Encouraging Word
Tuesday 9/22/2009
Then the way you live will always honor and please the Lord, and your lives will produce every kind of good fruit. All the while, you will grow as you learn to know God better and better.
~ Colossians 1:10, NLT
c/o K-Love
Tuesday, 22 September 2009
Monday, 21 September 2009
Thursday, 17 January 2008
Push for education yields little for India's poor By Somini Sengupta Thursday, January 17, 2008 c/o IHT
Push for education yields little for India's poor
By Somini Sengupta
Thursday, January 17, 2008
LAHTORA, India: With the dew just rising from the fields, dozens of children streamed into the two-room school in this small, poor village, tucking used rice sacks under their arms to use as makeshift chairs. So many children streamed in that the newly appointed head teacher, Rashid Hassan, pored through attendance books for the first two hours of class and complained bitterly. He had no idea who belonged in which grade. There was no way he could teach.
Another teacher arrived 90 minutes late. A third did not show up. The most senior teacher, the only one with a teaching degree, was believed to be on official government duty preparing voter registration cards. No one could quite recall when he had last taught.
"When they get older, they'll curse their teachers," said Arnab Ghosh, 26, a social worker trying to help the government improve its schools, as he stared at clusters of children sitting on the grass outside. "They'll say, 'We came every day and we learned nothing.' "
Sixty years after independence, with 40 percent of its population under 18, India is now confronting the perils of its failure to educate its citizens, notably the poor. More Indian children are in school than ever before, but the quality of public schools like this one has sunk to spectacularly low levels, as government schools have become reserves of children at the very bottom of India's social ladder. The children in this school come from the poorest of families — those who could not afford to send away their young to private schools elsewhere, as do most Indian families with any means.
India has long had a legacy of weak schooling for its young, even as it has promoted high-quality government-financed universities. But if in the past a largely poor and agrarian nation could afford to leave millions of its people illiterate, that is no longer the case. Not only has the roaring economy run into a shortage of skilled labor, but also the nation's many new roads, phones and television sets have fueled new ambitions for economic advancement among its people — and new expectations for schools to help them achieve it.
That they remain ill equipped to do so is clearly illustrated by an annual survey, conducted by Pratham, the organization for which Ghosh works. The latest survey, conducted across 16,000 villages in 2007 and released Wednesday, found that while many more children were sitting in class, vast numbers of them could not read, write or perform basic arithmetic, to say nothing of those who were not in school at all. Among children in fifth grade, 4 out of 10 could not read text at the second grade level, and 7 out of 10 could not subtract. The results reflected a slight improvement in reading from 2006 and a slight decline in arithmetic; together they underscored one of the most worrying gaps in India's prospects for continued growth.
Education experts debate the reasons for failure. Some point out that children of illiterate parents are less likely to get help at home; the Pratham survey shows that the child of a literate woman performs better at school. Others blame longstanding neglect, insufficient public financing and accountability, and a lack of motivation among some teachers to pay special attention to poor children from lower castes. "Education is a long-term investment," said Montek Singh Ahluwalia, the deputy chairman of the Planning Commission and the government's top policy czar. "We have neglected it, in my view quite criminally, for an enormously long period of time."
Looking for a Way Up
Arguments aside, India is today engaged in an epic experiment to uplift its schools. Along the way lie many hurdles, and Ghosh, on his visits to villages like this one, encounters them all. The aides who were hired to draw more village children into school complain that they have not received money to buy educational materials. Or the school has stopped serving lunch even though sacks of rice are piled in the classroom. Or parents agree to enroll their son in school, but know that they will soon send the child away to work. Or worst of all, from Ghosh's perspective, all these stick-thin, bright-eyed children trickle into school every morning and take back so little. "They're coming with some hope of getting something," Ghosh muttered. "It's our fault we can't give them anything."
Even here, the kind of place from which millions of uneducated men and women have traditionally migrated to cities for work, an appetite for education has begun to set in. An educated person would not only be more likely to fetch a good job, parents here reasoned, but also less likely to be cheated in a bad one. "I want my children to do something, to advance themselves," is how Muhammad Alam Ansari put it. "To do that they must study."
Education in the new India has become a crucial marker of inequality. Among the poorest 20 percent of the population, half are illiterate, and barely 2 percent graduate from high school, according to government data. By contrast, among the richest 20 percent of the population, nearly half are high school graduates and only 2 percent are illiterate.
Just as important, at a time when only one in 10 college-age Indians actually go to college, higher education has become the most effective way to scale the golden ladder of the new economy. A recent study by two economists based in Delhi found that between 1993-94 and 2004-05, college graduates enjoyed pay raises of 11 percent every year, and illiterates saw their pay rise by roughly 8.5 percent, though from a miserably low base; here in Bihar State, for instance, a day laborer makes barely more than a dollar a day.
"The link between getting your children prepared and being part of this big, changing India is certainly there in everyone's minds," said Rukmini Banerji, the research director of Pratham. "The question is: what's the best way to get there, how much to do, what to do? As a country, I think we are trying to figure this out."
She added, "If we wait another 5 or 10 years, you are going to lose millions of children."
Money From the State
India has lately begun investing in education. Public spending on schools has steadily increased over the last few years, and the government now proposes to triple its financing commitment over the next five years. At present, education spending is about 4 percent of the gross domestic product. Every village with more than 1,000 residents has a primary school. There is money for free lunch every day.
Even a state like Bihar, which had an estimated population of 83 million in 2001 and where schools are in particularly bad shape, the scale of the effort is staggering. In the last year or so, 100,000 new teachers have been hired. Unemployed villagers are paid to recruit children who have never been to school. A village education committee has been created, in theory to keep the school and its principal accountable to the community. And buckets of money have been thrown at education, to buy swings and benches, to paint classrooms, even to put up fences around the campus to keep children from running away.
And yet, as Lahtora shows, good intentions can become terribly complicated on the ground.
At the moment, the village was not lacking for money for its school. The state had committed $15,000 to construct a new school building, $900 for a new kitchen and another $400 for new school benches. But only some of the money had arrived, so no construction had started, and the school committee chairman said he was not sure how much local officials might demand in bribes. The chairman's friend from a neighboring village said $750 had been demanded of his village committee in exchange for building permits.
The chairman here also happens to be the head teacher's uncle, making the idea of accountability additionally complicated. One parent told Ghosh that their complaints fell on deaf ears: The teachers were connected to powerful people in the community. It is a common refrain in a country where teaching jobs are a powerful instrument of political patronage. The school's drinking-water tap had stopped working long ago, like 30 percent of schools nationwide, according to the Pratham survey. Despite the extra money, the toilet was broken, as was the case in nearly half of all schools nationwide. Thankfully, there was a heap of rice in one corner of the classroom, provisions for the savory rice porridge that acts as one of the main draws of government schools. Except that Hassan, the head teacher, said the rice was not officially reflected in his books, and therefore he had not served lunch for the last week. What about the money that comes from the state to buy eggs and other provisions for lunch, Ghosh asked? That too remained unspent, Hassan explained, because there was no rice to serve them with — at least not in his record books.
(Analysts of government antipoverty programs say rice can be a tempting side income for unscrupulous school officials; food meant for the poor in general, though not at this particular village school, is sometimes found diverted and sold on the private market, though one of the brighter findings of the Pratham survey was that free meals were served in over 90 percent of schools.)
Ghosh went from befuddled to exasperated. "You have rice. You have money. You prefer that kids don't eat?" he asked.
Hassan shook his head. He said he could only cook what rice was in his records, or cook this rice if a senior government officer instructed him to do so. Ghosh went on to point out that one of the aides had shown up more than an hour late, and then with a crying baby in her arms. Two teachers were altogether absent. Even Hassan, Ghosh added, had pulled up a half-hour late.
"You're the head of this school," Ghosh told him. "Only you can improve this school."
Hassan fired back: "What are you talking about? For the last 25 years this school wasn't running at all."
New Plans, Old Attitudes
Ghosh could not dispute that. There were times when the school doors did not open. One father, an agricultural laborer, said he had tried a few times to enroll his children but gave up after the former principal demanded money. Many parents in this largely Muslim village chose Islamic schools because they were seen to offer better discipline.
Others saw no need to send their children to school at all.
Ghosh, too, went to government schools, in a small town in neighboring West Bengal state, which is only slightly better off than here. But if he dared skip class, he recalled, he would be thrashed by his father, a public school principal. The children of this village, he knew, would not be so lucky. "When I first started coming here," Ghosh recalled, parents "would ask me, 'What are you going to give me? Your porridge isn't enough. Because if I send my child to herd a buffalo, at least he'll make three rupees.' " Three rupees is less than 10 cents.
One morning Ghosh reached the mud-and-thatch compound of Mohammed Zakir, a migrant laborer who goes to work in Delhi each year. Zakir's son, Farooq, about 10 years old, was going to school for the first time this week. And as Zakir saw it, that was fine until Farooq turned 14, the legal age for employment, when he too would have to go work in Delhi. Keeping children in school through their teenage years, the father said flatly, was not a luxury the family could afford.
Walking out of the Zakir family compound, Ghosh looked utterly worn out. "If I don't get this child in school," he said, "then his child in turn won't go to school."
By Somini Sengupta
Thursday, January 17, 2008
LAHTORA, India: With the dew just rising from the fields, dozens of children streamed into the two-room school in this small, poor village, tucking used rice sacks under their arms to use as makeshift chairs. So many children streamed in that the newly appointed head teacher, Rashid Hassan, pored through attendance books for the first two hours of class and complained bitterly. He had no idea who belonged in which grade. There was no way he could teach.
Another teacher arrived 90 minutes late. A third did not show up. The most senior teacher, the only one with a teaching degree, was believed to be on official government duty preparing voter registration cards. No one could quite recall when he had last taught.
"When they get older, they'll curse their teachers," said Arnab Ghosh, 26, a social worker trying to help the government improve its schools, as he stared at clusters of children sitting on the grass outside. "They'll say, 'We came every day and we learned nothing.' "
Sixty years after independence, with 40 percent of its population under 18, India is now confronting the perils of its failure to educate its citizens, notably the poor. More Indian children are in school than ever before, but the quality of public schools like this one has sunk to spectacularly low levels, as government schools have become reserves of children at the very bottom of India's social ladder. The children in this school come from the poorest of families — those who could not afford to send away their young to private schools elsewhere, as do most Indian families with any means.
