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Canada's House of Commons has been in session for 24 hours for amendment votes on its budget bill, with voting expected to continue until early on Friday.
Coca-Cola says it will resume business in Burma after 60 years, following a US decision to suspend investment sanctions.
As oil companies complain of lost revenues, the government is moving forward with plans to build more pipelines of its own.
The programs are an effort to tighten American border security, and have required substantial concessions from foreign leaders.
US President Barack Obama and Republican rival Mitt Romney offer competing visions of the road to economic recovery in speeches in Ohio.
Disgraced Texas tycoon Allen Stanford, famed for bankrolling cricket in the Caribbean, is jailed for 110 years for running a $7bn Ponzi scheme.
The makers of Game of Thrones have apologised for using a decapitated head that looks like former US president George W Bush.
Seven-time Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong denies drug charges brought against him by the US Anti-Doping Agency.
U.S. lawmakers said Jorge Luis GarcÃa Pérez, who testified last Thursday on the short-term detention of dissidents, was released Wednesday, four days after he was beaten and arrested by authorities.
With formidable size and a powerful right hand, the Cuban heavyweight won three Olympic gold medals. He had 301 victories in 321 bouts over a 20-year career.
Caught between a proverbial rock and a hard place, African and Pacific countries are still unsure whether they should follow the lead of their Caribbean counterparts and sign a wide-ranging Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) with Europe.
African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) ministers are meeting here ahead of their joint Council of Ministers meeting with Europe on Thursday and Friday. However, they are still far from completing the negotiations that would allow them to participate in the accord that Europe is using as its main vehicle for trade and other assistance.
Namibia is looking to diversify its beef exports to countries in the global South in order to lessen its dependency on the lucrative EU market. Credit: Servaas van den Bosch/IPS
In 2008, the Caribbean Forum (CARIFORUM), comprising the 15-member Caribbean Community (CARICOM) and the Dominican Republic, signed the accord. Ironically, Guyana, which had been reluctant to sign until it received certain assurances, is the only one so far to have ratified the EPA.
“At the time of signing Guyana was able to secure a joint declaration which is appended to the CARIFORUM-EPA indicating that within a five-year period there will be a review of the implementation process to examine to what extent it is adversely affecting our development strategies and this is something… we hope will be incorporated in the other regions as they work to conclude their agreements,” the country’s ambassador to Brussels Dr. P.I. Gomes told IPS.
In its report to the conference here, the Pacific region has described the negotiations with Europe that began in 2004 as “a long and challenging process”.
Tonga’s Labour, Commerce and Industries Minister Isieli Pulu, the lead spokesman for the Pacific grouping, said that while two Pacific states have signed an interim EPA – mainly to avoid market access restrictions – it was always understood that the interim accord “would be a stepping stone towards a comprehensive EPA”.
The Cotonou Agreement signed in 2000 puts in place a cooperation framework aimed at liberalising trade between both the ACP and EU, and also specified that a new World Trade Organization (WTO) compatible regime or an EPA must be agreed by the end of 2007.
Pulu said that the Pacific countries have reaffirmed this commitment and their leaders have mandated “that we continue to negotiate a comprehensive EPA as single region with the European Union which should be concluded by 2012.
But he said while this commitment has been made, the Pacific group wants an EPA “based on principles and objectives enshrined in the Cotonou Agreement” and it “must go far beyond market access arrangements and constitute a trade and development cooperation agreement that will form the basis for the elaboration of a true, strengthened and strategic partnership over time between the Pacific ACP region and the European Union”.
Pulu has accused Europe of “stalling”, noting that it “has continually deferred meeting with the Pacific region for a formal negotiating session since 2009.
“Furthermore, they have not responded to the Pacific’s proposals and market access offers submitted in July 2011. This has seriously threatened the possibility of concluding the negotiations on a comprehensive EPA as called for by the Pacific ACP leaders. Instead, the European Commission has been coercing the Pacific ACP region to accept the interim EPA,” Pulu told the meeting.
He said the delay has reduced the alternatives for several Pacific countries wishing to conclude “a beneficial trading arrangement” with Europe given the implications of the commission’s proposals to amend EU market access regulations.
“In the Pacific region, Fiji could be forced to ratify the interim EPA if the region is not able to satisfactorily conclude a comprehensive EPA by 2014. Major industries in Fiji could face disruption and could collapse as they are dependent on duty-free and quota-free access to the European market,” he said.
For their part, the African countries, grouped under several bodies, have also expressed reservations.
Central Africa, for instance, has indicated that three countries – Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea and Gabon – have specific concerns regarding cooperation with the European Union.
Cameroon, which signed the “Stepping Stone” agreement in 2009 as proposed by Europe to safeguard market access to the European Union, but has not yet ratified it, has indicated it would be penalised by having the European market access benefits withdrawn by January 2014.
