New Internationalist articles from January 2005

New Internationalist archives from January 2005

From this month's editor.(Editorial)
January 1, 2005... THIS edition of the NI was completed just two days before disaster overwhelmed so many people living on the rim of the Indian Ocean. There can be few people anywhere in the world who have not also been struck by the shockwaves of a 'natural'...

Religious rights.(LETTERS)(Letter to the Editor)
January 1, 2005... I was surprised at the superior, mocking tone adopted in Seriously (NI 374), referring to plaques espousing creationist theories at sites such as the Grand Canyon. You rightly condemn some of the actions of the American Government. But to...

Men for change.(LETTERS)(Letter to the Editor)
January 1, 2005... As a man working towards ending violence against women I was excited to hear of other projects and individuals who are trying to engage men in this issue (Women's rights, NI 373). As Michael Kimmel explains ('A Black woman took my job')...

Add it up.(LETTERS)(Letter to the Editor)
January 1, 2005... In presenting the 'masculinization of wealth' as the neglected side of the 'feminization of poverty', Michael Kimmel (NI 373) can make an even stronger case for demonstrating male privilege by fixing the math: if US women earn 70 cents for...

States of engagement.(LETTERS)(Letter to the Editor)
January 1, 2005... Although I find myself broadly in sympathy with Paul Kingsnorth's argument (Essay, NI 373), there is one aspect of it that does not help his call for political engagement. Like many critics of global capitalism, he conflates markets (global or...

Painful debate.(LETTERS)(Letter to the Editor)
January 1, 2005... While living in London in 2000-01, I was often embarrassed by expressions of antisemitism in internationalist and radical Left circles (Judeophobia, NI 372). When I objected, I was told that I was only 'Jew-friendly' because of the history of...

Running the risk.(LETTERS)(Letter to the Editor)
January 1, 2005... I strongly support your effort to combat antisemitism (NI 372). I also support security for Israel as well as justice for Palestinians. But it's wrong to call former French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin antisemitic for his comment...

Questions of identification.(LETTERS)(Letter to the Editor)
January 1, 2005... I enjoyed the Judeophobia issue's Keynote essay and found in it much I agreed with, but I must take issue with one rather fundamental point. This is the assumption that the 'likening [of] Sharon to Hitler' and the condemnation of 'Zionazis'...

Deadly subsidies.(LETTERS)(Letter to the Editor)
January 1, 2005... The Free Trade Game (NI 374) was very informative, but you did not cover the subsidies currently paid to the arms trade. Weapons are specifically excluded from free trade agreements, and G8 governments all subsidize their export. See, for...

Right to respect.(LETTERS)(Letter to the Editor)
January 1, 2005... Judeophobia (NI 372) caused me to face my own prejudices. The Israeli/Palestinian conflict is too often polarized in the media, especially with the rise in recent times of fundamental Christianity. Your articles reminded me that Jews have the...

Philippine calumny.(LETTERS)(Letter to the Editor)
January 1, 2005... Before I file NI 371, I would like to deal with a calumny on the Philippines, in the Country Profile. 'Fairly benign colonization from 1898 when Spain ceded the Philippines to the US.' This is a fair statement of colonial revisionism. The...

Slave trade correction.(LETTERS)(Letter to the Editor)
January 1, 2005... Thank you for publishing my letter on the slave trade in NI 373. However, an error seems to have crept in, insofar as the date '1744' should have read '1774'. I'd be grateful if you could correct his, as I don't want people thinking I've got...

Asdghig's long march: Reem Haddad is seared by the pain and hope of lives scarred by genocide.(Letter from Lebanon)
January 1, 2005... THE book had been among my parents' possessions for years. They couldn't remember who had given it to them and they had never got around to reading it. Finding nothing to do one lazy afternoon, I began leafing through its pages. The sentences...

Highlighting the work of photographers from the Majority World.(SOUTHERN EXPOSURE)
January 1, 2005... I LIKE this picture because it leaves one wondering whether the ball went in or not. It's filled with suspense--the only person who has the answer to the question is the photographer. Unlike a professional basketball player, this aspiring...

Small arms, big trouble.(URVASHI BUTALIA'S VIEW FROM THE SOUTH)
January 1, 2005... NEWSPAPER headlines sometimes pass you by. I remember reading something a few weeks ago and thinking 'how odd'. But I didn't give it more attention than that until suddenly the news began to fill the pages of all our local newspapers. ...

