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."
Thursday, 17 January 2008
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."
Staking a claim in the new Singapore By Sonia Kolesnikov-Jessop Friday, January 4, 2008 c/o IHT
Staking a claim in the new Singapore
By Sonia Kolesnikov-Jessop
Friday, January 4, 2008
SINGAPORE: When the master developer of Sentosa Cove, an exclusive oceanfront residential community here, started selling land to individual builders in 2003, the first plot went for 350 Singapore dollars per square foot. In July, during the most recent land auction for a condominium site, the price was 1,799 dollars a square foot.
"Back in 2003, it was an untested market and the sale came right after SARS," recalled Nicholas Chua, the business development and marketing manager at Ho Bee Group, which paid the equivalent of $203 a square foot at the time. "The confidence level in the property market wasn't that great." Now, Ho Bee owns six development sites there.
The luxury development's success partly reflects the underlying strength of Singapore's property market, which is expected to increase by as much as 30 percent this year, estimated Tay Huey Ying, director of research and consultancy at Colliers International real estate in Singapore. It also has benefited from the government's 48-hour fast-track approval program for foreigners who want to buy homes or land in the development as well as plans to build a resort featuring a casino and Universal Studios theme park nearby.
"The product wasn't a success at the beginning because it didn't look interesting to the market, especially after the Dubai Palm and The World were launched in Dubai," said Ku Swee Yong, director of marketing and business development at Savills Singapore. "It was after mid-2005, when the casino was announced, that buyers become more confident in the Cove's prospects."
"Solid marketing has also helped," Ku said. "Developers will do well to take a leaf from the books of Sentosa Cove. The packaging has been so successful that investors who failed to secure a plot of land there still aspire to live there.
"I hope they will continue to sustain the brand name years after the Sentosa integrated resort has been completed and packed in with tourists," he said.
In the space of a few years, Sentosa Cove, the only residential development on Sentosa Island, has become one of Southeast Asia's most exclusive and expensive addresses, with three-bedroom condominiums selling for 5 million dollars and free-standing properties selling for 15 million.
The Cove has been marketed as "the world's most desirable address" — a poster child for the "new" Singapore, which is trying to reinvent itself. In recent years, the city-state of 4.5 million has polished up its image as a dull place by developing a vibrant nightlife and art scene, announcing plans for two integrated resorts with casinos (including a family resort on Sentosa), and scheduling its first Formula One Grand Prix on Sept. 28.
On the economic front, the country also has become an important financial hub for private banking and hedge fund management, luring hordes of well-heeled bankers that splash out on high-end properties.
Sentosa Cove is divided into two gated communities, covering 117 hectares, or 290 acres, 60 percent of which has been reclaimed from the sea. It has a members-only marina with a few berths for mega yachts and a 320-room W Hotel is being planned.
When completed in 2010, the community of oceanfront, waterway-facing and fairway-flanking properties is to total 2,500 homes, including 400 free-standing structures, and 2,100 condominium units. So far, only around 275 homes have been completed.
At this point, more than half of the Cove's buyers are foreigners, developers say.
Sentosa Cove was inspired by Port Grimaud, the 40-year-old lagoon development in the south of France designed by the late François Spoerry. "Our vision was to create one of the most desirable oceanfront residential communities," explained Kemmy Tan, general manager of Sentosa Cove Pte, the project's master planner and developer. "But we also realized we needed to adapt Port Grimaud's concept to a tropical setting."
So far, the company has sold more than 3 billion dollars in land to individual developers; buyers get only 99-year leaseholds on land.
The Cove's property prices have moved up faster than the rest of Singapore's because the overall development started from a lower base, Chua said. Units in Ho Bee's first condominium, The Berth by the Cove, sold for 800 dollars per square foot when they were first offered for sale in 2004. Today, the apartments resell for about 1,800 dollars per square foot.
Meanwhile, a unit at the uncompleted Oceanfront condominium re-sold recently for 2,550 dollars per square foot. The seller initially bought the unit in September 2006 for 1,750 dollars per square foot; the resale produced a profit of more than 2 million dollars.
Since the start in September of sales of its latest condominium, The Turquoise, Ho Bee has sold 40 of the 55 available units, with prices averaging 5.2 million dollars for a three-bedroom condo and 6 million for a four bedroom.
"People have many reasons for buying on Sentosa. Some love the sea and have a boat they can moor there, others buy because they want to be close to two championship golf courses, and it is 15 minutes away from the financial district," Chua noted.
Jenny Chua, chairwoman of Sentosa Cove Pte, adds that the gated communities offer greater privacy to home buyers. "Obviously this is not a security issue here, but more of a lifestyle decision," she added.
Attention now is focused on the land tender for The Pinnacle Collection, a planned 20-story condominium structure that will be the tallest building on the island and will offer panoramic vistas of the South China Sea, the Southern Islands and the city skyline. The tender closed Dec. 12 and the result should be announced this month.
"The Pinnacle Collection is the last condominium parcel at Sentosa Cove and can categorically be classified as the best. It is anticipated that this will be the most coveted parcel of all, due to its strategic location at the entrance of the marina leading into Sentosa Cove," said Li Hiaw Ho, executive director at CBRE Research in Singapore. Li believes that bids for the undeveloped site will exceed 2,000 dollars per square foot.
All of the buildable land on Sentosa Island will be sold by the end of 2008 but would-be home buyers will still have plenty of opportunities. Ho Bee is planning to sell a 150-unit condo, the Seaview, in the second quarter, while Lippo Group will start selling the Marina Collection and City Development will sell apartments in the Quayside Collection.
Also, sometime this year Elevation Developments will sell apartments in the Cove's only development facing the Sentosa Golf Club's Tanjong Course. The company is considering hiring the renowned architect Zaha Hadid for the project, which should have 20 units of about 6,000 square feet each, each with its own pool, said Satinder Garcha, chief executive of Elevation Developments. At current market prices, Garcha estimates each will sell for about 9 million dollars to 10 million dollars.
The reputation of the Italian architect Claudio Silvestrin probably has made the 18-villa development on Sandy Island, one of the manmade islands in the Cove, one of the area's most anticipated projects.
Silvestrin designs Giorgio Armani's stores; the landscaping will be done by Jamie Durie, an Australian who occasionally appears as a garden consultant on Oprah Winfrey's show.
The villas will range in size from about 6,500 square feet to 12,000 square feet and each will come with a boat berth and private pool. Genesis-Alliance (YTL Companies) will offer them for sale sometime during the first quarter of the year.
By Sonia Kolesnikov-Jessop
Friday, January 4, 2008
SINGAPORE: When the master developer of Sentosa Cove, an exclusive oceanfront residential community here, started selling land to individual builders in 2003, the first plot went for 350 Singapore dollars per square foot. In July, during the most recent land auction for a condominium site, the price was 1,799 dollars a square foot.
"Back in 2003, it was an untested market and the sale came right after SARS," recalled Nicholas Chua, the business development and marketing manager at Ho Bee Group, which paid the equivalent of $203 a square foot at the time. "The confidence level in the property market wasn't that great." Now, Ho Bee owns six development sites there.
The luxury development's success partly reflects the underlying strength of Singapore's property market, which is expected to increase by as much as 30 percent this year, estimated Tay Huey Ying, director of research and consultancy at Colliers International real estate in Singapore. It also has benefited from the government's 48-hour fast-track approval program for foreigners who want to buy homes or land in the development as well as plans to build a resort featuring a casino and Universal Studios theme park nearby.
"The product wasn't a success at the beginning because it didn't look interesting to the market, especially after the Dubai Palm and The World were launched in Dubai," said Ku Swee Yong, director of marketing and business development at Savills Singapore. "It was after mid-2005, when the casino was announced, that buyers become more confident in the Cove's prospects."
"Solid marketing has also helped," Ku said. "Developers will do well to take a leaf from the books of Sentosa Cove. The packaging has been so successful that investors who failed to secure a plot of land there still aspire to live there.
"I hope they will continue to sustain the brand name years after the Sentosa integrated resort has been completed and packed in with tourists," he said.
In the space of a few years, Sentosa Cove, the only residential development on Sentosa Island, has become one of Southeast Asia's most exclusive and expensive addresses, with three-bedroom condominiums selling for 5 million dollars and free-standing properties selling for 15 million.
The Cove has been marketed as "the world's most desirable address" — a poster child for the "new" Singapore, which is trying to reinvent itself. In recent years, the city-state of 4.5 million has polished up its image as a dull place by developing a vibrant nightlife and art scene, announcing plans for two integrated resorts with casinos (including a family resort on Sentosa), and scheduling its first Formula One Grand Prix on Sept. 28.
On the economic front, the country also has become an important financial hub for private banking and hedge fund management, luring hordes of well-heeled bankers that splash out on high-end properties.
Sentosa Cove is divided into two gated communities, covering 117 hectares, or 290 acres, 60 percent of which has been reclaimed from the sea. It has a members-only marina with a few berths for mega yachts and a 320-room W Hotel is being planned.
When completed in 2010, the community of oceanfront, waterway-facing and fairway-flanking properties is to total 2,500 homes, including 400 free-standing structures, and 2,100 condominium units. So far, only around 275 homes have been completed.
At this point, more than half of the Cove's buyers are foreigners, developers say.
Sentosa Cove was inspired by Port Grimaud, the 40-year-old lagoon development in the south of France designed by the late François Spoerry. "Our vision was to create one of the most desirable oceanfront residential communities," explained Kemmy Tan, general manager of Sentosa Cove Pte, the project's master planner and developer. "But we also realized we needed to adapt Port Grimaud's concept to a tropical setting."
So far, the company has sold more than 3 billion dollars in land to individual developers; buyers get only 99-year leaseholds on land.
The Cove's property prices have moved up faster than the rest of Singapore's because the overall development started from a lower base, Chua said. Units in Ho Bee's first condominium, The Berth by the Cove, sold for 800 dollars per square foot when they were first offered for sale in 2004. Today, the apartments resell for about 1,800 dollars per square foot.
