan Sangh, was fabricated. Hence too the disavowal of Golwalkar's book, We or Our Nationhood Defined, as an expedient. What, however, the book had already achieved remarkably successfully through its wide diffusion was to remain inviolate, i.e., its racist precepts and its politically invidious indoctrination of the masses.
   
   Safety valve
   The ban on RSS on 4 Feb.1948 was a temporary glitch, but it was also a safety valve, curiously, helping RSS more than hindering it. The legal hibernation thus secured, it went ahead with its perfidies and pogroms, neither handicapped, nor humbled. The title of this seminal booklet was well chosen, not in a symbolic but in quite a substantive sense. It defined the Hindutwa cult of crime and sedition, as it defiled the Indian nationhood at the same time. It thus upheld treason as virtue, pitched terrorism as duty, tyranny as statecraft, and theocracy as polity. The sinister screed had achieved its squalid ends well.
   It would be apposite to quote the redoubtable RSS stalwart of yesteryears, Prof. Balraj Madhok on Vajpayee and Advani, as extremely pertinent to the criminality that has characterised RSS all along. How did Advani climb the organisational ladder?
   "The position of Lal Krishan Advani was like a puppet. He was not capable for the post (presidentship of BJS) which was given to him after discarding many senior workers. I knew through my personal experience that he is a boneless wonder. He has neither personal integrity nor opinion. But he is lucky. The office which he had got due to the offerings (prasad) of Vajpayee and officials of Sangh, keeping aside its honour, he acted as a bonded labourer, for any work assigned to him." (p. 146, Zindagi Ka Safar- 3: Deendayal Upadhyay Ki Hatya Se Indira Gandhi Ki Hatya Tak, 2003, Delhi).
   
   Immoral
   And on Vajpayee: "Sometime back when I was the President of Jana Sangh, Jagadish Prasad Mathur, in charge of the Central Office, who was staying with Atal Bihari at 30, Rajendra Prasad Road, had complained to me that Atal had turned that house into a den of immoral activities. There everyday new girls were coming." (p.25, Ibid.)
   Madhok points out unreservedly to the triad of Vajpayee, Nana Deshmukh and Balasaheb Deoras, responsible for the murder of Dendayal Upadhyaya in 1968 at Mughalsarai Railway junction, having been patronized by Golwalkar, popular as Guru in the RSS lore. These qualifications and attributes, essential to Hindutwa, have propelled it onward. It earned its cherished laurels as a den of cutthroats, kleptomaniacs, womanizers, rapists, arsonists, terrorists and traitors by remaining constant to its cultist pledge of gothic grime and messianic gore.
   For unraveling its various layers of diabolical and anti-national crimes in such a painstakingly thorough manner, and highlighting the threat they pose to the unity and security of India, the author has put us all in his debt.