The decision to withdraw the regulations applies to all countries signatory to interim EPA agreements that have not yet ratified them, ACP officials told IPS.
In the case of Equatorial Guinea, it is faced with financial restrictions on some of the regional projects under the 10th European Development Fund (EDF) for having failed to fully ratify the first revised Cotonou Agreement of June 2005.
Because of an increase in its resources, that country will soon graduate from LDC (least developed country) status to middle income country status, according to U.N. classification, the ACP ministers meeting here was informed.
Gabon, already classified as an “upper-range middle income country”, could see its General System of Preferences (GSP) regime revoked, with Central Africa noting that “in fact the GSP, which is a non-negotiable scheme, continues to be applied at the discretion of the European side”.
The East African Community, which includes countries such as Kenya, Tanzania and Somalia, say they have noted “with great concern that our partners seem to be imposing unrealistic deadlines on the conclusions of the negotiation talks and have gone ahead to propose an amendment to EC market access regulations that would deny a group of 18 countries preferential market access to the EU with effect from Jan. 1, 2014 if they have not ratified the EPAs.
“We view this move as not only putting undue pressure on the ongoing EPA negotiation process and therefore the possibility of not concluding an agreement capable of meeting the intended objectives but also an affront to our regional integration,” the EAC added.
The 16 West African countries and those comprising the East South Africa (ESA) grouping have also voiced similar concerns.
The West African countries, which include Ghana and Nigeria, say given the EU’s position of excluding countries that have concluded EPA agreements, but have not yet ratified them, the region must consider “alternative solutions”.
Honduras, in the heart of Central America, normally makes headlines for its political upheavals and violence. But sometimes there is good news, too. It is one of only a few countries with a shark sanctuary off its coasts, and it has just created a protected area around a reef of a coral species formerly on the brink of extinction.
This month Honduras is celebrating the first anniversary of the declaration of the Bi-Oceanic Shark Sanctuary that encompasses its entire exclusive economic zone, some 240,000 sq km spanning both the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean Sea.
A photographer dives near a great hammerhead shark. Credit: Jim Abernethy - Courtesy of the Pew Environment Group
Its coastal waters are home to numerous shark species, including hammerhead sharks, bull sharks, nurse sharks, tiger sharks and even six-gill sharks, which can reach lengths of almost five metres and are found in the Caribbean waters off Roatán, one of Honduras’ Bay Islands.
“In the Gulf of Fonseca (on the Pacific) there are hammerhead sharks, one of the most endangered shark species due to the fact that their fins are highly sought after in Asia for making soup. There are many young hammerhead sharks in the gulf, where they are protected,” biologist Stephen Box, who has studied the threats to these creatures in the Honduran sanctuary, told Tierramérica.
Shark fin soup, considered a delicacy in China, can cost up to 750 dollars. Although the fins have no nutritional value, the soup is a culinary tradition that dates back to the Ming dynasty and became popular beginning in the 18th century among Chinese monarchs, who coveted it because of its rareness, experts told Tierramérica.
Sharks are highly vulnerable animals. Although they have long life spans, they do not begin to reproduce until they are 18 years old and they have very few offspring, explained Box, who has lived in Honduras for almost a decade and works for the Centre for Marine Ecology, a Honduran NGO.
A third of shark species are threatened or endangered around the world, said Maximiliano Bello of the Pew Environment Group, a conservation organisation based in Washington.
These large predators act as controllers that maintain the balance of ecosystems, added Bello, the coordinator in Latin America of Pew’s Global Shark Conservation Campaign. “They are like the lions of the sea. If the sharks are not there, the system could collapse,” Bello told Tierramérica.
Between May 31 and Jun. 2, Bello participated in a series of activities organised to celebrate the first anniversary of the shark sanctuary and the declaration of a protected area encompassing a bank of coral reefs off the Bay Islands.
Together with Honduran President Porfirio Lobo, Bello witnessed the burning of 184 shark fins seized by the authorities from fishermen. In the waters of the sanctuary, the capture, sale and export of sharks are strictly prohibited.
Natural Resources and Environment Minister Rigoberto Cuéllar told Tierramérica that the fact that sharks do not form part of the national diet has made it easier to protect them in Honduras. They are now working to educate fishing communities about the importance of sharks for maintaining the balance of ecosystems, he added.
Honduras is sending a message to the world about the need to protect marine species, said the minister, who announced that neighboring Costa Rica is preparing to join Honduras in the shark sanctuary initiative. “We would like to see it extend to all of Central America, because sharks are barometres of the health of oceans and coastal ecosystems.”
Alongside the Bahamas, the Maldives, the Marshall Islands, Palau and Tokelau, Honduras is one of the few countries in the world that have established sanctuaries to protect sharks.
