New Internationalist articles from March 2005

New Internationalist archives from March 2005

From this month's editor.(security)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2005... THEY say the 3,000-odd that died tragically on 9/11 changed everything. But surely 12/26, when a quarter million died in the Asian Tsunami, is a tragedy and date of more profound import. Or are some lives more valuable than others? If we are to...

Plunder.(LETTERS)(Letter to the Editor)
March 1, 2005... Call it free trade, IMF, NAFTA, FTA, FTAA, World Bank, IMF... it all comes down to the same: First World nations plundering Third World countries for the benefit of First World thieves. Vera Gottlieb British Columbia, Canada

The cost of disunity.(Letter to the Editor)
March 1, 2005... For developing countries to be disunited plays into the hands of the developed nations. Countries that are united can through co-operation create an infrastructure independent of the IMF or WTO. When these countries have commodities in demand...

We shall overcome.(LETTERS)(Letter to the Editor)
March 1, 2005... Les Reid (Letters, NI 374) misreads my article 'Who needs Religion?' (In the name of God, NI 370). Nowhere do I argue that we should 'stick with the old tribal organizations that religions are, instead of joining forces with the Humanist...

Sophistication and sophistry.(LETTERS)(Letter to the Editor)
March 1, 2005... I do wish that people would stop peddling the (should be) now hackneyed idea that the developing world's problems are due to the selfish developed world's cruel bullying. You give a crude interpretation of the role the IMF plays in keeping the...

Evangelical hijack.(LETTERS)(Letter to the Editor)
March 1, 2005... Reem Haddad is right on target ('Dangerous Times', Letter from Lebanon, NI 374). Don't let the Armageddon-hungry US fundamentalists hijack the term 'evangelical', which is usually translated into French, German, Spanish, etc as 'Protestant'....

Defend life.(LETTERS)(Letter to the Editor)
March 1, 2005... Women's rights (NI 373) falls into the contradictory trap of confusing abortion with issues of rights and equality. Abortion is often a result of inequality, sexism, poverty, social prejudice, disempowerment, social expectations and...

Build the trust.(LETTERS)(Letter to the Editor)
March 1, 2005... Re: 'Democracy is dead' (Essay, NI 373). Genuine people power could begin with acceptance that money is an illusion. It depends on community confidence. It can evaporate as it did in 1929 and in Argentina more recently and it can grow...

Despot rulers.(LETTERS)(Letter to the Editor)
March 1, 2005... To what extent do developed Western countries have authentic democracy (Essay, NI 373) or are we really in a monarchy without fully realizing it? It seems like we are living a new monarchy era, where corporate and monetary bodies are the despot...

Vicarious responsibility.(LETTERS)(Letter to the Editor)
March 1, 2005... On the one hand, Lucy Michaels ('Fear and loathing', Judeophobia, NI 372) wishes to differentiate herself from 'the Israeli state' and its actions against Palestinians; on the other, she wishes to identify herself with the whole Jewish people...

Get in touch.(LETTERS)(Letter to the Editor)
March 1, 2005... My poem 'You Get Proud by Practising' appeared in Equality (NI 364). I would appreciate it if you could mention my mailing address and website so that interested readers may contact me. They are PO Box 9004, Denver CO 80209, US web:...

Playroom of the Gulf: Lebanon's tourist boom leaves Reem Haddad out of pocket.
March 1, 2005... WE stared at the bill incredulously. 'Did we just pay $60 for a little bit of grilled meat and hummus?' I asked my husband. Again we stared at the bill. The answer was all around us. The restaurant was packed with unquestioning tourists....

Highlighting the work of photographers from the majority world.(SOUTHERN EXPOSURE)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2005... AT the end of the 1990s I was working as a photographer at a Lima newspaper and decided to take a break from politics. I was looking for new motivations, stories and characters. I hoped to find them outside Peru's Americanized, overcrowded...

The waters of October.(privatization)
March 1, 2005... A few days before last November's election of the President of the planet in the US, elections and a plebiscite were held in a little-known, almost secret, South American country called Uruguay. In these elections, for the first time in the...

Daughters for debts: 'Jihad' against opium poppies claims child brides.(AFGHANISTAN)
March 1, 2005... ZEVA'S eyes filled with tears as the 10-year-old's father took her by the arm and handed her to the moneylender. 'I cannot pay you in any other way. Take my daughter,' said Gul Miran, a farmer in Nangarhar province. Like many other farmers in...

