Devil's Advocate ...
In short, Colombo is borrowing from China, but in fact actually pumping money into the Chinese Economy and not the Sri Lanka Economy.
However, many try to justify and portray that these massive Chinese loans are to rescue the Rajapakse administration from international economic pressure over Human Rights abuses.
While China’s loans are an immediate de-facto handout for Chinese companies (Which Sri Lanka is obliged through conditionality’s to hire and purchase from), which means, future Colombo government will be left with debts, at interest rates higher than other developmental lenders agree.
Already the biggest lender to Sri Lanka, China has now pledged more than $3bn (£1.9bn) for infrastructure development, maintenance and other projects, the BCC Sinhala service reports.
Much of the debt is offered by China’s fully government-owned Export-Import Bank.
And here is the catch …
Key Conditions:
“Chinese loans by Exim Bank are mainly offered to strictly buy Chinese Products and Services.”
“Contracting Firms, Sub-Contractors and Labourers are Chinese nationals.”
“There are also reports that 30% of the labourers are Chinese Convicts.”
“All Raw Materials is imported from China.”
“Sri Lanka gets no concessions or Favours on interest rates either.”
Mr Asantha Sirimanne of Lanka Business Online, reports to BBC Sinhala Service.
The World Bank and the Japanese government loans rates are far better.
Any country embarking on massive infrastructure relies on soft (long duration, low interest) loans from the World Bank – which exists to provide such assistance, or from Bilateral State Donors.
However, much development Aid, especially from the World Bank and Asian Development Bank, come from as grants, which necessarily does not have to be paid back by Governments.
Prior to Chinese lending of funds, 75% of Sri Lanka’s AID was from Japan, World Bank and Asian Development Bank.
China is no Forgiving friend to Sri Lanka, when it comes to funds.
Here’s what the Sunday Times Editor had to say: “Negotiations continue with China for several unpaid bills for Arms purchased during the protracted, insurgency.
Hence, China is offering to bail out European economies, it just won’t simply write off these loans to Sri Lanka as Bad Debt.
(What comes to mind is a stand up comedian “Russell Peters”, Indians and Chinese can never do business together … Chinese won't give a bargain, and Indians won't do without.)
Sunday Times also reported that Sri Lanka is applying and taking Soft Loans too from the IMF and Commercial Loans from Foreign Banks at even higher interest rates.
Whilst Sri Lanka is banking on the fate of Hambatota port, which is at present being constructed by Chinese contractors, Labourers and Financiers, in becoming a trans-shipment hub to generate income, this is no means a given.
Rajapakse administration envisions 10,000 ships coming to port at Hambantota each year.
At present all combined ports in Sri Lanka cannot handle 5,000 ships a year.
Sri Lanka’s existing container port, in Colombo, has already seen a serious growth in competition from fast and improving of one of many Indian ports such as Cochin and also Alalah port in Oman.
India in the meanwhile has been developing a number of ports, which is already proving to be a favourite for Chinese owned companies and reportedly also bidding.
Point made here is, if the Hambantota Port fails to generate sufficient revenue, repayment of Loan with its conditions is going to prove a serious disaster.
Sri Lanka is still amongst world’s heaviest borrowers.
In proportion to what it earns, Sri Lanka borrows more than almost any other state, according to the ratings Agency Moody’s.
Sri Lanka’s total debt in 2009 was 545 per cent larger than the total government revenue.
Moody’s LBO reports.
Only Lebanon rated B1, Jamaica and Pakistan rated B3 had worse credit metrics, amongst countries rated by Moody’s.
In 2010, the government’s own figures showed between January and April 2010, while the total revenue was Rs234, 345 million, total government expenditure was Rs410, 864 million. A overspend of Rs167, 520 million, over two thirds (69%) of its total Income.
In September ahead of the billion US dollar Bond issue, Moody’s rated Sri Lanka at a below investment grade of B1 with a ‘stable’ outlook.
Moody’s says its future assessment of Sri Lanka’s debt rating would be depend on whether Colombo demonstrated a commitment to Fiscal disciple and took action to cut the budget deficit.
Fitch and S&P rates Sri Lanka with B+ four notches below the lowest BBB- investment grade level.
The World Bank, Asian Development Bank, Japan Bank and IMT suggested and supported the idea that Rajapakse administration, should ask for assistance and guidance of Pr Manmohan Singh (The most respected Financier of our time) of India to view and oversee the finance of Sri Lanka, but was declined by the Rajapakse administration. This has raised serious concerns in the region.
Any State needs to generate cash to function day today, but at present Sri Lanka heavily relies on borrowing to meet its needs to survive.
Meanwhile Sri Lanka has set up a ‘Sovereign Rating Committee’ which is charged with devising a strategy of taking the country’s rating to an investment grade of BBB-, or higher over the next four years, The Sunday Times reports.
Exactly what the President of Uganda Dada Idi Amin did during his reign during the seventies, which resulted in bringing the country down on its knees.
Aninda Mitra, senior analyst and vice President of Moody’s Investors Services told Lanka Business Online that the rating agency was waiting to assess whether the 2011 budget will indicate a ‘Policy Intention to Improve Fiscal Fundamental.’
At present most African already troubled countries are subject to same finance policies by China.
I sense trouble ahead ... !!!
Let me have your views ...
Paza Sauti ...
Awaaz Utao ...
Tuesday 14 December 2010
Sunday 12 December 2010
Sri Lanka's Displace People ...
Devil's Advocate ... By 2002, over 80% of Sri Lanka’s displaced people were Tamils.
This is an extract from Amnesty International report from 2006 into the plight of the internally displaced.
According to a census of all IDP’s in Sri Lanka conducted by the Ministry of Rehabilitation, Resettlement and Refugees in 2002.
The displaced population was:
80% Tamil.
13.7% Muslim.
4.56 Sinhalese.
0.88% Other.
(There has been no comprehensive survey of IDP’s since 2002.)
Many of the IDP’s have suffered multiple displacements during the course of the conflict.
What are these Politicians of the world up to?
Mass Exodus and Ethnic cleansing will not work.
When Humans ever learn from History’s past?
Half the Issues are caused by Religion and Power Hungry Politician.
Punjab paid the price. Due to the Partition by the British, all hell was let loose. What has Pakistan or Punjab achieved. The others may have.
In 1984, again the Sikhs were singled out!!!
In 2009, Ethnic cleansing in Kenya!!!
Rwanda, Dafore, all religion based, by the Rich and the Politicians!!!
Do they have a conscious?
Why? Why? Why? It’s a Sin to forgo with this action against Mankind?
Let me have your views ...
Paza Sauti ...
Awaaz Utao ...
Obama: India cannot ignore abusive States ...
Devils Advocate ... 
Barack Obama ~ India cannot ignore Abusive states.
24th Nov 2010 - Guardian
US President Barack Obama criticised India for shying away from condemning Rights abuses in repressive states, saying those states with Global aspirations should not remain silent and Ignore “Gross Violations” in other countries.
Is America enticing India to get aggressive with neighbouring countries?
Go to War?
Or is trying to de-stabilise the emerging region?
Or is genuinely concerned?
Remember it is NOT Barack Obama, I am questioning, but the US Policies. It’s the Policies that drive the Presidents.
Let me have your views...
Paza Sauti !!!
Make your Opinion Count !!!
Awaaz Utao !!!
Barack Obama ~ India cannot ignore Abusive states.
24th Nov 2010 - Guardian
US President Barack Obama criticised India for shying away from condemning Rights abuses in repressive states, saying those states with Global aspirations should not remain silent and Ignore “Gross Violations” in other countries.
Is America enticing India to get aggressive with neighbouring countries?
Go to War?
Or is trying to de-stabilise the emerging region?
Or is genuinely concerned?
Remember it is NOT Barack Obama, I am questioning, but the US Policies. It’s the Policies that drive the Presidents.
Let me have your views...
Paza Sauti !!!
Make your Opinion Count !!!
Awaaz Utao !!!
Saturday 6 November 2010
Kenya lifts ban on Mau Mau ...
The Kenyan Government has decided to legalise the Mau Mau, the movement that fought colonial rule, over 50 years after it was banned by the British authorities.
The decision, announced by Kenya's minister of national security, will allow former Mau Mau fighters to register as a society and end the stigma that has hung over the movement, even after independence in 1963.
President Jomo Kenyatta was jailed for his alleged links with the group
Mau Mau - or the Land and Freedom Army, as they called themselves - have waited a very long time to receive recognition.
Their attacks on white settlers threw colonial society into panic and Britain imposed a state of emergency in 1952.
Yet despite their obvious role in fighting for independence, no Kenyan Government has previously been prepared to lift the ban.
This is because the Mau Mau rebellion was, at least in part, a civil war.
'Bury the past'
Kenya's first President, Jomo Kenyatta, was a strong nationalist, but he was not a member of Mau Mau, despite being convicted of belonging to the movement in what historians regard as a rigged, show trial.
Once independence came, Kenyatta's government included more people who had fought against Mau Mau than had participated in the rebellion.
"When he came to power in 1963, Kenyatta tried very hard to bury the past, to put Mau Mau behind him," says David Anderson of St Anthony's College, Oxford.
"He told Kenyans that they should forget it, that the quickest way to curing the evils of that period was to forget it. And so in public life, it became almost impossible to mention Mau Mau, never mind to memorialise it."
The conflict took a terrible toll: Mau Mau lost around 20,000 men.
They killed some 4,000 people - including 32 white settlers.
The movement administered oaths and inflicted death on anyone who betrayed them. More than 1,000 were hanged, including their leader, Dedan Kimathi, whose body still lies in a Nairobi prison. ~ By Martin Plaut
The decision, announced by Kenya's minister of national security, will allow former Mau Mau fighters to register as a society and end the stigma that has hung over the movement, even after independence in 1963.
President Jomo Kenyatta was jailed for his alleged links with the group
Mau Mau - or the Land and Freedom Army, as they called themselves - have waited a very long time to receive recognition.
Their attacks on white settlers threw colonial society into panic and Britain imposed a state of emergency in 1952.
Yet despite their obvious role in fighting for independence, no Kenyan Government has previously been prepared to lift the ban.
This is because the Mau Mau rebellion was, at least in part, a civil war.
'Bury the past'
Kenya's first President, Jomo Kenyatta, was a strong nationalist, but he was not a member of Mau Mau, despite being convicted of belonging to the movement in what historians regard as a rigged, show trial.
Once independence came, Kenyatta's government included more people who had fought against Mau Mau than had participated in the rebellion.
"When he came to power in 1963, Kenyatta tried very hard to bury the past, to put Mau Mau behind him," says David Anderson of St Anthony's College, Oxford.
"He told Kenyans that they should forget it, that the quickest way to curing the evils of that period was to forget it. And so in public life, it became almost impossible to mention Mau Mau, never mind to memorialise it."
The conflict took a terrible toll: Mau Mau lost around 20,000 men.
They killed some 4,000 people - including 32 white settlers.
The movement administered oaths and inflicted death on anyone who betrayed them. More than 1,000 were hanged, including their leader, Dedan Kimathi, whose body still lies in a Nairobi prison. ~ By Martin Plaut
Kenya wants UK "Atrocity" apology
British soldiers are accused of rape, torture and killing
Kenya has demanded an apology from the UK for alleged atrocities committed against Mau Mau fighters seeking independence in the 1950s.
Justice Minister Kiraitu Murungi said it was the honourable thing to do to formally apologise for "barbaric crimes against humanity".
War veterans are preparing to sue Britain for compensation, claiming they were tortured in detention.
Official estimates say 11,000 Mau Mau were killed by British forces.
The minister made the comments at the launch of the book Caroline Elkins' Britain's Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire, which details the crackdown of the rebellion and the Kikuyu community.
Ms Elkins, who is a professor at Harvard University, disputes the official death toll saying many more died in the conflict.
"I now believe there was in late colonial Kenya a murderous campaign to eliminate Kikuyu people that left tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands dead," she writes in the book.
Corruption
"I call upon the government of the United Kingdom, as a civilised nation to do the honourable thing and issue a formal apology to the Mau Mau, their families and the people of Kenya for these barbaric crimes against humanity," Mr Murungi said.
British servicemen who suffered atrocities at the hands of the Japanese during the Second World War were compensated, he said.
It's only that way that we can say that our humanity is recognised
Lawyer Paul Muite
"We do not believe it would be too much to ask the UK government to extend the same principle to the Mau Mau war veterans and their families."
A spokesman from the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office said the UK government understood the issue still created strong feelings in Kenya and that the hardships during the emergency had caused pain on both sides and marred the progress towards independence.
"But this took place 50 years ago. Kenya needs to look to future challenges like fighting corruption, fighting injustice and building a strong democracy," he told the BBC News website.
Relations between the UK and Kenya have recently been strained after the UK High Commission to Nairobi accused the Kenyan government of massive corruption.
Doing wrong
Vice President Moody Awori, also at the function, said the British campaign was "cruel and pitiless".
"The fact that colonialists put so much effort to conceal their actions means they knew what they were doing was wrong," he said.
The allegations in the book include rape, torture, murder and theft of property.
"We want the British government to acknowledge their wrongdoing and say sorry," Paul Muite, one of a group of lawyers preparing to sue Britain for compensation on behalf of former Mau Mau fighters, told AFP news agency.
"It's only that way that we can say that our humanity is recognised."
Kenya has demanded an apology from the UK for alleged atrocities committed against Mau Mau fighters seeking independence in the 1950s.
Justice Minister Kiraitu Murungi said it was the honourable thing to do to formally apologise for "barbaric crimes against humanity".
War veterans are preparing to sue Britain for compensation, claiming they were tortured in detention.
Official estimates say 11,000 Mau Mau were killed by British forces.
The minister made the comments at the launch of the book Caroline Elkins' Britain's Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire, which details the crackdown of the rebellion and the Kikuyu community.
Ms Elkins, who is a professor at Harvard University, disputes the official death toll saying many more died in the conflict.
"I now believe there was in late colonial Kenya a murderous campaign to eliminate Kikuyu people that left tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands dead," she writes in the book.
Corruption
"I call upon the government of the United Kingdom, as a civilised nation to do the honourable thing and issue a formal apology to the Mau Mau, their families and the people of Kenya for these barbaric crimes against humanity," Mr Murungi said.
British servicemen who suffered atrocities at the hands of the Japanese during the Second World War were compensated, he said.
It's only that way that we can say that our humanity is recognised
Lawyer Paul Muite
"We do not believe it would be too much to ask the UK government to extend the same principle to the Mau Mau war veterans and their families."
A spokesman from the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office said the UK government understood the issue still created strong feelings in Kenya and that the hardships during the emergency had caused pain on both sides and marred the progress towards independence.
"But this took place 50 years ago. Kenya needs to look to future challenges like fighting corruption, fighting injustice and building a strong democracy," he told the BBC News website.
Relations between the UK and Kenya have recently been strained after the UK High Commission to Nairobi accused the Kenyan government of massive corruption.
Doing wrong
Vice President Moody Awori, also at the function, said the British campaign was "cruel and pitiless".
"The fact that colonialists put so much effort to conceal their actions means they knew what they were doing was wrong," he said.
The allegations in the book include rape, torture, murder and theft of property.
"We want the British government to acknowledge their wrongdoing and say sorry," Paul Muite, one of a group of lawyers preparing to sue Britain for compensation on behalf of former Mau Mau fighters, told AFP news agency.
"It's only that way that we can say that our humanity is recognised."
Thursday 16 September 2010
Winston Churchill~1mil Deaths in India Famine ...
Winston Churchill Blamed For 1m Deaths In India Famine
Sir Winston Churchill may be one of Britain's greatest wartime leaders, but in India he has been blamed for allowing more than a million people to die of starvation.
Winston Churchill said Britain could not spare the ships to transport emergency supplies Photo: PA
According to a new book on the famine, Sir Winston ignored pleas for emergency food aid for millions in Bengal left to starve as their rice paddies were turned over to jute for sandbag production and supplies of rice from Burma stopped after Japanese occupation.
Between one and three million died of hunger in 1943.
The wartime leader said Britain could not spare the ships to transport emergency supplies as the streets of Calcutta filled with emaciated villagers from the surrounding countryside, but author Madhusree Mukerjee has unearthed new documents which challenge his claim.
In her book, Churchill's Secret War, she cites ministry records and personal papers which reveal ships carrying cereals from Australia were bypassed India on their way to the Mediterranean where supplies were already abundant.
"It wasn't a question of Churchill being inept: sending relief to Bengal was raised repeatedly and he and his close associates thwarted every effort," the author said.
"The United States and Australia offered to send help but couldn't because the war cabinet was not willing to release ships. And when the US offered to send grain on its own ships, that offer was not followed up by the British," she added.
The man-made famine and the contrast between the plight of starving Indians and well-fed British officers dining in the city's many colonial clubs has been described as one of the darkest chapters in British rule on the Indian subcontinent.
Miss Mukerjee blames Churchill's 'racism' for his refusal to intervene.
He derided Gandhi as a "half-naked holy man" and once said: "I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion."
He was known to favour and support anything against India. The mighty size of India bothered him immensely.
When the Muslim party was established, he quickly took sides and supported the break up of India. Some say, He was known to favour Islam over Hinduism.
"Winston's racist hatred was due to his loving the empire in the way a jealous husband loves his trophy wife: he would rather destroy it than let it go," said Miss Mukerjee.
A brief Biography on Winston Churchill:
Winston Churchill, the son of Randolph Churchill, a Conservative politician, was born in Blenheim Palace, Woodstock, on 30th November, 1874. His mother, Jennie Jerome, was the daughter of Leonard Jerome, a New York businessman.
After being educated at Harrow he went to the Royal Military College at Sandhurst. Churchill joined the Fourth Hussars in 1895 and saw action on the Indian north-west frontier and in the Sudan where he took part in the Battle of Omdurman (1898).
While in the army Churchill supplied military reports for the Daily Telegraph and wrote books such as The Story of the Malakand Field Force (1898) and The River War (1899).
After leaving the British Army in 1899, Churchill worked as a war correspondent for the Morning Post. While reporting the Boer War in South Africa he was taken prisoner by the Boers but made headline news when he escaped. On returning to England he wrote about his experiences in the book, London to Ladysmith (1900).
In the 1900 General Election Churchill was elected as the Conservative MP for Oldham. As a result of reading, Poverty, A Study of Town Life by Seebohm Rowntree he became a supporter of social reform. In 1904, unconvinced by his party leaders desire for change, Churchill decided to join the Liberal Party.
In the 1906 General Election Churchill won North West Manchester and immediately became a member of the new Liberal government as Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies. When Herbert Asquith replaced Henry Campbell-Bannerman as Prime Minister in 1908 he promoted Churchill to his cabinet as President of the Board of Trade. While in this post he carried through important social legislation including the establishment of employment exchanges.
On 12th September 1908 Churchill married Clementine Ogilvy Spencer and the following year published a book on his political philosophy, Liberalism and the Social Problem (1909).
Following the 1910 General Election Churchill became Home Secretary. Churchill introduced several reforms to the prison system, including the provision of lecturers and concerts for prisoners and the setting up of special after-care associations to help convicts after they had served their sentence. However, Churchill was severely criticized for using troops to maintain order during a Welsh miners's strike.
Churchill became First Lord of the Admiralty in October 1911 where he helped modernize the navy. Churchill was one of the first people to grasp the military potential of aircraft and in 1912 he set up the Royal Naval Air Service. He also established an Air Department at the Admiralty so as to make full use of this new technology. Churchill was so enthusiastic about these new developments that he took flying lessons.
Churchill: A Life
Churchill's Wit
On the outbreak of war in 1914, Churchill joined the War Council. However, he was blamed for the failure at the Dardanelles Campaign in 1915 and was moved to the post of Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. Unhappy about not having any power to influence the Government's war policy, he rejoined the British Army and commanded a battalion of the Royal Scots Fusiliers on the Western Front.
When David Lloyd George replaced Herbert Asquith as Prime Minister, he brought Churchill back into the government as Minister of Munitions and for the final year of the war, Churchill was in charge of the production of tanks, aeroplanes, guns and shells.
Churchill also served under David Lloyd George as Minister of War and Air (1919-20) and Colonial Secretary (1921-22). Churchill created great controversy over his policies in Iraq. It was estimated that around 25,000 British and 80,000 Indian troops would be needed to control the country. However, he argued that if Britain relied on air power, you could cut these numbers to 4,000 (British) and 10,000 (Indian). The government was convinced by this argument and it was decided to send the recently formed Royal Air Force to Iraq.
An uprising of more than 100,000 armed tribesmen took place in 1920. Over the next few months the RAF dropped 97 tons of bombs killing 9,000 Iraqis. This failed to end the resistance and Arab and Kurdish uprisings continued to pose a threat to British rule. Churchill suggested that chemical weapons should be used "against recalcitrant Arabs as an experiment." He added "I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes to spread a lively terror" in Iraq.
The divisions in the Liberal Party led to Churchill being defeated by E. D. Morel at Dundee in the 1922 General Election. Churchill now rejoined the Conservative Party and was successfully elected to represent Epping in the 1924 General Election.
Stanley Baldwin, the leader of the new Conservative administration, appointed Churchill as Chancellor of the Exchequer. In 1925 Churchill controversially returned Britain the the Gold Standard and the following year took a strong line against the General Strike. Churchill edited the Government's newspaper, the British Gazette, during the dispute where he argued that "either the country will break the General Strike, or the General Strike will break the country."
With the defeat of the Conservative government in 1929, Churchill lost office. When Ramsay MacDonald formed the National Government in 1931 Churchill, who was now seen as a right-wing extremist, was not invited to join the Cabinet. He spent the next few years concentrating on his writing, including the publication of the History of the English Speaking Peoples.
After Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party gained power in Germany in 1933, Churchill became a leading advocate of rearmament. He was also a staunch critic of Neville Chamberlain and the Conservative government's appeasement policy. In 1939 Churchill controversially argued that Britain and France should form of a military alliance with the Soviet Union.
On the outbreak of the Second World War Churchill was appointed First Lord of the Admiralty and on 4th April 1940 became chairman of the Military Coordinating Committee. Later that month the German Army invaded and occupied Norway. The loss of Norway was a considerable setback for Neville Chamberlain and his policies for dealing with Nazi Germany.
On 8th May the Labour Party demanded a debate on the Norwegian campaign and this turned into a vote of censure. At the end of the debate 30 Conservatives voted against Chamberlain and a further 60 abstained. Chamberlain now decided to resign and on 10th May, 1940, George VI appointed Churchill as prime minister. Later that day the German Army began its Western Offensive and invaded the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg. Two days later German forces entered France.