Meanwhile, a unit at the uncompleted Oceanfront condominium re-sold recently for 2,550 dollars per square foot. The seller initially bought the unit in September 2006 for 1,750 dollars per square foot; the resale produced a profit of more than 2 million dollars.
Since the start in September of sales of its latest condominium, The Turquoise, Ho Bee has sold 40 of the 55 available units, with prices averaging 5.2 million dollars for a three-bedroom condo and 6 million for a four bedroom.
"People have many reasons for buying on Sentosa. Some love the sea and have a boat they can moor there, others buy because they want to be close to two championship golf courses, and it is 15 minutes away from the financial district," Chua noted.
Jenny Chua, chairwoman of Sentosa Cove Pte, adds that the gated communities offer greater privacy to home buyers. "Obviously this is not a security issue here, but more of a lifestyle decision," she added.
Attention now is focused on the land tender for The Pinnacle Collection, a planned 20-story condominium structure that will be the tallest building on the island and will offer panoramic vistas of the South China Sea, the Southern Islands and the city skyline. The tender closed Dec. 12 and the result should be announced this month.
"The Pinnacle Collection is the last condominium parcel at Sentosa Cove and can categorically be classified as the best. It is anticipated that this will be the most coveted parcel of all, due to its strategic location at the entrance of the marina leading into Sentosa Cove," said Li Hiaw Ho, executive director at CBRE Research in Singapore. Li believes that bids for the undeveloped site will exceed 2,000 dollars per square foot.
All of the buildable land on Sentosa Island will be sold by the end of 2008 but would-be home buyers will still have plenty of opportunities. Ho Bee is planning to sell a 150-unit condo, the Seaview, in the second quarter, while Lippo Group will start selling the Marina Collection and City Development will sell apartments in the Quayside Collection.
Also, sometime this year Elevation Developments will sell apartments in the Cove's only development facing the Sentosa Golf Club's Tanjong Course. The company is considering hiring the renowned architect Zaha Hadid for the project, which should have 20 units of about 6,000 square feet each, each with its own pool, said Satinder Garcha, chief executive of Elevation Developments. At current market prices, Garcha estimates each will sell for about 9 million dollars to 10 million dollars.
The reputation of the Italian architect Claudio Silvestrin probably has made the 18-villa development on Sandy Island, one of the manmade islands in the Cove, one of the area's most anticipated projects.
Silvestrin designs Giorgio Armani's stores; the landscaping will be done by Jamie Durie, an Australian who occasionally appears as a garden consultant on Oprah Winfrey's show.
The villas will range in size from about 6,500 square feet to 12,000 square feet and each will come with a boat berth and private pool. Genesis-Alliance (YTL Companies) will offer them for sale sometime during the first quarter of the year.
The wing of an Angel Posted by Tim McGirk January 4, 2008 2:29 c/o Times blog
January 4, 2008 2:29
The wing of an Angel
Posted by Tim McGirk | Comments (0) | Permalink | Trackbacks (0) | Email This
An Israeli woman asked me where I lived in Jerusalem. When I replied that it was in Abu Tor, which has a view of the Old City, with its domes and shrines holy to Judaism, Christianity and Islam, she said cuttingly: "You foreign correspondents are all the same. You love the Orientalism of Jerusalem. We Israelis turn our backs on Jerusalem, It's the source of all our pain."
She was secular, this Israeli woman --but that's probably obvious to my readers. Her point was that most Israelis are normal people, leading normal lives, and are far removed from the zealots shouting into TV cameras. Wishing that Jerusalem were less religious is like wishing that Manhattan would revert to pasture for dairy cows.
You can't avoid religion in Jerusalem. The other day, I was stopped by an odd little man with a white beard. He said he was a Syrian bishop, even though he sounded Canadian. He pointed to an tangle of jasmine vines and whispered: "Look, a rare sight!"
Buzzing around the jasmine were two Palestine Sunbirds, which are small and quick like hummingbirds, with miniature wings of iridescent blue. And then the bishop tells me: "You know, everybody thinks that angels have wings. Maybe sapphire blue wings like those or white or transparent like dragonfly wings."
I confessed that I hadn't thought too much about the color of angel wings.Maybe I imagined them tipped with a pale fire.
The Sunbirds flew off but the bishop was still whispering. "Truth is," he said, "angels don't have wings."
"They don't?"
He shook his head with authority and replied, "No. Angels don't need to flap wings to fly. They're not bound by gravity. So why should they have them?"
"Can't argue with that."
The bishop smiled enigmatically, and I walked away promising that I'd keep my eyes open for Sunbirds and for angels --with or without wings. Only in Jerusalem.
The wing of an Angel
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An Israeli woman asked me where I lived in Jerusalem. When I replied that it was in Abu Tor, which has a view of the Old City, with its domes and shrines holy to Judaism, Christianity and Islam, she said cuttingly: "You foreign correspondents are all the same. You love the Orientalism of Jerusalem. We Israelis turn our backs on Jerusalem, It's the source of all our pain."
She was secular, this Israeli woman --but that's probably obvious to my readers. Her point was that most Israelis are normal people, leading normal lives, and are far removed from the zealots shouting into TV cameras. Wishing that Jerusalem were less religious is like wishing that Manhattan would revert to pasture for dairy cows.
You can't avoid religion in Jerusalem. The other day, I was stopped by an odd little man with a white beard. He said he was a Syrian bishop, even though he sounded Canadian. He pointed to an tangle of jasmine vines and whispered: "Look, a rare sight!"
Buzzing around the jasmine were two Palestine Sunbirds, which are small and quick like hummingbirds, with miniature wings of iridescent blue. And then the bishop tells me: "You know, everybody thinks that angels have wings. Maybe sapphire blue wings like those or white or transparent like dragonfly wings."
I confessed that I hadn't thought too much about the color of angel wings.Maybe I imagined them tipped with a pale fire.
The Sunbirds flew off but the bishop was still whispering. "Truth is," he said, "angels don't have wings."
"They don't?"
He shook his head with authority and replied, "No. Angels don't need to flap wings to fly. They're not bound by gravity. So why should they have them?"
"Can't argue with that."
The bishop smiled enigmatically, and I walked away promising that I'd keep my eyes open for Sunbirds and for angels --with or without wings. Only in Jerusalem.
From Times OnlineDecember 30, 2007 A Life in the Day: Rabbi Ascherman c/o Times of London
From Times OnlineDecember 30, 2007
A Life in the Day: Rabbi Ascherman
The executive director of the Jerusalem-based Rabbis for Human Rights, Rabbi Arik Ascherman, 48, is a Zionist and humanitarian. He lives in Jerusalem with his wife, Einat, also a rabbi, and their two children: Adi, 8, and Ayal, 5
My day starts around 5am. By nature I’m a late-night person — I’ll maybe work till 1 or 2 in the morning or later, but I still get up at 5.
The rest of the family are still fast asleep. For breakfast I usually have cereal and milk, and I’ll grab a coffee.
Then around 6am I go and meet the bus taking our volunteers — local Israelis who support our humanitarian cause — to help with the Palestinian olive harvest in the village olive groves on the West Bank. I brief them on the day’s task ahead, and warn them that they may face violence, verbal and physical, so they need to know who to call, how to behave, how to protect themselves, and how to protect the Palestinians they are working with.
After the bus goes off I either go to the office or home and squeeze out half an hour on the computer, until around 7 or 7.30, when I’ll wake up the children. Adi and Ayal may be eight and five, but they’re already teenagers in training. By this time I’ll also be on the phone, putting out fires — maybe the army has not shown up to protect us, as promised. Or perhaps, having agreed to allow us to work at an agreed location, they’re now making problems.
When I look at the suppression of the Palestinian people — the home demolitions, the settler violence — I ask myself: “Is this what Zionism has come to? Is this what we created the state of Israel for? To be demolishing the home of this or that person to whom we never gave a fair chance to build legally?” This is not what Zionism is about. And it is certainly not what Judaism is about. For me, the real Zionism today is creating an Israel that is not only physically strong, but morally strong, and which reaches our highest Jewish values.
So many times I’ve seen Palestinian homes demolished — it’s like a d�jà vu. A 10-year-old sees Israeli forces tear down his home and his parents humiliated in front of his eyes. And the parents turn to me and say: “What do we say to our child when he sees what has just been done and tells us, ‘I want to grow up to become a terrorist’? We want our 10-year-old to know that not every Israeli comes to demolish our homes. We want him to understand that there are Israelis who stand shoulder to shoulder to help us rebuild our houses.”
I often don’t have time for lunch, but if it’s an office day I’ll run across the street and get some rolls and cheese and go back to my desk and eat while I’m on the phone or meeting with people. When I’m out in the olive groves with the volunteers, lunch is sometimes just drinking water. Palestinians are incredibly hospitable, so often they’ll share what little they have with us — humus, cheese, olives, tomatoes, bread... And I have to tell you that no lunch tastes as good as when sitting outdoors and sharing this fellowship, crossing the divides that everyone thinks are uncrossable.
Only I, as an Israeli, can break down the stereotypes so many Palestinians have about Israelis — thereby empowering Palestinian peacemakers to be listened to by their own people. And only Palestinians can empower me to be heard down my street. We are thereby totally interdependent. And almost every day, when I or any of our volunteers are out there in the field, exchanging views with Palestinians and sometimes with settlers — a process I call “the dialogue of the olive groves” — we build bridges of peace between us.
One day when I was out there I met a young man who was taking time off from his normal job to help with the harvest. His day job is being a member of the Palestinian Authority’s Presidential Guard. He was surprised to find himself harvesting Palestinian olives alongside an Israeli rabbi. He said to me: “This makes no sense. Why are you here? Explain this to me.” So I talked to him about the Jewish tradition of justice, of rights, and of helping your neighbour. He replied: “Well, for us Palestinians there is no justice.” We were not far off the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah — lighting one candle of the menorah on the first night, a second on the next night until by the eighth day all the candles are burning. So my reply to him was: “When all is dark you have to start by lighting that first candle.”