India has long had a legacy of weak schooling for its young, even as it has promoted high-quality government-financed universities. But if in the past a largely poor and agrarian nation could afford to leave millions of its people illiterate, that is no longer the case. Not only has the roaring economy run into a shortage of skilled labor, but also the nation's many new roads, phones and television sets have fueled new ambitions for economic advancement among its people — and new expectations for schools to help them achieve it.
That they remain ill equipped to do so is clearly illustrated by an annual survey, conducted by Pratham, the organization for which Ghosh works. The latest survey, conducted across 16,000 villages in 2007 and released Wednesday, found that while many more children were sitting in class, vast numbers of them could not read, write or perform basic arithmetic, to say nothing of those who were not in school at all. Among children in fifth grade, 4 out of 10 could not read text at the second grade level, and 7 out of 10 could not subtract. The results reflected a slight improvement in reading from 2006 and a slight decline in arithmetic; together they underscored one of the most worrying gaps in India's prospects for continued growth.
Education experts debate the reasons for failure. Some point out that children of illiterate parents are less likely to get help at home; the Pratham survey shows that the child of a literate woman performs better at school. Others blame longstanding neglect, insufficient public financing and accountability, and a lack of motivation among some teachers to pay special attention to poor children from lower castes. "Education is a long-term investment," said Montek Singh Ahluwalia, the deputy chairman of the Planning Commission and the government's top policy czar. "We have neglected it, in my view quite criminally, for an enormously long period of time."
Looking for a Way Up
Arguments aside, India is today engaged in an epic experiment to uplift its schools. Along the way lie many hurdles, and Ghosh, on his visits to villages like this one, encounters them all. The aides who were hired to draw more village children into school complain that they have not received money to buy educational materials. Or the school has stopped serving lunch even though sacks of rice are piled in the classroom. Or parents agree to enroll their son in school, but know that they will soon send the child away to work. Or worst of all, from Ghosh's perspective, all these stick-thin, bright-eyed children trickle into school every morning and take back so little. "They're coming with some hope of getting something," Ghosh muttered. "It's our fault we can't give them anything."
Even here, the kind of place from which millions of uneducated men and women have traditionally migrated to cities for work, an appetite for education has begun to set in. An educated person would not only be more likely to fetch a good job, parents here reasoned, but also less likely to be cheated in a bad one. "I want my children to do something, to advance themselves," is how Muhammad Alam Ansari put it. "To do that they must study."
Education in the new India has become a crucial marker of inequality. Among the poorest 20 percent of the population, half are illiterate, and barely 2 percent graduate from high school, according to government data. By contrast, among the richest 20 percent of the population, nearly half are high school graduates and only 2 percent are illiterate.
Just as important, at a time when only one in 10 college-age Indians actually go to college, higher education has become the most effective way to scale the golden ladder of the new economy. A recent study by two economists based in Delhi found that between 1993-94 and 2004-05, college graduates enjoyed pay raises of 11 percent every year, and illiterates saw their pay rise by roughly 8.5 percent, though from a miserably low base; here in Bihar State, for instance, a day laborer makes barely more than a dollar a day.
"The link between getting your children prepared and being part of this big, changing India is certainly there in everyone's minds," said Rukmini Banerji, the research director of Pratham. "The question is: what's the best way to get there, how much to do, what to do? As a country, I think we are trying to figure this out."
She added, "If we wait another 5 or 10 years, you are going to lose millions of children."
Money From the State
India has lately begun investing in education. Public spending on schools has steadily increased over the last few years, and the government now proposes to triple its financing commitment over the next five years. At present, education spending is about 4 percent of the gross domestic product. Every village with more than 1,000 residents has a primary school. There is money for free lunch every day.
Even a state like Bihar, which had an estimated population of 83 million in 2001 and where schools are in particularly bad shape, the scale of the effort is staggering. In the last year or so, 100,000 new teachers have been hired. Unemployed villagers are paid to recruit children who have never been to school. A village education committee has been created, in theory to keep the school and its principal accountable to the community. And buckets of money have been thrown at education, to buy swings and benches, to paint classrooms, even to put up fences around the campus to keep children from running away.
And yet, as Lahtora shows, good intentions can become terribly complicated on the ground.
At the moment, the village was not lacking for money for its school. The state had committed $15,000 to construct a new school building, $900 for a new kitchen and another $400 for new school benches. But only some of the money had arrived, so no construction had started, and the school committee chairman said he was not sure how much local officials might demand in bribes. The chairman's friend from a neighboring village said $750 had been demanded of his village committee in exchange for building permits.
The chairman here also happens to be the head teacher's uncle, making the idea of accountability additionally complicated. One parent told Ghosh that their complaints fell on deaf ears: The teachers were connected to powerful people in the community. It is a common refrain in a country where teaching jobs are a powerful instrument of political patronage. The school's drinking-water tap had stopped working long ago, like 30 percent of schools nationwide, according to the Pratham survey. Despite the extra money, the toilet was broken, as was the case in nearly half of all schools nationwide. Thankfully, there was a heap of rice in one corner of the classroom, provisions for the savory rice porridge that acts as one of the main draws of government schools. Except that Hassan, the head teacher, said the rice was not officially reflected in his books, and therefore he had not served lunch for the last week. What about the money that comes from the state to buy eggs and other provisions for lunch, Ghosh asked? That too remained unspent, Hassan explained, because there was no rice to serve them with — at least not in his record books.
(Analysts of government antipoverty programs say rice can be a tempting side income for unscrupulous school officials; food meant for the poor in general, though not at this particular village school, is sometimes found diverted and sold on the private market, though one of the brighter findings of the Pratham survey was that free meals were served in over 90 percent of schools.)
Ghosh went from befuddled to exasperated. "You have rice. You have money. You prefer that kids don't eat?" he asked.
Hassan shook his head. He said he could only cook what rice was in his records, or cook this rice if a senior government officer instructed him to do so. Ghosh went on to point out that one of the aides had shown up more than an hour late, and then with a crying baby in her arms. Two teachers were altogether absent. Even Hassan, Ghosh added, had pulled up a half-hour late.
"You're the head of this school," Ghosh told him. "Only you can improve this school."
Hassan fired back: "What are you talking about? For the last 25 years this school wasn't running at all."
New Plans, Old Attitudes
Ghosh could not dispute that. There were times when the school doors did not open. One father, an agricultural laborer, said he had tried a few times to enroll his children but gave up after the former principal demanded money. Many parents in this largely Muslim village chose Islamic schools because they were seen to offer better discipline.
Others saw no need to send their children to school at all.
Ghosh, too, went to government schools, in a small town in neighboring West Bengal state, which is only slightly better off than here. But if he dared skip class, he recalled, he would be thrashed by his father, a public school principal. The children of this village, he knew, would not be so lucky. "When I first started coming here," Ghosh recalled, parents "would ask me, 'What are you going to give me? Your porridge isn't enough. Because if I send my child to herd a buffalo, at least he'll make three rupees.' " Three rupees is less than 10 cents.
One morning Ghosh reached the mud-and-thatch compound of Mohammed Zakir, a migrant laborer who goes to work in Delhi each year. Zakir's son, Farooq, about 10 years old, was going to school for the first time this week. And as Zakir saw it, that was fine until Farooq turned 14, the legal age for employment, when he too would have to go work in Delhi. Keeping children in school through their teenage years, the father said flatly, was not a luxury the family could afford.
Walking out of the Zakir family compound, Ghosh looked utterly worn out. "If I don't get this child in school," he said, "then his child in turn won't go to school."
Tuesday, 15 January 2008
Something's fishy as Europe dines By Elisabeth Rosenthal Monday, January 14, 2008 c/o IHT
Something's fishy as Europe dines
By Elisabeth Rosenthal
Monday, January 14, 2008
LONDON: Surrounded by parrot fish, doctor fish, butter fish, Effa Edusie is engulfed by pieces of her childhood in Ghana. Caught the day before far off the coast of West Africa, they have been airfreighted to London for dinner.
Edusie's relatives used to be fishermen. But no more. These fish are no longer caught by Africans.
Under the waterlogged brown cardboard box that holds the snapper is the improbable red logo of Chinese National Fisheries, one of the largest suppliers of West African fish to Europe. Europe's dinner tables are increasingly supplied by global fishing fleets that are depleting the world's oceans to feed the ravenous consumers who have become fish's most effective predators.
Fish is now the most traded animal commodity on the planet, with a global turnover of more than 100 million tons each year. Europe has suddenly become the world's largest market for fish, each year worth more than €14 billion. Europe's appetite has grown as its native fish stocks have shrunk, so that 60 percent of fish sold in Europe now needs to be imported, according to the European Union.
"So much of fishing is motivated by consumer demand," said Rupert Howes, chief executive of the Marine Stewardship Council, a private global group. "The world wants more seafood at a time when 50 percent of stocks are exploited as hard as we can and 25 percent overexploited. There is a real disconnect."
In Europe, the imbalance between supply and demand has led to a thriving illegal trade. About 50 percent of the fish sold in the EU originates in developing nations, and much of it is laundered like contraband, caught and shipped illegally beyond the limits of government quotas or treaties. It is a well-financed, sophisticated smuggling operation, carried out by large-scale mechanized fishing fleets able to sweep up more fish than ever, chasing threatened stocks from ocean to ocean.
The European Commission estimates that more than €1.1 billion worth, or $1.6 billion, of illegal seafood enters Europe each year. The World Wildlife Fund says that up to half of fish sold in Europe is illegal.
While some of the "pirate fishing" is carried out by foreign vessels far afield, European ships are also guilty, some of them operating close to home. An estimated 40 percent of cod caught in the Baltic Sea is illegal, said Mireille Thom, spokeswoman for the European Union's Fisheries and Maritime Affairs commissioner, Joe Borg.
"We know that it's much too easy to land illegal fish in European ports, and we are really eager to block their access to European markets," Thom said.
If cost is an indication, fish is poised to become Europe's most precious contraband: Prices have doubled and tripled in response to surging demand, scarcity and recent fishing quotas imposed by the EU in a desperate effort to save native species.
In London, a kilogram of the lowly cod, the central ingredient of fish and chips, now costs £30, or $60, up from £6 four years ago.