Churchill formed a coalition government and placed leaders of the Labour Party such as Clement Attlee, Ernest Bevin, Herbert Morrison, Stafford Cripps and Hugh Dalton in key positions. He also brought in another long-time opponent of Chamberlain, Anthony Eden, as his secretary of state for war. Later that year Eden replaced Lord Halifax as foreign secretary.
Churchill also developed a strong personal relationship with Franklin D. Roosevelt and this led to the sharing and trading of war supplies. The Lend Lease agreement of March 1941 allowed Britain to order war goods from the United States on credit.
Although he provided strong leadership the war continued to go badly for Britain and after a series of military defeats Churchill had to face a motion of no confidence in Parliament. However, he maintained the support of most members of the House of Commons and won by 475 votes to 25.
Troublesome Young Men
Churchill continued to be criticized for meddling in military matters and tended to take too much notice of the views of his friends such as Frederick Lindemann rather than his military commanders. In April 1941 he made the serious mistake of trying to save Greece by weakening his forces fighting the Desert War.
One of the major contributions made by Churchill to eventual victory was his ability to inspire the British people to greater effort by making public broadcasts on significant occasions. A brilliant orator he was a tireless source of strength to people experiencing the sufferings of the Blitz.
After Pearl Harbor Churchill worked closely with Franklin D. Roosevelt to ensure victory over Germany and Japan. He was also a loyal ally of the Soviet Union after Adolf Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa in June, 1941.
Churchill held important meetings with Franklin D. Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin at Teheran (November, 1943) and Yalta (February, 1945). Although Churchill's relationship with Stalin was always difficult he managed to successfully develop a united strategy against the Axis powers.
Despite intense pressure from Stalin to open a second-front by landing Allied troops in France in 1943, Churchill continued to argue that this should not happen until the defeat of Nazi Germany was guaranteed. The D-Day landings did not take place until June, 1944 and this delay enabled the Red Army to capture territory from Germany in Eastern Europe.
In public Churchill accepted plans for social reform drawn up by William Beveridge in 1944. However, he was unable to convince the electorate that he was as committed to these measures as much as Clement Attlee and the Labour Party. In the 1945 General Election Churchill's attempts to compare a future Labour government with Nazi Germany backfired and Attlee won a landslide victory.
Churchill became leader of the opposition and when visiting the United States in March 1946, he made his famous Iron Curtain speech at Fulton, Missouri. He suffered the first of several strokes in August 1946 but this information was kept from the general public and he continued to lead the Conservative Party.
Churchill returned to power after the 1951 General Election. After the publication of his six volume, The Second World War, Churchill was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Churchill's health continued to deteriorate and in 1955 he reluctantly retired from politics.
Winston Churchill died on 24th January, 1965.
Sir Winston Churchill may be one of Britain's greatest wartime leaders, but in India he has been blamed for allowing more than a million people to die of starvation.
Winston Churchill said Britain could not spare the ships to transport emergency supplies Photo: PA
According to a new book on the famine, Sir Winston ignored pleas for emergency food aid for millions in Bengal left to starve as their rice paddies were turned over to jute for sandbag production and supplies of rice from Burma stopped after Japanese occupation.
Between one and three million died of hunger in 1943.
The wartime leader said Britain could not spare the ships to transport emergency supplies as the streets of Calcutta filled with emaciated villagers from the surrounding countryside, but author Madhusree Mukerjee has unearthed new documents which challenge his claim.
In her book, Churchill's Secret War, she cites ministry records and personal papers which reveal ships carrying cereals from Australia were bypassed India on their way to the Mediterranean where supplies were already abundant.
"It wasn't a question of Churchill being inept: sending relief to Bengal was raised repeatedly and he and his close associates thwarted every effort," the author said.
"The United States and Australia offered to send help but couldn't because the war cabinet was not willing to release ships. And when the US offered to send grain on its own ships, that offer was not followed up by the British," she added.
The man-made famine and the contrast between the plight of starving Indians and well-fed British officers dining in the city's many colonial clubs has been described as one of the darkest chapters in British rule on the Indian subcontinent.
Miss Mukerjee blames Churchill's 'racism' for his refusal to intervene.
He derided Gandhi as a "half-naked holy man" and once said: "I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion."
He was known to favour and support anything against India. The mighty size of India bothered him immensely.
When the Muslim party was established, he quickly took sides and supported the break up of India. Some say, He was known to favour Islam over Hinduism.
"Winston's racist hatred was due to his loving the empire in the way a jealous husband loves his trophy wife: he would rather destroy it than let it go," said Miss Mukerjee.
A brief Biography on Winston Churchill:
Winston Churchill, the son of Randolph Churchill, a Conservative politician, was born in Blenheim Palace, Woodstock, on 30th November, 1874. His mother, Jennie Jerome, was the daughter of Leonard Jerome, a New York businessman.
After being educated at Harrow he went to the Royal Military College at Sandhurst. Churchill joined the Fourth Hussars in 1895 and saw action on the Indian north-west frontier and in the Sudan where he took part in the Battle of Omdurman (1898).
While in the army Churchill supplied military reports for the Daily Telegraph and wrote books such as The Story of the Malakand Field Force (1898) and The River War (1899).
After leaving the British Army in 1899, Churchill worked as a war correspondent for the Morning Post. While reporting the Boer War in South Africa he was taken prisoner by the Boers but made headline news when he escaped. On returning to England he wrote about his experiences in the book, London to Ladysmith (1900).
In the 1900 General Election Churchill was elected as the Conservative MP for Oldham. As a result of reading, Poverty, A Study of Town Life by Seebohm Rowntree he became a supporter of social reform. In 1904, unconvinced by his party leaders desire for change, Churchill decided to join the Liberal Party.
In the 1906 General Election Churchill won North West Manchester and immediately became a member of the new Liberal government as Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies. When Herbert Asquith replaced Henry Campbell-Bannerman as Prime Minister in 1908 he promoted Churchill to his cabinet as President of the Board of Trade. While in this post he carried through important social legislation including the establishment of employment exchanges.
On 12th September 1908 Churchill married Clementine Ogilvy Spencer and the following year published a book on his political philosophy, Liberalism and the Social Problem (1909).
Following the 1910 General Election Churchill became Home Secretary. Churchill introduced several reforms to the prison system, including the provision of lecturers and concerts for prisoners and the setting up of special after-care associations to help convicts after they had served their sentence. However, Churchill was severely criticized for using troops to maintain order during a Welsh miners's strike.
Churchill became First Lord of the Admiralty in October 1911 where he helped modernize the navy. Churchill was one of the first people to grasp the military potential of aircraft and in 1912 he set up the Royal Naval Air Service. He also established an Air Department at the Admiralty so as to make full use of this new technology. Churchill was so enthusiastic about these new developments that he took flying lessons.
Churchill: A Life
Churchill's Wit
On the outbreak of war in 1914, Churchill joined the War Council. However, he was blamed for the failure at the Dardanelles Campaign in 1915 and was moved to the post of Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. Unhappy about not having any power to influence the Government's war policy, he rejoined the British Army and commanded a battalion of the Royal Scots Fusiliers on the Western Front.
When David Lloyd George replaced Herbert Asquith as Prime Minister, he brought Churchill back into the government as Minister of Munitions and for the final year of the war, Churchill was in charge of the production of tanks, aeroplanes, guns and shells.
Churchill also served under David Lloyd George as Minister of War and Air (1919-20) and Colonial Secretary (1921-22). Churchill created great controversy over his policies in Iraq. It was estimated that around 25,000 British and 80,000 Indian troops would be needed to control the country. However, he argued that if Britain relied on air power, you could cut these numbers to 4,000 (British) and 10,000 (Indian). The government was convinced by this argument and it was decided to send the recently formed Royal Air Force to Iraq.
An uprising of more than 100,000 armed tribesmen took place in 1920. Over the next few months the RAF dropped 97 tons of bombs killing 9,000 Iraqis. This failed to end the resistance and Arab and Kurdish uprisings continued to pose a threat to British rule. Churchill suggested that chemical weapons should be used "against recalcitrant Arabs as an experiment." He added "I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes to spread a lively terror" in Iraq.
The divisions in the Liberal Party led to Churchill being defeated by E. D. Morel at Dundee in the 1922 General Election. Churchill now rejoined the Conservative Party and was successfully elected to represent Epping in the 1924 General Election.
Stanley Baldwin, the leader of the new Conservative administration, appointed Churchill as Chancellor of the Exchequer. In 1925 Churchill controversially returned Britain the the Gold Standard and the following year took a strong line against the General Strike. Churchill edited the Government's newspaper, the British Gazette, during the dispute where he argued that "either the country will break the General Strike, or the General Strike will break the country."
With the defeat of the Conservative government in 1929, Churchill lost office. When Ramsay MacDonald formed the National Government in 1931 Churchill, who was now seen as a right-wing extremist, was not invited to join the Cabinet. He spent the next few years concentrating on his writing, including the publication of the History of the English Speaking Peoples.
After Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party gained power in Germany in 1933, Churchill became a leading advocate of rearmament. He was also a staunch critic of Neville Chamberlain and the Conservative government's appeasement policy. In 1939 Churchill controversially argued that Britain and France should form of a military alliance with the Soviet Union.
On the outbreak of the Second World War Churchill was appointed First Lord of the Admiralty and on 4th April 1940 became chairman of the Military Coordinating Committee. Later that month the German Army invaded and occupied Norway. The loss of Norway was a considerable setback for Neville Chamberlain and his policies for dealing with Nazi Germany.
On 8th May the Labour Party demanded a debate on the Norwegian campaign and this turned into a vote of censure. At the end of the debate 30 Conservatives voted against Chamberlain and a further 60 abstained. Chamberlain now decided to resign and on 10th May, 1940, George VI appointed Churchill as prime minister. Later that day the German Army began its Western Offensive and invaded the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg. Two days later German forces entered France.
Churchill formed a coalition government and placed leaders of the Labour Party such as Clement Attlee, Ernest Bevin, Herbert Morrison, Stafford Cripps and Hugh Dalton in key positions. He also brought in another long-time opponent of Chamberlain, Anthony Eden, as his secretary of state for war. Later that year Eden replaced Lord Halifax as foreign secretary.
Churchill also developed a strong personal relationship with Franklin D. Roosevelt and this led to the sharing and trading of war supplies. The Lend Lease agreement of March 1941 allowed Britain to order war goods from the United States on credit.
Although he provided strong leadership the war continued to go badly for Britain and after a series of military defeats Churchill had to face a motion of no confidence in Parliament. However, he maintained the support of most members of the House of Commons and won by 475 votes to 25.
Troublesome Young Men
Churchill continued to be criticized for meddling in military matters and tended to take too much notice of the views of his friends such as Frederick Lindemann rather than his military commanders. In April 1941 he made the serious mistake of trying to save Greece by weakening his forces fighting the Desert War.
One of the major contributions made by Churchill to eventual victory was his ability to inspire the British people to greater effort by making public broadcasts on significant occasions. A brilliant orator he was a tireless source of strength to people experiencing the sufferings of the Blitz.
After Pearl Harbor Churchill worked closely with Franklin D. Roosevelt to ensure victory over Germany and Japan. He was also a loyal ally of the Soviet Union after Adolf Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa in June, 1941.
Churchill held important meetings with Franklin D. Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin at Teheran (November, 1943) and Yalta (February, 1945). Although Churchill's relationship with Stalin was always difficult he managed to successfully develop a united strategy against the Axis powers.
Despite intense pressure from Stalin to open a second-front by landing Allied troops in France in 1943, Churchill continued to argue that this should not happen until the defeat of Nazi Germany was guaranteed. The D-Day landings did not take place until June, 1944 and this delay enabled the Red Army to capture territory from Germany in Eastern Europe.
In public Churchill accepted plans for social reform drawn up by William Beveridge in 1944. However, he was unable to convince the electorate that he was as committed to these measures as much as Clement Attlee and the Labour Party. In the 1945 General Election Churchill's attempts to compare a future Labour government with Nazi Germany backfired and Attlee won a landslide victory.
Churchill became leader of the opposition and when visiting the United States in March 1946, he made his famous Iron Curtain speech at Fulton, Missouri. He suffered the first of several strokes in August 1946 but this information was kept from the general public and he continued to lead the Conservative Party.
Churchill returned to power after the 1951 General Election. After the publication of his six volume, The Second World War, Churchill was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Churchill's health continued to deteriorate and in 1955 he reluctantly retired from politics.
Winston Churchill died on 24th January, 1965.
Thursday 9 September 2010
Catapult Experiences ...
All those who have used this apparatus at least once in their lifetime … Must leave your experience of where and when used.
I’ll tell you of one of mine.
I’ll tell you of one of mine.
In Mombasa 1969ish, At the age of 9-10yrs old, I was a loved favourite of a very kind neighbour who I treated like an older brother (Still Do) known as “Bato Din”.
I had been begging and crying for one, so Bato very kindly let me have his the finest in the neighbourhood. So me armed, we all went bird hunting, I did not even know how to use well enough, so I loaded it with a pebble and aimed to fire, it misfired hit the left arm of the catapult and diverted to a Beetle Car and smashed the windscreen. Shocked I looked up and realised that all my gang of hunters had fled, so I ran after in pursuit. That was the end of that.
However, years after in London in 90’s, I went with a friend to meet an old friend and we sat chatting and soon the conversation led to Mombasa and he told me where he had lived.
Mmmm ... I asked him if he ever owned a Sky Blue VW Beetle Car and if its windscreen had ever been smashed?
To his amazement (The Look on his Face) he said yes he had a VW Beetle and Yes! Its windscreen was smashed by some Rascals.
I then took a deep breath and confessed to him that I was that Rascal that had broken his windscreen!
He sat there shocked that I had confessed and then called his entire family in the room and asked me to repeat my confession again. I did...
We all laughed and a true gentleman he proved to be. He was pleased that I had the guts to confess and told me to write it off my conscious for ever. (The matter was closed)
What is your story … Go on share it with me/us.
What is your story … Go on share it with me/us.
Monday 23 August 2010
Jupiter In Astral Collision ...
Rare flash of light seen on Jupiter in astral collision 
A flash of light believed to be caused by astral matter colliding with Jupiter has been captured on camera by an amateur astronomer in Japan.
Video footage depicting the unusual flash of light was recorded by amateur stargazer Masayuki Tachikawa at his home in Kumamoto City, southern Japan.
It is the third sighting of flashes of light on Jupiter this year, with similar reports by astronomers based in the Philippines and Australia.
Junichi Watanabe, a professor at the NAOJ, told Kyodo News: "This kind of footage is rarely filmed."
It was in the early hours of Saturday morning that Mr Tachikawa, 52, recorded a glow that lasted for around two seconds near Jupiter's equator using a video telescope at his home.
"I took it for noise signals at first but I was really surprised because the image of the light remained on the video," Mr Tachikawa said.
Astronomers believe that the astral body that hit Jupiter was most likely less than 1km in width as there was no trace left after the flash subsided.
With the rise of sophisticated telescopic equipment on the market, a growing number of amateur astronomers are making significant planetary observations.
In June, amateur planet-watchers also captured on camera a similar fireball that seemed to hit into Jupiter with a flash.
Further investigations by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope concluded that this flash was caused by a giant meteor as it plunged into the atmosphere surrounding Jupiter.
By Danielle Demetriou in Tokyo - Published: 5:13PM BST 23 Aug 2010
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-video/7960799/Astral-matter-collides-with-Jupiter.html
A flash of light believed to be caused by astral matter colliding with Jupiter has been captured on camera by an amateur astronomer in Japan.
Video footage depicting the unusual flash of light was recorded by amateur stargazer Masayuki Tachikawa at his home in Kumamoto City, southern Japan.
It is the third sighting of flashes of light on Jupiter this year, with similar reports by astronomers based in the Philippines and Australia.
Junichi Watanabe, a professor at the NAOJ, told Kyodo News: "This kind of footage is rarely filmed."
It was in the early hours of Saturday morning that Mr Tachikawa, 52, recorded a glow that lasted for around two seconds near Jupiter's equator using a video telescope at his home.
"I took it for noise signals at first but I was really surprised because the image of the light remained on the video," Mr Tachikawa said.
Astronomers believe that the astral body that hit Jupiter was most likely less than 1km in width as there was no trace left after the flash subsided.
With the rise of sophisticated telescopic equipment on the market, a growing number of amateur astronomers are making significant planetary observations.
In June, amateur planet-watchers also captured on camera a similar fireball that seemed to hit into Jupiter with a flash.
Further investigations by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope concluded that this flash was caused by a giant meteor as it plunged into the atmosphere surrounding Jupiter.
By Danielle Demetriou in Tokyo - Published: 5:13PM BST 23 Aug 2010
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-video/7960799/Astral-matter-collides-with-Jupiter.html
Monday 9 August 2010
The Smart Game ...
There once lived a great mathematician in a village outside Amritsar.
He was often called by the local king to advice on matters related to the economy.
His reputation had spread as far as Afghanistan in the west and Burma in the East.
So it hurt him very much when the village headman told him, "You may be a great mathematician who advises the king on economic matters but your son does not know the value of gold or silver."
The mathematician disturbed by the allegation, approaches his son at home that evening.
Father: "What is more valuable - gold or silver?"
Son: "Gold,"
Father: That is correct! Why is it then that the village headman makes fun of you, claims you do not know the value of gold or silver? He teases me every day. He mocks me before other village elders as a father who neglects his son. This hurts me. I feel everyone in the village is laughing behind my back because they think you do not know what is more valuable, gold or silver. Explain this to me, son!?
Son: "Every day on my way to and fro from school, the village headman calls me to his house. There, in front of all village elders, he holds out a silver coin in one hand and a gold coin in other. He asks me to pick up the more valuable coin. I pick the silver coin. He laughs, the elders jeer, and everyone makes fun of me. And then I make my way.
This happens every day. That is why they tell you I do not know the value of gold or silver."
(The father was confused. His son knew the value of gold and silver, and yet when asked to choose between a gold coin and silver coin always picked the silver coin.)
Father: Why don't you pick up the gold coin?
In response, the son took the father to his room and showed him a trunk full of hundreds of silver coins.
Son: "The day I pick up the gold coin the game will stop.
They will stop having fun and I will stop making money."
The bottom line is...
Sometimes in life, we have to play the fool because our seniors and our peers, and sometimes even our juniors like it. That does not mean we lose in the game of life. It just means allowing others to win in one arena of the game, while we win in the other arena of the game. We have to choose which arena matters to us and which arenas do not.
He was often called by the local king to advice on matters related to the economy.
His reputation had spread as far as Afghanistan in the west and Burma in the East.
So it hurt him very much when the village headman told him, "You may be a great mathematician who advises the king on economic matters but your son does not know the value of gold or silver."
The mathematician disturbed by the allegation, approaches his son at home that evening.
Father: "What is more valuable - gold or silver?"
Son: "Gold,"
Father: That is correct! Why is it then that the village headman makes fun of you, claims you do not know the value of gold or silver? He teases me every day. He mocks me before other village elders as a father who neglects his son. This hurts me. I feel everyone in the village is laughing behind my back because they think you do not know what is more valuable, gold or silver. Explain this to me, son!?
Son: "Every day on my way to and fro from school, the village headman calls me to his house. There, in front of all village elders, he holds out a silver coin in one hand and a gold coin in other. He asks me to pick up the more valuable coin. I pick the silver coin. He laughs, the elders jeer, and everyone makes fun of me. And then I make my way.
This happens every day. That is why they tell you I do not know the value of gold or silver."
(The father was confused. His son knew the value of gold and silver, and yet when asked to choose between a gold coin and silver coin always picked the silver coin.)
Father: Why don't you pick up the gold coin?
In response, the son took the father to his room and showed him a trunk full of hundreds of silver coins.
Son: "The day I pick up the gold coin the game will stop.
They will stop having fun and I will stop making money."
The bottom line is...
Sometimes in life, we have to play the fool because our seniors and our peers, and sometimes even our juniors like it. That does not mean we lose in the game of life. It just means allowing others to win in one arena of the game, while we win in the other arena of the game. We have to choose which arena matters to us and which arenas do not.
Monday 2 August 2010
My Influencials of Friends & Foe's ...
Bill Gates, Plato, Cui Jiano, Vladimir Lenin, Pavel Korchagin, Bill Clinton, Peter I of Russia, Bruce Lee, Winston Churchill, Henri Matisse, Pelé, Guan Yu, Ramesses II, Charles de Gaulle, Margaret Thatcher, Alfred Nobel, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Ernest Hemingway, Elvis Presley,
J. Robert Oppenheimer, William Shakespeare, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Audrey Hepburn,
Ludwig van Beethoven, Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Saddam Hussein, Maxim Gorky, Sun Yat-sen, Deng Xiaoping, Alexander Pushkin, Lu Xun, Josef Stalin, Leonardo da Vinci, Karl Marx, Charlie Chaplin, Henry Ford, Lei Feng, Jonas Salk, Norman Bethune, or Harold E. Varmus?, Sigmund Frued, Jack Kevorkian, Chiang Kai-Shek, Queen Elizabeth II, Mike Tyson, Vladimir Putin, Lewis Carroll, Shirley Temple, Leo Tolstoy, Albert Einstein, Genghis Khan, Napoleon Bonaparte, Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, Marlon Brando as Don Vito Corleone, Yasser Arafat, Julius Caesar, Claire Lee Chennault, Luciano Pavoratti, George W Bush, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Osama bin Laden, Liu Xiang, Dante Alighieri, Friedrich Nietzsche, Steven Spielberg, Pablo Picaso, Abraham Lincoln, Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Laozi, Marilyn Monroe, Salvador Dalí, Empress Dowager Cixi, Marie Curie, Ariel Sharon, Prince Charles of Wales, Kofi Annan, Qi Baishi, Qin Shi Huang, Hideki Tojo, Mother Teresa, Mikhail Gorbachev, Soong Ching-ling, St Peter, Otto von, Bismarck, Run Run Shaw, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Li Bai, Charles Darwin, Confucius, Corneliu Baba, Michelangelo, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Vincent van Gogh, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Michael Jordan, Marcel Duchamp, Aristotle, Liu Bei
Celebrities that found success despite looking like a camel
Original Artists: Zhang An, Li Tiezi, and Dai Dudu
The creators are Chinese artists. They are Dai Dudu, Liaoning Art Institute’s Vice President; Li Tiezi, contemporary oil painter; Zhang Anjun, chairman of the Shenyang Youth Association of Artists, and contemporary oil painter. Dai Dudu led the effort.
According to Dai Dudu, the three began work on the painting in 2006, completing it 10 months later. “At the time, we wanted to represent world history within a single painting. We wanted to showcase the world’s story, and let viewers feel as if they were flipping the pages of a history book,” Dai said. Article Source.
