New Internationalist articles from October 2002

New Internationalist archives from October 2002

From this month's editor.
October 1, 2002... AT the moment Fatma Kayhan, a journalist from Kurdistan, is with us on a work placement in the Oxford office of the NI. Like us, she is used to working for a collective, independent publication. In her case it is Roza, the first...

Letters.
October 1, 2002... The New Internationalist welcomes your letters. But please keep them short. They may be edited for purposes of space or clarity. Letters should be sent to letters@newint.org or to your local NI office. Please remember to include a town and...

Making a difference. (Letter From).
October 1, 2002... The spotlight your reporters cast on US mining company Freeport McMoRan is bang on target. NI 344 (West Papua) identified this company as having an atrocious record on environmental and human-rights issues. Inside Business (NI 347) highlights...

Across the divide: Reem Haddad travels to Syria to meet a teacher on a mission. (Letter From).
October 1, 2002... THE teacher quickly agreed to meet me. I was in Syria for a few days and had heard quite a lot about him. Hamid Halabi, a simple schoolteacher, had decided to fight the Israeli occupation of the Syrian Golan Heights in his own way: by giving...

Southern exposure.
October 1, 2002... This photo was taken in the East Timorese capital, Diti. The three men are former guerrillas who had been in the jungle since they were very young. Now they are learning new skills -- carpentry, electronics, building -- at the Don Bosco...

The third sex. (View From the South).(eunuchs in India)
October 1, 2002... MONA Ahmed's visiting card currently lists five names. Apart from Mona, which is how I know her, there is Ahmad Bhai, Saraswati, Ahmed Iqbal and Radharani. These names are a mix of Hindu (Saraswati, Radharani), Muslim (Ahmed Bhai, Ahmed Iqbal)...

Asia-Pacific: US security creates insecurity. (Currents).(Brief Article)
October 1, 2002... Direct intervention in the political and military frameworks of other countries has been the chosen weapon of US foreign policy for over a century. The 'war on terror' has enabled President Bush to carry this intervention to new heights. Rather...

National Missile Defense (NMD). (Currents).(Brief Article)
October 1, 2002... President Ronald Reagan's Star Wars has re-emerged under recent US administrations as National Missile Defense (NMD). NMD will theoretically enable the US to destroy any missile fired at it (or its allies) while that missile is still travelling...

Centre for Policy Research. (Currents).(US relations with China, Pakistan, and India)(Brief Article)
October 1, 2002... India & Pakistan 'A GROWING US policy is to engage with countries which have unresolved disputes with China so as to contain China,' says Bharat Karnead, strategic-affairs expert with the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi, India....

National Missile Defense systems. (Currents).(Brief Article)
October 1, 2002... China CONTAINING China is the key to US foreign policy in the region. The Bush Administration has declared the country a 'strategic competitor', a description difficult to reconcile with China's military budget when compared with that of...

US State Department. (Currents).(policy toward North Korea)(Brief Article)
October 1, 2002... North Korea ALTHOUGH President Bush identified North Korea -- China's neighbour to north -- as a member of an 'axis of evil' in January this year, the North Korean Government has been on the US State Department's list of nations that...

Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs). (Currents).(Brief Article)
October 1, 2002... ICBMs are guided missiles -- self-propelled space or air vehicles carrying an explosive warhead. An ICBM car travel between 8,000 and 14,800 kilometres. When equipped with Multiple Independently Targetable Re-entry Vehicles (MIRVs), they can...

US company UNOCAL. (Currents).(Brief Article)
October 1, 2002... Central Asia SINCE the 11 September attacks the US has been using airports and previous Russian bases in Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan to carry out its offensive against Afghanistan. It has also expanded its presence to Kazakhstan...

Send in someone else's troops. (Currents).(Brief Article)
October 1, 2002... In a speech on 11 March 2002, President Bush said: 'We will not send American troops to every battle, but America will actively prepare other nations for the battles ahead.' As part of this preparation, the US International Military...

Camels. (Word Corner).(Brief Article)
October 1, 2002... One hump or two humps? The Bactrian camel has two humps, and the Dromedary one. Bactria was an ancient country in central Asia, named after the modern village of Balkh in Afghanistan. Dromedary is from the Greek dromos (runner), from which we...

Narmada river rising: dam-resisters watch as their villages flood. (Currents).
October 1, 2002... WATER swirls around their ankles, then reaches to their knees. The long-dreaded monsoon submergence of tribal villages in the Narmada Valley upstream from the massive Sardar Sarovar dam is under way. Activists of the Narmada Bachao Andolan...

Seriously. (Currents).(Brief Article)
October 1, 2002... You couldn't make this stuff up. This month we revisit the aspirational corporate anthems of scandal-ridden companies. We've been tapping our toes to this re-imagining of a corporate anthem for disgraced energy company Enron by reader Jane...

Fear eats the soul. (Refugees / Keynote).
October 1, 2002... Radical filmmaker Rainer Fassbinder gave this title to his haunting 1970s movie about a love affair between a young Moroccan migrant worker and an elderly local cleaning woman, set in an ordinary German town riddled with ordinary prejudices ...

The new common sense: immigration controls are unsustainable. let's junk them. (Refugees / Open Borders).
October 1, 2002... IMMIGRATION controls are a cruel 20th-century aberration. Although they may seem like common sense, an unavoidable reality, in fact, in most countries they are less than a 100 years old. International migration, on the other hand, has...