"Fish and chips used to be a poor man's treat, but with the prices its becoming a delicacy," said Mark Morris, a fishmonger for 20 years in London's vast Billingsgate market.
In Billingsgate on a wintry morning last month at 5 a.m., as wholesalers unpack fresh fish from all over the world, the vast international trade that feeds Europe's appetite was readily apparent, even if the origins of each filet and steak was not.
Less than 24 hours before, many of these fish on sale were passing through the port of Las Palmas in the Canary Islands, a port with five inspectors to evaluate 360,000 tons of perishable fish that must move rapidly through each year. The Canaries, a Spanish archipelago off the coast of Morocco, have become the favored landing point of illegal fish as well as people.
Once cleared there, the catch has entered the EU and can be sold anywhere within it without further inspection. By the time West African fish get to Europe, the legal fish is offered for sale alongside the ill-gotten.
"In the fish area, we're so far behind meat where you can trace it back to the origins," said Heike Vesper, who directs the World Wide Fund for Nature Fisheries Campaign.
The long distances and chain of fishermen and traders make that a difficult task, and every effort to regulate catches, it seems, pushes fishing fleets to other regions.
"There are quotas in Europe, and with air freight cheap it's much more globalized," Morris said. "we don't order ourselves - there are middlemen."
At Billingsgate, for instance, the colorful boxes of shrimp called African Beauty, bearing a drawing of a beautiful woman in tribal dress, were fished in Madagascar and processed in France.
"Ten years ago it was just from Britain, Norway and Iceland," said Morris, whose family has been in the fishmongering business for generations.
But many kinds of fish, like tuna and swordfish and cod, are not available in European waters anymore. In September, the European Commission banned the fishing of endangered bluefin tuna in the eastern Atlantic and Mediterranean for the rest of 2007. Such rules barely slow the industry.
"There isn't a market we can't access anymore," said Lee Fawcitt, selling tuna from Sri Lanka, salmon and cod from Norway, halibut from Canada, tilapia from China, shrimp from Madagascar and snapper from Indonesia and Senegal.
To many traders the origin of the fish hardly matters. "We try to do something, but once it's here, my attitude is that if its been caught it should be sold." Fawcitt said. "I'd hate to see it being thrown away."
Tracing where the fish comes from is nearly impossible, many experts say. Groups like Greenpeace and the Environmental Justice Foundation have documented a range of egregious and illegal fishing practices off West Africa.
Huge boats, owned by companies in China, South Korea and Europe, fly flags of convenience from other nations. They stay at sea for years at a time, fishing, fueling, changing crews and offloading their catches to refrigerated boats at sea, making international monitoring extremely difficult.
Even when permits and treaties make the fishing legal, it is not always environmentally sustainable. Many fleets far overstep the bounds of their agreements in any case, studies show, generally with total impunity.
Under international law, the country where the boat is registered is responsible for disciplining illegal activity. Many of the ships fly flags from distant landlocked countries that collect registration fees but put a low priority on enforcement.
When the Environmental Justice Foundation, which has studied the fishing industry, teamed up with a Greenpeace boat last year, more that half of 104 vessels it followed off the coast of Guinea were fishing illegally or were involved in illegal practices, they said.
Their cameras recorded boats whose names were hidden to prevent reporting; boats whose names were changed week to week, presumably to comply with a name on a permit; the catch from a licensed boat being offloaded in the dead of night to another vessel, so that the boat could start fishing again.
"There's a big competition out there with foreign vessels, especially from China," said Moshwood Kuku, a fishmonger at Afikala Afrikane, a stall that specializes in African fish at Billingsgate. "Locals can only fish the coast."
Chinese National Fisheries, which first sent boats to the Atlantic in 1985, now has offices up and down the coast of West Africa, accounting for more than half its international offices. It also has a huge compound in Las Palmas.
While small local fishermen in West Africa tend to fish sustainably, large seagoing boats use practices that are dangerous to the environment, particularly their habit of trawling the seabed with vast nets.
The nets destroy coral, and unsettle eggs and fish breeding grounds. They gulp up fish that cannot be sold because they are too small. Their competition decimates local fishing industries.
By the time huge mechanized vessels have thrown the unsellable juveniles back into the sea, they are often dead, bringing stocks another step closer to extinction. Of the estimated 90 million tons of fish caught each year, about 30 million tons are discarded, Vesper of the World Wide Fund for Nature said.
Many experts feel that a better way to control overfishing is to end the system of flags of convenience, to close Las Palmas and to improve port inspections. But enforcement requires resources, and that will most likely only push fish prices even higher.
The European Union is exploring the idea of requiring officials at its ports to check with officials from countries where boats are registered to make sure they are legal and have fishing rights. They are proposing to provide financial assistance for more enforcement in developing countries.
In the short term, prices will be higher. Procuring genuinely sustainable fish means buying more expensive fish or not eating fish at all.
"We've acted as if the supply of fish was limitless, and it's not," said Steve Trent, executive director of the Environmental Justice Foundation.
"In wealthy urban areas like London, we're going to have to pay more for fish we know is sustainably caught. Unlike in Guinea, we're not depending on fish for employment and protein."
By Elisabeth Rosenthal
Monday, January 14, 2008
LONDON: Surrounded by parrot fish, doctor fish, butter fish, Effa Edusie is engulfed by pieces of her childhood in Ghana. Caught the day before far off the coast of West Africa, they have been airfreighted to London for dinner.
Edusie's relatives used to be fishermen. But no more. These fish are no longer caught by Africans.
Under the waterlogged brown cardboard box that holds the snapper is the improbable red logo of Chinese National Fisheries, one of the largest suppliers of West African fish to Europe. Europe's dinner tables are increasingly supplied by global fishing fleets that are depleting the world's oceans to feed the ravenous consumers who have become fish's most effective predators.
Fish is now the most traded animal commodity on the planet, with a global turnover of more than 100 million tons each year. Europe has suddenly become the world's largest market for fish, each year worth more than €14 billion. Europe's appetite has grown as its native fish stocks have shrunk, so that 60 percent of fish sold in Europe now needs to be imported, according to the European Union.
"So much of fishing is motivated by consumer demand," said Rupert Howes, chief executive of the Marine Stewardship Council, a private global group. "The world wants more seafood at a time when 50 percent of stocks are exploited as hard as we can and 25 percent overexploited. There is a real disconnect."
In Europe, the imbalance between supply and demand has led to a thriving illegal trade. About 50 percent of the fish sold in the EU originates in developing nations, and much of it is laundered like contraband, caught and shipped illegally beyond the limits of government quotas or treaties. It is a well-financed, sophisticated smuggling operation, carried out by large-scale mechanized fishing fleets able to sweep up more fish than ever, chasing threatened stocks from ocean to ocean.
The European Commission estimates that more than €1.1 billion worth, or $1.6 billion, of illegal seafood enters Europe each year. The World Wildlife Fund says that up to half of fish sold in Europe is illegal.
While some of the "pirate fishing" is carried out by foreign vessels far afield, European ships are also guilty, some of them operating close to home. An estimated 40 percent of cod caught in the Baltic Sea is illegal, said Mireille Thom, spokeswoman for the European Union's Fisheries and Maritime Affairs commissioner, Joe Borg.
"We know that it's much too easy to land illegal fish in European ports, and we are really eager to block their access to European markets," Thom said.
If cost is an indication, fish is poised to become Europe's most precious contraband: Prices have doubled and tripled in response to surging demand, scarcity and recent fishing quotas imposed by the EU in a desperate effort to save native species.
In London, a kilogram of the lowly cod, the central ingredient of fish and chips, now costs £30, or $60, up from £6 four years ago.
"Fish and chips used to be a poor man's treat, but with the prices its becoming a delicacy," said Mark Morris, a fishmonger for 20 years in London's vast Billingsgate market.
In Billingsgate on a wintry morning last month at 5 a.m., as wholesalers unpack fresh fish from all over the world, the vast international trade that feeds Europe's appetite was readily apparent, even if the origins of each filet and steak was not.
Less than 24 hours before, many of these fish on sale were passing through the port of Las Palmas in the Canary Islands, a port with five inspectors to evaluate 360,000 tons of perishable fish that must move rapidly through each year. The Canaries, a Spanish archipelago off the coast of Morocco, have become the favored landing point of illegal fish as well as people.
Once cleared there, the catch has entered the EU and can be sold anywhere within it without further inspection. By the time West African fish get to Europe, the legal fish is offered for sale alongside the ill-gotten.
"In the fish area, we're so far behind meat where you can trace it back to the origins," said Heike Vesper, who directs the World Wide Fund for Nature Fisheries Campaign.
The long distances and chain of fishermen and traders make that a difficult task, and every effort to regulate catches, it seems, pushes fishing fleets to other regions.
"There are quotas in Europe, and with air freight cheap it's much more globalized," Morris said. "we don't order ourselves - there are middlemen."
At Billingsgate, for instance, the colorful boxes of shrimp called African Beauty, bearing a drawing of a beautiful woman in tribal dress, were fished in Madagascar and processed in France.
"Ten years ago it was just from Britain, Norway and Iceland," said Morris, whose family has been in the fishmongering business for generations.
But many kinds of fish, like tuna and swordfish and cod, are not available in European waters anymore. In September, the European Commission banned the fishing of endangered bluefin tuna in the eastern Atlantic and Mediterranean for the rest of 2007. Such rules barely slow the industry.
"There isn't a market we can't access anymore," said Lee Fawcitt, selling tuna from Sri Lanka, salmon and cod from Norway, halibut from Canada, tilapia from China, shrimp from Madagascar and snapper from Indonesia and Senegal.
To many traders the origin of the fish hardly matters. "We try to do something, but once it's here, my attitude is that if its been caught it should be sold." Fawcitt said. "I'd hate to see it being thrown away."
Tracing where the fish comes from is nearly impossible, many experts say. Groups like Greenpeace and the Environmental Justice Foundation have documented a range of egregious and illegal fishing practices off West Africa.
Huge boats, owned by companies in China, South Korea and Europe, fly flags of convenience from other nations. They stay at sea for years at a time, fishing, fueling, changing crews and offloading their catches to refrigerated boats at sea, making international monitoring extremely difficult.
Even when permits and treaties make the fishing legal, it is not always environmentally sustainable. Many fleets far overstep the bounds of their agreements in any case, studies show, generally with total impunity.