** There are a couple that I cannot identify ... Perhaps you can ... Drop me a line if you find someone that I have missed.
Monday 26 July 2010
The Bible Told Me to give back the Grand Larceny Hotel ...
Kamlesh Pattni: The Bible Told Me to give back the Grand Larceny Hotel
Someone ought to give Kamlesh Pattni his own reality show.
This man is a total comedian and why do these Indians who’ve been born and raised in Kenya sound like they just flew in from Kolkata?
Anyway, why is the government getting into the hotel business?
And that Central Bank Governor is one arrogant man.
He ought to answer questions from the media because his salary is being paid for by the taxpayers of Kenya.
A reporter asked him a very fair and legitimate question: What does the government plan to do with this hotel and the governor refused to answer it.
Are Kenyan journalists not tough enough or are they just afraid of getting roughed up?
~By Kenyan Entrepreneur
Link: http://www.kenyanentrepreneur.com/kamlesh-pattni-the-bible-told-me-to-give-back-the-grand-larceny-hotel
Someone ought to give Kamlesh Pattni his own reality show.
This man is a total comedian and why do these Indians who’ve been born and raised in Kenya sound like they just flew in from Kolkata?
Anyway, why is the government getting into the hotel business?
And that Central Bank Governor is one arrogant man.
He ought to answer questions from the media because his salary is being paid for by the taxpayers of Kenya.
A reporter asked him a very fair and legitimate question: What does the government plan to do with this hotel and the governor refused to answer it.
Are Kenyan journalists not tough enough or are they just afraid of getting roughed up?
~By Kenyan Entrepreneur
Link: http://www.kenyanentrepreneur.com/kamlesh-pattni-the-bible-told-me-to-give-back-the-grand-larceny-hotel
Thursday 22 July 2010
Kenya Torture Victims get Compensation Payment ...
Kenyan judges have awarded 21 former political prisoners almost $500,000 (£330,000) between them in compensation for torture they suffered in the 1980s. 
They were among hundreds of people who were illegally detained and tortured during the government of President Daniel Arap Moi, who retired in 2002.
Their lawyers, who first brought the case in 1988, said the constitutional court had made a landmark ruling.
The victims had described spending days in waterlogged torture chambers.
For almost as long as Mr Moi ruled Kenya, Nyayo House in Nairobi became an unutterable synonym for torture, terror and detention.
Daniel Arap Moi has always denied his government condoned torture
The upper floors of the building housed the department of immigration, but beneath them in the basement worked the special branch of internal security - Mr Moi's secret police. His government always denied torture, but more than two decades ago, while he was still in power, 21 former prisoners tried to sue the administration for violating their fundamental rights.
At the time, the court ruled that the case could not continue while the government remained in office.
So it is only now - eight years after Mr Moi retired - that the case has finally concluded.
During the hearings, victims told of being left in waterlogged torture chambers without food or water, and being hung from the ceiling while police beat them.
Judge Hannah Okengu said it had been a violation of their rights to liberty and freedom from torture. She awarded the 21 victims a total of almost $500,000 in compensation - a blow to the credibility of Mr Moi, who is now campaigning against a new constitution.
~By Peter GresteBBC East Africa correspondent
They were among hundreds of people who were illegally detained and tortured during the government of President Daniel Arap Moi, who retired in 2002.
Their lawyers, who first brought the case in 1988, said the constitutional court had made a landmark ruling.
The victims had described spending days in waterlogged torture chambers.
For almost as long as Mr Moi ruled Kenya, Nyayo House in Nairobi became an unutterable synonym for torture, terror and detention.
Daniel Arap Moi has always denied his government condoned torture
The upper floors of the building housed the department of immigration, but beneath them in the basement worked the special branch of internal security - Mr Moi's secret police. His government always denied torture, but more than two decades ago, while he was still in power, 21 former prisoners tried to sue the administration for violating their fundamental rights.
At the time, the court ruled that the case could not continue while the government remained in office.
So it is only now - eight years after Mr Moi retired - that the case has finally concluded.
During the hearings, victims told of being left in waterlogged torture chambers without food or water, and being hung from the ceiling while police beat them.
Judge Hannah Okengu said it had been a violation of their rights to liberty and freedom from torture. She awarded the 21 victims a total of almost $500,000 in compensation - a blow to the credibility of Mr Moi, who is now campaigning against a new constitution.
~By Peter GresteBBC East Africa correspondent
Wednesday 21 July 2010
New Kenyan Washing Machine
An alarm-fitted television set.A manually operated washing machine.
A Jiko (Stove) built of wood and windows.
George Kabiru, a 44-year-old resident of Nairobi, Kenya, is the inventor of all of this.
George Kabiru's washing machine was designed for those without electricity
When I paid Kabiru a visit, I was in for a shock. I touched the television set in his living room. and an ear-splitting sound immediately went off.
"Who will want to run down a street with a TV howling at them?" Kabiru comments wryly.
He has fitted a matchbox-sized alarm, which operates with batteries, at the back of the television set.
"It is a good crime deterrent," Kabiru says. "The alarm can sound for something like eight hours."
Charcoal stove
A medical technician at the Mathari Mental hospital in Nairobi, Kabiru earns extra money from what he regards as his invention, charging customers about $15 (Ksh1200) for the alarm and its installation.
The alarm can also be attached to fridges, computers and video players.
Many people have invented or created things but they are discouraged from patenting them
George Kabiru
And at his work-place, Kabiru puts his innovative skills to good use.
"My colleagues and I have been forced by circumstances to come up with incubators, lighting equipment and casualty beds which have proved to be better than conventional ones," he says with a laugh.
Kabiru has also made a solar Jiko (charcoal stove) which he sells for about $44. He says it is best to cook on it between 0900 and 1500 in cool, high-altitude areas.
Patent
The Jiko is an insulated wooden box with two glass windows on the top. One improves heat absorption, while the other allows heat from the sun, and the reflection of it from a coating of aluminium, to penetrate the box and cook the food.
But the invention Kabiru is most proud of is his washing machine - a plastic container fixed on a stand and operated manually by turning a wheel.
"I had people without electricity in mind when I made the machine," Kabiru says.
"You can wash clothes, blankets, linen and canvas bags in it and it takes a load of 40 kilogrammes."
He sells the washing machine for about $68. So proud is Kabiru of the invention, that he has patented it.
"It was a lengthy and demanding procedure. The government has to simplify it," Kabiru says. "Many people have invented or created things but they are discouraged from patenting them. It means that other people can steal their ideas and make money out of them."
~ By Ogova Ondego
BBC Focus on Africa magazine
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The BBC World Service programme Africa Live goes in search of African inventions next Wednesday: Necessity is the mother of invention they say, but does African creativity offer anything for development? Have you ever invented something or thought of a practical solution to an every day issue? Are you worried that your idea could be stolen? Have you ever tried to get an idea patented?
Use the form to send us your comments, some of which will be published below.
If you want to take part in the radio discussion, include your phone number, which will not be published.
Bahaya Invented Steel
"Early sub-Saharan Africans developed metallurgy at a
very early stage, possibly even before other peoples.
Around 1400 BC, East Africans began producing steel in carbon furnaces (steel was invented in the west in the eighteenth century).
The Iron Age itself came very early to Africa, probably around the sixth century BC, in Ethiopia, the Great Lakes region, Tanzania, Kenya and Nigeria.
Iron technology, however, only spread slowly across Africa; it wasn't until the first century AD that the smelting of iron began to rapidly diffuse throughout the continent."
Source and further information:
http://www.wsu.edu/~dee/CIVAFRCA/IRONAGE.HTM
Further information:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steel#Ancient_steel
"Iron technology has a long history in Africa. Steel is an alloy of iron. A high quality carbon steel was produced by the Bahaya people nearly 2000 thousand years ago. The Bahaya people are from the north-west area of what is now Tanzania, in East Africa.
This quality of steel was not found in Europe until about the year 1800. The iron ore used by the Bahaya people had the formula Fe304.This was added to the top of the furnace with charcoal, as the source of carbon. The air entered the furnace through blow-pipes at the bottom. In this way the air was preheated, which improved the yield and quality of the iron. The temperature reached in the furnace was 1800°C."
Source and further information:
http://www.jamiiforums.com/jukwaa-la-elimu-education-forum/10253-bahaya-invented-steel.html
"In Tanzania, Africa was smelting steel at 1850 degrees centigrade in a single process, using less fuel than later comparable Western methods, when this technological innovation was yet unknown in the Western world."
"These years have seen the discovery of African steel-smelting in Tanzania 1500- 2000 years ago, an astronomical observatory in Kenya 300 years before Christ"
Source and further information:
"Re-inventing Africa By Ifi Amadiume"
http://books.google.com/books?id=KeZUhtDhujsC&pg=PA90&lpg=PA90&dq=steel+invention+tanzania&source=bl&ots=fCkBdh0DV6&sig=NvSuLCoqWX-Gm0vosYy4SEwlZyU&hl=en&ei=1f_MSb7cGMiKsAaS1JGgCA&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=1&ct=result
"Steel technology was not confined to the Mediterranean and the European North West. India may well have been at the apex of steel technology and China had its own technology centered around cast iron, used not so much for warfare but for civil objects like pots and pans.
And lets not forget the Haya, a people who lived in what is now Tanzania. They had a highly developed Fe technology and used it for beautiful sculptures, too. Their myths and fairy tales contain many stories relating to the making of iron, using a vocabulary that was heartily enriched with expressions relating to the making of humans.
There is even some evidence - collected recently (and, of course, being discussed controversially), that the old Africans had the highest temperatures of all, even reaching the melting point of iron some 2000 years ago (long before everybody else did)"
Source and further information:
http://www.tf.uni-kiel.de/matwis/amat/def_en/kap_5/advanced/t5_1_4.html
Further information:
"African Iron Production: A Review of Recent Publications"
http://www.tf.uni-kiel.de/matwis/amat/def_en/articles/african_iron/african_iron.html
Read more: Was steel invented by Africans in ancient Tanzania? was it used by the ancient blacks in Tanzania initially?
http://www.answerbag.com/q_view/1366803#ixzz0uLfHbw88
very early stage, possibly even before other peoples.Around 1400 BC, East Africans began producing steel in carbon furnaces (steel was invented in the west in the eighteenth century).
The Iron Age itself came very early to Africa, probably around the sixth century BC, in Ethiopia, the Great Lakes region, Tanzania, Kenya and Nigeria.
Iron technology, however, only spread slowly across Africa; it wasn't until the first century AD that the smelting of iron began to rapidly diffuse throughout the continent."
Source and further information:
http://www.wsu.edu/~dee/CIVAFRCA/IRONAGE.HTM
Further information:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steel#Ancient_steel
"Iron technology has a long history in Africa. Steel is an alloy of iron. A high quality carbon steel was produced by the Bahaya people nearly 2000 thousand years ago. The Bahaya people are from the north-west area of what is now Tanzania, in East Africa.
This quality of steel was not found in Europe until about the year 1800. The iron ore used by the Bahaya people had the formula Fe304.This was added to the top of the furnace with charcoal, as the source of carbon. The air entered the furnace through blow-pipes at the bottom. In this way the air was preheated, which improved the yield and quality of the iron. The temperature reached in the furnace was 1800°C."
Source and further information:
http://www.jamiiforums.com/jukwaa-la-elimu-education-forum/10253-bahaya-invented-steel.html
"In Tanzania, Africa was smelting steel at 1850 degrees centigrade in a single process, using less fuel than later comparable Western methods, when this technological innovation was yet unknown in the Western world."
"These years have seen the discovery of African steel-smelting in Tanzania 1500- 2000 years ago, an astronomical observatory in Kenya 300 years before Christ"
Source and further information:
"Re-inventing Africa By Ifi Amadiume"
http://books.google.com/books?id=KeZUhtDhujsC&pg=PA90&lpg=PA90&dq=steel+invention+tanzania&source=bl&ots=fCkBdh0DV6&sig=NvSuLCoqWX-Gm0vosYy4SEwlZyU&hl=en&ei=1f_MSb7cGMiKsAaS1JGgCA&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=1&ct=result
"Steel technology was not confined to the Mediterranean and the European North West. India may well have been at the apex of steel technology and China had its own technology centered around cast iron, used not so much for warfare but for civil objects like pots and pans.
And lets not forget the Haya, a people who lived in what is now Tanzania. They had a highly developed Fe technology and used it for beautiful sculptures, too. Their myths and fairy tales contain many stories relating to the making of iron, using a vocabulary that was heartily enriched with expressions relating to the making of humans.
There is even some evidence - collected recently (and, of course, being discussed controversially), that the old Africans had the highest temperatures of all, even reaching the melting point of iron some 2000 years ago (long before everybody else did)"
Source and further information:
http://www.tf.uni-kiel.de/matwis/amat/def_en/kap_5/advanced/t5_1_4.html
Further information:
"African Iron Production: A Review of Recent Publications"
http://www.tf.uni-kiel.de/matwis/amat/def_en/articles/african_iron/african_iron.html
Read more: Was steel invented by Africans in ancient Tanzania? was it used by the ancient blacks in Tanzania initially?
http://www.answerbag.com/q_view/1366803#ixzz0uLfHbw88
Saturday 17 July 2010
Tanzania: Poaching On the Rise ...
Arusha — Poaching cases are on the increase in Loliondo game controlled area in contrast to limited number of game rangers in the vicinity.
The Ngoro Ngoro District Wildlife Officer Betekire Rubunga said there are just four game rangers including him, to patrol the rather large game controlled area, "We also have only one vehicle, a single-cabin Land-Rover 110 Tdi, which had resumed operation last week after being grounded for repairs since December 2008," said Rubunga.
Loliondo game controlled area measures 4000 square kilometers much of it being jungle, savannah bush land and hill ranges. That kind of topography coupled with underdeveloped infrastructure in the area impede rapid movement in case of emergency and works in favor of better equipped poachers.
"The entire landscape is dotted with traps, snares and dug out pits. The problem with these traps is that they catch both the intended and unintended animal ," said the Officer adding that poachers also use military-like heavy guns.
According to the Wildlife Officer, his department has been making arrests " within the first four months of this year, we have nabbed several offenders and a total of five cases been taken to court by the end of April 2009"
"We sometimes get assistance from the Loliondo based Ortello Business Corporation (OBC) which operates a hunting block in the vicinity and in some cases from the anti-poaching units based in Arusha," said the Wildlife Officer explaining that in order to be effective his department needs at least 10 more warders in the area plus an addition vehicle.
Between January and December last year a total of 15 illegal hunters were arrested three of whom were sentenced up to 15 years in jail with other cases going on at the District Magistrate Court. "The nation incurred a loss of over Tsh 30 million from such practices in 2008," stated Mr Rubunga.
According to the wildlife officer figures of the previous year 2007 indicate total arrests of 12 poachers who were apprehended and taken to court with most of them now serving various jail sentences.
The Wildlife officer explained that mot illegal game hunters come from Mara region and neighbouring Uganda and Rwanda. He also pointed out that there is an increase of Zebra killings in the Game controlled areas mainly for the animal's skins which of late have been on high demand. The sale is mostly to tourists via Kenya to the Far East
Elephants are also a favourite kill of the poachers; "We keep coming across carcasses of these large land mammals everywhere we go within the Game Controlled Area and so far we have recorded six recently killed Jumbos three in Njoloi Ward and other three in Arash village," he stated.
All the carcasses have been missing their tusks providing clear motives of their planned deaths.
Other than poaching, witchcraft beliefs are also said to be taking toll on wildlife killings, "We recently caught a suspect with teeth of recently killed lions," said Mr. Rubunga adding that upon further probing it turned out that the teeth were ordered by a witch doctor.
Lions have also been victims of 'Prestigious hunting' among local indigenous tribes like the Maasai who kill the ferocious animals to prove their manhood.
"We have had five cases of prestigious Lion killings, but as time goes by, buffaloes keep being added to the list of such ritual poaching, this year has debuted with one case of a large male buffalo that was killed to prove somebody's bravery in the community," said Mr Rubunga.
~ Arusha Times ~ 27 June 2009
The Ngoro Ngoro District Wildlife Officer Betekire Rubunga said there are just four game rangers including him, to patrol the rather large game controlled area, "We also have only one vehicle, a single-cabin Land-Rover 110 Tdi, which had resumed operation last week after being grounded for repairs since December 2008," said Rubunga.
Loliondo game controlled area measures 4000 square kilometers much of it being jungle, savannah bush land and hill ranges. That kind of topography coupled with underdeveloped infrastructure in the area impede rapid movement in case of emergency and works in favor of better equipped poachers.
"The entire landscape is dotted with traps, snares and dug out pits. The problem with these traps is that they catch both the intended and unintended animal ," said the Officer adding that poachers also use military-like heavy guns.
According to the Wildlife Officer, his department has been making arrests " within the first four months of this year, we have nabbed several offenders and a total of five cases been taken to court by the end of April 2009"
"We sometimes get assistance from the Loliondo based Ortello Business Corporation (OBC) which operates a hunting block in the vicinity and in some cases from the anti-poaching units based in Arusha," said the Wildlife Officer explaining that in order to be effective his department needs at least 10 more warders in the area plus an addition vehicle.
Between January and December last year a total of 15 illegal hunters were arrested three of whom were sentenced up to 15 years in jail with other cases going on at the District Magistrate Court. "The nation incurred a loss of over Tsh 30 million from such practices in 2008," stated Mr Rubunga.
According to the wildlife officer figures of the previous year 2007 indicate total arrests of 12 poachers who were apprehended and taken to court with most of them now serving various jail sentences.
The Wildlife officer explained that mot illegal game hunters come from Mara region and neighbouring Uganda and Rwanda. He also pointed out that there is an increase of Zebra killings in the Game controlled areas mainly for the animal's skins which of late have been on high demand. The sale is mostly to tourists via Kenya to the Far East
Elephants are also a favourite kill of the poachers; "We keep coming across carcasses of these large land mammals everywhere we go within the Game Controlled Area and so far we have recorded six recently killed Jumbos three in Njoloi Ward and other three in Arash village," he stated.
All the carcasses have been missing their tusks providing clear motives of their planned deaths.
Other than poaching, witchcraft beliefs are also said to be taking toll on wildlife killings, "We recently caught a suspect with teeth of recently killed lions," said Mr. Rubunga adding that upon further probing it turned out that the teeth were ordered by a witch doctor.
Lions have also been victims of 'Prestigious hunting' among local indigenous tribes like the Maasai who kill the ferocious animals to prove their manhood.
"We have had five cases of prestigious Lion killings, but as time goes by, buffaloes keep being added to the list of such ritual poaching, this year has debuted with one case of a large male buffalo that was killed to prove somebody's bravery in the community," said Mr Rubunga.
~ Arusha Times ~ 27 June 2009
Somalia Islamists threaten to invade Kenya
Somali Islamists battling the transitional government of the Horn of Africa nation have reiterated their threats to invade Kenya unless the east African nation pullout it's military from the common border.
The local Daily Nation newspaper reported on Thursday that Sheikh Hassan Yakoub Ali, an official of a coalition of Islamists ruling Kismayo town, near the country's border with Somalia, said Kenya and Ethiopia have planned to deploy their forces in Somalia.
Sheikh Ali told both Kenya and Ethiopia to withdraw their forces from Somali borders. "These countries must redeploy their forces from Somali soil. Otherwise, their armies will meet defeat and humiliation," he said.
Sheikh Ali said the hostile forces will not be welcome in Somalia. "You will collide with the same insurgents that forced the Ethiopian troops to withdraw from Somalia."
Somalia's government fears Al-Qaeda is positioning itself in the capital Mogadishu as a base to launch attacks across the African continent.
The newspaper said that Kenyan soldiers in the northern region's border in Wajir town seized 1,000 bags of sugar smuggled into the country from Somalia.
"There have reports that the Islamists are financing their war campaign with money from contraband sold in Kenya which include sugar and electronics," the newspaper reported.
A Kenyan military officer in charge of Wajir station, who sought anonymity because he is not authorised to speak to the press, told the Daily Nation that the intercepted sugar was part of assorted goods that illegally crossed into the country.
"They were ferried in two heavy commercial vehicles," the officer with the rank of Major said. "We are now investigating whether illegal firearms from Somalia can be hidden inside the sugar." The vehicles are now held up at Wajir military base.
Somalia's capital Mogadishu has again been rocked by intense fighting between government forces and the militant group Al-Shabab, which has links to Al-Qaeda. At least 22 people have been killed this week in the latest battle, including Mogadishu's chief of police.
Regional analysts said the death of Colonel Ali Said will be a significant setback for the pro-government forces, as he had often been on the frontline encouraging his colleagues to defend their positions.
The Islamist insurgents are determined to oust the western-backed government.
The Somali government has warned that an increasing number of Al-Qaeda members are being drawn to Somalia with the aim of seizing control of the country. It fears that if they succeed, they will create havoc across Africa.
The government has called on African and western nations for logistical and financial support.
Last Saturday, the Hezbul Islam insurgent group accused the Somali government of allowing Ethiopian troops to sneak back into Somalia.
Sheikh Hassan Mahdi, the spokesman of Hezbul Islam, an Islamist group opposing the government, said the Ethiopian forces were in the southern and central regions of Somalia.
"The TFG is behind the Ethiopian troops coming back to Somali territory," said Sheikh Mahdi. "It is part of the government's plan to seek Ethiopian assistance if need arises."
Ethiopia has denied having forces in Somalia.
~Daily Ethopia ~ June 18th, 2009
The local Daily Nation newspaper reported on Thursday that Sheikh Hassan Yakoub Ali, an official of a coalition of Islamists ruling Kismayo town, near the country's border with Somalia, said Kenya and Ethiopia have planned to deploy their forces in Somalia.
Sheikh Ali told both Kenya and Ethiopia to withdraw their forces from Somali borders. "These countries must redeploy their forces from Somali soil. Otherwise, their armies will meet defeat and humiliation," he said.
Sheikh Ali said the hostile forces will not be welcome in Somalia. "You will collide with the same insurgents that forced the Ethiopian troops to withdraw from Somalia."
Somalia's government fears Al-Qaeda is positioning itself in the capital Mogadishu as a base to launch attacks across the African continent.
The newspaper said that Kenyan soldiers in the northern region's border in Wajir town seized 1,000 bags of sugar smuggled into the country from Somalia.
"There have reports that the Islamists are financing their war campaign with money from contraband sold in Kenya which include sugar and electronics," the newspaper reported.
A Kenyan military officer in charge of Wajir station, who sought anonymity because he is not authorised to speak to the press, told the Daily Nation that the intercepted sugar was part of assorted goods that illegally crossed into the country.