^ TOP OF THIS PAGE ^ MAIN PAGE

Haifa oil pipeline

Nasrine R. Karim

Relations between Israel and several Persian Gulf states have thawed since Israel's withdrawal from the Gaza. Qatar donated $6 million to help build a soccer stadium for an Arab-Jewish team, the first such Arab financial assistance for any town inside Israel. Qatar received the Israeli Foreign Minister with great aplomb last week and hosted an Israeli commercial exhibition. Things would be better if all Arab countries thought alike but alas...
   The ultra-modern Israel Defense Force finally learned this in Lebanon last July, when Hezbollah rockets destroyed or seriously damaged at least 20 of its best tanks and they were fought to a draw abandoning the field of battle and losing their precious myth of invincibility. Growing demoralization well before the Lebanon war plagued Israel, and the percentage of Jews with higher academic degrees that migrated grew steadily after 2002. Israel exports brainpower to an extent very high by world standards. The Lebanon war and talk both from Israeli and Iranian leaders of "existential" threats to the state's very existence only gravely aggravated this defeatism and the desire to leave. At the end of January, 78 per cent of the Israeli public was "unhappy" with their leaders for a variety of reasons.
   There is a veritable arms race in the area. There have been decisive changes in balances of power, and more accurate and destructive weapons and soon nuclear bombs and the missiles to deliver them are becoming more and more available to various countries. Technology is moving much more rapidly than the diplomatic and political resources or will to control its inevitable consequences. Politics and ideologies of the past have been taken over the volatile necessities of the day.
   Syria believed in Pan-Arabism but that is really a concept of the past. It never took root beyond the leadership of the various countries and Syria, weakened since the collapse of the Soviet Union. It is seen as an easy target. Israel has never forgiven that it was Syria that backed Lebanese Hizbollah, a small militant group at the time, which culminated in the humiliating expulsion of Israel's occupation of the Southern Lebanon.
   However, the real reasons for antagonisms to Syria seems to have less to do with Lebanon's Prime Minister Hariri's assassination and more to do with oil and Israel. An April 20, 2003 article in the Observer, London "Israel seeks Pipeline for Iraqi Oil", clarifies this point. The Observer noted that Washington and Tel Aviv are hammering out the details for a pipeline that will run through Syria and "create an endless and easily accessible source of cheap Iraqi oil for the US guaranteed by reliable allies other than Saudi Arabia". The pipeline "would transform economic power in the region, bringing revenue to the new US-dominated Iraq, cutting out Syria and solving Israel's energy crisis at a stroke." This seems to be the strong driving force behind the confrontation with Syria.
   Unfortunately, President Bashar al Assad, unlike other Arab neighbours, refused to normalize relations with Israel until Israel surrenders the land it seized in the Golan Heights during the 1967 war. Israelis, on the other hand, have no intentions of returning the land and are constantly planning to remove Bashar al Assad instead!
   It's widely known that Israeli Intelligence (Mossad) is already operating in Mosul area in Iraq, where the pipeline originates. They have developed good relations with the Kurds in the area. The only remaining obstacle is the current Syrian regime. So one can imagine that they will align with the devil to get their way.
   James Akins, a former US ambassador to the region and critic of the pipeline plan said, "This is a new world order now. This is what things look like particularly if we wipe out Syria. It just goes to show that it is all about oil, for the United States and its ally.'"
   The Observer also quoted a CIA official who said: 'It has long been a dream of a powerful section of the people now driving this administration and the war in Iraq to safeguard Israel's energy supply as well as that of the United States. The Haifa pipeline was something that existed, was resurrected as a dream, and is now a viable project - albeit with a lot of building to do."
   The Americans were considering which steps to take against Syria at the UN Security Council. "The toughest nut to crack is Russia, which is trying to save the Syrians," noted a senior UN diplomat.
   The Russian government, perhaps aware of the real designs, attempted to rescue the Syrians from the potentially devastating consequences of the U.N. report on the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister, Rafik Hariri. Mr. Harriri worked closely with the Syrians till he was assassinated and the Syrians were made the scapegoats for the incident. The Mehlis report tied senior Syrian officials to the murder. The Russian stance was that the report was intermediate, unconvincing, and that the final substantiated report of the investigation committee had to be made public before further steps were considered.
   The German judge leading the investigation team Detlev Mehlis presented the findings to the Security Council. However, shortly before publication, Mehlis had removed the names of senior Syrian and Lebanese officials "suspected" of being involved in the murder of Hariri. At a press conference, Mehlis explained that he took the decision to remove the names because it became known to him that they were leaked to the media. Or was it that the names were unsubstantiated? Or the whole investigation fabricated?
   The reaction in Damascus then? "We don't fear America, down with America," some youths chanted. Others carried banners that read: "Syria is not another Iraq." The demonstrations coincided with the start of a campaign to rally Syrian public opinion against the UN report it says is politically motivated and does not provide enough evidence to indict any officials. "Excuse me Mr. Mehlis the report did not convince me and it only serves Zionist and American goals," another banner said.