Having spent all day in the olive groves, I’ll have a couple of hours’ catch-up to do in the office. At the end of the afternoon everyone else in the office is about to leave, but my day is far from over. The struggle amid all this is to try to get home and spend some time with my children. So I try to get back around 8pm to give them a bath and talk with them a little bit, help put them to bed, say evening prayers with them — and if priorities allow me to do so, fall asleep with them, then get up in the small hours to continue preparations for the day’s work ahead. If I can’t get away to do this, my wife, who is also a rabbi and dean of the Schechter Rabbinical Seminary, puts the children to bed.
I’m so exhausted. I count how many hours I’m going to get to sleep. Will it be four hours, five hours? And I fall asleep thinking we must distinguish between the terrorist coming to murder my children, on the one hand, and the family that simply wants to put a roof over their heads or harvest their olives on the other. And if we can think like that, I believe our world would be so much better.
Interview by Peter Small. Photograph by Heidi Levine
Contact our advertising team for advertising and sponsorship in Times Online, The Times and The Sunday Times.
© Copyright 2008 Times Newspapers Ltd.
This service is provided on Times Newspapers' standard Terms and Conditions. Please read our Privacy Policy.To inquire about a licence to reproduce material from Times Online, The Times or The Sunday Times, click here.This website is published by a member of the News International Group. News International Limited, 1 Virginia St, London E98 1XY, is the holding company for the News International group and is registered in England No 81701. VAT number GB 243 8054 69.
A Life in the Day: Rabbi Ascherman
The executive director of the Jerusalem-based Rabbis for Human Rights, Rabbi Arik Ascherman, 48, is a Zionist and humanitarian. He lives in Jerusalem with his wife, Einat, also a rabbi, and their two children: Adi, 8, and Ayal, 5
My day starts around 5am. By nature I’m a late-night person — I’ll maybe work till 1 or 2 in the morning or later, but I still get up at 5.
The rest of the family are still fast asleep. For breakfast I usually have cereal and milk, and I’ll grab a coffee.
Then around 6am I go and meet the bus taking our volunteers — local Israelis who support our humanitarian cause — to help with the Palestinian olive harvest in the village olive groves on the West Bank. I brief them on the day’s task ahead, and warn them that they may face violence, verbal and physical, so they need to know who to call, how to behave, how to protect themselves, and how to protect the Palestinians they are working with.
After the bus goes off I either go to the office or home and squeeze out half an hour on the computer, until around 7 or 7.30, when I’ll wake up the children. Adi and Ayal may be eight and five, but they’re already teenagers in training. By this time I’ll also be on the phone, putting out fires — maybe the army has not shown up to protect us, as promised. Or perhaps, having agreed to allow us to work at an agreed location, they’re now making problems.
When I look at the suppression of the Palestinian people — the home demolitions, the settler violence — I ask myself: “Is this what Zionism has come to? Is this what we created the state of Israel for? To be demolishing the home of this or that person to whom we never gave a fair chance to build legally?” This is not what Zionism is about. And it is certainly not what Judaism is about. For me, the real Zionism today is creating an Israel that is not only physically strong, but morally strong, and which reaches our highest Jewish values.
So many times I’ve seen Palestinian homes demolished — it’s like a d�jà vu. A 10-year-old sees Israeli forces tear down his home and his parents humiliated in front of his eyes. And the parents turn to me and say: “What do we say to our child when he sees what has just been done and tells us, ‘I want to grow up to become a terrorist’? We want our 10-year-old to know that not every Israeli comes to demolish our homes. We want him to understand that there are Israelis who stand shoulder to shoulder to help us rebuild our houses.”
I often don’t have time for lunch, but if it’s an office day I’ll run across the street and get some rolls and cheese and go back to my desk and eat while I’m on the phone or meeting with people. When I’m out in the olive groves with the volunteers, lunch is sometimes just drinking water. Palestinians are incredibly hospitable, so often they’ll share what little they have with us — humus, cheese, olives, tomatoes, bread... And I have to tell you that no lunch tastes as good as when sitting outdoors and sharing this fellowship, crossing the divides that everyone thinks are uncrossable.
Only I, as an Israeli, can break down the stereotypes so many Palestinians have about Israelis — thereby empowering Palestinian peacemakers to be listened to by their own people. And only Palestinians can empower me to be heard down my street. We are thereby totally interdependent. And almost every day, when I or any of our volunteers are out there in the field, exchanging views with Palestinians and sometimes with settlers — a process I call “the dialogue of the olive groves” — we build bridges of peace between us.
One day when I was out there I met a young man who was taking time off from his normal job to help with the harvest. His day job is being a member of the Palestinian Authority’s Presidential Guard. He was surprised to find himself harvesting Palestinian olives alongside an Israeli rabbi. He said to me: “This makes no sense. Why are you here? Explain this to me.” So I talked to him about the Jewish tradition of justice, of rights, and of helping your neighbour. He replied: “Well, for us Palestinians there is no justice.” We were not far off the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah — lighting one candle of the menorah on the first night, a second on the next night until by the eighth day all the candles are burning. So my reply to him was: “When all is dark you have to start by lighting that first candle.”
Having spent all day in the olive groves, I’ll have a couple of hours’ catch-up to do in the office. At the end of the afternoon everyone else in the office is about to leave, but my day is far from over. The struggle amid all this is to try to get home and spend some time with my children. So I try to get back around 8pm to give them a bath and talk with them a little bit, help put them to bed, say evening prayers with them — and if priorities allow me to do so, fall asleep with them, then get up in the small hours to continue preparations for the day’s work ahead. If I can’t get away to do this, my wife, who is also a rabbi and dean of the Schechter Rabbinical Seminary, puts the children to bed.
I’m so exhausted. I count how many hours I’m going to get to sleep. Will it be four hours, five hours? And I fall asleep thinking we must distinguish between the terrorist coming to murder my children, on the one hand, and the family that simply wants to put a roof over their heads or harvest their olives on the other. And if we can think like that, I believe our world would be so much better.
Interview by Peter Small. Photograph by Heidi Levine
Contact our advertising team for advertising and sponsorship in Times Online, The Times and The Sunday Times.
© Copyright 2008 Times Newspapers Ltd.
This service is provided on Times Newspapers' standard Terms and Conditions. Please read our Privacy Policy.To inquire about a licence to reproduce material from Times Online, The Times or The Sunday Times, click here.This website is published by a member of the News International Group. News International Limited, 1 Virginia St, London E98 1XY, is the holding company for the News International group and is registered in England No 81701. VAT number GB 243 8054 69.
Burma's bittersweet independence By Joe Boyle c/o BBC News
Burma's bittersweet independence
By Joe Boyle
BBC News
For most nations, the anniversary of a successful independence struggle against imperial overlords would be marked with flag-waving, official celebrations and perhaps even a public holiday. Not so in Burma.
On 4 January 1948, more than 60 years of British colonial rule came to an end.
Many Burmese had fared badly under the British, as integration into the empire's political and economic systems took its toll.
The authorities carried out mass executions as they sought to control the country, people's pride took a battering as Burma was absorbed into India, and the landscape was devastated as mangroves and lush jungle were cleared to create industrial-scale rice fields.
By the early 20th Century, the British had created an impoverished, dysfunctional society with the world's second-highest murder rate.
The seeds of rebellion had been sewn among impoverished farmers and educated middle classes, and soldier-statesman Aung San emerged as the figurehead of resistance.
By mid-1947, Aung San had negotiated an independence agreement with the UK, his party had won a convincing election victory and a cabinet of ministers had been agreed to take over from the British.
The mood was optimistic - and if Burmese history had continued on this course, perhaps Independence Day would be a cause for celebration.
But even before independence was actually achieved, Aung San and six of his cabinet were murdered by a rival. His political movement splintered and the fallout has blighted the nation ever since.
No unifying figure
Aung Saw Oo, a US-based activist opposed to the ruling junta, describes Independence Day as the start of Burma's civil war.
"The war is still going on - Burma is the longest civil-war society in the world."
Aung Saw Oo is a member of the National League for Democracy (NLD) - the Burmese opposition party led by Aung San Suu Kyi, the daughter of Aung San.
The NLD has decided to mark the anniversary with protests, and it is clear that few dissidents consider the date one to celebrate.
Kyaw Zwa Moe, a journalist from Irrawaddy magazine, which is run by Burmese in exile, says there is little to commemorate because Burma has not achieved true independence.
"Independence didn't bring liberty, prosperity or happiness to the Burmese people," he said.
"When we talk to young people in Rangoon and in the country, they don't even notice today is Independence Day."
In the decade following independence, Burma had no unifying figure to look to and its civilian government became overwhelmed by insurgencies from several ethnic and political communities.
In 1958 the army, led by Ne Win, stepped in to restore government control.
But Dr Pornpimol Trichoge, from Bangkok's Chulalongkorn University, says the generals developed a taste for power between 1958 and 1960 that they have never managed to shake off.
"The civil government and political parties had not had enough of a chance to build themselves up to be as strong as the army," he said.
In 1962, Ne Win assumed control of the country. The military has ruled Burma ever since.
Rewriting history
While the opposition has little cause to celebrate independence, the junta also has mixed feelings.
Current leader Gen Than Shwe did not appear at the Independence Day commemoration.
Kyaw Zwa Moe says the junta has spent its 45 years in power trying to eradicate the legacy of Aung San.
"Under Ne Win, they changed the picture on the currency - it used to have Aung San, but then the government removed his picture from the notes.
"Also in the school curricula - from primary school through to high school - they don't elaborate about Aung San."
He says the desire to wipe out the memory of Aung San is exacerbated by the strong family resemblance to his daughter.
"They don't even get a chance to see pictures of Aung San or Aung San Suu Kyi in Burma. Only the children born to political parents know all the facts."
Additional reporting by Philippa Fogarty in Bangkok.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/7171361.stm
Published: 2008/01/04 12:12:04 GMT
© BBC MMVIII
By Joe Boyle
BBC News
For most nations, the anniversary of a successful independence struggle against imperial overlords would be marked with flag-waving, official celebrations and perhaps even a public holiday. Not so in Burma.