Under international law, the country where the boat is registered is responsible for disciplining illegal activity. Many of the ships fly flags from distant landlocked countries that collect registration fees but put a low priority on enforcement.
When the Environmental Justice Foundation, which has studied the fishing industry, teamed up with a Greenpeace boat last year, more that half of 104 vessels it followed off the coast of Guinea were fishing illegally or were involved in illegal practices, they said.
Their cameras recorded boats whose names were hidden to prevent reporting; boats whose names were changed week to week, presumably to comply with a name on a permit; the catch from a licensed boat being offloaded in the dead of night to another vessel, so that the boat could start fishing again.
"There's a big competition out there with foreign vessels, especially from China," said Moshwood Kuku, a fishmonger at Afikala Afrikane, a stall that specializes in African fish at Billingsgate. "Locals can only fish the coast."
Chinese National Fisheries, which first sent boats to the Atlantic in 1985, now has offices up and down the coast of West Africa, accounting for more than half its international offices. It also has a huge compound in Las Palmas.
While small local fishermen in West Africa tend to fish sustainably, large seagoing boats use practices that are dangerous to the environment, particularly their habit of trawling the seabed with vast nets.
The nets destroy coral, and unsettle eggs and fish breeding grounds. They gulp up fish that cannot be sold because they are too small. Their competition decimates local fishing industries.
By the time huge mechanized vessels have thrown the unsellable juveniles back into the sea, they are often dead, bringing stocks another step closer to extinction. Of the estimated 90 million tons of fish caught each year, about 30 million tons are discarded, Vesper of the World Wide Fund for Nature said.
Many experts feel that a better way to control overfishing is to end the system of flags of convenience, to close Las Palmas and to improve port inspections. But enforcement requires resources, and that will most likely only push fish prices even higher.
The European Union is exploring the idea of requiring officials at its ports to check with officials from countries where boats are registered to make sure they are legal and have fishing rights. They are proposing to provide financial assistance for more enforcement in developing countries.
In the short term, prices will be higher. Procuring genuinely sustainable fish means buying more expensive fish or not eating fish at all.
"We've acted as if the supply of fish was limitless, and it's not," said Steve Trent, executive director of the Environmental Justice Foundation.
"In wealthy urban areas like London, we're going to have to pay more for fish we know is sustainably caught. Unlike in Guinea, we're not depending on fish for employment and protein."
Monday, 14 January 2008
Europe takes Africa's fish, and migrants follow By Sharon Lafraniere Monday, January 14, 2008 c/o IHT
Europe takes Africa's fish, and migrants follow
By Sharon Lafraniere
Monday, January 14, 2008
KAYAR, Senegal: Ale Nodye, the son and grandson of fishermen in this northern Senegalese village, said that for the past six years he netted barely enough fish to buy fuel for his boat. So he jumped at the chance for a new beginning. He volunteered to captain a wooden canoe full of 87 Africans to the Canary Islands in the hopes of making their way illegally to Europe.
The 2006 voyage ended badly. He and his passengers were arrested and deported. His cousin died on a similar mission not long afterward.
Nonetheless, Nodye, 27, said he intended to try again.
"I could be a fisherman there," he said. "Life is better there. There are no fish in the sea here anymore."
Many scientists agree. A vast flotilla of industrial trawlers from the European Union, China, Russia and elsewhere, together with an abundance of local boats, have so thoroughly scoured northwest Africa's ocean floor that major fish populations are collapsing.
That has crippled coastal economies and added to the surge of illegal migrants who brave the high seas in wooden pirogues hoping to reach Europe. While reasons for immigration are as varied as fish species, Europe's lure has clearly intensified as northwest Africa's fish population has dwindled.
Last year roughly 31,000 Africans tried to reach the Canary Islands, a prime transit point to Europe, in more than 900 boats. About 6,000 died or disappeared, according to one estimate cited by the United Nations.
The region's governments bear much of the blame for their fisheries' decline. Many have allowed a desire for money from foreign fleets to override concern about the long-term health of their fisheries. Illegal fishermen are notoriously common; efforts to control fishing, rare.
But in the view of West African fishermen, Europe is having its fish and eating them, too. Their own waters largely fished out, European nations have steered their heavily subsidized fleets to Africa.
"As Europe has sought to manage its fisheries and to limit its fishing, what we've done is to export the overfishing problem elsewhere, particularly to Africa," said Steve Trent, executive director of the European Justice Foundation, a research group.
European Union officials insist that their bloc, which has negotiated fishing deals with Africa since 1979, is a scapegoat for Africa's management failures and the misdeeds of other foreign fleets. They argue that African officials oversell fishing rights, inflate potential catches and allow pirate vessels and local boats free rein in breeding grounds.
Pierre Chavance, a scientist with the French Institute for Research and Development, said both foreign fleets and African governments allowed financial considerations to trump concerns for fish or local fishermen.
"One side has a big interest to sell, and the other side has a big interest to buy," he said. "The negotiations are based upon what people want to hear, not the reality."
Overfishing is hardly limited to African waters. Worldwide, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that 75 percent of fish stocks are overfished or fished to their maximum. But in a poor region like northwest Africa, the consequences are particularly stark.
Fish are the main source of protein for much of the region, but some species are now so scarce that the poor can no longer afford them, said Pierre Failler, senior research fellow for the British Center for Economics and Management of Aquatic Resources.
The coastal stock of bottom-dwelling fish is just a quarter of what it was 25 years ago, studies show. Already, scientists say, the sea's ecological balance has shifted as species lower on the food chain replace some above them.
In Mauritania, lobsters vanished years ago. The catch of octopus — now the most valuable species — is four-fifths of what it should be if it were not overexploited. A 2002 report by the European Commission found that the most marketable fish species off the coast of Senegal were close to collapse — essentially sliding toward extinction.
"The sea is being emptied," said Moctar Ba, a consultant who once led scientific research programs for Mauritania and West Africa.
In a region where at least 200,000 people depend on the sea for their livelihoods, local investments in fishing industries are drying up with the fish stocks. In Guinea-Bissau, fishermen who were buying more boats less than a decade ago now complain they are in debt and looking to get out of the business.
"Before, my whole family could live on what we caught in one pirogue," said Niadye Diouf, 28, whose Senegalese family sold their pirogue for $500 to pay for an illegal — and ultimately unsuccessful — voyage to Spain. "Now even five pirogues would not be enough."
Fishermen like Diouf argue that Africans should have first priority in their own waters — an idea enshrined in a 1994 United Nations treaty on the seas that acknowledges the right of local governments to sell foreigners fishing rights only to their surplus stocks.
But that rule has been repeatedly violated along northwest Africa's nearly 2,000-mile coast.
Studies dating to 1991 indicated that Senegal's fishery was in trouble. In 2002, a scientific report commissioned by the European Union stated that the biomass of important species had declined by three-fourths in 15 years — a finding the authors said should "cause significant alarm."
But the week the report was issued, European Union officials signed a new four-year fishing deal with Senegal, agreeing to pay $16 million a year to fish for bottom-dwelling species and tuna.
Four years later, Mauritania followed suit. Despite reports that octopus were overfished by nearly a third, in 2006 Mauritania's government sold six more years' access to 43 European Union vessels for $146 million a year — the equivalent of nearly a fifth of Mauritania's government budget.
"I don't know a government in the region that can say no," said Chavance, the French scientist. "This is good money, and they need it."
Sid-Ahmed Ould-Abeid, who leads a Mauritanian association of small fishermen, said: "The EU has the money, so it has the power. It is easier to sacrifice the local fishermen."
Those sacrifices are multiplying in Mauritania. One of the few countries with a private industrial fleet, most of it jointly owned with the Chinese, it has lost one-third of roughly 150 trawlers since 1996.
Ahmed and Mohamed Cherif, whose family owns PCA, a fish exporting firm in Nouadhibou, say they have lost money for two years running. Their two new orange trawlers spend weeks docked in Nouadhibou's rough-hewn harbor.
"We can't compete with the European Union," Ahmed Cherif said as he strolled past row after row of idle pirogues. "The government should have kept this resource for Mauritanians. Let these people work."
Europe is just one foreign contributor to fish declines. Countries from Asia and the former Soviet Union also dispatched ships to ply northwest Africa's seas. But often those fleets stay for shorter durations and without the same promises of responsible fishing and local development.
In fact, little development has taken place since the European Union signed its first fish deal with a West African nation in 1979. The huge economic benefits that come from processing and exporting the catch remain firmly in European hands.
African governments either misspent or diverted the funds earmarked for development to more pressing needs, while the Europeans sometimes made only token efforts on promised projects. Nouadhibou harbor, for instance, remains littered with 107 wrecked fishing trawlers eight years after the European Union promised to clear them to help develop the port.
In their defense, European officials say they moved to reform their fishing agreements in 2003 to address criticism that ship operators were overfishing and were undercutting local fishermen. Fabrizio Donatella, who heads the European Union unit that negotiates fishing deals, says the new agreements are models of responsible fishing and transparency.
"One cannot say we are not fishing the surplus or that we have not respected scientific recommendations," he said. Ultimately, African governments must protect and manage their own resources, he said.
Examples of mismanagement abound. The number of pirogues in six northwest African countries exploded from 3,000 to 19,000 in the last half-century, but Senegal and other nations have only recently begun to license them.
Guinea-Bissau, a nation of 1.4 million people, is a prime example of how not to run a fishery. According to Vladimir Kacyznski, a marine scientist with the University of Washington, no one has comprehensively studied the nation's coastal waters for at least 20 years.
For two years, Sanji Fati was in charge of enforcing Guinea-Bissau's fishing rules. When he took the job in 2005, he said, his agency did not have a single working patrol boat to monitor hundreds of pirogues and dozens of industrial trawlers, most of them foreign. An estimated 40 percent of fish were caught without licenses or in violation of regulations, and vessel operators routinely lied about their haul. Government observers were mostly illiterate, underpaid and easily bought off.
Fati tightened enforcement, but said he still felt as if he was waging a one-man war. A few months ago, he left in frustration.
That bleak picture did not stop Guinea-Bissau and the European Union from agreeing last May to allow European boats to fish its waters for shrimp, fish, octopus and tuna. Over the next four years, the agreement will pump $42 million into a government that is months behind in paying salaries and still emerging from civil war.