Stats from the race for cyberspace.(CURRENTS)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2005... 771,000: The number of visitors to JohnKerry.com during the week of the US Democratic Convention. * 3.5 million: The number of visitors during the week of the US Democratic Convention to the website of Japanese soccer star, Hidetoshi...

Death threat to global justice activists.(Focus on the Global South)(Walden Bello)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2005... Walden Bello, a prominent activist in the global justice movement and frequent contributor to the NI, has been included on a hitlist issued by the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) and its paramilitary wing, the New People's Army. The...

Peace faces the axe: large-scale logging destabilizes the Solomon Islands.(SOLOMON ISLANDS)
March 1, 2005... WHEN a delegation of over a dozen Solomon Island chiefs boarded the Greenpeace flagship Rainbow Warrior late last year they were seeking global support to save the Marovo Lagoon--dubbed 'the eighth wonder of the world'. They pointed to the...

Zimbabwe targets international NGOs.(nongovernmental organizations)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2005... Despite international condemnation, a new law criminalizing foreign funding of NGOs has passed the Zimbabwe Parliament and, as the NI goes to press, is awaiting President Robert Mugabe's signature. The Bill is the latest addition to a...

Indonesia's enterprising army.(finance)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2005... Army chief of staff General Ryamizard Ryacudu has revealed that army businesses, particularly those which are part of foundations, 'only' generate 30 billion rupiah ($3.28 million) per year: 'That's if [we're] lucky. Perhaps this amount could...

Word power.(CURRENTS)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2005... The language of international relations... think-tank n. Israeli policy advisor lobbyist n. Palestinian demonstrator freedom-fighter n. terrorist with good PR democratize v. to force people to choose to elect their leaders ...

Speechmarks.(quotations)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2005... Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. Dwight D Eisenhower (1890-1969), Second World War...

The death of Hadi Saleh: Iraq's internal politics is killing off civil society.(IRAQ)
March 1, 2005... WHEN they came for Hadi Saleh, they found him at home in Baghdad with his family. First they bound his hands and feet with wire. Then they tortured him, cutting him with a knife. He finally died of strangulation, but apparently that wasn't...

Gulf War III--rise of the machines.(robots)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2005... Of all the Hollywood visions of the future that could end up coming true, you have to hope the Terminator films will not be among them. Is there anything more terrifying than an invulnerable robot blowing people away with a sawn-off shotgun and...

State of fear the global attack on rights: Richard Swift wonders if we will all end up under occupation.(KEYNOTE)
March 1, 2005... 'THE army is a poor school for democracy.' The words are those of the former Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau. We students took them and plastered them all over the walls of downtown Montreal when Trudeau invoked the War Measures...

They are watching you.
March 1, 2005... THE PENTAGON CALLS IT TOTAL INFORMATION AWARENESS and it's coming to your neighbourhood soon. Information is being gathered about you and stored in an easily searchable database. There are now over five million people on the US MASTER TERROR...

Be very afraid! Sara Ahmed enters the maze of fear politics and finds there is no way out.(FREEDOM TO MOVE)
March 1, 2005... I ARRIVE in New York, clutching my British passport. I hand it over. He looks at me, and then looks at my passport. I know what questions will follow. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] 'Where are you from?' My passport indicates my place of...

Crackdown: Aziz Choudry on the post-9/11 chill that is undermining struggles for social justice worldwide.(TARGETING ACTIVISTS)
March 1, 2005... IT's one thing to hold forth on how the suppression of dissent marches hand in hand with free market capitalism. It's quite another to have the idea thrown in your face by secret agents invading your house in the 'burbs'. That is what...

Occupied world the facts.
March 1, 2005... THE POST-9/11 War on Terror has cast the spotlight on military occupations from Iraq to Chechnya. But the logic of occupation expands far beyond that as foreign military bases (mostly US) now span the globe. Moreover civilian populations are...

Putin's terror card: Russia's Political boss has built his career on fighting terrorism and Chechen nationalism. Fred Weir counts the cost in lost freedoms.(RUSSIA UNDER SIEGE)(Vladimir Putin)
March 1, 2005... RUSSIA is slipping back into a pattern of governance that looks a lot like Soviet-style deja vu to anyone brought up during the Cold War. A new strong man in the Kremlin, President Vladimir Putin, is tightening his grip upon society, cracking...

Vigilante heaven: in Latin America it used to be 'subversives' who had to worry about the jackboots on the stairs. But in the post-9/11 days of 'zero tolerance' it is the most marginal who must watch for the cruising vans of the social cleansers. Anastasia MoLoney reports.(DEATH SQUADS)
March 1, 2005... A STREET kid in bare feet with matted hair huddles in a doorway sniffing glue. Further up the road, a young prostitute loiters on a street corner. A street dweller shuffles past her, stopping to scavenge through the rubbish. A group of...