On 4 January 1948, more than 60 years of British colonial rule came to an end.
Many Burmese had fared badly under the British, as integration into the empire's political and economic systems took its toll.
The authorities carried out mass executions as they sought to control the country, people's pride took a battering as Burma was absorbed into India, and the landscape was devastated as mangroves and lush jungle were cleared to create industrial-scale rice fields.
By the early 20th Century, the British had created an impoverished, dysfunctional society with the world's second-highest murder rate.
The seeds of rebellion had been sewn among impoverished farmers and educated middle classes, and soldier-statesman Aung San emerged as the figurehead of resistance.
By mid-1947, Aung San had negotiated an independence agreement with the UK, his party had won a convincing election victory and a cabinet of ministers had been agreed to take over from the British.
The mood was optimistic - and if Burmese history had continued on this course, perhaps Independence Day would be a cause for celebration.
But even before independence was actually achieved, Aung San and six of his cabinet were murdered by a rival. His political movement splintered and the fallout has blighted the nation ever since.
No unifying figure
Aung Saw Oo, a US-based activist opposed to the ruling junta, describes Independence Day as the start of Burma's civil war.
"The war is still going on - Burma is the longest civil-war society in the world."
Aung Saw Oo is a member of the National League for Democracy (NLD) - the Burmese opposition party led by Aung San Suu Kyi, the daughter of Aung San.
The NLD has decided to mark the anniversary with protests, and it is clear that few dissidents consider the date one to celebrate.
Kyaw Zwa Moe, a journalist from Irrawaddy magazine, which is run by Burmese in exile, says there is little to commemorate because Burma has not achieved true independence.
"Independence didn't bring liberty, prosperity or happiness to the Burmese people," he said.
"When we talk to young people in Rangoon and in the country, they don't even notice today is Independence Day."
In the decade following independence, Burma had no unifying figure to look to and its civilian government became overwhelmed by insurgencies from several ethnic and political communities.
In 1958 the army, led by Ne Win, stepped in to restore government control.
But Dr Pornpimol Trichoge, from Bangkok's Chulalongkorn University, says the generals developed a taste for power between 1958 and 1960 that they have never managed to shake off.
"The civil government and political parties had not had enough of a chance to build themselves up to be as strong as the army," he said.
In 1962, Ne Win assumed control of the country. The military has ruled Burma ever since.
Rewriting history
While the opposition has little cause to celebrate independence, the junta also has mixed feelings.
Current leader Gen Than Shwe did not appear at the Independence Day commemoration.
Kyaw Zwa Moe says the junta has spent its 45 years in power trying to eradicate the legacy of Aung San.
"Under Ne Win, they changed the picture on the currency - it used to have Aung San, but then the government removed his picture from the notes.
"Also in the school curricula - from primary school through to high school - they don't elaborate about Aung San."
He says the desire to wipe out the memory of Aung San is exacerbated by the strong family resemblance to his daughter.
"They don't even get a chance to see pictures of Aung San or Aung San Suu Kyi in Burma. Only the children born to political parents know all the facts."
Additional reporting by Philippa Fogarty in Bangkok.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/7171361.stm
Published: 2008/01/04 12:12:04 GMT
© BBC MMVIII
Crisis over election deepens in Kenya By Jeffrey Gettleman Thursday, January 3, 2008 c/o IHT
Crisis over election deepens in Kenya
By Jeffrey Gettleman
Thursday, January 3, 2008
NAIROBI: Nairobi degenerated into violence Thursday as the riot police used tear gas, batons and water cannons to push back thousands of opposition supporters who poured into the streets to answer a call for a million-person rally that had been banned by the government.
Later in the day, the Kenyan attorney general broke ranks with the president and insisted on an independent investigation into disputed election results, an indication of the growing divide within the government about how to solve a crisis that has ignited chaos and ethnic fighting throughout the country, killing more than 300 people.
Starting about 10 a.m., protesters burned tires, smashed windows and clashed with the police across Nairobi. Some demonstrators showed restraint, yelling to the rowdier members in their ranks, "Drop your stones!" Others tore through the slums, raping women and attacking residents with machetes, witnesses said. The body of one young man who had been hacked to death lay in a muddy alleyway. His face was covered with plastic bags and his shoes had been stolen.
"We are headed to die!" yelled one young protester as he charged a wall of police officers in body armor. But when a police officer fired a can of tear gas overhead, the young protester ran back.
It has been a week since Kenyans went to the polls in the most contested elections in the country's history and the dispute over whether Mwai Kibaki, the president, honestly won the most votes continues to violently divide the nation.
The attorney general, Amos Wako, said that an independent body should investigate the disputed vote tabulations, which gave the president, at the eleventh hour of the counting process, a razor thin margin of victory. But a few hours later, Kibaki repeated at a news conference that he had won the elections fair and square and would not relinquish power.
"I will personally lead this nation in healing," he said.
Alfred Mutua, the government's top spokesman, said the attorney general was merely making a suggestion and that an independent investigation into election irregularities "was not necessarily going to happen."
"The president prefers the court system," Mutua said. But, he added, "the president has nothing to hide."
Foreign diplomats continued to urge Kibaki and Raila Odinga, the main opposition leader who says he was cheated out of the presidency, to come to some sort of entente. Until last week, Kenya was one of the most promising countries on the continent, but ethnic violence, fueled by political passions, is now threatening to ruin that. The economy, one of the biggest in Africa, has ground to a halt. Roads are blocked. Shops are closed. Factories are idle. And the currency is plunging.
Beyond that, the unrest here is hurting the entire region. In Rwanda, gasoline stations are rationing fuel because their supply from Kenya has been cut. In Uganda, Sudan and Congo, displaced people are running out of food because UN relief trucks cannot get past vigilante checkpoints. Production in places like Tanzania is slowing down because parts made in Kenya are being held up.
"Kenya is the dynamo of this whole region," said Harvey Rouse, a diplomat for the European Union.
Rouse spoke from a hill overlooking an enormous slum where police officers were battling protesters. He and several other Western diplomats said they had come out to observe. They were literally a stone's throw from the front lines.
Thursday was supposed to be the day that Odinga's supporters held a million-person march into central Nairobi and meet at a place called Uhuru Park. But they never got close.
Thousands of riot police fanned out at dawn and sealed off the main roads into the city. They refused to let demonstrators pass.
Some were clearly peaceful, like the hundreds of women carrying palm leaves and walking barefoot to town.
For others, it was not so clear. One young protester crouched in the street with a rock in one hand and a green leaf, the sign of peace, in the other. "We have been patient long enough!" he yelled.
It is difficult to tell which way things are going. In the past two days, there have been no big attacks, like the one on Tuesday in which 50 people hiding in a church were burned alive. But reports from the provinces indicate that low- level killings are going on. And much of the violence is tribal-based, with tribes that support the opposition, like the Luos, Maasai, Kalenjin and Luhya, killing Kikuyus, the tribe of the president.
U.S. aide to press for calm
The top U.S. diplomat for Africa is being sent to Kenya to press leaders directly to calm the violence that has followed allegations of election fraud, the State Department said Thursday, The Associated Press reported from Washington.
Jendayi Frazer, assistant secretary of state for African affairs, was planning to leave Thursday for talks with Kibaki and Odinga, the opposition leader, Sean McCormack, a State Department spokesman, said.
McCormack said Frazer would not serve as a mediator,, but would try to encourage the leaders to get together and work toward a political solution. It was not clear how long Frazer will be in Kenya.
By Jeffrey Gettleman
Thursday, January 3, 2008
NAIROBI: Nairobi degenerated into violence Thursday as the riot police used tear gas, batons and water cannons to push back thousands of opposition supporters who poured into the streets to answer a call for a million-person rally that had been banned by the government.
Later in the day, the Kenyan attorney general broke ranks with the president and insisted on an independent investigation into disputed election results, an indication of the growing divide within the government about how to solve a crisis that has ignited chaos and ethnic fighting throughout the country, killing more than 300 people.
Starting about 10 a.m., protesters burned tires, smashed windows and clashed with the police across Nairobi. Some demonstrators showed restraint, yelling to the rowdier members in their ranks, "Drop your stones!" Others tore through the slums, raping women and attacking residents with machetes, witnesses said. The body of one young man who had been hacked to death lay in a muddy alleyway. His face was covered with plastic bags and his shoes had been stolen.
"We are headed to die!" yelled one young protester as he charged a wall of police officers in body armor. But when a police officer fired a can of tear gas overhead, the young protester ran back.
It has been a week since Kenyans went to the polls in the most contested elections in the country's history and the dispute over whether Mwai Kibaki, the president, honestly won the most votes continues to violently divide the nation.
The attorney general, Amos Wako, said that an independent body should investigate the disputed vote tabulations, which gave the president, at the eleventh hour of the counting process, a razor thin margin of victory. But a few hours later, Kibaki repeated at a news conference that he had won the elections fair and square and would not relinquish power.
"I will personally lead this nation in healing," he said.
Alfred Mutua, the government's top spokesman, said the attorney general was merely making a suggestion and that an independent investigation into election irregularities "was not necessarily going to happen."
"The president prefers the court system," Mutua said. But, he added, "the president has nothing to hide."
Foreign diplomats continued to urge Kibaki and Raila Odinga, the main opposition leader who says he was cheated out of the presidency, to come to some sort of entente. Until last week, Kenya was one of the most promising countries on the continent, but ethnic violence, fueled by political passions, is now threatening to ruin that. The economy, one of the biggest in Africa, has ground to a halt. Roads are blocked. Shops are closed. Factories are idle. And the currency is plunging.
Beyond that, the unrest here is hurting the entire region. In Rwanda, gasoline stations are rationing fuel because their supply from Kenya has been cut. In Uganda, Sudan and Congo, displaced people are running out of food because UN relief trucks cannot get past vigilante checkpoints. Production in places like Tanzania is slowing down because parts made in Kenya are being held up.