   The United States was applying international pressure to ensure that the Security Council passed a decision calling on Damascus to cooperate with the international community in the investigation. It was widely reported that Washington demanded that Damascus "turn in" alleged senior Syrian officials involved in the assassination, including Mahar Assad, brother of President Basher Assad. Other so-called suspects include Asaf Shawkat, an official close to the Syrian President along with a number of Syrian intelligence officials. Mysteriously, the head of the Intelligence and Syria's strongman, Ghazi Kanaan took his life, after giving an interview to a popular Lebanese radio station that Syria was honourable in its dealings with Lebanon. Some say that he was murdered to have him silenced. No doubt details will never be unveiled.
   President Al-Assad told CNN in an interview a week before the UN report was published that he could not have ordered the killing of the Lebanese Prime Minister. He said the involvement of any Syrian would be considered treason and would be punished in Syria or internationally. At the disclosure of the document, Syria said the report was shocking and its findings were contrary to the expectations that the investigation would be balanced and based on clear and tangible evidence. After all, UN is expected to be neutral." Syria is going to set up a high-ranking committee comprising political and legal experts to study the report and finalize an official reply to be sent to the UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan on the matter," Elias Murad, editor-in-chief of Al-Baath, said. Syrian satellite TV quoted Information Minister Mahdi Dakhlallah as saying that "the report is 100 percent politicized as it is based on fabrications and accounts of some witnesses known for being enemies of our country."
   Syria was threatened that if it doesn't respond to the request for cooperation with the UN, the U.S. plans on imposing aggressive international economic sanctions on Damascus. In response, President Assad apparently dispatched a letter to members of the Security Council addressing the murder. The content of the letter has yet to be revealed.
   The Mehlis report cited "converging evidence" of Syrian and Lebanese involvement and categorically accused Damascus of blocking and misleading the probe. Calling the report "politically biased," the Syrian regime has vigorously denied the charge that top-level officials, including two members of President Assad's family, were involved. It also denied that it deliberately misled the UN investigators.
   At a news conference in Damascus, Syrian Foreign Minister Riyad Dawoodi also condemned the report as politically biased, based upon "presumptions and allegations," and "no proof." The Foreign Minister continued: "The report has a conclusion that this operation, the assassination of late Prime Minister Hariri, cannot be done without a means, a very sophisticated means which belongs to a highly equipped security organ. And you just look around you, who is very, very well equipped?"
   While Dawoodi did not elaborate, the statement reflected suspicions within the region that the Israeli intelligence service, Mossad, may have organized the assassination in order to destabilize both Lebanon and Syria and create the conditions for US military actions against the Damascus regime.
   There are mounting indications that the Bush administration is considering opening up a second front in its war of aggression in Iraq. In an article entitled "Plans: Next, War on Syria," Newsweek magazine had reported: "Deep in the Pentagon, admirals and generals are updating plans for possible US military action in Syria and Iran.... The Defense Department unit responsible for military planning for the two troublesome countries is 'busier than ever,' an administration official says."
   The secular Syrian government, with its strong ties to pan-Arab nationalism, is the biggest nightmare for the Likudniks, and it is no accident that the two first targets, Iraq and Syria, were both secular governments, which fought internal religious strife from Islamists by appealing to Arab identity. As in Iraq, Syria also stands to be splintered and devastated by religious strife.
   The plan seems to be seriously afoot for Syria. That it is to break off the Kurdish east and give it to the upcoming new Israeli ally called "Kurdistan", and allow a new Syrian government to reign along fundamentalist line. Israel will immediately permanently confiscate the Golan Heights (necessary for 'security' against the 'radicals' leading Syria), and will soon contrive another war to confiscate more parts of Syria on the way to building Greater Israel. Picture prefect.
   The U.S. Department of State did everything it can to demonize Syria, Condi Rice's spokesman, Adam Ereli, declared that Syria must end attempts to "destabilize" its neighbors. It seems that one has forgotten that Syria was an ally once. Syrian troops were part of the U.S. coalition organized by President George Herbert Walker Bush that liberated Kuwait in 1991 from Saddam Hussein. But now it is convenient to elapse into amnesia.
   The current head of government in Syria is a mild-mannered ophthalmologist who inherited the post as his older brother was killed in a car crash. Bashar Al- Assad was considered a pro-West leader, the opposite of his father Hafez - A hardheaded socialist and very pro-Soviet bloc. However, if Saddam was conveniently thrown over why not the Al-Assad clan?
   Judge Mehlis blamed Syria for an assassination on the strength of an informer described by the German news magazine Der Spiegel as a convicted felon and swindler. But one must not also forget that a fraudster named Ahmed Chalabi and his connections in Washington was instrumental in the Iraqi invasion!
   To discover who committed any a crime, ask the question, "Who benefits?" But precisely, how has Syria benefited from the Lebanese Prime Minister's murder - that is the real question? Syria and Lebanon goes back thousands of years. Maybe that is the real chagrin...

^ TOP OF THIS PAGE ^ MAIN PAGE