Places of death: Gana fight to retain land in Botswana.(INDIGENOUS PEOPLES)
January 1, 2005... THE two Gana men never imagined they would find themselves on other continents thousands of kilometres away from their ancestral lands in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve in southern Africa. But the fight to save their homelands and their...

Landslide: Uruguay turns left.(CURRENTS)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2005... After 170 years of rule by traditional centre-right parties, the leftist Frente Amplio (Broad Front) won the 31 October 2004 elections with more than 50 per cent of the votes, taking the Presidency and a majority in both chambers. Second came...

Caught in the crossfire: epidemic of terrorist attacks against women.(IRAQ)(Organization for Women's Freedom )
January 1, 2005... THE Organization for Women's Freedom in Iraq (OWFI) recently sent out a communique stating that: 'Terrorist acts against women in Iraq by Islamic groups have increased dramatically in recent months and reached an unprecedented level under the...

The language of international organizations ...(CURRENTS)
January 1, 2005... Word power 5 EU abbrev. European Union; (archaic) bizarre festival where 25 men in suits gather in a room in Brussels and grin at each other UN prefix. un-; denotes inability; impotence Veto det. Esperanto for 'No' IMF abbrev....

Big bad world.(CURRENTS)
January 1, 2005... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Speechmarks.(CURRENTS)
January 1, 2005... 'There is no true social revolution without the liberation of women. May my eyes never see and my feet never take me to a society where half The people are held in silence.' Thomas Sankara (1949-87), African revolutionary leader,...

Under siege: villagers in southern Thailand fight a gas pipeline.(HUMAN RIGHTS)
January 1, 2005... THE southernmost provinces of Thailand, some parts of which are now reeling from the aftermath of the devastating tsunami, have been plagued with turmoil and killings since early this year. In Chana district in Songkla province, villagers are...

CopyCats.(True tales of a mixed-up world)(cloned-to-order pet)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2005... It was perhaps only a matter of time, but recently a Californian biotech startup called Genetic Savings & Clone (GSC) announced that it was the first company successfully to deliver a cloned-to-order pet. A woman in Texas paid the company...

Upside down: the United Nations at 60; It made peace with power, only to find that power would not make peace with the world. David Ransom probes some of the UN's genetic disorders--and its immunity to treatment.(The UN / KEYNOTE)
January 1, 2005... IN the baroque cavern of the San Francisco Opera House, 60 years ago, delegates assembled from the 50 nation-states that founded the United Nations. After several months of horse trading, amid comprehensive snooping by US agents, the screening...

Alejandra Costamagna -- writer, Santiago, Chile.(What the UN means to ...)
January 1, 2005... 'IT is impossible not to think about the UN after Bush and Iraq,' she says. 'The UN would be quite a different thing without that background. The UN has become Bush's toilet. The UN has become an operator dealing with the disasters Bush has...

The United Nations system: principal organs.
January 1, 2005... For reasons of space the list of organizations is selective. The World Trade Organization is the only 'related' body that has no constitutional links to the UN at all. [GRAPHIC OMITTED]

Saving humanity from hell: the failure of the UN to make heaven on earth should not obscure its mundane achievements, argues UN Under-Secretary General Shashi Tharoor.(The UN / HOW IT WORKS)
January 1, 2005... IN March 2003, as the debates were raging in the Security Council over Iraq, a BBC interviewer rather glibly asked me: 'So how does the UN feel about being seen as the "i" word--irrelevant?' [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] He was about to go...

Rafael Linares -- street bookseller, Caracas, Venezuela.(What the UN means to ...)
January 1, 2005... RAFAEL sells used books under a highway bridge in crowded downtown Caracas. All kinds of things are sold here, from books to pirate software, CDs, DVDs, clothes, food, beer. Traffic and music are heavy and noisy. Some people quietly play chess....

In memory of Srebrenica.(Genocide)
January 1, 2005... Last year marked the 10th anniversary of the genocide in Rwanda. This coming July a decade will have passed since the slaughter of Bosnian Muslims in the UN 'safe area' of Srebrenica. In the context of 'ethnic cleansing' during the war in...