"Kenya is the dynamo of this whole region," said Harvey Rouse, a diplomat for the European Union.
Rouse spoke from a hill overlooking an enormous slum where police officers were battling protesters. He and several other Western diplomats said they had come out to observe. They were literally a stone's throw from the front lines.
Thursday was supposed to be the day that Odinga's supporters held a million-person march into central Nairobi and meet at a place called Uhuru Park. But they never got close.
Thousands of riot police fanned out at dawn and sealed off the main roads into the city. They refused to let demonstrators pass.
Some were clearly peaceful, like the hundreds of women carrying palm leaves and walking barefoot to town.
For others, it was not so clear. One young protester crouched in the street with a rock in one hand and a green leaf, the sign of peace, in the other. "We have been patient long enough!" he yelled.
It is difficult to tell which way things are going. In the past two days, there have been no big attacks, like the one on Tuesday in which 50 people hiding in a church were burned alive. But reports from the provinces indicate that low- level killings are going on. And much of the violence is tribal-based, with tribes that support the opposition, like the Luos, Maasai, Kalenjin and Luhya, killing Kikuyus, the tribe of the president.
U.S. aide to press for calm
The top U.S. diplomat for Africa is being sent to Kenya to press leaders directly to calm the violence that has followed allegations of election fraud, the State Department said Thursday, The Associated Press reported from Washington.
Jendayi Frazer, assistant secretary of state for African affairs, was planning to leave Thursday for talks with Kibaki and Odinga, the opposition leader, Sean McCormack, a State Department spokesman, said.
McCormack said Frazer would not serve as a mediator,, but would try to encourage the leaders to get together and work toward a political solution. It was not clear how long Frazer will be in Kenya.
'Miraculous' recovery for man who fell 47 floors By James Barron Friday, January 4, 2008 c/o IHT
'Miraculous' recovery for man who fell 47 floors
By James Barron
Friday, January 4, 2008
Alcides Moreno plunged 47 stories that morning last month, clinging to his 3-foot-wide window washer's platform as it shot down the dark glass face of an Upper East Side apartment building. His brother Edgar, who had been working with him on the platform, was killed.
Somehow, Alcides Moreno survived.
He was given roughly 24 pints of blood and 19 pints of plasma and underwent an operation to open his abdomen in the emergency room because, his doctor said, they did not want to risk moving him to an operating room. As December went on, he endured nine orthopedic operations.
Yet somehow, Alcides Moreno, the man who fell from the sky, survived.
In his hospital room, amid all the machines that helped keep him alive, his wife, Rosario, lifted his hand again and again to stroke her face and her hair, hoping against hope that a simple tactile sensation would remind him, would help bring him back.
Then on Christmas Day, Alcides Moreno reached out — and stroked the wrong face.
"Apparently he tried to do it to one of the nurses," Rosario Moreno said on Thursday, describing how she chided him, gently, when she was told what had happened. "I looked at him and said, 'You're not supposed to do that. I'm your wife, you touch your wife.'"
For the first time since the accident on Dec. 7, he spoke.
"He turned around and, in English, said, 'What did I do?'" she said. "It stunned me because I didn't know he could speak."
Surrounded by doctors who had helped save her husband, Rosario Moreno told her story at a press conference at which medical professionals with long years of experience in treating traumatic injuries used words like "miraculous" and "unprecedented" to describe something that seems remarkable: a man who fell nearly 500 feet into a New York alleyway is now talking and, with a little more luck, a few more operations and some rehabilitation therapy, may well walk again.
"If you are a believer in miracles, this would be one," said Dr. Philip Barie, the chief of the division of critical care at New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center in New York, where Alcides Moreno, 37, is being treated.
"We are very pleased — dare I say astonished? — at the level of recovery that this patient has enjoyed so far," he added, "and although there is more work to be done, we are very optimistic for his prospects for survival."
Optimistic though they were, the doctors tempered their discussion of Moreno's prospects with some pragmatism. He will undergo surgery Friday to stabilize his spine. Sometime after that, he faces another orthopedic operation. Then there will be long months in rehabilitation.
But they predicted that his recovery would be complete in about a year.
Asked at the press conference whether Moreno would walk again, Barie said, "We believe so, yes." He noted that Moreno's pelvis had not been injured in the fall. Barie also said that all the injuries to Moreno's legs — some 10 fractures — had been "repaired" except one.
"Our goal is not just survival, but functional survival," he said.
Still, Barie suggested that Moreno had taken the team treating him into largely uncharted medical territory. Barie said Moreno's medical team had had no experience with someone who had fallen so far. He said that falls from even three stories can be fatal if the victim hits his or her head on landing.
"Above 10 stories, most of the time we never see the patients because they usually go to the morgue," Barie said, though he added that the staff at New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell had treated — and had written a medical journal article about — a patient who survived a 19-story fall, less than half the distance Moreno fell.
"This is right up there with those anecdotes of people falling out of airplanes and surviving, people whose parachutes don't open and somehow they manage to survive," Barie said in an interview after the press conference. "We're talking about tiny, tiny percentages, well under 1 percent, of people who fall that distance and survive."
But Moreno, of Linden, New Jersey, confounded the odds from the beginning. He was sitting up when firefighters arrived at the building, the Solow Tower, at 265 East 66th Street. He was "on the borderline of consciousness" when he was wheeled into the emergency room, Barie said, despite serious injuries to his brain, his spine, his chest and his abdomen, along with several fractured ribs, a broken right arm and two broken legs.
Rosario Moreno said her husband's determination had not vanished that day. "If anything, he keeps me going," she said.
A moment later she added: "He wants to go to rehab. He wants to start walking." She also said she had told him he was not going back to his old job.
She said their three children — ages 14, 8 and 6 — had visited their father, the two younger children only once. She said she had wanted to show them that "Mommy wasn't lying" and that "unlike Edgar, he's alive."
Rosario Moreno said her husband apparently knew all along that his brother had died. She said that she did not tell him, but he mentioned it on Tuesday night. "He doesn't remember much about that day other than his brother passed," she said.
A full explanation for how the man survived, while his brother died, remained elusive. One theory is that Edgar Moreno, 30, was thrown from the platform as it sped toward the ground. One official who was at the scene said that part of Edgar Moreno's body was under the platform when rescuers arrived. But Barie also noted that Alcides Moreno had landed without striking his head.
Rosario Moreno was asked more than once at the press conference why she believed her husband had survived. "He was trained," she said "He knew what to do with the platform" — meaning, according to other window washers, lie flat and ride it down.
But she also hinted that he was all too aware of the risks of the job. "Even knowing about his brother, not a tear came down, and they were very close," she said. "They lived together. They did everything together."
Rosario Moreno said she did not know if her husband and brother-in-law had been worried about the safety of their scaffold that day. After the accident, another family member who is also a window washer, Jose Cumbicos, said they had mentioned their misgivings in a telephone call that morning. Cumbicos also said that the Morenos' supervisor had reassured them, saying a mechanical problem with their rig had been taken care of.
At least three agencies are investigating the accident.
By James Barron
Friday, January 4, 2008
Alcides Moreno plunged 47 stories that morning last month, clinging to his 3-foot-wide window washer's platform as it shot down the dark glass face of an Upper East Side apartment building. His brother Edgar, who had been working with him on the platform, was killed.
Somehow, Alcides Moreno survived.
He was given roughly 24 pints of blood and 19 pints of plasma and underwent an operation to open his abdomen in the emergency room because, his doctor said, they did not want to risk moving him to an operating room. As December went on, he endured nine orthopedic operations.
Yet somehow, Alcides Moreno, the man who fell from the sky, survived.
In his hospital room, amid all the machines that helped keep him alive, his wife, Rosario, lifted his hand again and again to stroke her face and her hair, hoping against hope that a simple tactile sensation would remind him, would help bring him back.
Then on Christmas Day, Alcides Moreno reached out — and stroked the wrong face.
"Apparently he tried to do it to one of the nurses," Rosario Moreno said on Thursday, describing how she chided him, gently, when she was told what had happened. "I looked at him and said, 'You're not supposed to do that. I'm your wife, you touch your wife.'"
For the first time since the accident on Dec. 7, he spoke.
"He turned around and, in English, said, 'What did I do?'" she said. "It stunned me because I didn't know he could speak."
Surrounded by doctors who had helped save her husband, Rosario Moreno told her story at a press conference at which medical professionals with long years of experience in treating traumatic injuries used words like "miraculous" and "unprecedented" to describe something that seems remarkable: a man who fell nearly 500 feet into a New York alleyway is now talking and, with a little more luck, a few more operations and some rehabilitation therapy, may well walk again.
"If you are a believer in miracles, this would be one," said Dr. Philip Barie, the chief of the division of critical care at New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center in New York, where Alcides Moreno, 37, is being treated.
"We are very pleased — dare I say astonished? — at the level of recovery that this patient has enjoyed so far," he added, "and although there is more work to be done, we are very optimistic for his prospects for survival."
Optimistic though they were, the doctors tempered their discussion of Moreno's prospects with some pragmatism. He will undergo surgery Friday to stabilize his spine. Sometime after that, he faces another orthopedic operation. Then there will be long months in rehabilitation.
But they predicted that his recovery would be complete in about a year.
Asked at the press conference whether Moreno would walk again, Barie said, "We believe so, yes." He noted that Moreno's pelvis had not been injured in the fall. Barie also said that all the injuries to Moreno's legs — some 10 fractures — had been "repaired" except one.
"Our goal is not just survival, but functional survival," he said.
Still, Barie suggested that Moreno had taken the team treating him into largely uncharted medical territory. Barie said Moreno's medical team had had no experience with someone who had fallen so far. He said that falls from even three stories can be fatal if the victim hits his or her head on landing.
"Above 10 stories, most of the time we never see the patients because they usually go to the morgue," Barie said, though he added that the staff at New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell had treated — and had written a medical journal article about — a patient who survived a 19-story fall, less than half the distance Moreno fell.