Now, the Honduran authorities have declared the Cordelia Coral Bank off the island of Roatán to be a protected area for wildlife preservation.
The 17 sq km of reefs encompassed by the Cordelia Bank are home to the Caribbean’s most extensive living colonies of staghorn coral, a critically endangered species, marine biologist Calina Zepeda of The Nature Conservancy told Tierramérica.
Aside from these recently discovered reefs in Honduras, staghorn coral has become almost extinct in the Caribbean, with its populations decimated by a rare disease between 1983 and 2000.
In addition, the Cordelia Bank is an important spawning ground for various fish species, including the Nassau grouper (Epinephelus striatus), an endangered species. It is also home to a significant population of Caribbean reef sharks (Carcharhinus perezi), which draw tourists to the area for the practice of shark diving.
In July 2011, another seven reefs were discovered in Tela Bay, on the country’s Atlantic coast.
Six of them form the barrier reef of Capiro Bank, located 8 km out to sea from the city of Tela. The seventh, similar to Cordelia, is off the coast of nearby Punta Sal. The national and local authorities have decided to create a protected area to encompass all of them.
For Zepeda, Honduras could serve as a sort of coral gene bank for the Mesoamerican Biological Corridor, an initiative jointly undertaken by eight countries – Belize, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua and Panama – for the conservation and protection of the region’s immense biodiversity.
*The writer is an IPS correspondent. This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network. Tierramérica is a specialised news service produced by IPS with the backing of the United Nations Development Programme, United Nations Environment Programme and the World Bank.
The Falkland Islands government has planned a referendum next year, seeking to end Argentina's claims of sovereignty and to secure the Falklands' status as a British territory.
The outbreak over the past week of communal violence between Buddhists and Muslims in Rakhine State seriously threatens the ongoing reform process in Myanmar, according to experts here.
The violence, whose death toll currently stands at more than 20, constitutes a major test not only for the government, which Monday ceded power to the military by declaring a state of emergency in the western coastal state.
It also poses a major challenge to Myanmar’s indigenous democracy movement, according to some human rights activists who have supported the movement.
“It’s been a very disappointing week,” said Jennifer Quigley, advocacy director of the U.S. Campaign for Burma. “There have been too many leaders of Burma’s democracy movement who’ve added to the tension as opposed to working to alleviate it.”
The United States, which recently began rolling back long-standing economic sanctions against Myanmar as part of a broader Western effort to encourage the reform process launched over the past year by the government of President Thein Sein, said it was “deeply concerned” about the violence in a statement issued by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton Monday.
“The situation in Rakhine State underscores the critical need for mutual respect among all ethnic and religious groups and for serious efforts to achieve national reconciliation in Burma,” she said, using the official U.S. government name for the Southeast Asian nation.
Human Rights Watch (HRW), which called Tuesday for Bangladesh to open its borders to refugees fleeing Myanmar, warned that the violence “is spiralling out of control under the government’s watch”. It expressed concern about the military’s enhanced powers in the state and called for opening the area to independent international observers.
“Influential government such as the U.S., Japan, Australia, and members of the European Union should continue to press for full civilian control over the military and building the rule of law, instead of giving up all its leverage at a moment when the reform process has barely begun,” the New York-based group said in an implicit reproach for the recent lifting of sanctions.
The reported rape and murder of a 27-year-old Buddhist woman in late May apparently sparked the violence. The police subsequently detained three Muslim men and resisted calls by Buddhist mobs to hand them over.
Following the distribution in the area of inflammatory leaflets against Muslims, who are often called Rohingyas in Myanmar, one mob attacked a bus and beat 10 Muslim passengers to death on Jun. 3.
Inter-communal violence, particularly in the state’s largest city, Sittwe, has intensified since, despite the president’s establishment of a commission of inquiry and the declaration of a state of emergency.
Rohingya Muslims have long suffered severe discrimination in Myanmar where they have been widely regarded as “Bengalis” – that is, immigrants from Bangladesh – despite their having lived in Myanmar for generations.
Much of the resentment against the Rohingyas can be traced back to the colonial period, when the British authorities encouraged immigration of Muslims and other groups to Burma either as minor officials, as part of a commercial class, or as indentured labourers, according to the International Crisis Group (ICG).
Since the 1960s, successive military governments have launched campaigns to expel them from the country, which is predominantly Buddhist. In 1982, almost all Rohingyas were denied citizenship and excluded from the census the following year.
Some 800,000 Rohingyas are believed to live in Myanmar, where, among other restrictions, they must gain official permission to travel beyond their villages, to practice certain professions, attend school, or receive health services. Another 200,000 Rohingyas live in Bangladesh, many of them refugees who were forced to flee Myanmar.