Daniel Gomes, Guinea-Bissau's 12th fishing minister in eight years, said he had tried to be conservative in how much access to grant foreigners, despite paltry scientific data and severe economic pressures.
Still, asked whether his nation would end up with empty waters, he replied: "This prospect is not out of the question. This could happen."
By Sharon Lafraniere
Monday, January 14, 2008
KAYAR, Senegal: Ale Nodye, the son and grandson of fishermen in this northern Senegalese village, said that for the past six years he netted barely enough fish to buy fuel for his boat. So he jumped at the chance for a new beginning. He volunteered to captain a wooden canoe full of 87 Africans to the Canary Islands in the hopes of making their way illegally to Europe.
The 2006 voyage ended badly. He and his passengers were arrested and deported. His cousin died on a similar mission not long afterward.
Nonetheless, Nodye, 27, said he intended to try again.
"I could be a fisherman there," he said. "Life is better there. There are no fish in the sea here anymore."
Many scientists agree. A vast flotilla of industrial trawlers from the European Union, China, Russia and elsewhere, together with an abundance of local boats, have so thoroughly scoured northwest Africa's ocean floor that major fish populations are collapsing.
That has crippled coastal economies and added to the surge of illegal migrants who brave the high seas in wooden pirogues hoping to reach Europe. While reasons for immigration are as varied as fish species, Europe's lure has clearly intensified as northwest Africa's fish population has dwindled.
Last year roughly 31,000 Africans tried to reach the Canary Islands, a prime transit point to Europe, in more than 900 boats. About 6,000 died or disappeared, according to one estimate cited by the United Nations.
The region's governments bear much of the blame for their fisheries' decline. Many have allowed a desire for money from foreign fleets to override concern about the long-term health of their fisheries. Illegal fishermen are notoriously common; efforts to control fishing, rare.
But in the view of West African fishermen, Europe is having its fish and eating them, too. Their own waters largely fished out, European nations have steered their heavily subsidized fleets to Africa.
"As Europe has sought to manage its fisheries and to limit its fishing, what we've done is to export the overfishing problem elsewhere, particularly to Africa," said Steve Trent, executive director of the European Justice Foundation, a research group.
European Union officials insist that their bloc, which has negotiated fishing deals with Africa since 1979, is a scapegoat for Africa's management failures and the misdeeds of other foreign fleets. They argue that African officials oversell fishing rights, inflate potential catches and allow pirate vessels and local boats free rein in breeding grounds.
Pierre Chavance, a scientist with the French Institute for Research and Development, said both foreign fleets and African governments allowed financial considerations to trump concerns for fish or local fishermen.
"One side has a big interest to sell, and the other side has a big interest to buy," he said. "The negotiations are based upon what people want to hear, not the reality."
Overfishing is hardly limited to African waters. Worldwide, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that 75 percent of fish stocks are overfished or fished to their maximum. But in a poor region like northwest Africa, the consequences are particularly stark.
Fish are the main source of protein for much of the region, but some species are now so scarce that the poor can no longer afford them, said Pierre Failler, senior research fellow for the British Center for Economics and Management of Aquatic Resources.
The coastal stock of bottom-dwelling fish is just a quarter of what it was 25 years ago, studies show. Already, scientists say, the sea's ecological balance has shifted as species lower on the food chain replace some above them.
In Mauritania, lobsters vanished years ago. The catch of octopus — now the most valuable species — is four-fifths of what it should be if it were not overexploited. A 2002 report by the European Commission found that the most marketable fish species off the coast of Senegal were close to collapse — essentially sliding toward extinction.
"The sea is being emptied," said Moctar Ba, a consultant who once led scientific research programs for Mauritania and West Africa.
In a region where at least 200,000 people depend on the sea for their livelihoods, local investments in fishing industries are drying up with the fish stocks. In Guinea-Bissau, fishermen who were buying more boats less than a decade ago now complain they are in debt and looking to get out of the business.
"Before, my whole family could live on what we caught in one pirogue," said Niadye Diouf, 28, whose Senegalese family sold their pirogue for $500 to pay for an illegal — and ultimately unsuccessful — voyage to Spain. "Now even five pirogues would not be enough."
Fishermen like Diouf argue that Africans should have first priority in their own waters — an idea enshrined in a 1994 United Nations treaty on the seas that acknowledges the right of local governments to sell foreigners fishing rights only to their surplus stocks.
But that rule has been repeatedly violated along northwest Africa's nearly 2,000-mile coast.
Studies dating to 1991 indicated that Senegal's fishery was in trouble. In 2002, a scientific report commissioned by the European Union stated that the biomass of important species had declined by three-fourths in 15 years — a finding the authors said should "cause significant alarm."
But the week the report was issued, European Union officials signed a new four-year fishing deal with Senegal, agreeing to pay $16 million a year to fish for bottom-dwelling species and tuna.
Four years later, Mauritania followed suit. Despite reports that octopus were overfished by nearly a third, in 2006 Mauritania's government sold six more years' access to 43 European Union vessels for $146 million a year — the equivalent of nearly a fifth of Mauritania's government budget.
"I don't know a government in the region that can say no," said Chavance, the French scientist. "This is good money, and they need it."
Sid-Ahmed Ould-Abeid, who leads a Mauritanian association of small fishermen, said: "The EU has the money, so it has the power. It is easier to sacrifice the local fishermen."
Those sacrifices are multiplying in Mauritania. One of the few countries with a private industrial fleet, most of it jointly owned with the Chinese, it has lost one-third of roughly 150 trawlers since 1996.
Ahmed and Mohamed Cherif, whose family owns PCA, a fish exporting firm in Nouadhibou, say they have lost money for two years running. Their two new orange trawlers spend weeks docked in Nouadhibou's rough-hewn harbor.
"We can't compete with the European Union," Ahmed Cherif said as he strolled past row after row of idle pirogues. "The government should have kept this resource for Mauritanians. Let these people work."
Europe is just one foreign contributor to fish declines. Countries from Asia and the former Soviet Union also dispatched ships to ply northwest Africa's seas. But often those fleets stay for shorter durations and without the same promises of responsible fishing and local development.
In fact, little development has taken place since the European Union signed its first fish deal with a West African nation in 1979. The huge economic benefits that come from processing and exporting the catch remain firmly in European hands.
African governments either misspent or diverted the funds earmarked for development to more pressing needs, while the Europeans sometimes made only token efforts on promised projects. Nouadhibou harbor, for instance, remains littered with 107 wrecked fishing trawlers eight years after the European Union promised to clear them to help develop the port.
In their defense, European officials say they moved to reform their fishing agreements in 2003 to address criticism that ship operators were overfishing and were undercutting local fishermen. Fabrizio Donatella, who heads the European Union unit that negotiates fishing deals, says the new agreements are models of responsible fishing and transparency.
"One cannot say we are not fishing the surplus or that we have not respected scientific recommendations," he said. Ultimately, African governments must protect and manage their own resources, he said.
Examples of mismanagement abound. The number of pirogues in six northwest African countries exploded from 3,000 to 19,000 in the last half-century, but Senegal and other nations have only recently begun to license them.
Guinea-Bissau, a nation of 1.4 million people, is a prime example of how not to run a fishery. According to Vladimir Kacyznski, a marine scientist with the University of Washington, no one has comprehensively studied the nation's coastal waters for at least 20 years.
For two years, Sanji Fati was in charge of enforcing Guinea-Bissau's fishing rules. When he took the job in 2005, he said, his agency did not have a single working patrol boat to monitor hundreds of pirogues and dozens of industrial trawlers, most of them foreign. An estimated 40 percent of fish were caught without licenses or in violation of regulations, and vessel operators routinely lied about their haul. Government observers were mostly illiterate, underpaid and easily bought off.
Fati tightened enforcement, but said he still felt as if he was waging a one-man war. A few months ago, he left in frustration.
That bleak picture did not stop Guinea-Bissau and the European Union from agreeing last May to allow European boats to fish its waters for shrimp, fish, octopus and tuna. Over the next four years, the agreement will pump $42 million into a government that is months behind in paying salaries and still emerging from civil war.
Daniel Gomes, Guinea-Bissau's 12th fishing minister in eight years, said he had tried to be conservative in how much access to grant foreigners, despite paltry scientific data and severe economic pressures.
Still, asked whether his nation would end up with empty waters, he replied: "This prospect is not out of the question. This could happen."
Friday, 4 January 2008
Muslim Claims of Accomplishment By Peter BetBasoo ChristiansOfIraq.com | 1/4/2008 c/o Front Page Mag
Muslim Claims of Accomplishment
By Peter BetBasoo
ChristiansOfIraq.com | 1/4/2008
EDITOR'S NOTE: There is great need for setting the record straight on the history of the Middle East. The revisionism of the last few years will lead Western Civilization into bondage. The following letter by Assyrian scholar Peter BetBasoo is a very important step in the right direction. It was sent by Assyrian scholar Peter BetBasoo to Carly Fiorina, CEO of Hewlett Packard Corporation, in response to a speech she presented in Minneapolis on September 26, 2001. It is reprinted by permission. Please read and pass it on to others.
Dear Madame Fiorina:
It is with great interest that I read your speech delivered on September 26, 2001, titled "Technology, Business and Our way of Life: What's Next" [sic]. I was particularly interested in the story you told at the end of your speech, about the Arab/Muslim civilization. As an Assyrian, a non-Arab, Christian native of the Middle East, whose ancestors reach back to 5000 B.C., I wish to clarify some points you made in this little story, and to alert you to the dangers of unwittingly being drawn into the Arabist/Islamist ideology, which seeks to assimilate all cultures and religions into the Arab/Islamic fold.
I know you are a very busy woman, but please find ten minutes to read what follows, as it is a perspective that you will not likely get from anywhere else. I will answer some of the specific points you made in your speech, then conclude with a brief perspective on this Arabist/Islamist ideology.
Arabs and Muslims appeared on the world scene in 630 A.D., when the armies of Muhammad began their conquest of the Middle East. We should be very clear that this was a military conquest, not a missionary enterprise, and through the use of force, authorized by a declaration of a Jihad against infidels, Arabs/Muslims were able to forcibly convert and assimilate non-Arabs and non-Muslims into their fold. Very few indigenous communities of the Middle East survived this - primarily Assyrians, Jews, Armenians and Coptics (of Egypt).