"This is right up there with those anecdotes of people falling out of airplanes and surviving, people whose parachutes don't open and somehow they manage to survive," Barie said in an interview after the press conference. "We're talking about tiny, tiny percentages, well under 1 percent, of people who fall that distance and survive."
But Moreno, of Linden, New Jersey, confounded the odds from the beginning. He was sitting up when firefighters arrived at the building, the Solow Tower, at 265 East 66th Street. He was "on the borderline of consciousness" when he was wheeled into the emergency room, Barie said, despite serious injuries to his brain, his spine, his chest and his abdomen, along with several fractured ribs, a broken right arm and two broken legs.
Rosario Moreno said her husband's determination had not vanished that day. "If anything, he keeps me going," she said.
A moment later she added: "He wants to go to rehab. He wants to start walking." She also said she had told him he was not going back to his old job.
She said their three children — ages 14, 8 and 6 — had visited their father, the two younger children only once. She said she had wanted to show them that "Mommy wasn't lying" and that "unlike Edgar, he's alive."
Rosario Moreno said her husband apparently knew all along that his brother had died. She said that she did not tell him, but he mentioned it on Tuesday night. "He doesn't remember much about that day other than his brother passed," she said.
A full explanation for how the man survived, while his brother died, remained elusive. One theory is that Edgar Moreno, 30, was thrown from the platform as it sped toward the ground. One official who was at the scene said that part of Edgar Moreno's body was under the platform when rescuers arrived. But Barie also noted that Alcides Moreno had landed without striking his head.
Rosario Moreno was asked more than once at the press conference why she believed her husband had survived. "He was trained," she said "He knew what to do with the platform" — meaning, according to other window washers, lie flat and ride it down.
But she also hinted that he was all too aware of the risks of the job. "Even knowing about his brother, not a tear came down, and they were very close," she said. "They lived together. They did everything together."
Rosario Moreno said she did not know if her husband and brother-in-law had been worried about the safety of their scaffold that day. After the accident, another family member who is also a window washer, Jose Cumbicos, said they had mentioned their misgivings in a telephone call that morning. Cumbicos also said that the Morenos' supervisor had reassured them, saying a mechanical problem with their rig had been taken care of.
At least three agencies are investigating the accident.
Economy and geopolitics decide where oil goes next By Clifford Krauss Friday, January 4, 2008 c/o IHT
Economy and geopolitics decide where oil goes next
By Clifford Krauss
Friday, January 4, 2008
NOW that the price of crude oil has crossed the $100-a-barrel threshold, and then retreated slightly, what direction will it take now?
Many experts say it will go up, then down, and then maybe up again. That, anyway, has been the pattern of the last several years of volatile prices.
The arguments for even higher oil prices are well known. The economies of China and India are booming and hungry for energy. Oil fields in Mexico, the United States and several other oil producers are drying up, tightening world supplies. President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela is using oil as a political weapon. Rebels in Nigeria are creating havoc in some of Africa's most productive oil fields.
The war in Iraq rages on. The dollar is weakening, causing hedge funds and traders to flee to oil and other commodities as a safe haven.
But all those factors were in play last summer when the price fell to about $60 a barrel, before it rallied at the end of the year. The price touched $100 on Wednesday and surpassed that briefly on Thursday before retreating after the government reported higher-than-expected heating oil and gasoline supplies. The price settled at $99.18 a barrel, down 44 cents.
"Predicting oil prices continually demonstrates the perils of prophecy, because oil prices are the derivative of what happens in the global economy and global geopolitics," said Daniel Yergin, chairman of Cambridge Energy Research Associates. Yergin said he could foresee oil prices surging as high as $150 in the next few years or falling as low as $40.
John Richels, president of the Devon Energy Corporation, an international oil and gas company based in Oklahoma City, said $150 a barrel was possible, but so was $55. "We have to make investments based on our outlook over a long period of time," he said. "It is tough."
Central to the question of where oil prices will go is the effect of high prices on the consumption and development of alternative fuels.
Large amounts of public and private investment are going into solar, wind and biofuel development, but so far they are making only a slight contribution to energy supplies. Scientific and engineering leaps, like developing the atomic bomb or sending a man to the moon, can be made relatively quickly, but they are still measured in years.
Until now, most economists have been surprised that the rise in oil prices — from as low as $11 less than a decade ago — has not had a greater effect on American consumers. But with oil prices rising at an increasingly rapid rate over the last few months in conjunction with the housing market slump and credit squeeze, many economists now wonder whether oil prices could tip the economy into a recession.
A recession, of course, would curb oil demand. That would push oil prices right back down again, or so the theory goes, as fewer consumers drive to the mall, companies produce and ship less and world trade slows.
"If we are slowing down, we will not be buying as much goods from China and services from India," said Addison Armstrong, director for market research at Tradition Energy, an energy broker that deals with banks and hedge funds. "My forecast for 2008 is that crude prices will average $75 a barrel, and that is based on a scenario of a slowing economy in the United States."
But Armstrong and other experts cautioned that a protracted insurgency in Nigeria, a punishing hurricane season or other unpredictable events could take oil prices up even more.
So why are oil prices going up now? The military situation in Iraq is arguably improving, and Iraqi oil exports are beginning to flow again. Tensions with Iran have eased a bit. There are forecasts for a mild late winter in the United States, which should help bolster oil and gasoline inventories going into the spring and summer driving season.
Many experts say the answer lies in the investment decisions of traders and hedge funds. With the markets in equities, housing, credit and currency shaky in the United States, traders are betting on oil and other commodities as a perceived safe haven.
Phil Flynn, a vice president and market analyst with the Alaron Trading Corporation in Chicago, said the recent interest rate cuts by the Federal Reserve had underscored for traders the depths of the country's economic risks and led them to buy oil futures.
Flynn said he thought that oil prices were more likely to fall than rise, "because I think the factors that drove us to today are unlikely to repeat in 2008." He added that he thinks the dollar will find a bottom in 2008 and that the problems in housing are already priced into the markets.
But most experts say that if oil prices do go down, they will probably not go down very far or for very long.
Richels of Devon Energy said that consumers in Europe and Japan were not feeling the same pressure as Americans because their currencies have been strengthening and not weakening.
"There is still a lot of demand that is outside of the United States," Richels said. "There is increasing oil consumption, particularly in the developing nations, and oil is getting more difficult to find."
By Clifford Krauss
Friday, January 4, 2008
NOW that the price of crude oil has crossed the $100-a-barrel threshold, and then retreated slightly, what direction will it take now?
Many experts say it will go up, then down, and then maybe up again. That, anyway, has been the pattern of the last several years of volatile prices.
The arguments for even higher oil prices are well known. The economies of China and India are booming and hungry for energy. Oil fields in Mexico, the United States and several other oil producers are drying up, tightening world supplies. President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela is using oil as a political weapon. Rebels in Nigeria are creating havoc in some of Africa's most productive oil fields.
The war in Iraq rages on. The dollar is weakening, causing hedge funds and traders to flee to oil and other commodities as a safe haven.
But all those factors were in play last summer when the price fell to about $60 a barrel, before it rallied at the end of the year. The price touched $100 on Wednesday and surpassed that briefly on Thursday before retreating after the government reported higher-than-expected heating oil and gasoline supplies. The price settled at $99.18 a barrel, down 44 cents.
"Predicting oil prices continually demonstrates the perils of prophecy, because oil prices are the derivative of what happens in the global economy and global geopolitics," said Daniel Yergin, chairman of Cambridge Energy Research Associates. Yergin said he could foresee oil prices surging as high as $150 in the next few years or falling as low as $40.
John Richels, president of the Devon Energy Corporation, an international oil and gas company based in Oklahoma City, said $150 a barrel was possible, but so was $55. "We have to make investments based on our outlook over a long period of time," he said. "It is tough."
Central to the question of where oil prices will go is the effect of high prices on the consumption and development of alternative fuels.
Large amounts of public and private investment are going into solar, wind and biofuel development, but so far they are making only a slight contribution to energy supplies. Scientific and engineering leaps, like developing the atomic bomb or sending a man to the moon, can be made relatively quickly, but they are still measured in years.
Until now, most economists have been surprised that the rise in oil prices — from as low as $11 less than a decade ago — has not had a greater effect on American consumers. But with oil prices rising at an increasingly rapid rate over the last few months in conjunction with the housing market slump and credit squeeze, many economists now wonder whether oil prices could tip the economy into a recession.
A recession, of course, would curb oil demand. That would push oil prices right back down again, or so the theory goes, as fewer consumers drive to the mall, companies produce and ship less and world trade slows.
"If we are slowing down, we will not be buying as much goods from China and services from India," said Addison Armstrong, director for market research at Tradition Energy, an energy broker that deals with banks and hedge funds. "My forecast for 2008 is that crude prices will average $75 a barrel, and that is based on a scenario of a slowing economy in the United States."
But Armstrong and other experts cautioned that a protracted insurgency in Nigeria, a punishing hurricane season or other unpredictable events could take oil prices up even more.
So why are oil prices going up now? The military situation in Iraq is arguably improving, and Iraqi oil exports are beginning to flow again. Tensions with Iran have eased a bit. There are forecasts for a mild late winter in the United States, which should help bolster oil and gasoline inventories going into the spring and summer driving season.
Many experts say the answer lies in the investment decisions of traders and hedge funds. With the markets in equities, housing, credit and currency shaky in the United States, traders are betting on oil and other commodities as a perceived safe haven.
Phil Flynn, a vice president and market analyst with the Alaron Trading Corporation in Chicago, said the recent interest rate cuts by the Federal Reserve had underscored for traders the depths of the country's economic risks and led them to buy oil futures.
Flynn said he thought that oil prices were more likely to fall than rise, "because I think the factors that drove us to today are unlikely to repeat in 2008." He added that he thinks the dollar will find a bottom in 2008 and that the problems in housing are already priced into the markets.
But most experts say that if oil prices do go down, they will probably not go down very far or for very long.
Richels of Devon Energy said that consumers in Europe and Japan were not feeling the same pressure as Americans because their currencies have been strengthening and not weakening.