In a statement Tuesday, ICG suggested that the recent violence could be attributed in part to the ongoing reform process itself. “It is not uncommon that when an authoritarian state loosens its grip, old angers flare up and spread fast,” it said.
While rights groups here have been critical of the government’s decision to send in the military, which has historically committed serious abuses against Rohingyas, they have welcomed Thein Sein’s statements against sectarian divisions.
“The situation could deteriorate and extend beyond Rakhine state if we are killing each other with such sectarianism, endless hatred, the desire for vengeance and anarchy,” he said in a nationally televised address in which he declared the state of emergency. “…If that happens, make no mistake, it would cause a severe loss to our fledgling democracy – stability and development.”
The main opposition leader, Nobel Peace Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, who met with Muslim leaders early in the crisis, has also called for reconciliation and non-violence.
“The majority have to be more compassionate and more understanding,” she was quoted as saying. “I want Burma to be a country where people from every race and religion feel secure.”
But Quigley told IPS that Suu Kyi’s message “has so far been drowned out by the folks (within the opposition) who want to get into the historical issue of religions and nationality in Burma”.
“Will (opposition leaders) support religious freedom and human rights for all, or will a racist agenda dominate (the movement’s) discourse, as it has during the past week?” she asked. “Suu Kyi has so far been an exception to the rule.”
Some analysts have suggested that the current crisis have may been stoked by government hard-liners eager to discredit Suu Kyi who last week, on her trip abroad in more than 20 years, advised foreign investors against “reckless optimism” regarding the country’s reform process.
“I don’t think they orchestrated any of this, but I think they see it as an opportunity to force her to take a position where will either be weak on human rights by not supporting the Rohingyas or come out strong for their human rights in which case she will alienate some of her supporters,” according to Quigley.
Rights activists expressed greatest concern about the decision by the U.N. to withdraw its staff from Rakhine State – thus effectively reducing the number of international observers – and by the likely anti-Rohingya prejudice of the military that has been charged with stopping the violence.
“Who are these troops?” asked T. Kumar, international advocacy director for the U.S. chapter of Amnesty International. “How can you expect them to protect these communities when the Burmese official media is calling Rohingyas terrorists?”
“Given the Burmese army’s brutal record of abuses in Arakan (Rakhine) State, putting the military in charge of law enforcement could make matters worse,” said HRW’s deputy Asia director, Elaine Pearson. “The government needs to be protecting threatened communities, but without any international presence there, there’s a real fear that won’t happen.”
Amnesty’s Kumar also stressed that the current crisis constitutes a serious test of the entire reform process and those, like the U.S. and other Western countries, that have promoted it.
“The U.S. authorities and Suu Kyi should take this as a wake-up call to find a permanent solution to Rohingyas, especially giving them full citizenship. Unless that happens, the whole reform process that people are talking about in Burma becomes effectively meaningless,” he told IPS.
*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.
Countering a two-year trend, the world overall became slightly more peaceful over the past year, according to an annual report released here on Tuesday.
The United States, however, moved down seven places to 88 out of 158, a “fairly low rank (that) largely reflects much higher levels of militarisation and involvement in external conflicts”, according to the Global Peace Index (GPI) 2012.
In Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States has proven itself largely incapable of engaging in a way that leads to peaceful societies. Credit: U.S. Defence Department
The report notes that although U.S. military expenditure “declined sharply” between 1991 and 2000, it “has now returned to Cold War levels”. Worryingly, the GPI finds that higher military expenditure (as a percentage of overall gross domestic product) correlates with lower levels of peace.
The U.S. also continues to score among the highest in the world on the proportion of its population in jail. (A U.S.-specific Peace Index was released in April.)
The report, now in its sixth year, is put out by the Institute for Economics & Peace, a nonpartisan research organisation based here in Washington, in collaboration with the Economist Intelligence Unit. It offers one of the few global looks at overall peacefulness – and even attempts to put a dollar amount on that issue.
This year’s GPI suggests that an entirely peaceful world would have had a positive net impact of some nine trillion dollars.
Looking at 23 indicators across 158 countries, the GPI found “improvements in the overall scores across all regions” except for the Middle East and North Africa. Due to unrest surrounding the Arab Spring – scored negatively according to GPI metrics – for the first time sub-Saharan Africa is not ranked as the world’s least peaceful region.
Indeed, all five of the countries that experienced the greatest falls in rankings were affected by the Arab Spring. Syria experienced the largest deterioration, dropping by 31 places to 147th.
Somalia was once again the least peaceful country, while Iceland was once again the most peaceful, both continuing two-year trends.
At the U.S. unveiling of the report on Tuesday, former State Department official Anne-Marie Slaughter said the objective structure of the GPI helps in figuring out how exactly to define peace.