Having conquered the Middle East, Arabs placed these communities under a Dhimmi (see the book DHIMMI, by Bat Ye'Or) system of governance, where the communities were allowed to rule themselves as religious minorities (Christians, Jews and Zoroastrian). These communities had to pay a tax (called a Jizzya in Arabic) that was, in effect, a penalty for being non-Muslim, and that was typically 80% in times of tolerance and up to 150% in times of oppression. This tax forced many of these communities to convert to Islam, as it was designed to do.
You state, "its architects designed buildings that defied gravity." I am not sure what you are referring to, but if you are referring to domes and arches, the fundamental architectural breakthrough of using a parabolic shape instead of a spherical shape for these structures was made by the Assyrians more than 1300 years earlier, as evidenced by their archaeological record.
You state,
"its mathematicians created the algebra and algorithms that would enable the building of computers, and the creation of encryption."
The fundamental basis of modern mathematics had been laid down not hundreds but thousands of years before by Assyrians and Babylonians, who already knew of the concept of zero, of the Pythagorean Theorem, and of many, many other developments expropriated by Arabs/Muslims (see HISTORY OF BABYLONIAN MATHEMATICS by Otto E. Neugebauer).
You state,
"its doctors examined the human body, and found new cures for disease."
The overwhelming majority of these doctors (99%) were Assyrians. In the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries Assyrians began a systematic translation of the Greek body of knowledge into Assyrian. At first, they concentrated on the religious works but then quickly moved to science, philosophy and medicine. Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Galen, and many others were translated into Assyrian, and from Assyrian into Arabic. It is these Arabic translations which the Moors brought with them into Spain, and which the Spaniards translated into Latin and spread throughout Europe, thus igniting the European Renaissance.
By the sixth century A.D., Assyrians had begun exporting back to Byzantia their own works on science, philosophy and medicine. In the field of medicine, the Bakhteesho Assyrian family produced nine generations of physicians, and founded the great medical school at Gundeshapur (Iran). Also in the area of medicine, (the Assyrian) Hunayn ibn-Ishaq's textbook on ophthalmology, written in 950 A.D., remained the authoritative source on the subject until 1800 A.D.
In the area of philosophy, the Assyrian philosopher Job of Edessa developed a physical theory of the universe, in the Assyrian language, that rivaled Aristotle's theory, and that sought to replace matter with forces (a theory that anticipated some ideas in quantum mechanics, such as the spontaneous creation and destruction of matter that occurs in the quantum vacuum).
One of the greatest Assyrian achievements of the fourth century was the founding of the first university in the world, the School of Nisibis, which had three departments, theology, philosophy and medicine, and which became a magnet and center of intellectual development in the Middle East. The statutes of the School of Nisibis, which have been preserved, later became the model upon which the first Italian university was based (see THE STATUTES OF THE SCHOOL OF NISIBIS by Arthur Voobus).
When Arabs and Islam swept through the Middle East in 630 A.D., they encountered 600 years of Assyrian Christian civilization, with a rich heritage, a highly developed culture, and advanced learning institutions. It is this civilization that became the foundation of the Arab civilization.
You state,
"Its astronomers looked into the heavens, named the stars, and paved the way for space travel and exploration."
This is a bit melodramatic. In fact, the astronomers you refer to were not Arabs but Chaldeans and Babylonians (of present day south-Iraq), who for millennia were known as astronomers and astrologers, and who were forcibly Arabized and Islamized - so rapidly that by 750 A.D. they had disappeared completely.
You state,
"its writers created thousands of stories. Stories of courage, romance and magic. Its poets wrote of love, when others before them were too steeped in fear to think of such things."
There is very little literature in the Arabic language that comes from this period you are referring to (the Koran is the only significant piece of literature), whereas the literary output of the Assyrians and Jews was vast. The third largest corpus of Christian writing, after Latin and Greek, is by the Assyrians in the Assyrian language (also called Syriac).
You state,
"when other nations were afraid of ideas, this civilization thrived on them, and kept them alive. When censors threatened to wipe out knowledge from past civilizations, this civilization kept the knowledge alive, and passed it on to others."
This is a very important issue you raise, and it goes to the heart of the matter of what Arab/Islamic civilization represents. I reviewed a book titled HOW GREEK SCIENCE PASSED TO THE ARABS, in which author De Lacy O'Leary lists the significant translators and interpreters of Greek science. Of the 22 scholars listed, 20 were Assyrians, one was Persian and one an Arab. I state at the end of my review:
"The salient conclusion which can be drawn from O'Leary's book is that Assyrians played a significant role in the shaping of the Islamic world via the Greek corpus of knowledge. If this is so, one must then ask the question, what happened to the Christian communities which made them lose this great intellectual enterprise they had established? One can ask this same question of the Arabs. Sadly, O'Leary's book does not answer this question, and we must look elsewhere for the answer."
I did not answer this question I posed in the review because it was not the place to answer it, but the answer is very clear, the Christian Assyrian community was drained of its population through forced conversion to Islam (by the Jizzya), and once the community had dwindled below a critical threshold, it ceased producing the scholars that were the intellectual driving force of the Islamic civilization, and that is when the so called "Golden Age of Islam" came to an end (about 850 A.D.).
Islam the religion itself was significantly molded by Assyrians and Jews (see NESTORIAN INFLUENCE ON ISLAM and HAGARISM: THE MAKING OF THE ISLAMIC WORLD).
Arab/Islamic civilization is not a progressive force, it is a regressive force; it does not give impetus, it retards. The great civilization you describe was not an Arab/Muslim accomplishment, it was an Assyrian accomplishment that Arabs expropriated and subsequently lost when they drained, through the forced conversion of Assyrians to Islam, the source of the intellectual vitality that propelled it. What other Arab/Muslim civilization has risen since? What other Arab/Muslim successes can we cite?
You state,
"and perhaps we can learn a lesson from his [Suleiman] example: It was leadership based on meritocracy, not inheritance. It was leadership that harnessed the full capabilities of a very diverse population that included Christianity, Islamic, and Jewish traditions."
In fact, the Ottomans were extremely oppressive to non-Muslims. For example, young Christian boys were forcefully taken from their families, usually at the age of 8-10, and inducted into the Janissaries, (yeniceri in Turkish) where they were Islamized and made to fight for the Ottoman state. What literary, artistic or scientific achievements of the Ottomans can we point to? We can, on the other hand, point to the genocide of 750,000 Assyrians, 1.5 million Armenians and 400,000 Greeks in World War One by the Kemalist "Young Turk" government. This is the true face of Islam.
Arabs/Muslims are engaged in an explicit campaign of destruction and expropriation of cultures and communities, identities and ideas. Wherever Arab/Muslim civilization encounters a non-Arab/Muslim one, it attempts to destroy it (as the Buddhist statues in Afghanistan were destroyed, as Persepolis was destroyed by the Ayotollah Khomeini).
This is a pattern that has been recurring since the advent of Islam, 1400 years ago, and is amply substantiated by the historical record. If the "foreign" culture cannot be destroyed, then it is expropriated, and revisionist historians claim that it is and was Arab, as is the case of most of the Arab "accomplishments" you cited in your speech. For example, Arab history texts in the Middle East teach that Assyrians were Arabs, a fact that no reputable scholar would assert, and that no living Assyrian would accept. Assyrians first settled Nineveh, one of the major Assyrian cities, in 5000 B.C., which is 5630 years before Arabs came into that area. Even the word 'Arab' is an Assyrian word, meaning "Westerner" (the first written reference to Arabs was by the Assyrian King Sennacherib, 800 B.C., in which he tells of conquering the "ma'rabayeh" - Westerners. See THE MIGHT THAT WAS ASSYRIA by H. W. F. Saggs).
Even in America this Arabization policy continues. On October 27th a coalition of seven Assyrian and Maronite organizations sent an official letter to the Arab American Institute asking it to stop identifying Assyrians and Maronites as Arabs, which it had been deliberately doing.
There are minorities and nations struggling for survival in the Arab/Muslim ocean of the Middle East and Africa (Assyrians, Armenians, Coptics, Jews, southern Sudanese, Ethiopians, Nigerians...), and we must be very sensitive not to unwittingly and inadvertently support Islamic fascism and Arab Imperialism, with their attempts to wipe out all other cultures, religions and civilizations. It is incumbent upon each one of us to do our homework and research when making statements and speeches about these sensitive matters.
I hope you found this information enlightening. You may contact me at keepa@ninevehsoft.com for further questions.
Thank you for your consideration.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Peter BetBasoo is an Assyrian from Iraq and the co-founder and director of the Assyrian International News Agency (www.aina.org). He can be reached at peter@aina.org.
By Peter BetBasoo
ChristiansOfIraq.com | 1/4/2008
EDITOR'S NOTE: There is great need for setting the record straight on the history of the Middle East. The revisionism of the last few years will lead Western Civilization into bondage. The following letter by Assyrian scholar Peter BetBasoo is a very important step in the right direction. It was sent by Assyrian scholar Peter BetBasoo to Carly Fiorina, CEO of Hewlett Packard Corporation, in response to a speech she presented in Minneapolis on September 26, 2001. It is reprinted by permission. Please read and pass it on to others.
Dear Madame Fiorina:
It is with great interest that I read your speech delivered on September 26, 2001, titled "Technology, Business and Our way of Life: What's Next" [sic]. I was particularly interested in the story you told at the end of your speech, about the Arab/Muslim civilization. As an Assyrian, a non-Arab, Christian native of the Middle East, whose ancestors reach back to 5000 B.C., I wish to clarify some points you made in this little story, and to alert you to the dangers of unwittingly being drawn into the Arabist/Islamist ideology, which seeks to assimilate all cultures and religions into the Arab/Islamic fold.
I know you are a very busy woman, but please find ten minutes to read what follows, as it is a perspective that you will not likely get from anywhere else. I will answer some of the specific points you made in your speech, then conclude with a brief perspective on this Arabist/Islamist ideology.
Arabs and Muslims appeared on the world scene in 630 A.D., when the armies of Muhammad began their conquest of the Middle East. We should be very clear that this was a military conquest, not a missionary enterprise, and through the use of force, authorized by a declaration of a Jihad against infidels, Arabs/Muslims were able to forcibly convert and assimilate non-Arabs and non-Muslims into their fold. Very few indigenous communities of the Middle East survived this - primarily Assyrians, Jews, Armenians and Coptics (of Egypt).