"They were ferried in two heavy commercial vehicles," the officer with the rank of Major said. "We are now investigating whether illegal firearms from Somalia can be hidden inside the sugar." The vehicles are now held up at Wajir military base.
Somalia's capital Mogadishu has again been rocked by intense fighting between government forces and the militant group Al-Shabab, which has links to Al-Qaeda. At least 22 people have been killed this week in the latest battle, including Mogadishu's chief of police.
Regional analysts said the death of Colonel Ali Said will be a significant setback for the pro-government forces, as he had often been on the frontline encouraging his colleagues to defend their positions.
The Islamist insurgents are determined to oust the western-backed government.
The Somali government has warned that an increasing number of Al-Qaeda members are being drawn to Somalia with the aim of seizing control of the country. It fears that if they succeed, they will create havoc across Africa.
The government has called on African and western nations for logistical and financial support.
Last Saturday, the Hezbul Islam insurgent group accused the Somali government of allowing Ethiopian troops to sneak back into Somalia.
Sheikh Hassan Mahdi, the spokesman of Hezbul Islam, an Islamist group opposing the government, said the Ethiopian forces were in the southern and central regions of Somalia.
"The TFG is behind the Ethiopian troops coming back to Somali territory," said Sheikh Mahdi. "It is part of the government's plan to seek Ethiopian assistance if need arises."
Ethiopia has denied having forces in Somalia.
~Daily Ethopia ~ June 18th, 2009
Crocs Kill 9 as Floods Wreak Havoc
Crocodiles have killed at least nine people in Somalia, where devastating floods have displaced at least 50,000 others, bringing the death toll to over 50 in the lawless African nation, elders and witnesses said Sunday.
The nine died in Buulo Barte district in the central Hiraan region, about 200 kilometres (125 miles) north the capital Mogadishu in past three days, they said.
Survivors in other parts of the district were still clinging to trees in desperate attempts to avoid being eaten, local elder Ali Hassan Osmail told AFP.
"We are experiencing the worst crisis in this region, in addition to the evacuation and loss of property, people are expressing concerns over crocodiles that threaten their lives," Osmail added.
"At least nine people have been killed by crocodiles floating all over the floodwater in the past three days and the number could rise because the problems still persist," he added.
Witnesses and local officials have told AFP the deaths bring the toll to at least 52 killed in Somalia in raging flood waters since late October when torrential downpours first caused rivers to burst their banks.
The bulk of the dead were in the Middle and Lower Juba, Lower Shabelle, Gedo and Hiraan regions, all controlled by a powerful Islamic movement that seized Mogadishu in June and now hold almost all of southern and central Somalia, they said.
The United Nations said the current, unusually heavy seasonal rains were threatening Somalia with its worst floods in 50 years while the impoverished Horn of Africa country teeters on the brink of all-out war.
In addition, tens of thousands hectares of farmlands have been destroyed by the floods, which follow a prolonged drought that ravaged the entire eastern Africa region, causing a humanitarian disaster.
Relief efforts have been hampered by flooded roads and the military build-up and complicated further by a ban on flights to and from Somalia imposed by neighboring Kenya this week for security reasons, according the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).
Somalia, a nation of about 10 million people, has lacked a functioning central authority and any disaster response mechanisms since being plunged into anarchy after the 1991 ouster of dictator Mohamed Siad Barre.
The rise of the Islamists poses a serious challenge to the two-year-old transitional government that has been riddled with infighting and unable to assert control in much of the nation. - Sapa-AFP 15Nov06
The nine died in Buulo Barte district in the central Hiraan region, about 200 kilometres (125 miles) north the capital Mogadishu in past three days, they said.
Survivors in other parts of the district were still clinging to trees in desperate attempts to avoid being eaten, local elder Ali Hassan Osmail told AFP.
"We are experiencing the worst crisis in this region, in addition to the evacuation and loss of property, people are expressing concerns over crocodiles that threaten their lives," Osmail added.
"At least nine people have been killed by crocodiles floating all over the floodwater in the past three days and the number could rise because the problems still persist," he added.
Witnesses and local officials have told AFP the deaths bring the toll to at least 52 killed in Somalia in raging flood waters since late October when torrential downpours first caused rivers to burst their banks.
The bulk of the dead were in the Middle and Lower Juba, Lower Shabelle, Gedo and Hiraan regions, all controlled by a powerful Islamic movement that seized Mogadishu in June and now hold almost all of southern and central Somalia, they said.
The United Nations said the current, unusually heavy seasonal rains were threatening Somalia with its worst floods in 50 years while the impoverished Horn of Africa country teeters on the brink of all-out war.
In addition, tens of thousands hectares of farmlands have been destroyed by the floods, which follow a prolonged drought that ravaged the entire eastern Africa region, causing a humanitarian disaster.
Relief efforts have been hampered by flooded roads and the military build-up and complicated further by a ban on flights to and from Somalia imposed by neighboring Kenya this week for security reasons, according the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).
Somalia, a nation of about 10 million people, has lacked a functioning central authority and any disaster response mechanisms since being plunged into anarchy after the 1991 ouster of dictator Mohamed Siad Barre.
The rise of the Islamists poses a serious challenge to the two-year-old transitional government that has been riddled with infighting and unable to assert control in much of the nation. - Sapa-AFP 15Nov06
Kenya Jails 7 Somalis to 20 years for "Piracy"
A Kenyan court sentenced seven Somalis to 20 years in prison for piracy after they tried to attack a Danish cargo vessel.
A Kenyan court sentenced seven Somalis to 20 years in prison for piracy on Wednesday after they tried to attack a Danish cargo vessel.
British Royal Navy forces arrested the men in 2008 after they attempted to seize MV Powerful off the Gulf of Aden, one of the world's busiest shipping routes. Two pirates died in an ensuing fight.
They were then handed over to Kenyan authorities and charged with piracy.
"Having considered the seriousness ... of the offence, and circumstances under which the suspects were arrested, only stiff penalties can deter such activities," Senior Principal Magistrate Lilian Mutende said, delivering her judgment.
Pirates have caused havoc in the Gulf of Aden, raking in millions of dollars in ransoms, hiking insurance premiums on shipping and threatening humanitarian supplies.
Kenya is holding over 100 suspected pirates, and police say this is clogging jails and courts. Local Muslim leaders say Kenya should not be used as a dumping ground and foreign navies should take charge of the people they arrest.
International navies trying to counter piracy off Somalia are often reluctant to take suspects to their own countries because they either lack the jurisdiction to put them on trial there, or they fear the pirates may seek asylum.
The European Union, United States and some other countries have instead struck agreements with Kenya to hand over suspects to face trial there. Some pirates are being prosecuted in France and the Netherlands.
In Kenya, 10 other pirates are serving a seven-year jail term at a prison in Voi, near Mombasa.
A lawyer representing the seven, in their 20s and 30s, said he planned to appeal against the sentences.
"It is clearly stated in law that the court in Kenya ... has no jurisdiction beyond the Kenyan waters. Why should Kenya be the one to feed Somali aliens for 20 years?" Jared Magolo said.
Reuters-Wednesday, 10 March 2010 21:15
A Kenyan court sentenced seven Somalis to 20 years in prison for piracy on Wednesday after they tried to attack a Danish cargo vessel.
British Royal Navy forces arrested the men in 2008 after they attempted to seize MV Powerful off the Gulf of Aden, one of the world's busiest shipping routes. Two pirates died in an ensuing fight.
They were then handed over to Kenyan authorities and charged with piracy.
"Having considered the seriousness ... of the offence, and circumstances under which the suspects were arrested, only stiff penalties can deter such activities," Senior Principal Magistrate Lilian Mutende said, delivering her judgment.
Pirates have caused havoc in the Gulf of Aden, raking in millions of dollars in ransoms, hiking insurance premiums on shipping and threatening humanitarian supplies.
Kenya is holding over 100 suspected pirates, and police say this is clogging jails and courts. Local Muslim leaders say Kenya should not be used as a dumping ground and foreign navies should take charge of the people they arrest.
International navies trying to counter piracy off Somalia are often reluctant to take suspects to their own countries because they either lack the jurisdiction to put them on trial there, or they fear the pirates may seek asylum.
The European Union, United States and some other countries have instead struck agreements with Kenya to hand over suspects to face trial there. Some pirates are being prosecuted in France and the Netherlands.
In Kenya, 10 other pirates are serving a seven-year jail term at a prison in Voi, near Mombasa.
A lawyer representing the seven, in their 20s and 30s, said he planned to appeal against the sentences.
"It is clearly stated in law that the court in Kenya ... has no jurisdiction beyond the Kenyan waters. Why should Kenya be the one to feed Somali aliens for 20 years?" Jared Magolo said.
Reuters-Wednesday, 10 March 2010 21:15
The Radicalization Kenya Somali Youth ...
Two month ago the Kenyan public joined the Kenya police and security agencies in lynching, mob justice, shooting and stoning peaceful Somali demonstrators in front of Jamia Mosque. A number of innocent Somalis were killed and injured. This was the turning point for Somali Kenyan youth who were patriotic Kenyan until that day. It suddenly dawn to them after all this years they were only considered a second class citizen like their parents and forefathers before them . It was painful to watch this scene unravelling in front of our eyes which has been captured vividly in YouTube. The Butchers at the council market joined the police in chasing and harassing this Innocent Somali Kenya who were demonstrating rightly or wrongly on issue that they thought touched them personally.
The issue of Somali Kenyans has now been rekindled and this incident which should never have happed in modern day Kenya has reminded them where they belong the second class citizen. It is clear that they are not considered like other Kenyans and this ripple effect have been felt world wide by Somalis of all walk of life. Who are now preparing for plan B.
Since Kenya's independence Somalis have been targeted for economic ,political and social discrimination. There province has been divided and large chunks annexed to Kenyas Eastern province . Their area is least developed in the country with ravaging drought that has brought the nomadic life to a stand still. NFD or North Eastern which is the second largest province in Kenya has no single university or referral hospital. The Education system is neglected as number of teachers per student has declined since independence. The recent result of Secondary school examination KCPE is clear indicator how this expanse province and population is treated. The first candidate in this vast province was not equal to the last candidate of the whole other provinces combined.
The recent census which had placed the population of North Eastern 3 million has been suppressed by the authorities who are now doctoring the census. The Kenya authorities will not believe that the population of Somalis has increased by 140%. This act by the government which is discriminatory will not go unchallenged in any democracy or emerging democracies. Thanks to the poor calibre of Members of parliament produced by North Eastern who are busy lining there pocket than looking at the bigger picture of developing and fighting for the right of their people. This Mps do not contribute to their respective constituencies leave alone debating national issue on the floor of parliament.
No single Mp in present and past Parliament is capable of being compared to the legendary and fearless the late Hon. Abdi Sirat Khalif who fought for the rights of his people. The present Somali Mps in th Kenya parliament who are 14 plus have not raised a finger to the open discriminatory acts caused by the Kenya against its population and land. Late Abdi Sirat Khalif fought tooth and nail with Kenyatta administration who in the end silenced him by rigging him out.
The North Eastern province has been under emergency laws for the last 46 years.The government have always dealt ruthless with population whom one time politician requested that all the well of this nomads in the province to be poisoned to wipe out the Somali population an advice that made President Kenyatta angry to the point of reprimanding that politician by telling him if he were to kill the population of North Eastern he will be left with no one to rule.
When I was young and I remember vividly during the 1977 Ogaden War all Somalis in Kenya were hounded and detained in large camps in Schools for over 3days without food and water. It is a bitter memory that stays with me till today. The harassment caused to my people is beyond imagination. I have buried it in me till the recent indiscriminate attack on Somali by Kenya security forces and the Kenyan public.
The memories Wagalla, Malka Mari,Garrisa 1984 massacre are fresh in our minds. Thousand of Somalis were massacred by the Kenya security forces without any reason. The reason was flimsy and it is that Kenya government has carried systematic genocide against people it claims to be its own citizen. No one come to Somalis aid.
Recently George Kinuthia Saitoti went to Israel and asked the Israeli security forces to help and train their Kenyan counterpart to fight Somali terrorism which is about to overtake Kenya. Yes the Kenya government now want to use Israelis to kill and maim more Somalis. What do you expect from us??? To watch when you prepare to kill our women and children? NO No No enough is enough we will no longer be bound by the rule of ballots. It is time we also took lead and armed ourselves. For me today I will prepare to lead our people to our journey that will lead to self determination a right that is enshrine n the universal declaration of human rights. I will fight to defend my people. Brutal force should equally be met with Brutal force. The Israelis will look after its interest of not antagonizing the Somali population in Kenya.
The process of radicalization is irreversible and has been triggered by the recent attack of Somalis by the Kenya security forces with help of it citizens. We will not accept second class citizen. If you do not want to recognize us as your equals then it is high time we parted ways.
~ by Sadia Ahmed - Monday, March 15, 2010
Let's have your view ... Perhaps a counter argument
The issue of Somali Kenyans has now been rekindled and this incident which should never have happed in modern day Kenya has reminded them where they belong the second class citizen. It is clear that they are not considered like other Kenyans and this ripple effect have been felt world wide by Somalis of all walk of life. Who are now preparing for plan B.
Since Kenya's independence Somalis have been targeted for economic ,political and social discrimination. There province has been divided and large chunks annexed to Kenyas Eastern province . Their area is least developed in the country with ravaging drought that has brought the nomadic life to a stand still. NFD or North Eastern which is the second largest province in Kenya has no single university or referral hospital. The Education system is neglected as number of teachers per student has declined since independence. The recent result of Secondary school examination KCPE is clear indicator how this expanse province and population is treated. The first candidate in this vast province was not equal to the last candidate of the whole other provinces combined.
The recent census which had placed the population of North Eastern 3 million has been suppressed by the authorities who are now doctoring the census. The Kenya authorities will not believe that the population of Somalis has increased by 140%. This act by the government which is discriminatory will not go unchallenged in any democracy or emerging democracies. Thanks to the poor calibre of Members of parliament produced by North Eastern who are busy lining there pocket than looking at the bigger picture of developing and fighting for the right of their people. This Mps do not contribute to their respective constituencies leave alone debating national issue on the floor of parliament.
No single Mp in present and past Parliament is capable of being compared to the legendary and fearless the late Hon. Abdi Sirat Khalif who fought for the rights of his people. The present Somali Mps in th Kenya parliament who are 14 plus have not raised a finger to the open discriminatory acts caused by the Kenya against its population and land. Late Abdi Sirat Khalif fought tooth and nail with Kenyatta administration who in the end silenced him by rigging him out.
The North Eastern province has been under emergency laws for the last 46 years.The government have always dealt ruthless with population whom one time politician requested that all the well of this nomads in the province to be poisoned to wipe out the Somali population an advice that made President Kenyatta angry to the point of reprimanding that politician by telling him if he were to kill the population of North Eastern he will be left with no one to rule.
When I was young and I remember vividly during the 1977 Ogaden War all Somalis in Kenya were hounded and detained in large camps in Schools for over 3days without food and water. It is a bitter memory that stays with me till today. The harassment caused to my people is beyond imagination. I have buried it in me till the recent indiscriminate attack on Somali by Kenya security forces and the Kenyan public.
The memories Wagalla, Malka Mari,Garrisa 1984 massacre are fresh in our minds. Thousand of Somalis were massacred by the Kenya security forces without any reason. The reason was flimsy and it is that Kenya government has carried systematic genocide against people it claims to be its own citizen. No one come to Somalis aid.
Recently George Kinuthia Saitoti went to Israel and asked the Israeli security forces to help and train their Kenyan counterpart to fight Somali terrorism which is about to overtake Kenya. Yes the Kenya government now want to use Israelis to kill and maim more Somalis. What do you expect from us??? To watch when you prepare to kill our women and children? NO No No enough is enough we will no longer be bound by the rule of ballots. It is time we also took lead and armed ourselves. For me today I will prepare to lead our people to our journey that will lead to self determination a right that is enshrine n the universal declaration of human rights. I will fight to defend my people. Brutal force should equally be met with Brutal force. The Israelis will look after its interest of not antagonizing the Somali population in Kenya.
The process of radicalization is irreversible and has been triggered by the recent attack of Somalis by the Kenya security forces with help of it citizens. We will not accept second class citizen. If you do not want to recognize us as your equals then it is high time we parted ways.
~ by Sadia Ahmed - Monday, March 15, 2010
Let's have your view ... Perhaps a counter argument
The Kenyan Legislature ...
With a system similar to the United States and Great Britain, laws in Kenya are written and passed by their legislature, called the National Assembly. There are 224 seats in the Assembly, with 210 of them as elected representatives from all of Kenya's constituencies. The remaining 14 seats are directly appointed by the president himself.
The Judiciary ...
The judiciary is the body of judges and courts where the laws are upheld, and those breaking the laws are prosecuted. There are 8 sections of the judiciary, each with courts to handle different types of law. The courts cover civil, criminal, family, commercial, constitutional/judicial review, anti-corruption, city/municipal and children's laws.
The highest level of authority within the judiciary is the Court of Appeals, which hears cases only after they have already been through the High Court. Most average civil or criminal cases are tried through the lower Magistrate courts.
Overall, the judiciary is separate and independent from both the executive and legislative branches of the government. Influence from either body still exists, and the judiciary has not been free of corruption accusations along with the rest of the government.
The highest level of authority within the judiciary is the Court of Appeals, which hears cases only after they have already been through the High Court. Most average civil or criminal cases are tried through the lower Magistrate courts.
Overall, the judiciary is separate and independent from both the executive and legislative branches of the government. Influence from either body still exists, and the judiciary has not been free of corruption accusations along with the rest of the government.
The Law Society of Kenya ...
The Law Society of Kenya is the nation’s bar association, that regulates and serves Kenya's lawyers. There are more than 6,000 lawyers and advocates in Kenya, who are all members of the LSK. You must be a member in order to practice law. Besides being the regulatory body for lawyers, the Law Society also runs a Continuing Legal Education program, to help keep members informed of the ongoing changes and developments in the Kenyan legal field.
Kenya Law Reports ...
The Kenya Law Reports are published by the National Council for Law Reporting, and contains all the judgments, rulings and legal outcomes for the superior courts. As well as reporting on judicial results, they also publish monthly and weekly commentaries on legal issues with regard to the court judgments
Friday 16 July 2010
Kenya Law ...
How does the Kenya law system work? The Kenyan legal system consists of a mix of Kenya statutory (written) law and Kenyan and English common law, mixed with elements of tribal and Islamic law.
Kenya's basic legal system and body of law is very similar to that found in western or European countries. This is mainly a result of Kenya being a part of the British empire for many decades until 1963; Kenya is still a member of the British Commonwealth.
Kenya's basic legal system and body of law is very similar to that found in western or European countries. This is mainly a result of Kenya being a part of the British empire for many decades until 1963; Kenya is still a member of the British Commonwealth.
Sunday 18 April 2010
Mombasa~Water Wrangles Endangering Lives
The water shortage facing the tourist resort town of Mombasa has reached crisis level as local residents face threats of contracting water borne diseases. Water taps are permanently dry and boreholes are the only alternative source of this precious commodity.
Unfortunately for Mombasa residents, borehole water, according to Ministry of Health officials, is heavily contaminated because faeces from pit latrines seep into the boreholes as they are too close to each other.
The water available to residents in Mombasa stands at 45,000 cubic litres per day, although the demand has shot up to more than 200,000 cubic litres per day. And yet, this supply suffers constant interruptions due to obsolete equipment and interrupted power supply resulting from unpaid bills. The electricity bill by the Kenya Power and Lighting Company stands at Sh63 million, prompting the frequent electricity interruptions.
The Coast Water Services Board technical manager, Chihanga Donda, confirms the water crisis in the region. "If something is not done urgently to rectify the situation, the little water provision services is going to a halt," he warns.
Vandalism Of Transmission Lines
Donda takes issue with vandalism of the water transmission lines and break down of water pipes, which is compounding the crisis facing his organisation. "It is true that the electricity bill is too high since the power tariffs were reviewed upwards," he says. "I will not tell you how much it is because that is confidential information."
Patrick Ochieng, an official of the Mombasa water consortium, says poor garbage collection poses a serious health hazard in the town. "Mombasa people place their garbage outside their houses expecting the Municipal Council trucks to pass by and collect it but that rarely happens," he says.
He takes issue with the Mwakirunge dumpsite, pointing out that the huge mounds of garbage dumped there on a daily basis could easily find its way into the water system and endanger the lives of the residents. The solution of garbage management lies with solid waste management.
Ochieng says the management of the Coast Water Services Board has a lot to explain to Coast people over the water shortage in the region. "The water problem in this town is just a tip of the iceberg," he reveals. "The whole of this province has no water despite being a top tourism destination. Coast Water Services Board must tell us what is happening instead of directing the blame to Council water companies that can only sell water they are supplied by Coast water," he says.
Haggai Charo is a resident of Bamba, Kilifi district. He says the water crisis is breaking up homes in his village because women are forced to wake up at 4am and walk for more than 15 kilometres to fetch murky water at the nearest water pan. Due to poverty, the dirty water is consumed without boiling, which is risking the lives of the more than 5,000 Bamba residents. Already, livestock are dying in large numbers in this vallage due to lack of water.
Council Has Failed To Deliver
Mohamed Hersi, the chairman of Kenya Association of Hotelkeepers and Caterers at the Coast, says the Council has failed to deliver its core services and should not be allowed to risk the lives of Kenyans. "Water reforms that gave the councils the mandate to provide water to residents was a big mistake," he says. "These institutions have failed to run even nursery schools. How do we give them such huge responsibilities like water? It is sad that Mombasa residents have been held hostage by the Council."
Hersi, who is also the general manager of Sarova Whitesands Beach Resort, says hoteliers have been forced to buy water daily for their guests to use.
Mombasa Town Clerk Tubman Otieno admits that Mombasa is a dirty city. His list of priorities includes ensuring streetlights are working, garbage is cleared and the drainage is working. "I spend nights walking to find out how to make this town better," he says. "I have come up with a proposal, which I will work on to make this city the envy of Kenya. I plead with Mombasa people to give me time to make this town the best, just like I did to Thika and Mavoko."
Otieno blames the crisis facing the town to the absence of a water board to run the water provision, which makes it difficult for Mombasa Water and Sewerage Services Company to effectively provide water to the town.
Genesis Of Trouble
Trouble in Mombasa started when Charity Ngilu, the Minister for Water, rejected the water board on allegations that it was not inclusive. "The minister advised the mayor, the four Mombasa members of Parliament and I to sit down and agree on the individuals to make up the board, but after we had consulted and arrived at our list, the minister rejected it again and came up with her own proposal," says Otieno.
The Mombasa Municipal Council rejected the minister’s list, prompting the current standoff. The Town Clerk now blames political interests for the current crisis.
