Chechens to Move Government to Afghanistan
Chechen and Taliban leaders have agreed to relocate the seat of Chechnya�s government to Afghanistan, ITAR-TASS reported on Monday, December 6. Envoys from Grozny visited Afghanistan in the past week, and secured permission to begin a government-in-exile lead by Chechen President Aslan Maskhadov in the Taliban-controlled region of the country. The Afghani embassy in Moscow informed Ekho Moskvy radio station that they knew nothing about the agreement, but conceded that such an agreement between Talibs and Chechen emissaries could have taken place.
Russia, Belorussia to Form Union
Russian Presidential press secretary Dmitry Yakushin announced on Monday, December 6 that an agreement forming a new union between Russia and Belorussia will be signed on December 8. Belorussian President Alexander Lukashenko expressed his resentment that the first person with whom Boris Yeltsin will meet after his convalescence would be Leonid Kuchma. He made it clear that he would come to �corresponding conclusions� about the slight.
The signing was originally scheduled for last week but was delayed when Russian President Boris Yeltsin was hospitalized. Yeltsin today left the Central Clinical Hospital, where he had been treated for a week with influenza. After negotiations with Kuchma, he left for his residence Torki-9. Lukashenko will arrive December 8 in Moscow for the signing.
By MICHAEL PAULSON
ROBERT McCLURE
Dec 4
(SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER)
The world�s trade ministers last night abandoned their effort to launch a new round of global trade negotiations, bringing an ugly conclusion to an ugly week.
The meeting of the World Trade Organization, hampered throughout the week by sometimes violent protests, broke up just before 10 p.m. when delegates from 135 nations said they could not agree on an agenda for future trade talks.
The defeat for the trade ministers was a major blow to President Clinton, who had said success in Seattle required the launch of a new round of global trade talks. It was also a blow to the U.S. business community, which wants greater access to foreign markets.
The collapse of the talks does not mean that the move toward globalization ends; trade officials will gather at WTO headquarters in Geneva next year and continue to talk about reducing barriers to trade in agriculture and services. But there is now no guarantee anything will get done because the delegates could not set specific deadlines by which they would agree to a specific agenda, such as the elimination of agricultural subsidies.
Smaller and poorer countries have long felt slighted in the WTO, where they say they are pushed around by bigger, stronger countries. Many Third World countries view with suspicion initiatives advanced by developed countries, and this week they complained that they were being excluded from important meetings.
Third World countries found themselves disadvantaged as wealthy countries with huge delegations were able to send people to a variety of meetings at all times of the day. Japan had 88 negotiators in Seattle; the United States 85 and the Europeans 76. By contrast, Belize, Burkina Faso and the Congo each had five, while Dominica could afford only four.
The week got off to a tumultuous start as tens of thousands of protesters, upset about the WTO�s impact on labor, environmental and consumer issues, stormed the streets. Some of the protests turned violent, and police responded with tear gas and rubber pellets.
The policy debate, always difficult in an organization with as diverse a membership as the WTO, was protracted and unpleasant. The United States attacked European and Japanese farm subsidies, Japan attacked U.S. steel-protection measures, and the developing world complained that it was not gaining any benefits no matter what the WTO did.
President Clinton, who spent about 30 hours in town on Tuesday and Wednesday, threw a further wrench into the works when, on the eve of his arrival, he told the Post-Intelligencer that he wanted a proposed WTO working group on trade and labor to develop labor standards that would eventually be enforceable by trade sanctions. That comment, although welcomed by labor groups, irritated developing nations concerned that they would suffer as a result, and Clinton�s labor agenda was sunk.
And the United States was losing another fight over opening the WTO itself to greater public scrutiny by opening tribunals to the public, and by allowing environmental, labor and other groups to file �friend of the court� briefs. But the U.S. effort won little support, in part because many smaller countries fear that allowing participation by non-governmental organizations, which often are based in industrialized countries, would further bias the WTO toward the interests of wealthy countries.
�The average American simply didn�t know the WTO existed on Monday. Just five days later, the average American has now heard of the WTO, and they know that it makes some people angry � some of whom look like they do, and some of whom they saw on TV carrying American flags.�
By Alessandro RAIMONDI
LUGANO, Dec 4 (THE GLOBE)
�Cows for Kosovo� the operation engineered by the Swiss Farmers Union has just come to an end. In fact the last 60 cattle have been delivered at destination, the western area of the war thorn country, where the effects of the conflict have been disastrous for a population traditionally devoted to cattle-breeding. Their means of support completely slaughtered, for those lucky enough for not having shared the same destiny of their animals, perspectives of survival with the approaching of Winter where very dim. It has been at this point that Switzerland has activated another helping project, joined by the responsive Farmers Union.