"There is still a lot of demand that is outside of the United States," Richels said. "There is increasing oil consumption, particularly in the developing nations, and oil is getting more difficult to find."
George MacDonald Fraser: Writer whose tales of Flashman changed the face of British historical fiction c/o Independent Jan 03 2008
George MacDonald Fraser: Writer whose tales of Flashman changed the face of British historical fiction
George MacDonald Fraser, writer and journalist: born Carlisle 2 April 1925; deputy editor, Glasgow Herald 1964-69; FRSL 1998; OBE 1999; married 1949 Kathleen Hetherington (two sons, two daughters); died Strang, Isle of Man 2 January 2008
Published: 04 January 2008
It needed only a few moments exposure to one of his reminiscing public performances to establish that George MacDonald Fraser had led quite a life. His experiences included being held upside down by his heels, while strafed by Japanese sniper fire, as he foraged for water during the Burma Campaign of the Second World War, basking in the admiration of Charlie Chaplin and worrying about whether Burt Lancaster disliked his film scripts. Posterity, on the other hand, will remember him for a single achievement. This was the creation, or rather the re-creation, of Harry Flashman, originally the villain of Thomas Hughes's Victorian morality tale Tom Brown's Schooldays (1857), but remodelled, under MacDonald Fraser's expert grasp, into the star of a dozen books that changed the face of British historical fiction.
MacDonald Fraser came late to authorship: he was already in his mid-forties when the first Flashman novel inspired in P.G. Wodehouse what he called "that watcher-of-the-skies-when-a-new-planet stuff", with a quarter-century's military service and bread-and-butter journalism behind him. Though no one could have been more Scottish in his outward demeanour, George MacDonald Fraser was a Carlisle doctor's son, and educated at the town's grammar school, before indifferent exam results prompted a relocation to Glasgow Academy. A fan of blood-and-thunder historical novels since pre-teendom – he discovered Rafael Sabatini's Captain Blood at the age of 10 – MacDonald Fraser was also fascinated by the history of the Anglo-Scottish border. This interest later produced two full-length novels (The Candlemass Road, 1993 and The Reivers, 2007) and a historical work, The Steel Bonnets (1971).
In 1943, aged 18, and fearing that he would never amass the qualifications necessary to enter Glasgow University's medical school, he enlisted in the Border Regiment and was sent to India. Quartered Safe Out Here (1992), his memoir of the Burma Campaign, is one of the great military autobiographies: unsparing in its head-first immersion in the horrors of war, but also – a characteristic of nearly everything MacDonald Fraser wrote – extremely funny. Among other exploits he was promoted to lance-corporal on four occasions, but three times broken to private for minor infringements of army routine. One of these involved losing a tea urn. Subsequently he was given a commission in the Gordon Highlanders and served with the regiment in the Middle East and North Africa, eventually leaving the army in 1947. This period in his life forms the back-drop to the semi-autobiographical "McAuslan" stories, collected in The General Danced at Dawn (1970), McAuslan in the Rough (1974) and The Sheikh and the Dustbin (1988).
Returned to Carlisle, MacDonald Fraser embarked on a career in journalism. Beginning with a post on the Carlisle Journal, this took him briefly to Canada and then to Glasgow, where he settled with his family in 1953. He had married Kathleen Hetherington, a reporter on a rival paper, in 1949. Passed over for ultimate preferment on the Glasgow Herald – though at one point he rose to the post of acting editor – he determined, as he put it to his wife, "to write us out of this".
The result was a novel based on "The Flashman Papers", supposedly a mass of hand-written manuscripts discovered during a sale of household furniture at Ashby, Leicestershire in 1965 but in fact deriving from MacDonald Fraser's own exhaustive researches among the Victorian history books.
The distinguishing mark of the Flashman series, which eventually ran to a dozen instalments, is its historical detail. Harry Paget Flashman, its motivating force, may in the end be only an inspired invention, but the world in which he moves is sharply and accurately laid out. As well as offering readers the comparatively rare spectacle of an unreal person at large in a real world, MacDonald Fraser added a further refinement. Unlike the conventional heroes of historical fiction, Flashman is a coward, a bully and a satyromaniacal philanderer. The fistfuls of honours and decorations with which he is routinely showered (these include a General's rank, the Victoria Cross, the Queen's Medal and the thanks of Parliament) are invariably the result of grotesque accidents.
This worm's-eye view of history gives the books a significant internal dynamic. Knowing that Flashman is a self-advertised moral absence, the reader believes everything that he says, on the grounds that he has no reason to dissemble. All this realises a scarifying, but often bitterly humorous, critique of the Victorian Imperial project, which Flashman witnesses at first hand for upwards of half a century. Here, for example, in Flashman at the Charge (1973), he ruminates on the Crimean campaign of 1854 in which, inevitably, he manages to breast the guns at Balaclava and foil a Russian plot to invade India:
I was as close to the conduct of the war in the summer of 1854 as anyone, and I can tell you truthfully that the official view of the whole thing was:
"Well, here we are, the French and ourselves, at war with Russia, in order to protect Turkey. Ve-ery good. What shall we do, then? Better attack Russia, eh? H'm, yes. (Pause). Big place, ain't it?"
Turned down by nearly every publisher in London, Flashman, which follows its anti-hero ingloriously through the Afghan War of 1841-42, was an instant success. In subsequent adventures, Flashman impersonates Danish royalty in a rewrite of The Prisoner of Zenda (Royal Flash, 1970), gets mixed up in the slave trade (Flash For Freedom!, 1971), sails a war canoe with Rajah Brooke in Borneo (Flashman's Lady, 1977), is the solitary survivor of Custer's army at the Battle of the Little Big Horn (Flashman and the Redskins, 1982) and holes up with the US abolitionist John Brown at Harper's Ferry (Flashman and the Angel of the Lord, 1994). Among a riot of encounters with the great and good, he becomes the intimate of Bismarck, Queen Victoria, Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant and Ranavalona, the deranged and lustful monarch of 1840s Madagascar.
The pace and vigour of MacDonald Fraser's prose had him bracketed with Stevenson by discerning critics, but there were also comparisons with tough-minded 18th-century realists such as Tobias Smollett. A small part of his vast international fan-base – mostly deluded Americans – continued to believe that the books were genuine historical documents and Macdonald Fraser merely their editor.
From the early 1970s, on the back of Flashman's success, MacDonald Fraser pursued a second and yet more lucrative career as a Hollywood screen-writer. Here his credits included The Three Musketeers (1973), a sequel, The Four Musketeers (1974), Royal Flash (adapted from the novel, 1975), the James Bond vehicle Octopussy (1983) and Red Sonja (1985), featuring the young Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Royal Flash, starring Malcolm McDowell and Britt Ekland, was not a success: there were obvious difficulties in reproducing the Flashman "voice" in any medium beyond the page, and no subsequent adaptation ever reached the widescreen. As The Light's On at Signpost (2002), his Hollywood memoir, makes clear, MacDonald Fraser came from a generation for whom the novelty of cinema never waned: the shaky transit of – say – an aged Gregory Peck across a restaurant foyer always has him delightedly turning his head.
In his personal dealings, MacDonald Fraser combined an occasionally rugged reserve with an extreme courtesy. He was devoted to his wife, Kathleen, and delighted in the success of his novelist daughter Caro. As he grew older, living in the tax exile's seclusion of the Isle of Man, his political and social views became markedly hard-line. The Light's On at Signpost is interspersed, and – most readers would have said – marred by periodic teeth-gnashings on the subject of law and order, New Labour and other outrages.
Exposure to a typical MacDonald Fraser audience, which tended to reflect these opinions, could occasionally unnerve some of his more "literary" admirers. A younger acquaintance who had conducted a conversazioni with him at the Royal Army Museum in Chelsea, in front of an audience largely composed of serving soldiers, remarked that the experience made him feel "vaguely homosexual and left-wing".
Although MacDonald Fraser kept writing almost to the end – he could be glimpsed in Hatchard's only a month or two ago signing copies of The Reivers for a queue stretching towards the door – the last decade of his life was a thin time for Flashman-fanciers, with only a book of fragmentary pieces (Flashman and the Tiger, 1999) and an account of the Abyssinian War of 1868 (Flashman on the March, 2005) to break the drought.
One of the great sadnesses of MacDonald Fraser's death is that, to judge from various hints strewn around the novels, there were at least four more Flashman adventures waiting to be written. What did he get up to in the American Civil War? How did he survive Rorke's Drift? What precise exploit, presumably in the Mexican Revolution, had him awarded the San Serafino Order of Purity and Truth (Fourth Class)? Now, alas, we shall never know.
An OBE and a belated Fellowship of the Royal Society of Literature aside, MacDonald Fraser received no formal recognition for his work, won no literary prizes and goes unmentioned in the Oxford Companion to English Literature. This neglect did not appear to trouble him. But he belonged to what in these days is an almost exclusive category – the blood-and-thunder merchant who, however much he shies away from the fact, is also a genuine literary artist.
D.J. Taylor
Back in the early 1990s, writes Jack Adrian, George MacDonald Fraser was prevailed upon to write a foreword to a volume of rare short stories by the historical novelist Rafael Sabatini (1875-1950) I put together for the Oxford University Press. His fee was not a fat cheque but a case of decent claret, although, as he said, "I'd have done it for free: Sabatini is one of my gods."
Only one thing disturbed him. Across the bottom of the front of the dust-jacket for the finished book his name was writ large – in pink upper-case. "Good God!" he growled down the phone. "People'll think I've turned into some kind of pinko-lefty in my dotage!" I assured him there was no need to worry: he'd made his general views on life, politics, history, current affairs, and so on, pretty clear by then.
Even so, he was an odd mixture of conservative (small "c") and gleeful rebel, and liked nothing better than to, in the old-fashioned phrase, "épater les bourgeois" or discombobulate the pompously respectable. "Bring down the mighty from their seats?" he chuckled with immense relish.
His wonderful Flashman series is an extended act of subversion against the kind of "Victorian values" promoted by politicians who have no notion or understanding of history, and certainly no knowledge of the real 19th century.