"Transferring Anthony Chitavi, the managing director of Mombasa Water Services Board, from Mombasa to Malindi, will not resolve the water crisis," he says.
Mombasa mayor Abukakar Modhar also attributes the water shortage to the absence of a water board. He accuses the water minister of meddling in the affairs of the Council when the Water Reforms Act gives clear guidelines on how directors of the water company should be picked.
Kuldip Sondhi, the chairman of Mombasa and Coast Tourist Association (MCTA), says the chronic water shortage has reached crisis level. At the moment, hotels in Mombasa and beyond have to buy water on daily basis for domestic use because they are not allowed to use borehole water.
"Borehole water is only used for the toilet. For use in the kitchen and other departments, we are forced to buy clean water from companies that supply this precious commodity," says Sondhi.
Ngilu surprised Mombasa residents when she demanded that up to 50 per cent of the members of the Mombasa Water and Sewerage Company be women, despite clear guidelines on how board members should be appointed. The Mombasa mayor maintains that the minister’s demands are unacceptable and illegal.
Deputy mayor John Mcharo says the absence of a board may make it impossible for the board to receive Sh6.3 billion grant from the World Bank to rehabilitate the Mzima Water pipeline and other water sources in the region. He says the Council has decided to go to court if the minister stands her ground and handpicks the company directors and imposes them on the Council.
Wasted Water
Investigations by Home & Away indicate that while Mombasa residents go thirsty, there are several litres of water that go to waste along the Mzima pipeline between Jomvu and Changamwe as a result of vandalism. Several trucks are parked along the Nairobi-Mombasa highway and car washers do booming business.
Medical experts say the use of borehole water for domestic purposes is a time bomb because Mombasa residents in general use pit latrines. Tests conducted by the Ministry of Health indicate that faeces find their way into boreholes and contaminate water. A quick solution to this water crisis is, therefore, critical.
Health experts warn further that the water crisis in Mombasa, coupled with over reliance on borehole water, poses a great health concern to the health experts in the town. But even with such dire warnings, residents of the sprawling Kisauni and Mishomoroni area say they would rather use the ‘free’ borehole water because it is available.
Residents are aware that they must first boil borehole water before using it at home. "But we rarely do it because we believe God is there for us," says Said Athman, a resident. "We no longer think and hope for piped water."
Katana Charo, a water vendor, says the crisis is a blessing to him because he is making money from selling borehole water. Every day, he takes his mkokoteni (handcart) to the nearest free water point and fills it, then hawks the water directly to people’s homes. A 20 litre jerrican sells at Sh20. At the end of each day, Charo makes about Sh1,000. He counts himself lucky when he finds clean water because he then sells a 20 litre jerrican for between Sh30 to Sh40, increasing his earnings to more than Sh1,500 per day.
Blessing In Disguise
Charo is one of the few people in Mombasa who wishes that the water crisis continues. "That way, I will be able to make enough money to go back to my rural home in Kaloleni, Giriama, and look for a woman to marry," he says.
Fatuma Ali, a Kisauni resident, says the water crisis poses grave challenges to women. "We are forced to wake up in the wee hours of the morning to go searching for water," she says. "Often, we go to queue at the nearest water point with our jerricans. It is more common to end up with untreated water than with clean water.
"Mombasa has had water problems for a long time but I don’t think we have experienced the severity of the crisis as we are suffering now. It has been a long time since we got a single drop in our pipes and there is no explanation from the authorities."
Nema Intervention
As the water crisis rages, the National Environmental Management Authority (Nema) has threatened to take the Mombasa Municipal Council to court if it continues dumping waste at the Kibarani dumpsite. Nema insists that Kibarani is an illegal dumpsite and should not be used.
Prof Mwinzi Muasya, the Nema director general, recently led a high-powered delegation of Nema board members to the Council and warned they would not issue any more warnings. "We issued them with notices to cease dumping garbage at Kibarani as from June 20, 2008. There is a designated waste disposal site at Mwakirunge, which is not far off from Mombasa city."
It emerged during the site visit that the Mombasa Municipal Council has not applied for a license to transport garbage.
~ Ngumbao Kithi of Daily Nation - Nov 2009
Unfortunately for Mombasa residents, borehole water, according to Ministry of Health officials, is heavily contaminated because faeces from pit latrines seep into the boreholes as they are too close to each other.
The water available to residents in Mombasa stands at 45,000 cubic litres per day, although the demand has shot up to more than 200,000 cubic litres per day. And yet, this supply suffers constant interruptions due to obsolete equipment and interrupted power supply resulting from unpaid bills. The electricity bill by the Kenya Power and Lighting Company stands at Sh63 million, prompting the frequent electricity interruptions.
The Coast Water Services Board technical manager, Chihanga Donda, confirms the water crisis in the region. "If something is not done urgently to rectify the situation, the little water provision services is going to a halt," he warns.
Vandalism Of Transmission Lines
Donda takes issue with vandalism of the water transmission lines and break down of water pipes, which is compounding the crisis facing his organisation. "It is true that the electricity bill is too high since the power tariffs were reviewed upwards," he says. "I will not tell you how much it is because that is confidential information."
Patrick Ochieng, an official of the Mombasa water consortium, says poor garbage collection poses a serious health hazard in the town. "Mombasa people place their garbage outside their houses expecting the Municipal Council trucks to pass by and collect it but that rarely happens," he says.
He takes issue with the Mwakirunge dumpsite, pointing out that the huge mounds of garbage dumped there on a daily basis could easily find its way into the water system and endanger the lives of the residents. The solution of garbage management lies with solid waste management.
Ochieng says the management of the Coast Water Services Board has a lot to explain to Coast people over the water shortage in the region. "The water problem in this town is just a tip of the iceberg," he reveals. "The whole of this province has no water despite being a top tourism destination. Coast Water Services Board must tell us what is happening instead of directing the blame to Council water companies that can only sell water they are supplied by Coast water," he says.
Haggai Charo is a resident of Bamba, Kilifi district. He says the water crisis is breaking up homes in his village because women are forced to wake up at 4am and walk for more than 15 kilometres to fetch murky water at the nearest water pan. Due to poverty, the dirty water is consumed without boiling, which is risking the lives of the more than 5,000 Bamba residents. Already, livestock are dying in large numbers in this vallage due to lack of water.
Council Has Failed To Deliver
Mohamed Hersi, the chairman of Kenya Association of Hotelkeepers and Caterers at the Coast, says the Council has failed to deliver its core services and should not be allowed to risk the lives of Kenyans. "Water reforms that gave the councils the mandate to provide water to residents was a big mistake," he says. "These institutions have failed to run even nursery schools. How do we give them such huge responsibilities like water? It is sad that Mombasa residents have been held hostage by the Council."
Hersi, who is also the general manager of Sarova Whitesands Beach Resort, says hoteliers have been forced to buy water daily for their guests to use.
Mombasa Town Clerk Tubman Otieno admits that Mombasa is a dirty city. His list of priorities includes ensuring streetlights are working, garbage is cleared and the drainage is working. "I spend nights walking to find out how to make this town better," he says. "I have come up with a proposal, which I will work on to make this city the envy of Kenya. I plead with Mombasa people to give me time to make this town the best, just like I did to Thika and Mavoko."
Otieno blames the crisis facing the town to the absence of a water board to run the water provision, which makes it difficult for Mombasa Water and Sewerage Services Company to effectively provide water to the town.
Genesis Of Trouble
Trouble in Mombasa started when Charity Ngilu, the Minister for Water, rejected the water board on allegations that it was not inclusive. "The minister advised the mayor, the four Mombasa members of Parliament and I to sit down and agree on the individuals to make up the board, but after we had consulted and arrived at our list, the minister rejected it again and came up with her own proposal," says Otieno.
The Mombasa Municipal Council rejected the minister’s list, prompting the current standoff. The Town Clerk now blames political interests for the current crisis.
"Transferring Anthony Chitavi, the managing director of Mombasa Water Services Board, from Mombasa to Malindi, will not resolve the water crisis," he says.
Mombasa mayor Abukakar Modhar also attributes the water shortage to the absence of a water board. He accuses the water minister of meddling in the affairs of the Council when the Water Reforms Act gives clear guidelines on how directors of the water company should be picked.
Kuldip Sondhi, the chairman of Mombasa and Coast Tourist Association (MCTA), says the chronic water shortage has reached crisis level. At the moment, hotels in Mombasa and beyond have to buy water on daily basis for domestic use because they are not allowed to use borehole water.
"Borehole water is only used for the toilet. For use in the kitchen and other departments, we are forced to buy clean water from companies that supply this precious commodity," says Sondhi.
Ngilu surprised Mombasa residents when she demanded that up to 50 per cent of the members of the Mombasa Water and Sewerage Company be women, despite clear guidelines on how board members should be appointed. The Mombasa mayor maintains that the minister’s demands are unacceptable and illegal.
Deputy mayor John Mcharo says the absence of a board may make it impossible for the board to receive Sh6.3 billion grant from the World Bank to rehabilitate the Mzima Water pipeline and other water sources in the region. He says the Council has decided to go to court if the minister stands her ground and handpicks the company directors and imposes them on the Council.
Wasted Water
Investigations by Home & Away indicate that while Mombasa residents go thirsty, there are several litres of water that go to waste along the Mzima pipeline between Jomvu and Changamwe as a result of vandalism. Several trucks are parked along the Nairobi-Mombasa highway and car washers do booming business.
Medical experts say the use of borehole water for domestic purposes is a time bomb because Mombasa residents in general use pit latrines. Tests conducted by the Ministry of Health indicate that faeces find their way into boreholes and contaminate water. A quick solution to this water crisis is, therefore, critical.
Health experts warn further that the water crisis in Mombasa, coupled with over reliance on borehole water, poses a great health concern to the health experts in the town. But even with such dire warnings, residents of the sprawling Kisauni and Mishomoroni area say they would rather use the ‘free’ borehole water because it is available.
Residents are aware that they must first boil borehole water before using it at home. "But we rarely do it because we believe God is there for us," says Said Athman, a resident. "We no longer think and hope for piped water."
Katana Charo, a water vendor, says the crisis is a blessing to him because he is making money from selling borehole water. Every day, he takes his mkokoteni (handcart) to the nearest free water point and fills it, then hawks the water directly to people’s homes. A 20 litre jerrican sells at Sh20. At the end of each day, Charo makes about Sh1,000. He counts himself lucky when he finds clean water because he then sells a 20 litre jerrican for between Sh30 to Sh40, increasing his earnings to more than Sh1,500 per day.
Blessing In Disguise
Charo is one of the few people in Mombasa who wishes that the water crisis continues. "That way, I will be able to make enough money to go back to my rural home in Kaloleni, Giriama, and look for a woman to marry," he says.
Fatuma Ali, a Kisauni resident, says the water crisis poses grave challenges to women. "We are forced to wake up in the wee hours of the morning to go searching for water," she says. "Often, we go to queue at the nearest water point with our jerricans. It is more common to end up with untreated water than with clean water.
"Mombasa has had water problems for a long time but I don’t think we have experienced the severity of the crisis as we are suffering now. It has been a long time since we got a single drop in our pipes and there is no explanation from the authorities."
Nema Intervention
As the water crisis rages, the National Environmental Management Authority (Nema) has threatened to take the Mombasa Municipal Council to court if it continues dumping waste at the Kibarani dumpsite. Nema insists that Kibarani is an illegal dumpsite and should not be used.
Prof Mwinzi Muasya, the Nema director general, recently led a high-powered delegation of Nema board members to the Council and warned they would not issue any more warnings. "We issued them with notices to cease dumping garbage at Kibarani as from June 20, 2008. There is a designated waste disposal site at Mwakirunge, which is not far off from Mombasa city."
It emerged during the site visit that the Mombasa Municipal Council has not applied for a license to transport garbage.
~ Ngumbao Kithi of Daily Nation - Nov 2009
Knowledge Is The Key To Action
Mombasa Plan of Action on Illicit Small Arms and Light Weapons Reduction
Introduction
Subsequent to the Nairobi Declaration of March 15, 2000, on the proliferation of illicit small arms and light weapons in the Great Lakes and Horn of Africa region, signed by 10 Member States, UNDP in partnership with AWEPA organized a parliamentary conference on illicit small arms sensitization, awareness and reduction in Mombasa from the 26th-28th of November 2003.
In this regard, the conference brought together delegations from the Parliaments of Burundi, Republic of Congo, Democratic Republic of Congo, Central African Republic, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda and from the East African Legislative Assembly, including representatives of the civil society from the region and Parliamentarians from Europe.
The conference recognized the international conventions and agreements on issues related to small arms and fully shared the growing international concern that easy accessibility to illicit small arms and light weapons escalates conflicts and undermines political stability, and has devastating impacts on human security and development. When populations continue to live in great poverty, under social injustice and inequitable distribution of resources efforts to reduce small arms and light weapons will not be achieved.
With respect to the proliferation of illicit small arms and light weapons the conference has at length debated on the following themes:
Poverty, social and economic injustice, Good governance, Security Corruption at State and other levels (State brokering, use of brokers by states), Porous borders, cattle rustling Unstable states, Proxy wars, restriction of supply to non-state actors, arms manufacturers and unscrupulous middlemen, Weak legal and institutional frameworks (structure, human resources, sustainability), Inadequate legislation, Demobilisation, reintegration of ex-combatants, exilees, and displaced persons, Source of weapons and weapons surplus.
The participants to the Parliamentary Conference agree on the following Plan of Action :
1) To create a Regional Inter-Parliamentary Network to lobby and influence issues related to armed violence and calls on the UNDP and AWEPA to support this initiative;
2) To review and amend if necessary existing national legislation and to support the harmonization of laws as called for in the agenda for action of the Nairobi Declaration;
3) To promote ongoing international action in the United Nations framework with the aim of developing and adopting a binding international agreement on the marking, record keeping, and tracing of small arms and an international arms trade treaty;
4) To strengthen the capacities of Parliaments in order to improve the ability to review and harmonize legislation,
5) To harmonize legislation on border controls;
6) To accelerate the establishment of National Focal Points where they do not exist, and strengthen the already existing National Focal Points in accordance with the Nairobi Declaration agenda for action,
7) Welcome the expressed wish on behalf of the delegates from the Republic of Congo and the Central African Republic to for their respective countries to join the Nairobi Declaration,
8) To take action in our respective Parliaments including but not limited to:
a) Becoming stakeholders of the Nairobi Declaration and strongly supporting executive action in its implementation;
b) Creation of ad-hoc committees seized of the small arms issue;
c) Asking questions of the executive in Parliament;
d) Asking the responsible Minister and relevant Committees to report regularly to Parliament in plenary or in Committee on the activities of the National Focal Point Coordinators for the Nairobi Declaration;
e) Identifying pertinent small arms issues and their underlying causes in the members' constituencies and propose means to Parliament or the relevant Minister to address these issues;
f) Proposing private members' bills to address the issues;
g) Requesting that small arms issues be placed on the Parliamentary agenda for debate;
h) Interacting regularly with the media on small arms issues in order to raise visibility and understanding of the issues.
9) To call on European MPs including members of AWEPA to;
a) Critically study the legislation and factual situations in their respective home countries as to the regime governing manufacturing, marking, trade, brokering and export of arms;
b) Draw the attention of their governments on UNDP involvement in small arms issues from a development perspective and lobby for increased support for such programmes;
c) Call on AWEPA to raise the matter with the appropriate European Parliamentary bodies such as the European Parliament and the Parliamentary assembly of the Council of Europe and to envisage a follow-up conference.
10) To seek the active involvement and collaboration of Civil Society in the pursuance of these efforts,
11) To seek sanctions against the users and suppliers of illicit arms and States who promote these type of practices
Participants of this conference agree to report about the actions they will have undertaken pursuant to this plan of action within three months time, at the latest by 29 February 2004.
Finally, the participants of this conference wish to thank the host country Kenya and to thank UNDP and AWEPA for having co-organized the conference.
~Mombasa, Kenya, 28 November 2003 (Dated but a Point to Note)
Introduction
Subsequent to the Nairobi Declaration of March 15, 2000, on the proliferation of illicit small arms and light weapons in the Great Lakes and Horn of Africa region, signed by 10 Member States, UNDP in partnership with AWEPA organized a parliamentary conference on illicit small arms sensitization, awareness and reduction in Mombasa from the 26th-28th of November 2003.
In this regard, the conference brought together delegations from the Parliaments of Burundi, Republic of Congo, Democratic Republic of Congo, Central African Republic, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda and from the East African Legislative Assembly, including representatives of the civil society from the region and Parliamentarians from Europe.
The conference recognized the international conventions and agreements on issues related to small arms and fully shared the growing international concern that easy accessibility to illicit small arms and light weapons escalates conflicts and undermines political stability, and has devastating impacts on human security and development. When populations continue to live in great poverty, under social injustice and inequitable distribution of resources efforts to reduce small arms and light weapons will not be achieved.
With respect to the proliferation of illicit small arms and light weapons the conference has at length debated on the following themes:
Poverty, social and economic injustice, Good governance, Security Corruption at State and other levels (State brokering, use of brokers by states), Porous borders, cattle rustling Unstable states, Proxy wars, restriction of supply to non-state actors, arms manufacturers and unscrupulous middlemen, Weak legal and institutional frameworks (structure, human resources, sustainability), Inadequate legislation, Demobilisation, reintegration of ex-combatants, exilees, and displaced persons, Source of weapons and weapons surplus.
The participants to the Parliamentary Conference agree on the following Plan of Action :
1) To create a Regional Inter-Parliamentary Network to lobby and influence issues related to armed violence and calls on the UNDP and AWEPA to support this initiative;
2) To review and amend if necessary existing national legislation and to support the harmonization of laws as called for in the agenda for action of the Nairobi Declaration;
3) To promote ongoing international action in the United Nations framework with the aim of developing and adopting a binding international agreement on the marking, record keeping, and tracing of small arms and an international arms trade treaty;
4) To strengthen the capacities of Parliaments in order to improve the ability to review and harmonize legislation,
5) To harmonize legislation on border controls;
6) To accelerate the establishment of National Focal Points where they do not exist, and strengthen the already existing National Focal Points in accordance with the Nairobi Declaration agenda for action,
7) Welcome the expressed wish on behalf of the delegates from the Republic of Congo and the Central African Republic to for their respective countries to join the Nairobi Declaration,
8) To take action in our respective Parliaments including but not limited to:
a) Becoming stakeholders of the Nairobi Declaration and strongly supporting executive action in its implementation;
b) Creation of ad-hoc committees seized of the small arms issue;
c) Asking questions of the executive in Parliament;
d) Asking the responsible Minister and relevant Committees to report regularly to Parliament in plenary or in Committee on the activities of the National Focal Point Coordinators for the Nairobi Declaration;
e) Identifying pertinent small arms issues and their underlying causes in the members' constituencies and propose means to Parliament or the relevant Minister to address these issues;
f) Proposing private members' bills to address the issues;
g) Requesting that small arms issues be placed on the Parliamentary agenda for debate;
h) Interacting regularly with the media on small arms issues in order to raise visibility and understanding of the issues.
9) To call on European MPs including members of AWEPA to;
a) Critically study the legislation and factual situations in their respective home countries as to the regime governing manufacturing, marking, trade, brokering and export of arms;
b) Draw the attention of their governments on UNDP involvement in small arms issues from a development perspective and lobby for increased support for such programmes;
c) Call on AWEPA to raise the matter with the appropriate European Parliamentary bodies such as the European Parliament and the Parliamentary assembly of the Council of Europe and to envisage a follow-up conference.
10) To seek the active involvement and collaboration of Civil Society in the pursuance of these efforts,
11) To seek sanctions against the users and suppliers of illicit arms and States who promote these type of practices
Participants of this conference agree to report about the actions they will have undertaken pursuant to this plan of action within three months time, at the latest by 29 February 2004.
Finally, the participants of this conference wish to thank the host country Kenya and to thank UNDP and AWEPA for having co-organized the conference.
~Mombasa, Kenya, 28 November 2003 (Dated but a Point to Note)
Saturday 10 April 2010
The Secret History of the American Empire ~ John Perkins
John Perkins on “The Secret History of the American Empire: Economic Hit Men, Jackals, and the Truth about Global Corruption”
Today, we spend the hour with a man who claims to have worked deep inside the forces driving corporate globalization. In his first book, “Confessions of an Economic Hit Man”, John Perkins told the story of his work as a highly paid consultant hired to strong-arm leaders into creating policy favorable to the U.S. government and corporations—what he calls the “corporatocracy.” John Perkins has just come out with a new book. It’s called “The Secret History of the American Empire: Economic Hit Men, Jackals, and the Truth about Global Corruption.” [includes rush transcript]
Hundreds of thousands of protesters are gathering in Germany ahead of tomorrow’s G8 meeting of the world’s richest nations. The three-day summit is being held in the coastal resort of Heiligendamm. German police have spent $18 million dollars to erect an eight-mile-long, two-meter-high fence around the meeting site. Global warming will be high on the agenda. Going into the meeting, President Bush has proposed to sideline the UN-backed Kyoto Accords and set voluntary targets on reducing emissions of greenhouse gas. Other top issues will include foreign aid and new trade deals.
Today, we spend the hour with a man who claims to have worked deep inside the forces driving corporate globalization. In his first book, “Confessions of an Economic Hit Man”, John Perkins told the story of his work as a highly paid consultant hired to strong-arm leaders into creating policy favorable to the U.S. government and corporations—what he calls the “corporatocracy.” Perkins says he helped the U.S. cheat poor countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars by lending them more money than they could possibly repay and then taking over their economies.
John Perkins has just come out with a new book. It’s called “The Secret History of the American Empire: Economic Hit Men, Jackals, and the Truth about Global Corruption.” John Perkins joins me now in the firehouse studio.
John Perkins, From 1971 to 1981 he worked for the international consulting firm of Chas T. Main where he was a self-described “economic hit man.” He is the author of the new book “The Secret History of the American Empire.”
Rush Transcript
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Amy Goodman:: Hundreds of thousands of protesters are gathering in Germany ahead of tomorrow’s G8 meeting of the world’s richest nations. The three-day summit is being held in the coastal resort of Heiligendamm. German police have spent $18 million to erect an eight-mile-long, two-meter-high fence around the meeting site.
Global warming will be high on the agenda. Going into the meeting, President Bush has proposed to sideline the UN-backed Kyoto Accords and set voluntary targets on reducing emissions of greenhouse gas. Other top issues will include foreign aid and new trade deals.