“The index goes beyond tracking the absence of conflict, beyond the absence of instability,” she said. “Instead, the definition used here is the absence of fear of violence.”
In so doing, Slaughter says, the rankings are able to collapse state and overall security into one category, contrary to traditional policy thinking.
For the first time this year, the GPI includes a new ranking, the Positive Peace Index. Based on the GPI’s first six years of experience, the Positive Peace Index focuses on factors that contribute to a country’s resilience – how countries can maintain a peaceful society.
“This includes the positive work of making life better,” Slaughter says, “not just avoiding what is bad.”
The eight factors that make up the Positive Peace Index – including high levels of education, low levels of corruption, well-functioning government and equitable distribution of resources – are described by Institute for Economics & Peace U.S. policy director Michael Shank as a roadmap for making peace.
According to the report’s researchers, “The imperative of deepening understanding of how to create peace has been highlighted by the recent state-building experiences such as in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
No Nation-builder
Unfortunately, the key player in both of those state-building exercises – the United States – has proven itself largely incapable of engaging in a way that leads to peaceful societies. After nearly a decade of U.S.-led nation-building, the report notes, both Afghanistan and Iraq “are still rooted at the bottom of the GPI”.
According to Emily Cadei, a reporter covering the U.S. Congress who spoke at the report’s presentation, past U.S. engagement overseas bodes particularly poorly for two GPI findings.
First, over the past six years GPI researchers have recorded a fall in external, state-to-state conflicts and a rise in internal violence. Second, as noted earlier, the GPI reports that increased militarisation – for instance, the amount of money a state spends on its military – correlates with lower levels of peace.
“The fact that internal conflicts are rising is bad news because the U.S. is not equipped to deal with such forms of violence – the government continues to lack a consensus on how to do so,” Cadei said on Tuesday.
“Further, the fact that militarisation is negatively correlated with peace has not sunk in yet in the U.S. The overwhelming view in the government is still that peace comes through strength; in Congress, aid is always associated with security.”
Echoing the GPI’s warnings on current U.S. military spending levels, Lawrence Wilkerson, a former U.S. Army colonel and professor of government and public policy, says this mindset goes back to a Cold War paradigm that hasn’t been able to find new footing following the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union.
“The new index shows that the United States needs to be more circumspect on what we try to do in other countries,” Wilkerson said on Tuesday. “For 50 years we’ve proven that we’re damn poor at peace-building.”
Although the GPI reports an overall decrease in military spending around the world as a result of austerity measures over the past year, Wilkerson reports that U.S. military spending may now constitute more than 10 percent of GDP – far higher, he says, than the three percent often cited by the Defence Department.
This does not include the massive and increasing outlay given to private military contractors.
“I’d be lying if I said the military-industrial complex doesn’t have significant impact on U.S. foreign policy,” Wilkerson says.
“If you want to completely reduce a country by force, the U.S. can do that. But anything after that, the U.S. has shown that it simply cannot do.”
Business will push for the freeing up of trade in green goods and services, at the upcoming summit of heads of state of the Group of 20 (G20) industrialised and emerging countries in Mexico.
“It’s an agenda for investors,” Diana Aguiar, representative of the Brazilian Network for the Integration of Peoples (REBRIP), told IPS. “The idea is that natural resources won’t be preserved if no monetary value is put on them. This is a very mistaken premise. They see it as a business.”
The activist is attending the alternative People’s Summit, which runs Tuesday Jun. 12 to Friday Jun. 15 in Mexico City before continuing in the northwestern city of La Paz until Tuesday Jun. 19.
The civil society forum has drawn hundreds of delegates of NGOs from Mexico and other G20 nations, whose presidents are meeting Jun. 18-19 in Los Cabos, a Pacific resort town at the southern tip of Mexico’s Baja California Peninsula, south of La Paz.
Fomenting free movement of green or sustainable products is one of the recommendations that Business 20 (B20) – which represents companies in the G20 bloc – set forth to the governments. The issue is to be discussed at the summit.
In a 102-page report on recommendations of the B20 task force, to which IPS had access, the business executives laid out suggestions on food security, green growth, employment, trade, investment, technology and innovation, and financing for growth and development.
The B20 argues that free movement of green-friendly goods and services will accelerate the adoption of green technology and foment competitiveness, innovation and job creation.
The document also recommends raising the price of carbon dioxide (CO2) in order to change investment patterns and decisions and help reduce greenhouse gases.
To that end, G20 leaders should guarantee that national goals and policies are ambitious enough to create international demand consistent with the units of CO2 and thus bolster green technologies, climate-smart agriculture, and energy efficiency, the report says.
Transnational corporations like Monsanto, Coca-Cola and Wal-Mart from the U.S.; the Anglo-Dutch Unilever; and Nestle from Switzerland are among the companies represented in the B20.