Knowing what their Kosovo�s colleagues would have mostly needed, as much as 497 alive cows have been airlifted to the Albanian inhabited area of Serbia. It�s the first time since 1996 that Switzerland has exported living animals, taking care, in so doing, of sending prime milk cows so to produce on the spot the milk so heavily needed by kids.
The cows have been sent at different stages and have been distributed to the families of farmers in worst conditions: it won�t change their lives, but it certainly is an encouraging start.
The operation that has brought half a thousand �Milkas� in the Balkans has costed 2 million Swiss Francs, of which 1.2 million used to buy those animals and the balance to cover transportation, distribution and on site assistance costs.
There is much satisfaction in the Confederation for this further humanitarian help whose costs have been absorbed by the Federal Bureau of Agricolture and by the Development and Co-operation Directorate.
DAVID FENNARIO
Dec 5
This year marks the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of the Boer War, waged by the British against the Afrikaners in South Africa. I marked the occasion by visiting the grave site of my grandfather, William (Jock) Kerr, who fought in the Boer War.
When I asked for information at the custodian�s office in the Pointe Claire Field of Honour, I found out that my grandfather had served as a private in the Highland Light Infantry, listed under regimental number 357111.
Since then, I did some research on the Highland Light Infantry and discovered that they supposedly disgraced themselves in the Battle of Majersfontein in December 1899 near the Modder River. The Scottish brigade in kilts crossed open ground in mass formation against entrenched Boers and were mowed down by a violent fusillade of rifle fire. The survivors, it seems, took to their heels.
I don�t know whether my grandfather was in that battle, but I do know he had nothing good to say about his experience in South Africa, even though the war, in its time, was presented as a glorious imperial venture, a humanitarian effort like the war in Kosovo.
Deposits of gold
In language similar to NATO�s pronouncements on Kosovo, British citizens in 1899 were urged to support a British military intervention in South Africa. The Afrikaners were portrayed as a backward people, oppressors of their own black population and guilty of the repression of the political rights of British citizens living in the Transvaal.
The charges were not without foundation, but the decision to launch a British intervention had a lot more to do with the fact that the largest deposits of gold in the world had been found in the highlands near Johannesburg in Transvaal, rather than British concern for the oppression of blacks.
The gold was secured, at the cost of thousands of lives.
The oppression of blacks continued, and years later, the Afrikaners introduced further discrimination against blacks in the form of the apartheid system: a system that generated tremendous profits because it kept the wages of black miners at subsistence levels.
It took generations to fully expose the fact that the Boer War was not motivated by philanthropic reasons, but it appears that the supposed humanitarian motives behind the NATO intervention in the Balkans are already being exposed as a sham.
Ulterior reasons were revealed recently when the presidents of Georgia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Turkey signed an accord to support the construction of an oil pipeline through their countries from the Caspian Sea - bypassing Russia and Iran.
U.S. Influence
According to the New York Times, �Construction of this pipeline, estimated at $2.4 billion, would give the United States and other Western countries access to an important new source of energy. But the main significance was that it would draw the new nations near the Caspian, which were part of the Soviet Union only a decade ago, away from Russia and give the United States greater influence in the region.�
From this information it becomes clear that NATO had strong ulterior motives to intervene in Kosovo, rather than its public concern for refugees.
NATO needed a war to expand its sphere of influence eastward at the expense of Russia, with an eye to controlling the vast oil reserves of the Caspian Sea region. This is the real motivation behind the Kosovo war, one similar to the motivation that propelled the British into South Africa 100 years ago, in a war generated by corporate greed and military ambitions.
In hindsight, the Boer War is seen by many historians as one of the first steps in the escalation of tensions between various European superpowers that led to World War I.
The war in Kosovo may prove to be one of the first steps leading to World War III unless masses of people, through mass protests, make it clear to their governments that they will not tolerate any more wars masked as humanitarian ventures.
All Over the Globe is published by IPA House.
© 1998 IPA House. All Rights Reserved.