Today, we spend the hour with a man who claims to have worked deep inside the forces driving corporate globalization. In his first book, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, John Perkins told the story of his work as a highly paid consultant hired to strong-arm leaders into creating policy favorable to the US government and corporations, what he calls the “corporatocracy.” John Perkins says he helped the US cheat poor countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars by lending them more money than they could possibly repay and then taking over their economies. John Perkins has just come out with his second book on this issue. It’s called The Secret History of the American Empire: Economic Hit Men, Jackals and the Truth about Global Corruption. John Perkins joins us now in the firehouse studio. Welcome to Democracy Now!
JOHN PERKINS: Thank you, Amy. It’s great to be here.
AMY GOODMAN:: Well, before we go further, “economic hit men”—for those who haven’t heard you describe this, let alone describe yourself as this, what do you mean?
JOHN PERKINS: Well, really, I think it’s fair to say that since World War II, we economic hit men have managed to create the world’s first truly global empire, and we’ve done it primarily without the military, unlike other empires in history. We’ve done it through economics very subtly.
We work many different ways, but perhaps the most common one is that we will identify a third world country that has resources our corporations covet, such as oil, and then we arrange a huge loan to that country from the World Bank or one of its sister organizations. The money never actually goes to the country. It goes instead to US corporations, who build big infrastructure projects—power grids, industrial parks, harbors, highways—things that benefit a few very rich people but do not reach the poor at all. The poor aren’t connected to the power grids. They don’t have the skills to get jobs in industrial parks. But they and the whole country are left holding this huge debt, and it’s such a big bet that the country can’t possibly repay it. So at some point in time, we economic hit men go back to the country and say, “Look, you know, you owe us a lot of money. You can’t pay your debt, so you’ve got to give us a pound of flesh.”
AMY GOODMAN:: And explain your history. What made you an economic hit man?
JOHN PERKINS: Well, when I graduated from business school at Boston University, I was recruited by the National Security Agency, the nation’s largest and perhaps most secretive spy organization.
AMY GOODMAN:: People sometimes think the CIA is that, but the NSA, many times larger.
JOHN PERKINS: Yeah, it is larger. It’s much larger. At least it was in those days. And it’s very, very secretive. We all—there’s a lot of rumors. We know quite a lot about the CIA, I think, but we know very, very little about the NSA. It claims to only work in a cryptography, you know, encoding and decoding messages, but in fact we all know that they’re the people who have been listening in on our telephone conversations. That’s come out recently. And they’re a very, very secretive organization.
They put me through a series of tests, very extensive tests, lie detector tests, psychological tests, during my last year in college. And I think it’s fair to say that they identified me as a good potential economic hit man. They also identified a number of weaknesses in my character that would make it relatively easy for them to hook me, to bring me in. And I think those weaknesses, I [inaudible] might call, the three big drugs of our culture: money, power and sex. Who amongst us doesn’t have one of them? I had all three at the time.
And then I joined the Peace Corps. I was encouraged to do that by the National Security Agency. I spent three years in Ecuador living with indigenous people in the Amazon and the Andes, people who today and at that time were beginning to fight the oil companies. In fact, the largest environmental lawsuit in the history of the world has just been brought by these people against Texaco, Chevron. And that was incredibly good training for what I was to do.
And then, while I was still in the Peace Corps, I was brought in and recruited into a US private corporation called Charles T. Main, a consulting firm out of Boston of about 2,000 employees, very low-profile firm that did a tremendous amount of work of what I came to understand was the work of economic hit men, as I described it earlier, and that’s the role I began to fulfill and eventually kind of rose to the top of that organization as its chief economist.
AMY GOODMAN:: And how did that tie to the NSA? Was there a connection?
JOHN PERKINS: You know, that’s what’s very interesting about this whole system, Amy, is that there’s no direct connection. The NSA had interviewed me, identified me and then essentially turned me over to this private corporation. It’s a very subtle and very smart system, whereby it’s the private industry that goes out and does this work. So if we’re caught doing something, if we’re caught bribing or corrupting local officials in some country, it’s blamed on private industry, not on the US government.
And it’s interesting that in the few instances when economic hit men fail, what we call “the jackals,” who are people who come in to overthrow governments or assassinate their leaders, also come out of private industry. These are not CIA employees. We all have this image of the 007, the government agent hired to kill, you know, with license to kill, but these days the government agents, in my experience, don’t do that. It’s done by private consultants that are brought in to do this work. And I’ve known a number of these individuals personally and still do.
AMY GOODMAN:: In your book, The Secret History of the American Empire, you talk about taking on global power at every level. Right now, we’re seeing these mass protests taking place in Germany ahead of the G8 meeting. Talk about the significance of these.
JOHN PERKINS: Well, I think it’s extremely significant. Something is happening in the world today, which is very, very important. Yeah, as we watched the headlines this morning, you know, what we can absolutely say is we live in a very dangerous world. It’s also a very small world, where we’re able to immediately know what’s going on in Germany or in the middle of the Amazon or anywhere else. And we’re beginning to finally understand around the world, I think, that the only way my children or grandchildren or any child or grandchild anywhere on this planet is going to be able to have a peaceful, stable and sustainable world is if every child has that. The G8 hasn’t got that yet.
AMY GOODMAN:: Explain what the Group of Eight are.
JOHN PERKINS: Well, the Group of Eight are the wealthiest countries in the world, and basically they run the world. And the leader is the United States, and it’s actually the corporations within these companies—countries, excuse me—that run it. It’s not the governments, because, after all, the governments serve at the pleasure of the corporations. In our own country, we know that the next two final presidential candidates, Republican and Democrat alike, are going to each have to raise something like half a billion dollars. And that’s not going to come from me and you. Primarily that’s going to come from the people who own and run our big corporations. They’re totally beholden to the government. So the G8 really is this group of countries that represent the biggest multinational corporations in the world and really serve at their behest.
And what we’re seeing now in Europe—and we’re seeing it very strongly in Latin America, we’re seeing it in the Middle East—we’re seeing this huge undercurrent of resistance, of protest, against this empire that’s been built out of this. And it’s been such a subtle empire that people haven’t been aware of it, because it wasn’t built by the military. It was built by economic hit men. Most of us aren’t aware of it. Most Americans have no idea that these incredible lifestyles that we all lead are because we’re part of a very vicious empire that literally enslaves people around the world, misuses people. But we’re beginning to understand this. And the Europeans and the Latin Americans are at the forefront of this understanding.
AMY GOODMAN:: Well, we’re going to talk to you about Congo, about Lebanon, about the Middle East, about Latin America, much of what you cover in The Secret History of the American Empire, when we come back.
AMY GOODMAN:: Our guest is John Perkins. From 1971 to ‘81, he worked for the international consulting firm of Charles T. Main, where he was a self-described “economic hit man.” His new book is called The Secret History of the American Empire: Economic Hit Men, Jackals and the Truth about Global Corruption. Let’s talk back, going to Latin America, about this ChevronTexaco lawsuit.
JOHN PERKINS: Well, that’s extremely significant. When I was sent to Ecuador as a Peace Corps volunteer in 1968, Texaco had just gone into Ecuador, and the promise to the Ecuadorian people at that time from Texaco and their own politicians and the World Bank was oil is going to pull this country out of poverty. And people believed it. I believed it at the time. The exact opposite has happened. Oil has made the country much more impoverished, while Texaco has made fortunes off this. It’s also destroyed vast areas of the Amazon rainforest.
So the lawsuit today that’s being brought by a New York lawyer and some Ecuadorian lawyers—Steve Donziger here in New York—is for $6 billion, the largest environmental lawsuit in the history of the world, in the name of 30,000 Ecuadorian people against Texaco, which is now owned by Chevron, for dumping over eighteen billion gallons of toxic waste into the Ecuadorian rainforest. That’s thirty times more than the Exxon Valdez. And dozens and dozens of people have died and are continuing to die of cancer and other pollution-related diseases in this area of the Amazon. So all this oil has come out of this area, and it’s the poorest area of one of the poorest countries in the hemisphere. And the irony of that is just so amazing.
But what I think—one of the really significant things about this, Amy, is that this law firm has taken this on, not pro bono, but they expect if they win the case, which they expect to do, to make a lot of money off of it, which is a philosophical decision. It isn’t because they wanted to get rich off this. It’s because they want to encourage other law firms to do similar things in Nigeria and in Indonesia and in Bolivia, in Venezuela and many other places. So they want to see a business grow out of this, of law firms going in and defending poor people, knowing that they can get a payoff from the big companies who have acted so terribly, terribly, terribly irresponsibly in the past.
And Steve Donziger, the attorney—I was in Ecuador with him just two weeks ago—and one of the very touching things he said is—he’s an American attorney with, you know, very good credentials, and he says, “You know, I’ve seen a lot of companies make mistakes and then try to defend themselves in law courts.” And he said, “That’s one thing. But in this case, Texaco didn’t make mistakes. This was done with intent. They knew what they were doing. To save a few bucks, they killed a lot of people.” And now they’re going to be forced to pay for that, to take responsibility for that, and hopefully open the door to make many companies take responsibility for the wanton destruction that’s occurred.
AMY GOODMAN: Let’s talk about Latin America and its leaders, like Jaime Roldos. Talk about him and his significance. You wrote about him in your first book, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man.
JOHN PERKINS: Yeah, Jaime Roldos was an amazing man. After many years of military dictators in Ecuador, US puppet dictators, there was a democratic election, and one man, Jaime Roldos, ran on a platform that said Ecuadorian resources ought to be used to help the Ecuadorian people, and specifically oil, which at that time was just coming in. This was in the late ’70s. And I was sent to Ecuador, and I was also sent at the same time to Panama to work with Omar Torrijos, to bring these men around, to corrupt them, basically, to change their minds.
You know, in the case of Jaime Roldos, he won the election by a landslide, and now he started to put into action his policy, his promises, and was going to tax the oil companies. If they weren’t willing to give much more of their profits back to the Ecuadorian people, then he threatened to nationalize them. So I was sent down, along with other economic hit men—I played a fairly minor role in that case and a major one in Panama with Torrijos—but we were sent into these countries to get these men to change their policies, to go against their own campaign promises. And basically what you do is you tell them, “Look, you know, if you play our game, I can make you and your family very healthy. I can make sure that you get very rich. If you don’t play our game, if you follow your campaign promises, you may go the way of Allende in Chile or Arbenz in Guatemala or Lumumba in the Congo.” On and on, we can list all these presidents that we’ve either overthrown or assassinated because they didn’t play our game. But Jaime would not come around, Jaime Roldos. He stayed uncorruptible, as did Omar Torrijos.
And both of these—and from an economic hit man perspective, this was very disturbing, because not only did I know I was likely to fail at my job, but I knew that if I failed, something dire was going to happen: the jackals would come in, and they would either overthrow these men or assassinate them. And in both cases, these men were assassinated, I have no doubt. They died in airplane crashes two months apart from each other in 1981—single plane; their own private planes crashed.
AMY GOODMAN: Explain more what happened with Omar Torrijos.
JOHN PERKINS: Well, Omar, again, was very stalwartly standing up to the United States, demanding that the Panama Canal should be owned by Panamanians. And I spent a lot of time with Torrijos, and I liked him very, very much as an individual. He was extremely charismatic, extremely courageous and very nationalistic about wanting to get the best for his people. And I couldn’t corrupt him. I tried everything I could possibly do to bring him around. And as I was failing, I was also very concerned that something would happen to him. And sure enough—it was interesting that Jaime Roldos’s plane crashed in May, and Torrijos said—got his family together and said, “I’m probably next, but I’m ready to go. We’ve now got the Canal turned over.” He had signed a treaty with Jimmy Carter to get the Canal in Panamanian hands. He said, “I’ve accomplished my job, and I’m ready to go now.” And he had a dream about being in a plane that hit a mountain. And within two months after it happened to Roldos, it happened to Torrijos also.
AMY GOODMAN: And you met with both these men?
JOHN PERKINS: Yes, I’d met with both of them.
AMY GOODMAN: What were your conversations like?
JOHN PERKINS: Well, especially with Torrijos, I spent a lot of time with him in some formal meetings and also at cocktail parties and barbecues—he was big on things like that—and was constantly trying to get him to come around to our side and letting him know that if he did, he and his family would get some very lucrative contracts, would become very wealthy, and, you know, warning him. And he didn’t really need much warning, because he knew what would be likely to happen if he didn’t. And his attitude was, “I want to get done what I can in my lifetime, and then so be it.”
And it’s been interesting, Amy, that since I wrote the book Confessions, Marta Roldos, who’s Jaime’s daughter, has come to the United States to meet with me, and I just spent time with her in Ecuador. She is now a member of parliament in Ecuador, just elected, and she married Omar Torrijos’s nephew. And it’s really interesting to hear their stories about what was going on—she was seventeen at the time her parents—her mother was also in the plane that her father died in; the two of them died in that plane—and then to hear her talk about how her husband, Omar’s nephew, was in that meeting when the family was called together and Omar said, “I’m probably next, but I’m ready to go. I’ve done my job. I’ve done what I could do for my people. So I’m ready to go, if that’s what has to happen.”
AMY GOODMAN: So what were your conversations at the time with other so-called economic hit men? I mean, you became the chief consultant at Charles Main.
JOHN PERKINS: Chief economist.
AMY GOODMAN: Chief economist.
JOHN PERKINS: Right. Well, you know, when I was with other people that—we could be sitting at a table, say, in the Hotel Panama, knowing that we’re both here to win these guys over, but we also had our official jobs, which were to do studies on the economy, to show how if the country accepted the loan, it was going to improve its gross national product. We would talk about those kinds of things. It’s, I suspect, a little bit like if two CIA agents, spies, get together or have a beer together, they don’t really talk about what they’re really doing beneath the surface, but they’ve got an official job, too, and that’s what you focus on. And, in fact, the two, in my case, are very closely linked.
So we were producing these economic reports that would prove to the World Bank and would prove to Omar Torrijos that if he accepted these huge loans, then his country’s gross national product would just mushroom and pull his people out of poverty. And we produced these reports, which made sense from a mathematical econometric standpoint. And, in fact, it often happened that with these loans, the GNP, the gross national product, did increase.
But what also was true, and what Omar knew and Jaime Roldos knew and I was coming to know very strongly, was that even if the general economy increased, the poor people with these loans would get poorer. The rich would make all the money, because most of the poor people weren’t even tied into the gross national product. A lot of them didn’t even make income. They were living off subsistence farming. They benefited nothing, but they were left holding the debt, and because of these huge debts, their country in the long term would not be able to provide them with healthcare, education and other social services.
AMY GOODMAN:: Talk about Congo.
JOHN PERKINS: Oh, boy. The whole story of Africa and the Congo is such a devastating and sad one. And it’s the hidden story, really. We in the United States don’t even talk about Africa. We don’t think about Africa. You know, Congo has something called coltan, which probably most of your listeners may not have even heard of, but every cell phone and laptop computer has coltan in it. And several million people in the last few years in the Congo have been killed over coltan, because you and I and all of us in the G8 countries demand low—or at least we want to see our computers inexpensive and our cell phones inexpensive. And, of course, the companies that make these sell them on that basis, that “Oh, here, mine’s $200 less than the other company.” But in order to do that, these people in the Congo are being enslaved. The miners, the people mining coltan, they’re being killed. There’s these vast wars going on to provide us with cheap coltan.
And I have to say, you know, if we want to live in a safe world, we need to be—we must be willing, and, in fact, we must demand that we pay higher prices for things like laptop computers and cell phones and that a good share of that money go back to the people who are mining the coltan. And that’s true of oil. It’s true of so many resources that we are not paying the true cost, and there’s millions of people around the world suffering from that. Roughly 50,000 people die every single day from hunger or hunger-related diseases and curable diseases that they don’t get the medicines for, simply because they’re part of a system that demands that they put in long hours, and they get very, very low pay, so we can have things cheaper in this country. And the Congo is an incredibly potent example of that.
AMY GOODMAN:: You talk about the so-called defeats in Vietnam and Iraq and what they mean for corporations.
JOHN PERKINS: Yeah, well, that’s—yeah, we, you and I, look at them as defeats, perhaps, and certainly anybody who lost a child or a sibling or a spouse in these countries look at them as disasters, as defeats, but the corporations made a huge amount of money off Vietnam, the military industry, huge corporations, the construction companies. And, of course, they’re doing it in a very, very big way in Iraq. So the corporatocracy, the people that are in fact insisting that our young men and women continue to go to Iraq and fight, they’re making a tremendous amount of money. These are not failures for them; they’re successes from a very strong economic standpoint. And I know that sounds cynical. I am cynical about these things. I’ve been there. I’ve seen it. And, you know, we must learn not to put up with that anymore. All of us.
AMY GOODMAN:: We’re talking to John Perkins. His book is The Secret History of the American Empire. It’s the fortieth anniversary of the 1967 Israeli-Arab war. You talk about Israel being a Fortress America in the Middle East.
JOHN PERKINS: I think it’s very sad and very telling, once again, that the Israeli people, for the most part, are led to believe that they’ve been given this land as a payoff, basically, for the Holocaust, because they deserve to be recompensed. And, of course, the Holocaust was terrible, and they do deserve to be taken care of and recompensed and have stability.
But why would we locate that place in the middle of the Arab world, their traditional enemies? Why would we locate that place in such an unstable area? It’s because it is serving as a huge fortress for us in the biggest oil fields known in the world today, and we knew this when Israel was located there. And I think the Israeli people have been terribly exploited in this process.
So, in fact, we built this vast military base, armed camp, in the middle of the Middle Eastern oil fields that are surrounded by the Arab communities, and in the process, we’ve obviously created a tremendous amount of resentment and anger and a situation that it’s very difficult to see any positive outcome there. But the fact of the matter is, our having this military base in Israel has been a huge defense for us. It’s been a place where we could really launch attacks, rely on. It’s been our equivalent of the Crusaders’ castles in the Middle East. And it’s very, very sad. I think it’s extremely sad for the Israeli people that they’re caught up in all of this. I think it’s extremely sad for the American people. It’s extremely sad for the world that this is going on.
AMY GOODMAN:: As we crisscross the globe, John Perkins, which is exaclty what you did in your years as an international consultant, having been groomed by the National Security Agency, but then becoming a top economist in an international consulting firm, you have also written books about Shamanism. You also write about Tibet. Where does Tibet fit into this picture?
JOHN PERKINS: Well, you know, I was just in Tibet a couple of years ago, and it was an interesting thing, because I took a group of about thirty people into Tibet with me as part of a non-profit organization. I was leading the trip. And some of these people had been in the Amazon with me, been to other places. And, of course, Tibet right now is—it’s very depressing, because the Chinese presence is extremely strong, and you see how the Tibetan culture has been put down. And you’re always aware that there’s Chinese soldiers and spies all around you. And many of the people on the trip came to the realization, yeah, this terrible here. “Free Tibet,” we all know about that, but the ones who had been with me on a trip to the Amazon, where the oil companies and our own military are doing the same things, said, “But doesn’t this remind us of what we’re doing in so much of the world?” And it’s something we tend to forget.
We can all wave banners about “Free Tibet,” which we should, but how about freeing the countries that are under our thumb, too? And certainly Tibet is not nearly—well, I hate to say it this way, because some people might disagree with me, but I think Iraq is in worse shape than Tibet is these days, although both of them are in pretty bad shape. But so, what we saw in Tibet is that same kind of model that we’re implementing around the world. And yet, most Americans are not aware that we’re doing it. They’re aware that the Chinese are doing it, but not aware that we’re doing it on actually a much bigger level than the Chinese are.
AMY GOODMAN:: John Perkins, talk about your transformation. You were making a lot of money. You were traveling the world. You were in a position where you were meeting presidents and prime ministers of countries, bringing them to their knees. What made you change, and then, ultimately, the decision to write about it?
JOHN PERKINS: You know, Amy, when I first got started—I grew up—three, four hundred years of Yankee Calvinism—in New Hampshire and Vermont, with very strong moral principles, came from a pretty conservative Republican family. And all during the ten years that I was an economic hit man, from ‘71 to ’81, I was pretty young, but it bothered my conscience. And yet, everybody was telling me I was doing the right thing. Like you said, presidents of countries, the president of the World Bank, Robert McNamara, patted me on the back. And I was asked to lecture at Harvard and many other places about what I was doing. And what I was doing was not illegal—should be, but it isn’t. And yet, in my heart, it always tore at my conscience. I’d been a Peace Corps volunteer. I saw. And as time went by and I began to understand more and more, it got to be more and more difficult for me to continue doing this. I had a staff of about four dozen people working for me. Things were building up.
And then, one day I was on vacation, sailing in the Virgin Islands, and I anchored my little boat off the St. John Island, and I took the dinghy in, and I climbed this mountain on St. John Island in the Virgin Islands up to this old sugar cane plantation in ruins. And it was beautiful. Bougainville. The sun was setting. I sat there and felt very peaceful. And then suddenly, I realized that this plantation had been built on the bones of thousands of slaves. And then I realized that the whole hemisphere had been built on the bones of millions of the slaves. And I got very angry and sad. And then, it suddenly struck me that I was continuing that same process and that I was a slaver, that I was making the same thing happen in a slightly—in a different way, more subtle way, but just as bad in terms of its outcome. And at that point, I made the decision I would never do it again. And I went back to Boston a couple of days later and quit.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to John Perkins, worked for Chas Main International Consulting Firm, self-described “economic hit man,” now has written a new book called The Secret History of the American Empire. When we come back from break, we’ll talk about—well, from quitting the American empire to taking it on. Stay with us.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to John Perkins. His second book on the issue of economic hit men is called The Secret History of the American Empire. John Perkins is a New York Times bestselling author. His book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man took this country by storm.
So, you quit, but that was one step. Writing about it was another. Talk about your attempts over time.
JOHN PERKINS: Oh, yes. After I quit, I tried several times to write the book that became Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, and each time I reached out to other economic hit men I had worked with or jackals to try to get their stories, word got out and I was threatened. I had a young daughter at the time. She’s now twenty-five. And I also was offered some bribe. In fact, I accepted a bribe of about a half a million dollars. It’s what’s called a legal bribe, but it’s a bribe, and it was given to me with the condition that I not write the book. There was no question about that. I describe it in detail.
And I assuaged my guilt by putting a lot of that money into nonprofits I had formed—Dream Change and Pachamama Alliance—that are helping Amazonian people fight oil companies, so to assuage my guilt some. But I didn’t write the story. And this happened a number of times, and I would find one excuse or another, and I wrote other books about indigenous people. I worked with these people. I wrote the books you mentioned earlier about Shamanism and so forth, and so I kind of, you know, distracted myself and assuaged my guilt and went on with this.