Having conquered the Middle East, Arabs placed these communities under a Dhimmi (see the book DHIMMI, by Bat Ye'Or) system of governance, where the communities were allowed to rule themselves as religious minorities (Christians, Jews and Zoroastrian). These communities had to pay a tax (called a Jizzya in Arabic) that was, in effect, a penalty for being non-Muslim, and that was typically 80% in times of tolerance and up to 150% in times of oppression. This tax forced many of these communities to convert to Islam, as it was designed to do.
You state, "its architects designed buildings that defied gravity." I am not sure what you are referring to, but if you are referring to domes and arches, the fundamental architectural breakthrough of using a parabolic shape instead of a spherical shape for these structures was made by the Assyrians more than 1300 years earlier, as evidenced by their archaeological record.
You state,
"its mathematicians created the algebra and algorithms that would enable the building of computers, and the creation of encryption."
The fundamental basis of modern mathematics had been laid down not hundreds but thousands of years before by Assyrians and Babylonians, who already knew of the concept of zero, of the Pythagorean Theorem, and of many, many other developments expropriated by Arabs/Muslims (see HISTORY OF BABYLONIAN MATHEMATICS by Otto E. Neugebauer).
You state,
"its doctors examined the human body, and found new cures for disease."
The overwhelming majority of these doctors (99%) were Assyrians. In the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries Assyrians began a systematic translation of the Greek body of knowledge into Assyrian. At first, they concentrated on the religious works but then quickly moved to science, philosophy and medicine. Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Galen, and many others were translated into Assyrian, and from Assyrian into Arabic. It is these Arabic translations which the Moors brought with them into Spain, and which the Spaniards translated into Latin and spread throughout Europe, thus igniting the European Renaissance.
By the sixth century A.D., Assyrians had begun exporting back to Byzantia their own works on science, philosophy and medicine. In the field of medicine, the Bakhteesho Assyrian family produced nine generations of physicians, and founded the great medical school at Gundeshapur (Iran). Also in the area of medicine, (the Assyrian) Hunayn ibn-Ishaq's textbook on ophthalmology, written in 950 A.D., remained the authoritative source on the subject until 1800 A.D.
In the area of philosophy, the Assyrian philosopher Job of Edessa developed a physical theory of the universe, in the Assyrian language, that rivaled Aristotle's theory, and that sought to replace matter with forces (a theory that anticipated some ideas in quantum mechanics, such as the spontaneous creation and destruction of matter that occurs in the quantum vacuum).
One of the greatest Assyrian achievements of the fourth century was the founding of the first university in the world, the School of Nisibis, which had three departments, theology, philosophy and medicine, and which became a magnet and center of intellectual development in the Middle East. The statutes of the School of Nisibis, which have been preserved, later became the model upon which the first Italian university was based (see THE STATUTES OF THE SCHOOL OF NISIBIS by Arthur Voobus).
When Arabs and Islam swept through the Middle East in 630 A.D., they encountered 600 years of Assyrian Christian civilization, with a rich heritage, a highly developed culture, and advanced learning institutions. It is this civilization that became the foundation of the Arab civilization.
You state,
"Its astronomers looked into the heavens, named the stars, and paved the way for space travel and exploration."
This is a bit melodramatic. In fact, the astronomers you refer to were not Arabs but Chaldeans and Babylonians (of present day south-Iraq), who for millennia were known as astronomers and astrologers, and who were forcibly Arabized and Islamized - so rapidly that by 750 A.D. they had disappeared completely.
You state,
"its writers created thousands of stories. Stories of courage, romance and magic. Its poets wrote of love, when others before them were too steeped in fear to think of such things."
There is very little literature in the Arabic language that comes from this period you are referring to (the Koran is the only significant piece of literature), whereas the literary output of the Assyrians and Jews was vast. The third largest corpus of Christian writing, after Latin and Greek, is by the Assyrians in the Assyrian language (also called Syriac).
You state,
"when other nations were afraid of ideas, this civilization thrived on them, and kept them alive. When censors threatened to wipe out knowledge from past civilizations, this civilization kept the knowledge alive, and passed it on to others."
This is a very important issue you raise, and it goes to the heart of the matter of what Arab/Islamic civilization represents. I reviewed a book titled HOW GREEK SCIENCE PASSED TO THE ARABS, in which author De Lacy O'Leary lists the significant translators and interpreters of Greek science. Of the 22 scholars listed, 20 were Assyrians, one was Persian and one an Arab. I state at the end of my review:
"The salient conclusion which can be drawn from O'Leary's book is that Assyrians played a significant role in the shaping of the Islamic world via the Greek corpus of knowledge. If this is so, one must then ask the question, what happened to the Christian communities which made them lose this great intellectual enterprise they had established? One can ask this same question of the Arabs. Sadly, O'Leary's book does not answer this question, and we must look elsewhere for the answer."
I did not answer this question I posed in the review because it was not the place to answer it, but the answer is very clear, the Christian Assyrian community was drained of its population through forced conversion to Islam (by the Jizzya), and once the community had dwindled below a critical threshold, it ceased producing the scholars that were the intellectual driving force of the Islamic civilization, and that is when the so called "Golden Age of Islam" came to an end (about 850 A.D.).
Islam the religion itself was significantly molded by Assyrians and Jews (see NESTORIAN INFLUENCE ON ISLAM and HAGARISM: THE MAKING OF THE ISLAMIC WORLD).
Arab/Islamic civilization is not a progressive force, it is a regressive force; it does not give impetus, it retards. The great civilization you describe was not an Arab/Muslim accomplishment, it was an Assyrian accomplishment that Arabs expropriated and subsequently lost when they drained, through the forced conversion of Assyrians to Islam, the source of the intellectual vitality that propelled it. What other Arab/Muslim civilization has risen since? What other Arab/Muslim successes can we cite?
You state,
"and perhaps we can learn a lesson from his [Suleiman] example: It was leadership based on meritocracy, not inheritance. It was leadership that harnessed the full capabilities of a very diverse population that included Christianity, Islamic, and Jewish traditions."
In fact, the Ottomans were extremely oppressive to non-Muslims. For example, young Christian boys were forcefully taken from their families, usually at the age of 8-10, and inducted into the Janissaries, (yeniceri in Turkish) where they were Islamized and made to fight for the Ottoman state. What literary, artistic or scientific achievements of the Ottomans can we point to? We can, on the other hand, point to the genocide of 750,000 Assyrians, 1.5 million Armenians and 400,000 Greeks in World War One by the Kemalist "Young Turk" government. This is the true face of Islam.
Arabs/Muslims are engaged in an explicit campaign of destruction and expropriation of cultures and communities, identities and ideas. Wherever Arab/Muslim civilization encounters a non-Arab/Muslim one, it attempts to destroy it (as the Buddhist statues in Afghanistan were destroyed, as Persepolis was destroyed by the Ayotollah Khomeini).
This is a pattern that has been recurring since the advent of Islam, 1400 years ago, and is amply substantiated by the historical record. If the "foreign" culture cannot be destroyed, then it is expropriated, and revisionist historians claim that it is and was Arab, as is the case of most of the Arab "accomplishments" you cited in your speech. For example, Arab history texts in the Middle East teach that Assyrians were Arabs, a fact that no reputable scholar would assert, and that no living Assyrian would accept. Assyrians first settled Nineveh, one of the major Assyrian cities, in 5000 B.C., which is 5630 years before Arabs came into that area. Even the word 'Arab' is an Assyrian word, meaning "Westerner" (the first written reference to Arabs was by the Assyrian King Sennacherib, 800 B.C., in which he tells of conquering the "ma'rabayeh" - Westerners. See THE MIGHT THAT WAS ASSYRIA by H. W. F. Saggs).
Even in America this Arabization policy continues. On October 27th a coalition of seven Assyrian and Maronite organizations sent an official letter to the Arab American Institute asking it to stop identifying Assyrians and Maronites as Arabs, which it had been deliberately doing.
There are minorities and nations struggling for survival in the Arab/Muslim ocean of the Middle East and Africa (Assyrians, Armenians, Coptics, Jews, southern Sudanese, Ethiopians, Nigerians...), and we must be very sensitive not to unwittingly and inadvertently support Islamic fascism and Arab Imperialism, with their attempts to wipe out all other cultures, religions and civilizations. It is incumbent upon each one of us to do our homework and research when making statements and speeches about these sensitive matters.
I hope you found this information enlightening. You may contact me at keepa@ninevehsoft.com for further questions.
Thank you for your consideration.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Peter BetBasoo is an Assyrian from Iraq and the co-founder and director of the Assyrian International News Agency (www.aina.org). He can be reached at peter@aina.org.
North Korea shows South a friendlier face By Norimitsu Onishi Thursday, January 3, 2008 c/o iht
North Korea shows South a friendlier face
By Norimitsu Onishi
Thursday, January 3, 2008
KAESONG, North Korea: Under the gaze of a bronze statue of Kim Il Sung standing atop a hill, a convoy of 11 buses packed with South Korean tourists wound its way through this quiet city in North Korea, which was opened up to daily tours early in December and is now suddenly host to hundreds of mostly South Korean tourists seven days a week.
Bus No. 1 halted at a street corner, temporarily blocking two middle-aged North Korean women from crossing the street and producing a telling moment in the short history of tourism in the North. Finding themselves only feet away from North Koreans - real, live North Koreans who were neither guides nor minders - the South Korean tourists stared at the two women outside, some even pressing their noses against the bus windows.
The two women, wearing gray overcoats and the kind of high-heeled boots that seem to be in fashion here, smiled in embarrassment. Then they waved at the South Korean tourists, who waved back just as the bus started moving.
And so went a recent visit to Kaesong, the product of a rare period of relative openness in the North, which strictly controls even the glimpses it provides of itself to the outside. Waved to, most women waved back. Men nodded. Schoolchildren, who could be seen going about unaccompanied by adults, did not fail to return a wave.
Although the North missed its yearend deadline of dismantling its nuclear program, it seems to be on track to do so, eventually.
Entry by foreigners to Pyongyang tends to be strictly controlled. But the tours to Kaesong, like those to the Kumgang Mountain area in North Korea's southeastern section, are open to all foreigners, including journalists, as long as they pay the fee of about $180 for a one-day trip.