If there was one word he loved above all else, it was "storyteller". For him there was no greater calling and it was precisely what he was, and a great one at that.
George MacDonald Fraser, writer and journalist: born Carlisle 2 April 1925; deputy editor, Glasgow Herald 1964-69; FRSL 1998; OBE 1999; married 1949 Kathleen Hetherington (two sons, two daughters); died Strang, Isle of Man 2 January 2008
Published: 04 January 2008
It needed only a few moments exposure to one of his reminiscing public performances to establish that George MacDonald Fraser had led quite a life. His experiences included being held upside down by his heels, while strafed by Japanese sniper fire, as he foraged for water during the Burma Campaign of the Second World War, basking in the admiration of Charlie Chaplin and worrying about whether Burt Lancaster disliked his film scripts. Posterity, on the other hand, will remember him for a single achievement. This was the creation, or rather the re-creation, of Harry Flashman, originally the villain of Thomas Hughes's Victorian morality tale Tom Brown's Schooldays (1857), but remodelled, under MacDonald Fraser's expert grasp, into the star of a dozen books that changed the face of British historical fiction.
MacDonald Fraser came late to authorship: he was already in his mid-forties when the first Flashman novel inspired in P.G. Wodehouse what he called "that watcher-of-the-skies-when-a-new-planet stuff", with a quarter-century's military service and bread-and-butter journalism behind him. Though no one could have been more Scottish in his outward demeanour, George MacDonald Fraser was a Carlisle doctor's son, and educated at the town's grammar school, before indifferent exam results prompted a relocation to Glasgow Academy. A fan of blood-and-thunder historical novels since pre-teendom – he discovered Rafael Sabatini's Captain Blood at the age of 10 – MacDonald Fraser was also fascinated by the history of the Anglo-Scottish border. This interest later produced two full-length novels (The Candlemass Road, 1993 and The Reivers, 2007) and a historical work, The Steel Bonnets (1971).
In 1943, aged 18, and fearing that he would never amass the qualifications necessary to enter Glasgow University's medical school, he enlisted in the Border Regiment and was sent to India. Quartered Safe Out Here (1992), his memoir of the Burma Campaign, is one of the great military autobiographies: unsparing in its head-first immersion in the horrors of war, but also – a characteristic of nearly everything MacDonald Fraser wrote – extremely funny. Among other exploits he was promoted to lance-corporal on four occasions, but three times broken to private for minor infringements of army routine. One of these involved losing a tea urn. Subsequently he was given a commission in the Gordon Highlanders and served with the regiment in the Middle East and North Africa, eventually leaving the army in 1947. This period in his life forms the back-drop to the semi-autobiographical "McAuslan" stories, collected in The General Danced at Dawn (1970), McAuslan in the Rough (1974) and The Sheikh and the Dustbin (1988).
Returned to Carlisle, MacDonald Fraser embarked on a career in journalism. Beginning with a post on the Carlisle Journal, this took him briefly to Canada and then to Glasgow, where he settled with his family in 1953. He had married Kathleen Hetherington, a reporter on a rival paper, in 1949. Passed over for ultimate preferment on the Glasgow Herald – though at one point he rose to the post of acting editor – he determined, as he put it to his wife, "to write us out of this".
The result was a novel based on "The Flashman Papers", supposedly a mass of hand-written manuscripts discovered during a sale of household furniture at Ashby, Leicestershire in 1965 but in fact deriving from MacDonald Fraser's own exhaustive researches among the Victorian history books.
The distinguishing mark of the Flashman series, which eventually ran to a dozen instalments, is its historical detail. Harry Paget Flashman, its motivating force, may in the end be only an inspired invention, but the world in which he moves is sharply and accurately laid out. As well as offering readers the comparatively rare spectacle of an unreal person at large in a real world, MacDonald Fraser added a further refinement. Unlike the conventional heroes of historical fiction, Flashman is a coward, a bully and a satyromaniacal philanderer. The fistfuls of honours and decorations with which he is routinely showered (these include a General's rank, the Victoria Cross, the Queen's Medal and the thanks of Parliament) are invariably the result of grotesque accidents.
This worm's-eye view of history gives the books a significant internal dynamic. Knowing that Flashman is a self-advertised moral absence, the reader believes everything that he says, on the grounds that he has no reason to dissemble. All this realises a scarifying, but often bitterly humorous, critique of the Victorian Imperial project, which Flashman witnesses at first hand for upwards of half a century. Here, for example, in Flashman at the Charge (1973), he ruminates on the Crimean campaign of 1854 in which, inevitably, he manages to breast the guns at Balaclava and foil a Russian plot to invade India:
I was as close to the conduct of the war in the summer of 1854 as anyone, and I can tell you truthfully that the official view of the whole thing was:
"Well, here we are, the French and ourselves, at war with Russia, in order to protect Turkey. Ve-ery good. What shall we do, then? Better attack Russia, eh? H'm, yes. (Pause). Big place, ain't it?"
Turned down by nearly every publisher in London, Flashman, which follows its anti-hero ingloriously through the Afghan War of 1841-42, was an instant success. In subsequent adventures, Flashman impersonates Danish royalty in a rewrite of The Prisoner of Zenda (Royal Flash, 1970), gets mixed up in the slave trade (Flash For Freedom!, 1971), sails a war canoe with Rajah Brooke in Borneo (Flashman's Lady, 1977), is the solitary survivor of Custer's army at the Battle of the Little Big Horn (Flashman and the Redskins, 1982) and holes up with the US abolitionist John Brown at Harper's Ferry (Flashman and the Angel of the Lord, 1994). Among a riot of encounters with the great and good, he becomes the intimate of Bismarck, Queen Victoria, Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant and Ranavalona, the deranged and lustful monarch of 1840s Madagascar.
The pace and vigour of MacDonald Fraser's prose had him bracketed with Stevenson by discerning critics, but there were also comparisons with tough-minded 18th-century realists such as Tobias Smollett. A small part of his vast international fan-base – mostly deluded Americans – continued to believe that the books were genuine historical documents and Macdonald Fraser merely their editor.
From the early 1970s, on the back of Flashman's success, MacDonald Fraser pursued a second and yet more lucrative career as a Hollywood screen-writer. Here his credits included The Three Musketeers (1973), a sequel, The Four Musketeers (1974), Royal Flash (adapted from the novel, 1975), the James Bond vehicle Octopussy (1983) and Red Sonja (1985), featuring the young Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Royal Flash, starring Malcolm McDowell and Britt Ekland, was not a success: there were obvious difficulties in reproducing the Flashman "voice" in any medium beyond the page, and no subsequent adaptation ever reached the widescreen. As The Light's On at Signpost (2002), his Hollywood memoir, makes clear, MacDonald Fraser came from a generation for whom the novelty of cinema never waned: the shaky transit of – say – an aged Gregory Peck across a restaurant foyer always has him delightedly turning his head.
In his personal dealings, MacDonald Fraser combined an occasionally rugged reserve with an extreme courtesy. He was devoted to his wife, Kathleen, and delighted in the success of his novelist daughter Caro. As he grew older, living in the tax exile's seclusion of the Isle of Man, his political and social views became markedly hard-line. The Light's On at Signpost is interspersed, and – most readers would have said – marred by periodic teeth-gnashings on the subject of law and order, New Labour and other outrages.
Exposure to a typical MacDonald Fraser audience, which tended to reflect these opinions, could occasionally unnerve some of his more "literary" admirers. A younger acquaintance who had conducted a conversazioni with him at the Royal Army Museum in Chelsea, in front of an audience largely composed of serving soldiers, remarked that the experience made him feel "vaguely homosexual and left-wing".
Although MacDonald Fraser kept writing almost to the end – he could be glimpsed in Hatchard's only a month or two ago signing copies of The Reivers for a queue stretching towards the door – the last decade of his life was a thin time for Flashman-fanciers, with only a book of fragmentary pieces (Flashman and the Tiger, 1999) and an account of the Abyssinian War of 1868 (Flashman on the March, 2005) to break the drought.
One of the great sadnesses of MacDonald Fraser's death is that, to judge from various hints strewn around the novels, there were at least four more Flashman adventures waiting to be written. What did he get up to in the American Civil War? How did he survive Rorke's Drift? What precise exploit, presumably in the Mexican Revolution, had him awarded the San Serafino Order of Purity and Truth (Fourth Class)? Now, alas, we shall never know.
An OBE and a belated Fellowship of the Royal Society of Literature aside, MacDonald Fraser received no formal recognition for his work, won no literary prizes and goes unmentioned in the Oxford Companion to English Literature. This neglect did not appear to trouble him. But he belonged to what in these days is an almost exclusive category – the blood-and-thunder merchant who, however much he shies away from the fact, is also a genuine literary artist.
D.J. Taylor
Back in the early 1990s, writes Jack Adrian, George MacDonald Fraser was prevailed upon to write a foreword to a volume of rare short stories by the historical novelist Rafael Sabatini (1875-1950) I put together for the Oxford University Press. His fee was not a fat cheque but a case of decent claret, although, as he said, "I'd have done it for free: Sabatini is one of my gods."
Only one thing disturbed him. Across the bottom of the front of the dust-jacket for the finished book his name was writ large – in pink upper-case. "Good God!" he growled down the phone. "People'll think I've turned into some kind of pinko-lefty in my dotage!" I assured him there was no need to worry: he'd made his general views on life, politics, history, current affairs, and so on, pretty clear by then.
Even so, he was an odd mixture of conservative (small "c") and gleeful rebel, and liked nothing better than to, in the old-fashioned phrase, "épater les bourgeois" or discombobulate the pompously respectable. "Bring down the mighty from their seats?" he chuckled with immense relish.
His wonderful Flashman series is an extended act of subversion against the kind of "Victorian values" promoted by politicians who have no notion or understanding of history, and certainly no knowledge of the real 19th century.
If there was one word he loved above all else, it was "storyteller". For him there was no greater calling and it was precisely what he was, and a great one at that.
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