In addition to the G8 industrialised nations – Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, the UK and the U.S. – the G20 is made up of Argentina, Australia, Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, South Korea and Turkey, as well as the European Union.
In Los Cabos, the presidents will discuss issues like policies against financial crises, food security, the green economy, the fight against climate change, transparency and corruption.
The non-member countries that have also been invited include Colombia, Chile, Peru and Spain.
The NGOs participating in the People’s Summit question the legitimacy of the G20, whose rotating presidency is currently held by Mexico, saying it represents the “one percent” of the world’s seven billion people.
They reject the summit’s agenda, which they say is more responsive to corporate and financial interests than to the needs and concerns of the world population.
“The G20 and B20 are very close, but that doesn’t happen with NGOs. That is worrisome,” Nancy Alexander, of the Heinrich Böll Foundation, told IPS.
Alexander, the director of the Economic Governance Programme in the Berlin-based Foundation’s North America office, also said the G20 has not focused on the priorities of infrastructure, green growth and food security.
Alexander and Aldo Caliari, director of the Rethinking Bretton Woods Project at the Center of Concern, a U.S. not-for-profit agency, stated in an article this month, “Selected Highlights of B20 Draft Recommendations to the G20”, that “If accepted by the G20, many of these recommendations would have far-reaching implications.”
Referring to the recommendation to place trade and investment on the G20’s permanent agenda, and to hold “periodic meetings of trade ministers” who would be in “ongoing dialogue” with the B20, they said this would exclude the 173 countries that are not members of the G20. “Therefore, if leaders accept this recommendation, it would institutionalise exclusionary trade negotiation practices,” they wrote.
The People’s Summit has scheduled seminars and workshops on questions like gender, energy, and alternatives to the G20, as well as street protests.
The NGOs are opposed to the austerity policies being implemented in the industrialised North, which have imposed drastic spending cuts in education, health and other essential social areas, and have driven up unemployment and stood in the way of developing a green economy.
“The G20 is in crisis,” Susana Sanz of Spain’s May 15 Movement (15M), which sprang up as nationwide protests against the government’s response to the economic crisis on that date last year, told IPS. “It doesn’t represent us. Public policies are adopted with a view to protecting private interests. We need participative democracy.”
The government of conservative Mexican President Felipe Calderón has outlined a five-point agenda for Los Cabos. The priorities include economic stability and structural reforms for growth and employment; consolidation of the international financial architecture; financial inclusion for economic growth; reduction of volatility in the commodities market; and promotion of sustainable development.
But what is expected to continue to monopolise the debate is the financial crisis that broke out in the U.S. in 2007, intensified in the EU last year, and has now thrown the future of the euro into doubt.
“They are seeking to use new spaces of accumulation of the financial system, to create commodities for speculation,” Aguiar said.
The G20 summit will announce the creation of a bloc that will include the multilateral financial institutions, private and development banks, companies, and private investors, to advance the B20 agenda over the next 36 months.
The B20 proposes an expansion of the public-private partnership model, especially in infrastructure construction, which is currently being tried in a number of the G20 countries.
“G20 promotes policies in low-income countries, but they are not represented nor have they been consulted properly,” Alexander said.
In their article, Alexander and Caliari argue that “formal engagement by the B20 in the assessment of trade and investment policies, as proposed, would also give the transnational business sector an unprecedented degree of access to decision-making, while excluding countervailing views from non-governmental actors”.
(END/IPS/WD LA G20 IF FM/TRASP-SW/EG/EGF/12)
President Hugo Chávez, battling cancer as he runs for re-election, has not declared an heir apparent, raising speculation about who could take his place.
Indigenous leaders from all over South America are making their way by foot, canoe and eventually on buses to be part of the Kari-Oca Caravan to Rio de Janeiro, to talk to world leaders at the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, Rio+20.
“We will be representing thousands of indigenous communities from all over South America,” Moi Enomenga, a Waorani leader, told Tierramérica just before he boarded a bus in Quito, Ecuador for the nine-day bus trip to Rio. Other indigenous leaders will join in along the way.
Moi Enomenga, just before boarding a bus in Quito, Ecuador, the starting point for the caravan to Rio de Janeiro. Credit: Courtesy of Moi Enomenga
The Waorani are an Amazonian indigenous people who live in eastern Ecuador, in an area of oil drilling activity.
Rio+20 is meant to serve as an intergovernmental forum for the adoption of solutions to the global crisis of sustainability, manifested in the repeated failure of the globalised economy, a food shortage, energy problems and global environmental woes like climate change and biodiversity loss.
“For years indigenous peoples have been divided. Now we are going to unite,” said Enomenga, who was born into an uncontacted community and is now president of the Quehueri’ono Association.