The sky's no limit: the Kyoto Protocol is supposedly one of the jewels in the crown of the UN system. Adam Ma'anit is not dazzled.(The UN
January 1, 2005... ON 2 November 2004, tens of millions of people around the world were transfixed by the drama unfolding in the US elections. Many of us stayed up all night watching random states flicker blue or red on the map, hoping a change in the political...

Ramesh -- vendor of periodicals and magazines, Delhi.(What the UN means to ...)
January 1, 2005... SMILING through a face tanned mahogany by life on the streets of Delhi, Ramesh says that his biggest disappointment with the UN was its failure to prevent the devastation of Iraq, where he worked as a truck driver before the first Gulf War in...

The UN: the facts.
January 1, 2005... WHO BELONGS' Discounting current disputes, the only independent 'countries' not now in UN membership are the Vatican City and Taiwan. Decolonization in the 1960s and the collapse of the Soviet Union after 1989 led to a rapid growth in UN...

Grimm rewards: would the UN be better off without a rogue superpower in its midst? Ian Williams thinks not.(The UN / THE US & REFORM)
January 1, 2005... THE UN is like the speck of sand in the oyster, the irritant seed of a growing pearl. One of the reasons it irritates the American Right so much is that simply by existing it acts as a catalyst. The threat is not what it does, but what it...

Usha John -- teacher, Faridabad, India.(What the UN means to ...)(Brief Article)(Interview)
January 1, 2005... USHA is optimistic about the UN. But that is mostly because of the humanitarian work done by agencies like UNICEF and UNESCO--in a country with masses of impoverished, illiterate people. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Usha feels that India...

Missing: the Millennium Development Goals.
January 1, 2005... All the member states of the UN adopted a Millennium Declaration at a special session of the General Assembly in September 2000. They went on to agree a set of Development Goals that are now a formal priority for every relevant UN agency. Here...

Bluewash: Kenny Bruno follows the course that has taken corporations from environmental 'greenwash' to polishing up their humanitarian image.(The UN / BIG BUSINESS)
January 1, 2005... As a child growing up in New York City, on Hallowe'en I used to go around with a little orange box to collect pennies for UNICEF. I have no idea how much those pennies helped children around the world but, if nothing else, it was a brilliant...

Jenni Williams -- women's rights activist, Zimbabwe.(What the UN means to ...)(Interview)
January 1, 2005... JENNI WILLIAMS is the National Co-ordinator of Women of Zimbabwe Arise (WOZA), a pressure group formed in Zimbabwe in 2004. With a membership of over 1,000, WOZA has staged peaceful demonstrations against the Government's infringement of human...

Cradle to grave: the atrocities of Saddam Hussein are widely known, but the impact of the UN embargo is quietly being airbrushed from history. Felicity Arbuthnot sets the record straight.(The UN / IRAQ)
January 1, 2005... IN 1995 a glossy publication marking 'Fifty Years of Achievement' presented 'a sample of what the UN system has accomplished since 1945'. Impressive headings included self-congratulatory statements about humanitarian aid to victims of...

Sheela Khazanchi -- grandmother, New Delhi, India and refugee from Kashmir.(What the UN means to ...)
January 1, 2005... SHEELA Khazanchi's earliest experience of the UN was of blue-bereted men buzzing about in jeeps in the rugged, coniferous terrain where the Line-of-Control (LoC) divides her native Kashmir between Pakistan and India. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]...

Humane development: the fractured fiefdoms and independent missions of the UN system may have made for an unwieldy bureaucracy--but they have also opened up spaces where unique projects can emerge. Mark Engler reads between the lines.(The UN / INNOVATION)
January 1, 2005... Our Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and jails for those who break them... It counts napalm and the cost of a...

Inviolatta Moyo -- development worker, Zimbabwe.(What the UN means to ...)
January 1, 2005... INVIOLATTA is the Executive Director for the Western Region Foundation, which helps women, youth, orphans and community-based organizations in areas of health, water, HIV/AIDS, education and income generation. It operates in the Matabeleland...

A brief history of the UN.
January 1, 2005... Early signs In the 16th century the 'known' world came to be dominated by violent, seagoing and increasingly nationalist European empires: Spain, Portugal, France, Britain and the Netherlands in particular. They attempted to carve up the...