No room at the inn: racism underpins current attitudes towards refugees and asylum seekers -- and a precious heritage is being lost. (Refugees
October 1, 2002... PEOPLE attending a Holocaust Memorial Day in London in 2001 will never forget the appearance on stage of Kemal Pervanic, the once-emaciated Bosnian Muslim seen on the news looking through barbed wire in the Serb-built Omarska concentration...

Road to freedom? A survey of the track records of different countries. Some good practice - and some bad. (1).
October 1, 2002... Canada has one the best records for treatment of refugees with innovative programmes and a strong humanitarian ethos. But will it survive? THE FACTS Refugees and asylum seekers: 70,000 Percentage of world total: 0.47% Ratio...

Act & Resist.
October 1, 2002... 1 STOP DEPORTATIONS 'It only takes one passenger to refuse to be seated to stop a deportation happening. Stand up against deportations.' Campaigns like this are taking place in Australia, Britain and other European countries. Protesters in...

Last word ... with refugees.
October 1, 2002... Philip Shamamba, student and torture survivor from DR Congo: 'It's terrible to be detained like a criminal when you have not done anything wrong. I think detention should be scrapped. When I was in a detention centre I went on hunger strike...

Nursultan Nazarbeyev: taking aim at the rich and powerful. (Worldbeaters).
October 1, 2002... NOTHING of any political significance happens in Kazakhstan, the largest of the former Soviet Central Asian republics, without the say-so of President Nursultan Nazarbeyev. The established local boss of the Communist Party, he inherited the...

Secret Ballot. (Mixed Media).(Movie Review)
October 1, 2002... ML directed by Babak Payami Iranian cinema celebrates the everyday. It doesn't glory in 'special' people or events, in spectacle or thrills. It finds the extraordinary in the rhythms of life, in everyday work and chores, in quiet...

Kluster. (Mixed Media).(Sound Recording Review)
October 1, 2002... LG by Kimmo Pohjonen (Rockadillo ZENCD 2074 CD) For all you people who would rather gnaw your own arms off than willingly listen to an entire album of accordion music -- Kimmo Pohjonen's Kluster is for you. Really. This wild man of...

Music of the Himalayas. (Mixed Media).(Sound Recording Review)
October 1, 2002... LG by Rahul Sharma (Real World CDRW105 CD) There's a quality to Rahul Sharma's interpretations of traditional Kashmiri tunes and his own original compositions that is as timeless as it is peaceful. It's a reminder that, whatever else...

Bitter Dawn. (Mixed Media).(East Timor: A People's Story)(Book Review)
October 1, 2002... DR East Timor -- a people's story by Irena Cristalis (Zed Books ISBN 1 84277 145 0) The truly extraordinary story of how one half of a tiny island -- invaded by Indonesia in 1975 -- resisted all odds to reach independence earlier...

Power Politics. (Mixed Media).(Book Review)
October 1, 2002... PW by Arundhati Roy (South End Press, ISBN 0 89608 668 2) Since she won the Booker Prize in 1997 with her splendid novel, The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy has become a severe annoyance to some very important people. Her...

The Years of Rice and Salt. (Mixed Media).(Book Review)
October 1, 2002... GF By Kim Robinson (HarperCollins, ISBN 0 00 224679 1) Here is an historical novel with a twist -- or rather an overturning -- that shows just how arbitrary the long span of human history is in terms of winners, losers and...

Making waves.
October 1, 2002... RETRIBUTION, retaliation and revenge -- understandable feelings from those who have been made to stand in mute witness to the rape of their daughters, mothers and sisters. But after nine years of such war crimes in Bougainville, throughout its...

A tribute to Gaudi: he was an original thinker, an iconoclast who did things his own way -- in spite of the steamroller impact of modernism. John Gough pays homage to the visionary genius of Spanish architect Antonio Gaudi. (Essay).(Critical Essay)
October 1, 2002... He was stubborn. He was obstinate. He couldn't care less about the conventions of his time -- actually he contemptuously disregarded them. In death no-one recognized him, except as a poor tramp who happened to walk under a tram. At first the...

Zambia. (Country Profile).
October 1, 2002... THE wind of change that swept through the world with the fall of communism carried Zambia briefly to centre stage. The country was hailed as one of Africa's new dynamic democracies when it reintroduced multi-party politics in 1991 after 27...

08:59. (Refugee Writing on the Journey).
October 1, 2002... Fleeing Afghanistan, Karim Haidari arrives in the West THE PLANE MANOEUVRED. I looked out of the window; little signs of activity were becoming visible on the ground below. I said to Suson: 'I think we are getting there.' She turned...

Dear Mimmy. (Refugee Writing on the Journey).
October 1, 2002... In a diary she calls 'Mimmy' schoolgirl Zlata Filipovic records her departure from besieged and war-torn Sarajevo and her arrival in Paris PARIS. There's electricity, there's water, there's gas. There's, there's... life, Mimmy. Yes,...

You are not you. (Refuge Writing on the Journey).
October 1, 2002... Iraqi dissident writer Zuhair Al-Jazairi prepares to leave his country -- and his identity THROUGH PRIOR ARRANGEMENT, I met a man who seemed in haste; he moved and spoke rapidly like a bird. He placed the false passport in front of me...

Run for your life.
October 1, 2002... There are an estimated 14.9 million refugees and asylum seekers in the world. A further 22 million people may be 'internally displaced'. These are not protected by international refugee law and may be at even greater risk. IRAQ There...

Refugee! Terrorist! Criminal! (Refugees / Criminalization).
October 1, 2002... Not one of the 11 September hijackers entered the country as a refugee. So why are refugees being punished for terrorism? Damien Lawson reports on a worldwide torrent of new 'security' laws. MANICKAVASAGAM Suresh has been given a reprieve...