“Not everyone can hear the voice of Mother Earth from the jungle, and we want to bring that voice to Rio,” added Enomenga, who said he was prepared to walk to Rio if the bus broke down.
The World Indigenous Peoples Conference on Territories, Rights and Sustainable Development or Kari-Oca II will be held Jun. 14-22 in a traditionally constructed conference village built by Brazilian indigenous peoples five kilometres from the official Rio+20 conference facility.
“Kari-Oca” means “white man’s house” in the Tupí-Guaraní language. It was the term used by the indigenous peoples living in the area where the city of Rio de Janeiro now stands to refer to the first settlements built by Portuguese colonisers.
The term also gave rise to “Carioca”, the word used to refer to inhabitants of Rio de Janeiro. Two decades ago, the first Kari-Oca conference was held parallel to the 1992 Earth Summit.
The Inter-Tribal Committee of Brazil, which is hosting the meeting, expects it to draw some 600 indigenous participants from around the world, who will prepare their message and recommendations to the high-level segment of Rio+20 taking place Jun. 20-22.
“I’m very worried about the situation of indigenous peoples globally,” said Enomenga. “It is the same story everywhere, indigenous peoples’ rights are not respected by governments. And everywhere, India, Africa, South America, there is the hunt for oil and other resources,” he added.
“We can’t keep going on the same path that we have been on the last 20 years,” said Hortencia Hidalgo Cáceres, an Aymara woman from Chile who is with the Indigenous Women’s Network of Latin America and the Caribbean for Biodiversity (RMIB).
“Real change is needed. We want to invite the world to a brighter future based on indigenous values and principles of ‘buen vivir’ (living well),” Cáceres told Tierramérica.
As opposed to the Western concept of “living better” – the belief that economic growth brings progress which in turn leads to the elimination of poverty – “buen vivir” or “living well” refers to living in harmony with nature while pursuing material, social and spiritual well-being for all members of society, but not at the cost of other members or the environment
Without adhering to these principles, the “green economy” many nations want to create as an outcome from Rio will represent a “false solution” to the crises of environmental degradation and social injustice, Cáceres said.
For Casey Box, program coordinator at the non-governmental organisation Land is Life, “Indigenous peoples have much to offer the international community as it tries to find its way forward to truly sustainable development.”
Land Is Life, an international coalition of indigenous communities and organisations based in the United States, has raised funds and helped coordinate the Kari-Oca Caravan and Summit.
“The goals of Rio+20 will be impossible to achieve without the traditional knowledge and long-established resource management practices of indigenous peoples,” said Box.
As many as 50,000 people are expected at Rio+20, including more than 130 heads of state and government. It is being held 20 years after the UN Conference on Environment and Development, or Earth Summit, hosted by the same city. The 1992 summit gave birth to three major environmental treaties on climate change, biodiversity and desertification.
More than 700 indigenous peoples joined the first Kari-Oca summit held in 1992 prior to the Earth Summit. It marked the birth of an international movement for indigenous peoples’ rights, and succeeded in gaining recognition for their important role in conservation and sustainable development.
“We are excited about going to Rio because there is an indigenous peoples’ space where we can talk about our concerns and share our knowledge and experience,” said Cáceres.
It will take 60 hours by bus for indigenous participants from Patagonia in southern Chile to reach La Paz, Bolivia. There they will join Enomenga and the others from the north, arriving from Ecuador via Peru.
The Kari-Oca Caravan will then take a good five days to cross the Andes and travel through Bolivia, Paraguay and southern Brazil to get to Rio on the Atlantic coast.
Indigenous peoples are eager to participate because it is only at such international meetings where they have the opportunity to be heard by government leaders and the public, Cáceres says. “When we come home these doors are closed.”
By going to Rio and expressing their views there, Enomenga and others from Ecuador are hoping their government will have greater respect for indigenous peoples’ rights and perspectives.
“There are two uncontacted communities near my home but there is the threat of oil exploration. They don’t want this. For them, taking the oil out of the ground is like taking blood out of their bodies,” he said.
The delegates also intend to denounce government initiatives they consider harmful.
Gloria Ushigua, president of the Association of Zápara Women, said that Ecuador’s “Socio Bosque” program, implemented by the Ministry of Environment to combat deforestation, has caused many problems for local communities.
The Zápara nation is located in the eastern part of the province of Pastaza, in the Amazon rainforest region of eastern Ecuador.
“My hope is to share my community’s story and discuss territory rights,” Ushigua said in a release.
Also in the Caravan is Celso Aranda from Sarayaku, a Kichwa territory in Pastaza, who is bringing a proposal called Kawsak Sacha, or Living Forests, to Kari-Oca.