Cosmopolis: David Ransom reckons common humanity is in urgent need of rediscovery.(The UN / COMMON HUMANITY)
January 1, 2005... 'In the world as it is, the looking-glass world, the countries that guard the peace also make and sell the most weapons. The most prestigious banks launder the most drug money and harbour the most stolen cash. The most successful industries...

The jumbo NI prize crossword.
January 1, 2005... The winning reader will receive not only a copy of the brand-new edition of the World Guide but also a Peters Atlas. All correct solutions received by 20 February will be put into a draw--though only the winner will be notified. Post your entry...

Best of the year: film+video.(MIXED MEDIA)
January 1, 2005... This year's top films were about love--but not romance. My Architect (NI 370) was Nathaniel Kahn's uniquely moving film about buildings and the visionary architect Louis Kahn, his father, who never publicly acknowledged him. The Story of the...

Best of the year: books.(MIXED MEDIA)
January 1, 2005... In The Cry of Winnie Mandela by Njabulo Ndebele (Ayebia Clarke Publishing, NI 369) a quartet of South African women await a return that may never come. Into the women's conversations comes the most famous waiting woman in South African history,...

Best of the year: music.(MIXED MEDIA)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2005... Before the winner's envelope gets opened, a couple of honourable mentions for those that didn't make it into these pages through no fault of their own: Rizwan-Muazzam's Qawwali and Le Tigre's This Island. That said, it's been a songwriter's...

Koktebel.(MIXED MEDIA)(Movie Review)
January 1, 2005... Koktebel directed by Boris Khlebnikov and Alexei Popogrebsky A man and his son tramp through the autumn countryside with little or no money. The son is eager to press on to a new life. The man, unsure, seems content to take his time....

Aaltra.(MIXED MEDIA)(Movie Review)
January 1, 2005... Aaltra directed by Gustave Kervern and Benoit Delepine Ben is an uptight office worker who hates his neighbour Gus, a huge, hairy, insecticidespraying farmer in a dirty vest. When Ben gets sacked, he flips and attacks Gus. Trapped...

Tekitoi?(MIXED MEDIA)(Sound Recording Review)
January 1, 2005... Tekitoi? by Rachid Taha (Wrasse Records WRASS 126X 2CD) Many have tried similar recipes--take a bit of Arabic, French, street slang, and throw into a hustling mix of rai, rock guitars and electronics--but only Rachid Taha can cook up...

Pepsi and Maria.(MIXED MEDIA)(Book Review)
January 1, 2005... Pepsi and Maria by Adam Zameenzad (The Maia Press ISBN 1 904559 06 9) Adam Zameenzad is rapidly gaining a reputation for highly imaginative and boundary-crossing fiction. His sixth novel is set in an unnamed South American city, a...

American Dream: Global Nightmare.(MIXED MEDIA)(Book Review)
January 1, 2005... American Dream: Global Nightmare by Ziauddin Sardar & Merryl Wyn Davies (Icon Books ISBN 1 84046 572 7) The vagaries of copydates mean that I am writing this review in the dismal wake of the election of George W Bush as President of...

Bin Laden in the Suburbs.(MIXED MEDIA)(Brief Article)(Book Review)
January 1, 2005... Bin Laden in the Suburbs by Jock Collins, Greg Noble et al (Federation Press ISBN 0 9751967 0 7) [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Few of us would choose to bathe in bile. But we seem to have little choice but to be bathed in the media bile...

Inspracion--Espiracion.(MIXED MEDIA)(Sound Recording Review)
January 1, 2005... Inspracion--Espiracion by Gotan Project (Wrasse WRASS 126 2CD) [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] One of the pleasures of the Gotan Project is that their tango-based music is as slithery as the dance itself when it comes to categorization....

Argentina.(COUNTRY PROFILE)
January 1, 2005... ARGENTINA began the 20th century as one of the world's 10 richest countries. It ended it as a byword for economic meltdown, with two-thirds of its population living in poverty. The country remains the most developed in Latin America according...

The unreported year 2004.
January 1, 2005... Africa [GRAPHIC OMITTED] OUT OF AFRICA (below). It is not that African news goes entirely unreported, just that the few stories that emerge tend to reinforce stereotypes or take place in a country with a colonial connection. The...