And then, on 9/11, I was in the Amazon with the Shuar people, had taken a group of nonprofit people in to learn from indigenous people in the Amazon. But shortly after that, I came up to New York to Ground Zero, and as I stood there looking down into that terrible pit, that smoldering—and it still smelled of burning flesh—I realized that I had to write the book, I could no longer defer, that the American people had no understanding of why so many people around the world are angry and frustrated and terrified, and that I had to take responsibility for what happened at 9/11. In fact, we all have to take a certain responsibility, which is not in any way to condone mass murder by anybody ever—I’m not condoning that in any way—but I did realize that the American people needed to understand why there’s so much anger around the world. I had to write the book.
So this time I didn’t tell anyone I was writing it, and even my wife and daughter, they knew I was writing something, but they didn’t know what. I didn’t reach out to other people. It made it a little more difficult to write it. But finally I got it in the hands of a very good New York agent, and he sent it out to publishers. At that point, this manuscript becomes my best insurance policy, as at that point if something strange happens to me, including now, suddenly the book will sell. Even though it’s been a bestseller for a long time, it will sell a lot more copies, if something—people sometimes laugh and say, “Do you worry that your publisher may be trying to assassinate you, because it would certainly help book sales?” I don’t worry about it. But, you know, so at that point, once I got the manuscript there, it became my insurance policy.
AMY GOODMAN: You write “A jackal is born,” about Jack Corbin. Who is he?
JOHN PERKINS: Well, Jack Corbin—and that’s not his real name, but he’s a real person—he’s alive and well today, working for us in Iraq. But he is a jackal, he is an assassin. And one of the most fascinating stories, I think, involves Seychelles, which is a small county, an island country, off the coast of Africa. And it happens to be located where Diego Garcia, one of the United States’s most strategic air bases, is located.
There’s a long history behind Diego Garcia. But in the late ‘70s, Seychelles had a president that was very friendly to us, James Mancham, and he was overthrown in a bloodless coup by [France-Albert] Rene, a socialist. And [France-Albert] Rene threatened to get us out of Diego Garcia, to expose the real facts behind the terrible things that went on to put us in Diego Garcia. There’s a lot of details that I won’t get into now.
In any case, I was called down to Washington to meet with a bunch of retired generals and admirals, who were trying—who were all working as economic hit men for consulting firms, and they were prepping me to go in and corrupt [France-Albert] Rene and bring him around to our side. But before doing that, they wanted to find out whether he was really corruptible or not. And it was sort of interesting that they—one of these generals had a young protégé, a young man, and the general had noticed that a high diplomat from Seychelles in Washington had a young wife who was not very happy. So this young man was sent in to seduce the wife and compromise her and get information from her, which is a fairly common tactic. Sex is a big thing in this game of diplomacy and economic hit people. And sort of an interesting bi-story here is that one time at lunch this general came back, and he said, “You know, I think you economic hit men have a much tougher job than you women counterpart, because,” he said, “now this woman, the diplomat’s wife, is buying into this with the young man, but she wants to be convinced that he loves her. So, you know, my god, you know, I’d give the keys to the Pentagon to a young lady just for some good sex. I don’t need to be convinced that she loves me. But I guess that’s the difference between men and women.” That’s what he said. Kind of interesting. Anyway, in the end, the young man did get the information from the wife, and the information was that [France-Albert] René was not corruptible. There was no point in even trying.
AMY GOODMAN:: Also, Diego Garcia is very significant as a military base.
JOHN PERKINS: Extremely significant. And it was used—it’s being used in Afghanistan and Iraq and sorties that we fly in to Africa or any part of that world. In any case, I was called off the job, and a little while later a team of assassins were sent in from South Africa—forty-five, forty-six, I can’t remember the exact number—were sent in as a rugby team to bring in Christmas gifts to children of the Seychelles, but their real job was to overthrow the government and assassinate Rene. At the time, I didn’t know these individuals. Now, I know Jack Corbin. I know him very well, personally. I’ve met him since. Our paths crossed back then, but we didn’t know each other.
AMY GOODMAN:: What exactly did he do?
JOHN PERKINS: Well, the team went in, and they were apprehended at the airport. A security guard discovered a hidden weapon on one of them. A huge gun battle broke out at the Mahi airport, and these mercenaries were surrounded by perhaps a thousand soldiers on the outside. Jack told me it was one of the few times in his life where he figured he was going to die and had time to think about it. Many times he could have died, but he just reacted quickly. And they didn’t know what to do, but eventually an Air India 707 came into view and asked permission to land, and they gave it permission to land. As soon as it landed, they hijacked it, and they flew it back to Durban, South Africa.
And I’m now watching this on the national news. This was now on US national news, and I’m knowing that this is—I didn’t know what was going to happen when I was called off the case, but now I’m seeing it unfold. And to the world, what we saw is this plane, Air India 707, flies into Durban, South Africa, surrounded by South African security guards. The men on the plane give themselves up. They march off. They’re sent to court and then sentenced to prison, and some, I think, to execution, and that’s the end of the story, as far as we know.
Now that I know Jack, what actually happened was when the plane was surrounded, the security forces got on the telephone with the plane and discovered there was their good friends, their teachers in fact, on the plane. They worked out a deal. The men gave themselves up. They did spend three months in prison. They had their own wing with television, etc., and then were quietly released after three months. A lot of those same men, that team, a lot of them today are in Iraq working for us there, doing things that, you know, our soldiers are forbidden from doing. And they’re making very good money doing it.
AMY GOODMAN:: Who is this man, so-called Jack Corbin, working for today in Iraq?
JOHN PERKINS: Well, he works for a private company in Iraq that has a contract, you know, that comes through the Pentagon, CIA, one of those organizations. So, like so much of this work, there’s a tremendous, as you’ve reported on this program, a tremendous number of these mercenaries there. Jack Corbin and his people are at the very top of that level. They’re the extremely skilled ones who do the really delicate work. We’ve also got a lot of people working for Blackwater and others that, you know, are not quite as skilled and are just out there doing kind of the grunt work. But there’s all kinds at that level.
AMY GOODMAN:: Bechtel, Bolivia, the water wars. You’re based in the Bay Area, where Bechtel is based, and the continent you know best, South America.
JOHN PERKINS: Yeah, well, you know, Bechtel was given the franchise to own and operate the water system of Cochabamba, Bolivia, third largest city in that country. And the World Bank forced this to happen. It’s so sad. When it happened, suddenly the price of water quadrupled for some people, went up by tremendous amounts. People could no longer afford water. Cochabamba is a pretty poor city. There’s sections of it that are extremely poor.
And so, the people took to the streets. They rebelled against this. There were riots. And Bechtel dug in its heels, but eventually they threw Bechtel out of Bolivia. Bechtel then sued Bolivia for $50 million in a European court, because they couldn’t sue in a US court, because of the laws between Bolivia and the US. And then Evo Morales was elected president of Bolivia, and very shortly after that, Bechtel dropped its lawsuit. But it was interesting that the lawsuit was for lost profits that they hadn’t been able to realize because they had been thrown out for doing things that were so onerous to the people there.
AMY GOODMAN:: John Perkins, what do you see as the solutions right now?
JOHN PERKINS: Well, you know, Amy, this empire that we’ve created really has an emperor, and it’s not the president of this country. The President serves, you know, for a short period of time. But it doesn’t really matter whether we have a Democrat or a Republican in the White House or running Congress; the empire goes on, because it’s really run by what I call the corporatocracy, which is a group of men who run our biggest corporations. This isn’t a conspiracy theory. They don’t need to conspire. They all know what serves their best interest. But they really are the equivalent of the emperor, because they do not serve at the wish of the people, they’re not democratically elected, they don’t serve any limited term. They essentially answer to no one, except their own boards, and most corporate CEOs actually run their boards, rather than the other way around. And they are the power behind this.
And so, if we want to turn this around, we have to impact them very strongly, which means that we have to change the corporations, which is their power base. And what I feel very strongly is that today corporations exists for the primary purpose of making large profits, making a few very rich people a lot richer on a quarterly basis, on a daily basis, on a very short-term basis. That shouldn’t be. There is no reason for that to be.
Corporations have been defined as individuals. Individuals have to be good citizens. Corporations need to be good citizens. They need to take—their primary goal must be to take care of their employees, their customers and all the people around the world who provide the resources that go into making this world run, and to take care of the environments and the communities where those people live.
We must get the corporations to redefine themselves, and I think it’s very realistic that we can do so. Every corporate executive out there is smart enough to realize that he’s running a very failed system. As an economist, as a rational person, nobody can conclude anything otherwise. If you look at the fact that less than 5% of the world’s population live in the United States and we consume more than 25% of the world’s resources and create over 30% of its major pollution, you can only conclude that we’ve created a very flawed and failed system. This is not a model that can be sold to the Chinese or the Indians or the Africans or the Middle Easterners or the Latin Americans. We can’t even continue with it ourselves. It has to change. And corporate executives know that. They’re smart individuals. I believe that they want to see change.
And when we have really pushed them to change, we’ve been extremely successful. For example, we’ve got them to clean up rivers that were terribly polluted in the 1970s in this country. We got them to get rid of the aerosol cans that were destroying the ozone layer. We got them to change their policies toward hiring and promoting minorities and women. We’ve gotten them to put seatbelts in cars and airbags, against their initial resistance. We’ve got them to change tremendously in any specific area where we’ve set out to do that.
Now, it behooves us, we must convince them that their corporations need to be institutions to make this a better world, rather than institutions that serve a few very rich people and their goal is to make those people even richer. We need to turn this around. We must.
AMY GOODMAN:: I want to ask one last quick question on Ecuador, and that is the death of Ecuador’s Defense Minister Guadalupe Larriva, who died in a helicopter crash last year near the Manta US Air Base installation. Do you know anything about that?
JOHN PERKINS: Well, yeah. I just came from Ecuador, and everybody is talking about it, because the same thing happened to Jaime Roldos’s minister of defense before he was assassinated. And the fact that it happened next to the US air base in Manta and it was a freak crash, two helicopters collidng, the similarities between what happened to Jaime Roldos, people all through Ecuador are saying this was a warning to Rafael Correa, the new president of Ecuador.
Amy Goodman:: We’re going to have to leave it there. John Perkins, thanks for joining us. John Perkins’s new book is called The Secret History of the American Empire: Economic Hit Men, Jackals and the Truth about Global Corruption.
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Worth a view & listen carefully.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6WstddMJZQ
Today, we spend the hour with a man who claims to have worked deep inside the forces driving corporate globalization. In his first book, “Confessions of an Economic Hit Man”, John Perkins told the story of his work as a highly paid consultant hired to strong-arm leaders into creating policy favorable to the U.S. government and corporations—what he calls the “corporatocracy.” John Perkins has just come out with a new book. It’s called “The Secret History of the American Empire: Economic Hit Men, Jackals, and the Truth about Global Corruption.” [includes rush transcript]
Hundreds of thousands of protesters are gathering in Germany ahead of tomorrow’s G8 meeting of the world’s richest nations. The three-day summit is being held in the coastal resort of Heiligendamm. German police have spent $18 million dollars to erect an eight-mile-long, two-meter-high fence around the meeting site. Global warming will be high on the agenda. Going into the meeting, President Bush has proposed to sideline the UN-backed Kyoto Accords and set voluntary targets on reducing emissions of greenhouse gas. Other top issues will include foreign aid and new trade deals.
Today, we spend the hour with a man who claims to have worked deep inside the forces driving corporate globalization. In his first book, “Confessions of an Economic Hit Man”, John Perkins told the story of his work as a highly paid consultant hired to strong-arm leaders into creating policy favorable to the U.S. government and corporations—what he calls the “corporatocracy.” Perkins says he helped the U.S. cheat poor countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars by lending them more money than they could possibly repay and then taking over their economies.
John Perkins has just come out with a new book. It’s called “The Secret History of the American Empire: Economic Hit Men, Jackals, and the Truth about Global Corruption.” John Perkins joins me now in the firehouse studio.
John Perkins, From 1971 to 1981 he worked for the international consulting firm of Chas T. Main where he was a self-described “economic hit man.” He is the author of the new book “The Secret History of the American Empire.”
Rush Transcript
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Amy Goodman:: Hundreds of thousands of protesters are gathering in Germany ahead of tomorrow’s G8 meeting of the world’s richest nations. The three-day summit is being held in the coastal resort of Heiligendamm. German police have spent $18 million to erect an eight-mile-long, two-meter-high fence around the meeting site.
Global warming will be high on the agenda. Going into the meeting, President Bush has proposed to sideline the UN-backed Kyoto Accords and set voluntary targets on reducing emissions of greenhouse gas. Other top issues will include foreign aid and new trade deals.
Today, we spend the hour with a man who claims to have worked deep inside the forces driving corporate globalization. In his first book, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, John Perkins told the story of his work as a highly paid consultant hired to strong-arm leaders into creating policy favorable to the US government and corporations, what he calls the “corporatocracy.” John Perkins says he helped the US cheat poor countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars by lending them more money than they could possibly repay and then taking over their economies. John Perkins has just come out with his second book on this issue. It’s called The Secret History of the American Empire: Economic Hit Men, Jackals and the Truth about Global Corruption. John Perkins joins us now in the firehouse studio. Welcome to Democracy Now!
JOHN PERKINS: Thank you, Amy. It’s great to be here.
AMY GOODMAN:: Well, before we go further, “economic hit men”—for those who haven’t heard you describe this, let alone describe yourself as this, what do you mean?
JOHN PERKINS: Well, really, I think it’s fair to say that since World War II, we economic hit men have managed to create the world’s first truly global empire, and we’ve done it primarily without the military, unlike other empires in history. We’ve done it through economics very subtly.
We work many different ways, but perhaps the most common one is that we will identify a third world country that has resources our corporations covet, such as oil, and then we arrange a huge loan to that country from the World Bank or one of its sister organizations. The money never actually goes to the country. It goes instead to US corporations, who build big infrastructure projects—power grids, industrial parks, harbors, highways—things that benefit a few very rich people but do not reach the poor at all. The poor aren’t connected to the power grids. They don’t have the skills to get jobs in industrial parks. But they and the whole country are left holding this huge debt, and it’s such a big bet that the country can’t possibly repay it. So at some point in time, we economic hit men go back to the country and say, “Look, you know, you owe us a lot of money. You can’t pay your debt, so you’ve got to give us a pound of flesh.”
AMY GOODMAN:: And explain your history. What made you an economic hit man?
JOHN PERKINS: Well, when I graduated from business school at Boston University, I was recruited by the National Security Agency, the nation’s largest and perhaps most secretive spy organization.
AMY GOODMAN:: People sometimes think the CIA is that, but the NSA, many times larger.
JOHN PERKINS: Yeah, it is larger. It’s much larger. At least it was in those days. And it’s very, very secretive. We all—there’s a lot of rumors. We know quite a lot about the CIA, I think, but we know very, very little about the NSA. It claims to only work in a cryptography, you know, encoding and decoding messages, but in fact we all know that they’re the people who have been listening in on our telephone conversations. That’s come out recently. And they’re a very, very secretive organization.
They put me through a series of tests, very extensive tests, lie detector tests, psychological tests, during my last year in college. And I think it’s fair to say that they identified me as a good potential economic hit man. They also identified a number of weaknesses in my character that would make it relatively easy for them to hook me, to bring me in. And I think those weaknesses, I [inaudible] might call, the three big drugs of our culture: money, power and sex. Who amongst us doesn’t have one of them? I had all three at the time.
And then I joined the Peace Corps. I was encouraged to do that by the National Security Agency. I spent three years in Ecuador living with indigenous people in the Amazon and the Andes, people who today and at that time were beginning to fight the oil companies. In fact, the largest environmental lawsuit in the history of the world has just been brought by these people against Texaco, Chevron. And that was incredibly good training for what I was to do.
And then, while I was still in the Peace Corps, I was brought in and recruited into a US private corporation called Charles T. Main, a consulting firm out of Boston of about 2,000 employees, very low-profile firm that did a tremendous amount of work of what I came to understand was the work of economic hit men, as I described it earlier, and that’s the role I began to fulfill and eventually kind of rose to the top of that organization as its chief economist.
AMY GOODMAN:: And how did that tie to the NSA? Was there a connection?
JOHN PERKINS: You know, that’s what’s very interesting about this whole system, Amy, is that there’s no direct connection. The NSA had interviewed me, identified me and then essentially turned me over to this private corporation. It’s a very subtle and very smart system, whereby it’s the private industry that goes out and does this work. So if we’re caught doing something, if we’re caught bribing or corrupting local officials in some country, it’s blamed on private industry, not on the US government.
And it’s interesting that in the few instances when economic hit men fail, what we call “the jackals,” who are people who come in to overthrow governments or assassinate their leaders, also come out of private industry. These are not CIA employees. We all have this image of the 007, the government agent hired to kill, you know, with license to kill, but these days the government agents, in my experience, don’t do that. It’s done by private consultants that are brought in to do this work. And I’ve known a number of these individuals personally and still do.
AMY GOODMAN:: In your book, The Secret History of the American Empire, you talk about taking on global power at every level. Right now, we’re seeing these mass protests taking place in Germany ahead of the G8 meeting. Talk about the significance of these.
JOHN PERKINS: Well, I think it’s extremely significant. Something is happening in the world today, which is very, very important. Yeah, as we watched the headlines this morning, you know, what we can absolutely say is we live in a very dangerous world. It’s also a very small world, where we’re able to immediately know what’s going on in Germany or in the middle of the Amazon or anywhere else. And we’re beginning to finally understand around the world, I think, that the only way my children or grandchildren or any child or grandchild anywhere on this planet is going to be able to have a peaceful, stable and sustainable world is if every child has that. The G8 hasn’t got that yet.
AMY GOODMAN:: Explain what the Group of Eight are.
JOHN PERKINS: Well, the Group of Eight are the wealthiest countries in the world, and basically they run the world. And the leader is the United States, and it’s actually the corporations within these companies—countries, excuse me—that run it. It’s not the governments, because, after all, the governments serve at the pleasure of the corporations. In our own country, we know that the next two final presidential candidates, Republican and Democrat alike, are going to each have to raise something like half a billion dollars. And that’s not going to come from me and you. Primarily that’s going to come from the people who own and run our big corporations. They’re totally beholden to the government. So the G8 really is this group of countries that represent the biggest multinational corporations in the world and really serve at their behest.
And what we’re seeing now in Europe—and we’re seeing it very strongly in Latin America, we’re seeing it in the Middle East—we’re seeing this huge undercurrent of resistance, of protest, against this empire that’s been built out of this. And it’s been such a subtle empire that people haven’t been aware of it, because it wasn’t built by the military. It was built by economic hit men. Most of us aren’t aware of it. Most Americans have no idea that these incredible lifestyles that we all lead are because we’re part of a very vicious empire that literally enslaves people around the world, misuses people. But we’re beginning to understand this. And the Europeans and the Latin Americans are at the forefront of this understanding.
AMY GOODMAN:: Well, we’re going to talk to you about Congo, about Lebanon, about the Middle East, about Latin America, much of what you cover in The Secret History of the American Empire, when we come back.
AMY GOODMAN:: Our guest is John Perkins. From 1971 to ‘81, he worked for the international consulting firm of Charles T. Main, where he was a self-described “economic hit man.” His new book is called The Secret History of the American Empire: Economic Hit Men, Jackals and the Truth about Global Corruption. Let’s talk back, going to Latin America, about this ChevronTexaco lawsuit.
JOHN PERKINS: Well, that’s extremely significant. When I was sent to Ecuador as a Peace Corps volunteer in 1968, Texaco had just gone into Ecuador, and the promise to the Ecuadorian people at that time from Texaco and their own politicians and the World Bank was oil is going to pull this country out of poverty. And people believed it. I believed it at the time. The exact opposite has happened. Oil has made the country much more impoverished, while Texaco has made fortunes off this. It’s also destroyed vast areas of the Amazon rainforest.
So the lawsuit today that’s being brought by a New York lawyer and some Ecuadorian lawyers—Steve Donziger here in New York—is for $6 billion, the largest environmental lawsuit in the history of the world, in the name of 30,000 Ecuadorian people against Texaco, which is now owned by Chevron, for dumping over eighteen billion gallons of toxic waste into the Ecuadorian rainforest. That’s thirty times more than the Exxon Valdez. And dozens and dozens of people have died and are continuing to die of cancer and other pollution-related diseases in this area of the Amazon. So all this oil has come out of this area, and it’s the poorest area of one of the poorest countries in the hemisphere. And the irony of that is just so amazing.
But what I think—one of the really significant things about this, Amy, is that this law firm has taken this on, not pro bono, but they expect if they win the case, which they expect to do, to make a lot of money off of it, which is a philosophical decision. It isn’t because they wanted to get rich off this. It’s because they want to encourage other law firms to do similar things in Nigeria and in Indonesia and in Bolivia, in Venezuela and many other places. So they want to see a business grow out of this, of law firms going in and defending poor people, knowing that they can get a payoff from the big companies who have acted so terribly, terribly, terribly irresponsibly in the past.
And Steve Donziger, the attorney—I was in Ecuador with him just two weeks ago—and one of the very touching things he said is—he’s an American attorney with, you know, very good credentials, and he says, “You know, I’ve seen a lot of companies make mistakes and then try to defend themselves in law courts.” And he said, “That’s one thing. But in this case, Texaco didn’t make mistakes. This was done with intent. They knew what they were doing. To save a few bucks, they killed a lot of people.” And now they’re going to be forced to pay for that, to take responsibility for that, and hopefully open the door to make many companies take responsibility for the wanton destruction that’s occurred.
AMY GOODMAN: Let’s talk about Latin America and its leaders, like Jaime Roldos. Talk about him and his significance. You wrote about him in your first book, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man.
JOHN PERKINS: Yeah, Jaime Roldos was an amazing man. After many years of military dictators in Ecuador, US puppet dictators, there was a democratic election, and one man, Jaime Roldos, ran on a platform that said Ecuadorian resources ought to be used to help the Ecuadorian people, and specifically oil, which at that time was just coming in. This was in the late ’70s. And I was sent to Ecuador, and I was also sent at the same time to Panama to work with Omar Torrijos, to bring these men around, to corrupt them, basically, to change their minds.
You know, in the case of Jaime Roldos, he won the election by a landslide, and now he started to put into action his policy, his promises, and was going to tax the oil companies. If they weren’t willing to give much more of their profits back to the Ecuadorian people, then he threatened to nationalize them. So I was sent down, along with other economic hit men—I played a fairly minor role in that case and a major one in Panama with Torrijos—but we were sent into these countries to get these men to change their policies, to go against their own campaign promises. And basically what you do is you tell them, “Look, you know, if you play our game, I can make you and your family very healthy. I can make sure that you get very rich. If you don’t play our game, if you follow your campaign promises, you may go the way of Allende in Chile or Arbenz in Guatemala or Lumumba in the Congo.” On and on, we can list all these presidents that we’ve either overthrown or assassinated because they didn’t play our game. But Jaime would not come around, Jaime Roldos. He stayed uncorruptible, as did Omar Torrijos.