The Kumgang Mountain area has received outsiders for almost a decade now, but it remains a Potemkin-like resort fenced off from surrounding villages. By contrast, Kaesong is a real city, one that, judging from the hand-painted, wooden traffic signs and total absence of cars on its streets, the authorities had not tried to transform into a Pyongyang-like showcase.
An ancient capital that eventually fell to the North during the Korean War, Kaesong lies just north of the demilitarized zone dividing the Korean Peninsula and is a two-hour drive from Seoul. It is considered richer than other parts of the North because thousands of its residents work in a South Korean-run special industrial zone just outside the city.
The tours here - run by Hyundai Asan, the South Korean company that developed the industrial zone and is now planning to launch regular tours to Mount Paektu, along the North's border with China, and possibly Pyongyang next spring - start in Seoul around 6 a.m. One recent morning, most of the tourists were elderly South Koreans, though they also included the young as well as non-Koreans.
Near the DMZ, as they filled out forms at a South Korean center, some dropped by the branch of a South Korean bank and exchanged South Korean won for U.S. dollars, the only currency accepted at gift shops here.
Once inside North Korea, South Korean guides reminded the tourists that taking photographs from inside the bus, or of anything but approved tourist spots, was forbidden. The convoy went up the highway alongside the expanding special industrial zone and past hills denuded of trees.
"Let's get rid of U.S. imperialism!" read a red-and-white banner on the side of a building next to the highway.
The first stop was Pakyon Falls outside the city. South Korean tourists posed for photos in front of the 121-foot, or 36-meter, waterfall, many of them trying to get the fall as well as a North Korean guide holding a big white bullhorn into the same picture. "Take a picture with the waterfall," the guide told one man who had mustered up the courage to ask her directly to pose with him.
At a stall selling drinks, though, a saleswoman dressed in a Christmasy, pink and fur-collared costume welcomed photographs and said flirtatiously that she should be paid a modeling fee.
"Ginseng tea? Coffee?" she asked.
One of the many North Korean guides traveling inside the buses came over. Smiling broadly, the guide, who was in his 40s, said he had been dispatched from Pyongyang to help out in Kaesong's opening.
"It would be good to normalize relations with the United States," he said, expressing an opinion repeated by two other guides. "We could focus our resources on developing our economy. From the U.S. perspective, it would no longer be threatened by our nuclear arms.
"Our relations began improving after our nuclear tests last year," he added, dragging on a cigarette. "The U.S. is basically afraid of nuclear proliferation, and we showed them who we are."
Another guide, in his 30s, said normalization would allow North Korea to shift its resources from defense so that it could become an "economic power."
Compared to guides in Kumgang Mountain or the Kaesong industrial complex a couple of years ago, some of the guides here, who wore elegant long overcoats and scarves, were indistinguishable from their South Korean counterparts.
"I also sell fresh mountain water," the woman at the stall said in a sing-song voice. "I even sell hangover pills."
One bus was filled with South Koreans who had grown up in Kaesong and were returning for the first time in six decades. Everything had changed, they said, except the very same tourist spots they were visiting.
On the footsteps leading to Sungyang, a Confucian lecture hall, another North Korean guide with a white bullhorn was dramatically interrupted by an old man who jabbed a large finger in the air and yelled out, "Why isn't there a nameplate on the entrance? Every Korean house should have a nameplate."
Flustered, the guide remained speechless as the South Koreans streamed past her into the hall. Inside, though, she said: "The Japanese imperialists took the nameplate and burned it during the occupation."
Later, the man with the large finger, Lee Hee Tae, 80, who had lived here until the Korean War, said he was dissatisfied with the answer.
"I don't think the Japanese took it," he said, "because I saw it after the end of the Japanese occupation."
Overhearing his comments, a young North Korean guide asked, "Is there anything wrong?"
After listening to Lee's explanation, the guide said simply, "I can't believe you remember what happened 60 years ago."
The trip brought mixed emotions to Lee and others returning for the first time to their hometown. They were back. But they weren't free to stray from the designated course, unable to cross the street to speak to a North Korean passerby, barred from taking photographs of the city's streets and neighborhoods - perhaps because the North Korean authorities did not want images of the dirt roads in the residential areas, the crooked walls and roofs on houses or the faded paint on apartment buildings to be shown outside the country.
"A lot of us used to live in houses right around here," said Chung Kyu Chang, 79. "But we can't go over to see our old houses and we can't talk to the people here."
By Norimitsu Onishi
Thursday, January 3, 2008
KAESONG, North Korea: Under the gaze of a bronze statue of Kim Il Sung standing atop a hill, a convoy of 11 buses packed with South Korean tourists wound its way through this quiet city in North Korea, which was opened up to daily tours early in December and is now suddenly host to hundreds of mostly South Korean tourists seven days a week.
Bus No. 1 halted at a street corner, temporarily blocking two middle-aged North Korean women from crossing the street and producing a telling moment in the short history of tourism in the North. Finding themselves only feet away from North Koreans - real, live North Koreans who were neither guides nor minders - the South Korean tourists stared at the two women outside, some even pressing their noses against the bus windows.
The two women, wearing gray overcoats and the kind of high-heeled boots that seem to be in fashion here, smiled in embarrassment. Then they waved at the South Korean tourists, who waved back just as the bus started moving.
And so went a recent visit to Kaesong, the product of a rare period of relative openness in the North, which strictly controls even the glimpses it provides of itself to the outside. Waved to, most women waved back. Men nodded. Schoolchildren, who could be seen going about unaccompanied by adults, did not fail to return a wave.
Although the North missed its yearend deadline of dismantling its nuclear program, it seems to be on track to do so, eventually.
Entry by foreigners to Pyongyang tends to be strictly controlled. But the tours to Kaesong, like those to the Kumgang Mountain area in North Korea's southeastern section, are open to all foreigners, including journalists, as long as they pay the fee of about $180 for a one-day trip.
The Kumgang Mountain area has received outsiders for almost a decade now, but it remains a Potemkin-like resort fenced off from surrounding villages. By contrast, Kaesong is a real city, one that, judging from the hand-painted, wooden traffic signs and total absence of cars on its streets, the authorities had not tried to transform into a Pyongyang-like showcase.
An ancient capital that eventually fell to the North during the Korean War, Kaesong lies just north of the demilitarized zone dividing the Korean Peninsula and is a two-hour drive from Seoul. It is considered richer than other parts of the North because thousands of its residents work in a South Korean-run special industrial zone just outside the city.
The tours here - run by Hyundai Asan, the South Korean company that developed the industrial zone and is now planning to launch regular tours to Mount Paektu, along the North's border with China, and possibly Pyongyang next spring - start in Seoul around 6 a.m. One recent morning, most of the tourists were elderly South Koreans, though they also included the young as well as non-Koreans.
Near the DMZ, as they filled out forms at a South Korean center, some dropped by the branch of a South Korean bank and exchanged South Korean won for U.S. dollars, the only currency accepted at gift shops here.
Once inside North Korea, South Korean guides reminded the tourists that taking photographs from inside the bus, or of anything but approved tourist spots, was forbidden. The convoy went up the highway alongside the expanding special industrial zone and past hills denuded of trees.
"Let's get rid of U.S. imperialism!" read a red-and-white banner on the side of a building next to the highway.
The first stop was Pakyon Falls outside the city. South Korean tourists posed for photos in front of the 121-foot, or 36-meter, waterfall, many of them trying to get the fall as well as a North Korean guide holding a big white bullhorn into the same picture. "Take a picture with the waterfall," the guide told one man who had mustered up the courage to ask her directly to pose with him.
At a stall selling drinks, though, a saleswoman dressed in a Christmasy, pink and fur-collared costume welcomed photographs and said flirtatiously that she should be paid a modeling fee.
"Ginseng tea? Coffee?" she asked.
One of the many North Korean guides traveling inside the buses came over. Smiling broadly, the guide, who was in his 40s, said he had been dispatched from Pyongyang to help out in Kaesong's opening.
"It would be good to normalize relations with the United States," he said, expressing an opinion repeated by two other guides. "We could focus our resources on developing our economy. From the U.S. perspective, it would no longer be threatened by our nuclear arms.
"Our relations began improving after our nuclear tests last year," he added, dragging on a cigarette. "The U.S. is basically afraid of nuclear proliferation, and we showed them who we are."
Another guide, in his 30s, said normalization would allow North Korea to shift its resources from defense so that it could become an "economic power."
Compared to guides in Kumgang Mountain or the Kaesong industrial complex a couple of years ago, some of the guides here, who wore elegant long overcoats and scarves, were indistinguishable from their South Korean counterparts.
"I also sell fresh mountain water," the woman at the stall said in a sing-song voice. "I even sell hangover pills."
One bus was filled with South Koreans who had grown up in Kaesong and were returning for the first time in six decades. Everything had changed, they said, except the very same tourist spots they were visiting.
On the footsteps leading to Sungyang, a Confucian lecture hall, another North Korean guide with a white bullhorn was dramatically interrupted by an old man who jabbed a large finger in the air and yelled out, "Why isn't there a nameplate on the entrance? Every Korean house should have a nameplate."
Flustered, the guide remained speechless as the South Koreans streamed past her into the hall. Inside, though, she said: "The Japanese imperialists took the nameplate and burned it during the occupation."
Later, the man with the large finger, Lee Hee Tae, 80, who had lived here until the Korean War, said he was dissatisfied with the answer.
"I don't think the Japanese took it," he said, "because I saw it after the end of the Japanese occupation."
Overhearing his comments, a young North Korean guide asked, "Is there anything wrong?"
After listening to Lee's explanation, the guide said simply, "I can't believe you remember what happened 60 years ago."
The trip brought mixed emotions to Lee and others returning for the first time to their hometown. They were back. But they weren't free to stray from the designated course, unable to cross the street to speak to a North Korean passerby, barred from taking photographs of the city's streets and neighborhoods - perhaps because the North Korean authorities did not want images of the dirt roads in the residential areas, the crooked walls and roofs on houses or the faded paint on apartment buildings to be shown outside the country.
"A lot of us used to live in houses right around here," said Chung Kyu Chang, 79. "But we can't go over to see our old houses and we can't talk to the people here."
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)