Insecure lives: for some, security is a healthy stock portfolio and life in a gate-guarded community. For others, it is a source of clean water and enough to eat. Jeremy Seabrook measures the distance and traces the connection.(SUSTAINABLE SECURITY)
March 1, 2005... THE belief that intensifying the mechanisms of surveillance at home and delivering engines of annihilation abroad will increase security is a cruel delusion. Such a narrow idea of 'security' is likely to produce an effect the reverse of that...

An open letter to George W Bush: 'they hate us and they hate freedom and they hate people who embrace freedom.' President George W Bush interviewed on Al Arabiya television, 6 May 2004.
March 1, 2005... Mr President, We have heard you offer such justifications for the war in Iraq many times since 11 September 2001. In words that carry all the moral weight of an action-movie script, you would have the American public believe that the main...

Counter-clampdown.(fighting for civil rights)(Directory)
March 1, 2005... The War on Terror is mutating into a form of militarized globalization. The cosmopolitan language of the old corporate globalization (hypocritical as it might have been) has mutated into the vocabulary of martial law: 'tough choices', 'urgent...

Worldbeaters ...: taking aim at the rich and powerful.
March 1, 2005... ONE way another you're going to be hearing a lot more about Robert Zoellick. Until recently the donnish-looking Harvard law graduate was the indefatigable US Trade Representative under US President George W Bush. Initially, there was...

The Sea Inside.(Movie Review)
March 1, 2005... The Sea Inside directed by Alejandro Amenabar Ramon is paralyzed--he can move only his eyes and mouth, and has been this way for 30 years. He now wants to die, and he wants whoever helps him to be free from prosecution. ...

The Woodsman.(Movie Review)
March 1, 2005... The Woodsman directed by Nicole Kassell Walter is a highly skilled furniture maker. He's slight, with a rather sad and gentle air. He keeps to himself but, when a woman colleague is sexually bullied, he's concerned enough to ask her...

Congotronics.(Sound Recording Review)
March 1, 2005... Congotronics by Konono No 1 (Crammed CRAW 27 CD) Once the likembe was, like its mbira cousin, a thumb piano producing a bluntish sound which in the hands of a virtuoso was a versatile instrument. Mawangu Mingiedi, founder of...

Dispatches from the People's War in Nepal.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
March 1, 2005... Dispatches from the People's War in Nepal by Li Onesto (Pluto Press ISBN 0 77453 2341 3) Nepal burst spectacularly out of media obscurity on 1 June 2001 when Prince Dipendra slaughtered his parents, siblings and six other members...

The Corporation The pathological pursuit of profit and power.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
March 1, 2005... The Corporation The pathological pursuit of profit and power by Joel Bakan (Constable ISBN 1 84529 079 8) You need to read this book. This was the work on corporate power that was waiting to be written. Bakan has produced...

The Oath: A Surgeon Under Fire.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
March 1, 2005... The Oath: A Surgeon Under Fire Khassan Baiev (Pocket Books ISBN 0 7434 3036 0) In 1994 Boris Yeltsin ordered Russian troops into Chechnya and the rebellious Caucasian republic's 400-year struggle for independence erupted into...

The Eternal Road.(Sound Recording Review)
March 1, 2005... The Eternal Road by Kurt Weill (Naxos 8 559402 CD) If it's possible to think of Kurt Weill as a composer whose later work was eclipsed by the genius of his early compositions, then The Eternal Road serves as a reminder that there...

Interview with Zvakwana.
March 1, 2005... THE words are everywhere. Zvakwana! Enough is enough! Scrawled on walls and street signs; printed on matchboxes and clothes pegs. From the cities to the towns and through to the villages all across Zimbabwe, this message--of hope and of...

Ken Sprague: David Ransom pays tribute to an unheralded genius.(ESSAY)(Biography)
March 1, 2005... I TEND to forget what's on the T-shirt I'm wearing. But there was one that always reminded me--particularly when I was in the Amazon more than 10 years ago--because people would smile and say: 'That's it! That's it!' The T-shirt soon wore out,...

Marshall Islands.(COUNTRY PROFILE)
March 1, 2005... TELL a friend you're travelling to the Marshall Islands and, Pacific paradise in mind, they may beg to come along. The Marshall Islands are certainly remarkable. Not because they're so beautiful--although they are--but because of the resilience...