And both of these—and from an economic hit man perspective, this was very disturbing, because not only did I know I was likely to fail at my job, but I knew that if I failed, something dire was going to happen: the jackals would come in, and they would either overthrow these men or assassinate them. And in both cases, these men were assassinated, I have no doubt. They died in airplane crashes two months apart from each other in 1981—single plane; their own private planes crashed.
AMY GOODMAN: Explain more what happened with Omar Torrijos.
JOHN PERKINS: Well, Omar, again, was very stalwartly standing up to the United States, demanding that the Panama Canal should be owned by Panamanians. And I spent a lot of time with Torrijos, and I liked him very, very much as an individual. He was extremely charismatic, extremely courageous and very nationalistic about wanting to get the best for his people. And I couldn’t corrupt him. I tried everything I could possibly do to bring him around. And as I was failing, I was also very concerned that something would happen to him. And sure enough—it was interesting that Jaime Roldos’s plane crashed in May, and Torrijos said—got his family together and said, “I’m probably next, but I’m ready to go. We’ve now got the Canal turned over.” He had signed a treaty with Jimmy Carter to get the Canal in Panamanian hands. He said, “I’ve accomplished my job, and I’m ready to go now.” And he had a dream about being in a plane that hit a mountain. And within two months after it happened to Roldos, it happened to Torrijos also.
AMY GOODMAN: And you met with both these men?
JOHN PERKINS: Yes, I’d met with both of them.
AMY GOODMAN: What were your conversations like?
JOHN PERKINS: Well, especially with Torrijos, I spent a lot of time with him in some formal meetings and also at cocktail parties and barbecues—he was big on things like that—and was constantly trying to get him to come around to our side and letting him know that if he did, he and his family would get some very lucrative contracts, would become very wealthy, and, you know, warning him. And he didn’t really need much warning, because he knew what would be likely to happen if he didn’t. And his attitude was, “I want to get done what I can in my lifetime, and then so be it.”
And it’s been interesting, Amy, that since I wrote the book Confessions, Marta Roldos, who’s Jaime’s daughter, has come to the United States to meet with me, and I just spent time with her in Ecuador. She is now a member of parliament in Ecuador, just elected, and she married Omar Torrijos’s nephew. And it’s really interesting to hear their stories about what was going on—she was seventeen at the time her parents—her mother was also in the plane that her father died in; the two of them died in that plane—and then to hear her talk about how her husband, Omar’s nephew, was in that meeting when the family was called together and Omar said, “I’m probably next, but I’m ready to go. I’ve done my job. I’ve done what I could do for my people. So I’m ready to go, if that’s what has to happen.”
AMY GOODMAN: So what were your conversations at the time with other so-called economic hit men? I mean, you became the chief consultant at Charles Main.
JOHN PERKINS: Chief economist.
AMY GOODMAN: Chief economist.
JOHN PERKINS: Right. Well, you know, when I was with other people that—we could be sitting at a table, say, in the Hotel Panama, knowing that we’re both here to win these guys over, but we also had our official jobs, which were to do studies on the economy, to show how if the country accepted the loan, it was going to improve its gross national product. We would talk about those kinds of things. It’s, I suspect, a little bit like if two CIA agents, spies, get together or have a beer together, they don’t really talk about what they’re really doing beneath the surface, but they’ve got an official job, too, and that’s what you focus on. And, in fact, the two, in my case, are very closely linked.
So we were producing these economic reports that would prove to the World Bank and would prove to Omar Torrijos that if he accepted these huge loans, then his country’s gross national product would just mushroom and pull his people out of poverty. And we produced these reports, which made sense from a mathematical econometric standpoint. And, in fact, it often happened that with these loans, the GNP, the gross national product, did increase.
But what also was true, and what Omar knew and Jaime Roldos knew and I was coming to know very strongly, was that even if the general economy increased, the poor people with these loans would get poorer. The rich would make all the money, because most of the poor people weren’t even tied into the gross national product. A lot of them didn’t even make income. They were living off subsistence farming. They benefited nothing, but they were left holding the debt, and because of these huge debts, their country in the long term would not be able to provide them with healthcare, education and other social services.
AMY GOODMAN:: Talk about Congo.
JOHN PERKINS: Oh, boy. The whole story of Africa and the Congo is such a devastating and sad one. And it’s the hidden story, really. We in the United States don’t even talk about Africa. We don’t think about Africa. You know, Congo has something called coltan, which probably most of your listeners may not have even heard of, but every cell phone and laptop computer has coltan in it. And several million people in the last few years in the Congo have been killed over coltan, because you and I and all of us in the G8 countries demand low—or at least we want to see our computers inexpensive and our cell phones inexpensive. And, of course, the companies that make these sell them on that basis, that “Oh, here, mine’s $200 less than the other company.” But in order to do that, these people in the Congo are being enslaved. The miners, the people mining coltan, they’re being killed. There’s these vast wars going on to provide us with cheap coltan.
And I have to say, you know, if we want to live in a safe world, we need to be—we must be willing, and, in fact, we must demand that we pay higher prices for things like laptop computers and cell phones and that a good share of that money go back to the people who are mining the coltan. And that’s true of oil. It’s true of so many resources that we are not paying the true cost, and there’s millions of people around the world suffering from that. Roughly 50,000 people die every single day from hunger or hunger-related diseases and curable diseases that they don’t get the medicines for, simply because they’re part of a system that demands that they put in long hours, and they get very, very low pay, so we can have things cheaper in this country. And the Congo is an incredibly potent example of that.
AMY GOODMAN:: You talk about the so-called defeats in Vietnam and Iraq and what they mean for corporations.
JOHN PERKINS: Yeah, well, that’s—yeah, we, you and I, look at them as defeats, perhaps, and certainly anybody who lost a child or a sibling or a spouse in these countries look at them as disasters, as defeats, but the corporations made a huge amount of money off Vietnam, the military industry, huge corporations, the construction companies. And, of course, they’re doing it in a very, very big way in Iraq. So the corporatocracy, the people that are in fact insisting that our young men and women continue to go to Iraq and fight, they’re making a tremendous amount of money. These are not failures for them; they’re successes from a very strong economic standpoint. And I know that sounds cynical. I am cynical about these things. I’ve been there. I’ve seen it. And, you know, we must learn not to put up with that anymore. All of us.
AMY GOODMAN:: We’re talking to John Perkins. His book is The Secret History of the American Empire. It’s the fortieth anniversary of the 1967 Israeli-Arab war. You talk about Israel being a Fortress America in the Middle East.
JOHN PERKINS: I think it’s very sad and very telling, once again, that the Israeli people, for the most part, are led to believe that they’ve been given this land as a payoff, basically, for the Holocaust, because they deserve to be recompensed. And, of course, the Holocaust was terrible, and they do deserve to be taken care of and recompensed and have stability.
But why would we locate that place in the middle of the Arab world, their traditional enemies? Why would we locate that place in such an unstable area? It’s because it is serving as a huge fortress for us in the biggest oil fields known in the world today, and we knew this when Israel was located there. And I think the Israeli people have been terribly exploited in this process.
So, in fact, we built this vast military base, armed camp, in the middle of the Middle Eastern oil fields that are surrounded by the Arab communities, and in the process, we’ve obviously created a tremendous amount of resentment and anger and a situation that it’s very difficult to see any positive outcome there. But the fact of the matter is, our having this military base in Israel has been a huge defense for us. It’s been a place where we could really launch attacks, rely on. It’s been our equivalent of the Crusaders’ castles in the Middle East. And it’s very, very sad. I think it’s extremely sad for the Israeli people that they’re caught up in all of this. I think it’s extremely sad for the American people. It’s extremely sad for the world that this is going on.
AMY GOODMAN:: As we crisscross the globe, John Perkins, which is exaclty what you did in your years as an international consultant, having been groomed by the National Security Agency, but then becoming a top economist in an international consulting firm, you have also written books about Shamanism. You also write about Tibet. Where does Tibet fit into this picture?
JOHN PERKINS: Well, you know, I was just in Tibet a couple of years ago, and it was an interesting thing, because I took a group of about thirty people into Tibet with me as part of a non-profit organization. I was leading the trip. And some of these people had been in the Amazon with me, been to other places. And, of course, Tibet right now is—it’s very depressing, because the Chinese presence is extremely strong, and you see how the Tibetan culture has been put down. And you’re always aware that there’s Chinese soldiers and spies all around you. And many of the people on the trip came to the realization, yeah, this terrible here. “Free Tibet,” we all know about that, but the ones who had been with me on a trip to the Amazon, where the oil companies and our own military are doing the same things, said, “But doesn’t this remind us of what we’re doing in so much of the world?” And it’s something we tend to forget.
We can all wave banners about “Free Tibet,” which we should, but how about freeing the countries that are under our thumb, too? And certainly Tibet is not nearly—well, I hate to say it this way, because some people might disagree with me, but I think Iraq is in worse shape than Tibet is these days, although both of them are in pretty bad shape. But so, what we saw in Tibet is that same kind of model that we’re implementing around the world. And yet, most Americans are not aware that we’re doing it. They’re aware that the Chinese are doing it, but not aware that we’re doing it on actually a much bigger level than the Chinese are.
AMY GOODMAN:: John Perkins, talk about your transformation. You were making a lot of money. You were traveling the world. You were in a position where you were meeting presidents and prime ministers of countries, bringing them to their knees. What made you change, and then, ultimately, the decision to write about it?
JOHN PERKINS: You know, Amy, when I first got started—I grew up—three, four hundred years of Yankee Calvinism—in New Hampshire and Vermont, with very strong moral principles, came from a pretty conservative Republican family. And all during the ten years that I was an economic hit man, from ‘71 to ’81, I was pretty young, but it bothered my conscience. And yet, everybody was telling me I was doing the right thing. Like you said, presidents of countries, the president of the World Bank, Robert McNamara, patted me on the back. And I was asked to lecture at Harvard and many other places about what I was doing. And what I was doing was not illegal—should be, but it isn’t. And yet, in my heart, it always tore at my conscience. I’d been a Peace Corps volunteer. I saw. And as time went by and I began to understand more and more, it got to be more and more difficult for me to continue doing this. I had a staff of about four dozen people working for me. Things were building up.
And then, one day I was on vacation, sailing in the Virgin Islands, and I anchored my little boat off the St. John Island, and I took the dinghy in, and I climbed this mountain on St. John Island in the Virgin Islands up to this old sugar cane plantation in ruins. And it was beautiful. Bougainville. The sun was setting. I sat there and felt very peaceful. And then suddenly, I realized that this plantation had been built on the bones of thousands of slaves. And then I realized that the whole hemisphere had been built on the bones of millions of the slaves. And I got very angry and sad. And then, it suddenly struck me that I was continuing that same process and that I was a slaver, that I was making the same thing happen in a slightly—in a different way, more subtle way, but just as bad in terms of its outcome. And at that point, I made the decision I would never do it again. And I went back to Boston a couple of days later and quit.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to John Perkins, worked for Chas Main International Consulting Firm, self-described “economic hit man,” now has written a new book called The Secret History of the American Empire. When we come back from break, we’ll talk about—well, from quitting the American empire to taking it on. Stay with us.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to John Perkins. His second book on the issue of economic hit men is called The Secret History of the American Empire. John Perkins is a New York Times bestselling author. His book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man took this country by storm.
So, you quit, but that was one step. Writing about it was another. Talk about your attempts over time.
JOHN PERKINS: Oh, yes. After I quit, I tried several times to write the book that became Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, and each time I reached out to other economic hit men I had worked with or jackals to try to get their stories, word got out and I was threatened. I had a young daughter at the time. She’s now twenty-five. And I also was offered some bribe. In fact, I accepted a bribe of about a half a million dollars. It’s what’s called a legal bribe, but it’s a bribe, and it was given to me with the condition that I not write the book. There was no question about that. I describe it in detail.
And I assuaged my guilt by putting a lot of that money into nonprofits I had formed—Dream Change and Pachamama Alliance—that are helping Amazonian people fight oil companies, so to assuage my guilt some. But I didn’t write the story. And this happened a number of times, and I would find one excuse or another, and I wrote other books about indigenous people. I worked with these people. I wrote the books you mentioned earlier about Shamanism and so forth, and so I kind of, you know, distracted myself and assuaged my guilt and went on with this.
And then, on 9/11, I was in the Amazon with the Shuar people, had taken a group of nonprofit people in to learn from indigenous people in the Amazon. But shortly after that, I came up to New York to Ground Zero, and as I stood there looking down into that terrible pit, that smoldering—and it still smelled of burning flesh—I realized that I had to write the book, I could no longer defer, that the American people had no understanding of why so many people around the world are angry and frustrated and terrified, and that I had to take responsibility for what happened at 9/11. In fact, we all have to take a certain responsibility, which is not in any way to condone mass murder by anybody ever—I’m not condoning that in any way—but I did realize that the American people needed to understand why there’s so much anger around the world. I had to write the book.
So this time I didn’t tell anyone I was writing it, and even my wife and daughter, they knew I was writing something, but they didn’t know what. I didn’t reach out to other people. It made it a little more difficult to write it. But finally I got it in the hands of a very good New York agent, and he sent it out to publishers. At that point, this manuscript becomes my best insurance policy, as at that point if something strange happens to me, including now, suddenly the book will sell. Even though it’s been a bestseller for a long time, it will sell a lot more copies, if something—people sometimes laugh and say, “Do you worry that your publisher may be trying to assassinate you, because it would certainly help book sales?” I don’t worry about it. But, you know, so at that point, once I got the manuscript there, it became my insurance policy.
AMY GOODMAN: You write “A jackal is born,” about Jack Corbin. Who is he?
JOHN PERKINS: Well, Jack Corbin—and that’s not his real name, but he’s a real person—he’s alive and well today, working for us in Iraq. But he is a jackal, he is an assassin. And one of the most fascinating stories, I think, involves Seychelles, which is a small county, an island country, off the coast of Africa. And it happens to be located where Diego Garcia, one of the United States’s most strategic air bases, is located.
There’s a long history behind Diego Garcia. But in the late ‘70s, Seychelles had a president that was very friendly to us, James Mancham, and he was overthrown in a bloodless coup by [France-Albert] Rene, a socialist. And [France-Albert] Rene threatened to get us out of Diego Garcia, to expose the real facts behind the terrible things that went on to put us in Diego Garcia. There’s a lot of details that I won’t get into now.
In any case, I was called down to Washington to meet with a bunch of retired generals and admirals, who were trying—who were all working as economic hit men for consulting firms, and they were prepping me to go in and corrupt [France-Albert] Rene and bring him around to our side. But before doing that, they wanted to find out whether he was really corruptible or not. And it was sort of interesting that they—one of these generals had a young protégé, a young man, and the general had noticed that a high diplomat from Seychelles in Washington had a young wife who was not very happy. So this young man was sent in to seduce the wife and compromise her and get information from her, which is a fairly common tactic. Sex is a big thing in this game of diplomacy and economic hit people. And sort of an interesting bi-story here is that one time at lunch this general came back, and he said, “You know, I think you economic hit men have a much tougher job than you women counterpart, because,” he said, “now this woman, the diplomat’s wife, is buying into this with the young man, but she wants to be convinced that he loves her. So, you know, my god, you know, I’d give the keys to the Pentagon to a young lady just for some good sex. I don’t need to be convinced that she loves me. But I guess that’s the difference between men and women.” That’s what he said. Kind of interesting. Anyway, in the end, the young man did get the information from the wife, and the information was that [France-Albert] René was not corruptible. There was no point in even trying.
AMY GOODMAN:: Also, Diego Garcia is very significant as a military base.
JOHN PERKINS: Extremely significant. And it was used—it’s being used in Afghanistan and Iraq and sorties that we fly in to Africa or any part of that world. In any case, I was called off the job, and a little while later a team of assassins were sent in from South Africa—forty-five, forty-six, I can’t remember the exact number—were sent in as a rugby team to bring in Christmas gifts to children of the Seychelles, but their real job was to overthrow the government and assassinate Rene. At the time, I didn’t know these individuals. Now, I know Jack Corbin. I know him very well, personally. I’ve met him since. Our paths crossed back then, but we didn’t know each other.
AMY GOODMAN:: What exactly did he do?
JOHN PERKINS: Well, the team went in, and they were apprehended at the airport. A security guard discovered a hidden weapon on one of them. A huge gun battle broke out at the Mahi airport, and these mercenaries were surrounded by perhaps a thousand soldiers on the outside. Jack told me it was one of the few times in his life where he figured he was going to die and had time to think about it. Many times he could have died, but he just reacted quickly. And they didn’t know what to do, but eventually an Air India 707 came into view and asked permission to land, and they gave it permission to land. As soon as it landed, they hijacked it, and they flew it back to Durban, South Africa.
And I’m now watching this on the national news. This was now on US national news, and I’m knowing that this is—I didn’t know what was going to happen when I was called off the case, but now I’m seeing it unfold. And to the world, what we saw is this plane, Air India 707, flies into Durban, South Africa, surrounded by South African security guards. The men on the plane give themselves up. They march off. They’re sent to court and then sentenced to prison, and some, I think, to execution, and that’s the end of the story, as far as we know.
Now that I know Jack, what actually happened was when the plane was surrounded, the security forces got on the telephone with the plane and discovered there was their good friends, their teachers in fact, on the plane. They worked out a deal. The men gave themselves up. They did spend three months in prison. They had their own wing with television, etc., and then were quietly released after three months. A lot of those same men, that team, a lot of them today are in Iraq working for us there, doing things that, you know, our soldiers are forbidden from doing. And they’re making very good money doing it.
AMY GOODMAN:: Who is this man, so-called Jack Corbin, working for today in Iraq?
JOHN PERKINS: Well, he works for a private company in Iraq that has a contract, you know, that comes through the Pentagon, CIA, one of those organizations. So, like so much of this work, there’s a tremendous, as you’ve reported on this program, a tremendous number of these mercenaries there. Jack Corbin and his people are at the very top of that level. They’re the extremely skilled ones who do the really delicate work. We’ve also got a lot of people working for Blackwater and others that, you know, are not quite as skilled and are just out there doing kind of the grunt work. But there’s all kinds at that level.
AMY GOODMAN:: Bechtel, Bolivia, the water wars. You’re based in the Bay Area, where Bechtel is based, and the continent you know best, South America.
JOHN PERKINS: Yeah, well, you know, Bechtel was given the franchise to own and operate the water system of Cochabamba, Bolivia, third largest city in that country. And the World Bank forced this to happen. It’s so sad. When it happened, suddenly the price of water quadrupled for some people, went up by tremendous amounts. People could no longer afford water. Cochabamba is a pretty poor city. There’s sections of it that are extremely poor.
And so, the people took to the streets. They rebelled against this. There were riots. And Bechtel dug in its heels, but eventually they threw Bechtel out of Bolivia. Bechtel then sued Bolivia for $50 million in a European court, because they couldn’t sue in a US court, because of the laws between Bolivia and the US. And then Evo Morales was elected president of Bolivia, and very shortly after that, Bechtel dropped its lawsuit. But it was interesting that the lawsuit was for lost profits that they hadn’t been able to realize because they had been thrown out for doing things that were so onerous to the people there.
AMY GOODMAN:: John Perkins, what do you see as the solutions right now?
JOHN PERKINS: Well, you know, Amy, this empire that we’ve created really has an emperor, and it’s not the president of this country. The President serves, you know, for a short period of time. But it doesn’t really matter whether we have a Democrat or a Republican in the White House or running Congress; the empire goes on, because it’s really run by what I call the corporatocracy, which is a group of men who run our biggest corporations. This isn’t a conspiracy theory. They don’t need to conspire. They all know what serves their best interest. But they really are the equivalent of the emperor, because they do not serve at the wish of the people, they’re not democratically elected, they don’t serve any limited term. They essentially answer to no one, except their own boards, and most corporate CEOs actually run their boards, rather than the other way around. And they are the power behind this.
And so, if we want to turn this around, we have to impact them very strongly, which means that we have to change the corporations, which is their power base. And what I feel very strongly is that today corporations exists for the primary purpose of making large profits, making a few very rich people a lot richer on a quarterly basis, on a daily basis, on a very short-term basis. That shouldn’t be. There is no reason for that to be.
Corporations have been defined as individuals. Individuals have to be good citizens. Corporations need to be good citizens. They need to take—their primary goal must be to take care of their employees, their customers and all the people around the world who provide the resources that go into making this world run, and to take care of the environments and the communities where those people live.
We must get the corporations to redefine themselves, and I think it’s very realistic that we can do so. Every corporate executive out there is smart enough to realize that he’s running a very failed system. As an economist, as a rational person, nobody can conclude anything otherwise. If you look at the fact that less than 5% of the world’s population live in the United States and we consume more than 25% of the world’s resources and create over 30% of its major pollution, you can only conclude that we’ve created a very flawed and failed system. This is not a model that can be sold to the Chinese or the Indians or the Africans or the Middle Easterners or the Latin Americans. We can’t even continue with it ourselves. It has to change. And corporate executives know that. They’re smart individuals. I believe that they want to see change.
And when we have really pushed them to change, we’ve been extremely successful. For example, we’ve got them to clean up rivers that were terribly polluted in the 1970s in this country. We got them to get rid of the aerosol cans that were destroying the ozone layer. We got them to change their policies toward hiring and promoting minorities and women. We’ve gotten them to put seatbelts in cars and airbags, against their initial resistance. We’ve got them to change tremendously in any specific area where we’ve set out to do that.
Now, it behooves us, we must convince them that their corporations need to be institutions to make this a better world, rather than institutions that serve a few very rich people and their goal is to make those people even richer. We need to turn this around. We must.
AMY GOODMAN:: I want to ask one last quick question on Ecuador, and that is the death of Ecuador’s Defense Minister Guadalupe Larriva, who died in a helicopter crash last year near the Manta US Air Base installation. Do you know anything about that?
JOHN PERKINS: Well, yeah. I just came from Ecuador, and everybody is talking about it, because the same thing happened to Jaime Roldos’s minister of defense before he was assassinated. And the fact that it happened next to the US air base in Manta and it was a freak crash, two helicopters collidng, the similarities between what happened to Jaime Roldos, people all through Ecuador are saying this was a warning to Rafael Correa, the new president of Ecuador.
Amy Goodman:: We’re going to have to leave it there. John Perkins, thanks for joining us. John Perkins’s new book is called The Secret History of the American Empire: Economic Hit Men, Jackals and the Truth about Global Corruption.
Source ~ Democracy Now
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