This proposal is the Sarayaku people’s response to climate change and the destruction of nature, and describes how indigenous communities can protect ecosystems by maintaining ancestral land management practices.
After Kari-Oca II and Rio+20, “indigenous peoples will continue to work in our communities to strengthen our cultures and resist exploitation of our territories,” said Enomenga.
“We have a very clear message. Leave everything beneath the Earth.”
*The writer is an IPS correspondent. This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network. Tierramérica is a specialised news service produced by IPS with the backing of the United Nations Development Programme, United Nations Environment Programme and the World Bank.
On the eve of the Rio+20 Summit in Brazil, the U.S.-based Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) released a report Monday ranking the world’s biggest countries on their use of renewable energy.
It shows the European Union’s clear leadership in the field, but also the significant progress made by developing countries.
Solar panel fields in Provence, France. Credit: Coralie Tripier/IPS
The last time that world leaders met to discuss sustainable development was at the Rio+10 Earth Summit in Johannesburg a decade ago. Since then, significant changes have been made in terms of renewable energy.
“We decided to look at the progress made since 2002 and check how countries were doing,” said Jake Schmidt, international climate programme director for NRDC, a nonprofit environmental organisation.
The report shows that the world’s biggest countries have taken some steps towards a more sustainable world.
“Since 2004, new clean-energy investment in the G20 countries has grown by almost 600 percent,” the report says, but there is still much work to be done, as renewable energy only accounts for 2.6 percent of the overall energy for the G20 as a whole.
European countries get more of their electricity from wind, solar, geothermal, tidal and wave power than any other region in the world. Germany is leading the way in green energy, followed by the EU as a group and Italy, according to the NRDC.
The NRDC scorecard also shows clear gaps in terms of renewable energy among the countries of the G20. Indeed, while a substantial 10.7 percent of Germany’s energy comes from clean sources, only 2.7 percent of the United States’ energy does, and some of the world’s biggest countries such as Russia are still investing very little in renewable energy.
Some developing countries, while still playing a minor role in green energy, are increasingly investing in clean sources. China, Brazil and Turkey are leading the way for developing nations, with China showing a staggering 7,605 percent increase in clean energy investments since 2002, according to the report.
“You see a diverse list of countries with South Africa, India, China, Indonesia and a lot of others playing key roles as well as the traditional G20,” said Dan Kammen, a professor in the Energy and Resources Group at the University of California, Berkeley.
Although the results show some significant progress coming from a range of countries, it is far from enough. Under current trends, the amount of energy produced from renewable sources throughout the world should increase from about two to seven percent by 2020, a number that has to be doubled, according to the report.
“That’s what the world needs,” Schmidt said.
As countries are focusing on Rio, they are working on long-term targets, which are critical but not essential, according to Schmidt.
“What we really need at Rio is a set of targeted short-term commitments from individual countries, companies, cities, to really scale up renewable energy,” he said.
“It is more important that key actors come to Rio+20 with individual country commitments to increase the amount of renewable energy to 15 percent of total electricity by 2020,” he added.
Urgent actions are also needed to elimiate Environmentally Harmful Subsidies (EHS), through which polluting energies are funded, according to Kammen.
“While the overall investment in renewables, estimated to have been around 160 billion dollars last year, is very impressive, we must also keep in mind that the the global subsidies are estimated to be around 400 to 500 billion dollars… and that’s just for fossil fuels,” he said. “The landscape is truly far from level.”
“That’s not just a threat to the thousands of new jobs being created by the renewable energy industry, but also a threat to our health, our environment and our planet,” Schmidt added.
In order to achieve these short-term goals, the cooperation between countries must increase, according to NRDC’s experts.
“There’s always a lot of collaboration around renewable electricity, in terms of helping countries overcome technology barriers, or cost barriers, and we need to take that to the next level. We need to step up the efforts to work together,” Schmidt said.
The benefits would be substantial. “There is a very diverse set of benefits, some local benefits ranging from improvement in the local air quality, local water quality, to diversifying the energy mix and of course global benefits as well,” Kammen said.
But for these benefits to become a reality, the progress made needs to be tracked overtime and regulary published in scorecards.
“We need to make sure that commitments are followed through. We need to hold them (governments) accountable for the progress, or lack of progress,” Schmidt warned.
The Jun. 20-22 summit in Rio is widely viewed as a once-in-a-lifetime chance to gather world leaders, participants from governments, the private sector, NGOs and other groups to discuss renewable energy, one of the top priorities of the conference.
But the outcome of Rio+20 will mainly depend on the involvement of the participating states, and only six out of the G20 countries have already confirmed that their leaders would attend the meeting.
“The G20 countries are not essential, but they are major economies around the world, so whether or not their head of government comes and makes a commitment would be a marker of the success at Rio,” Schmidt explained. “It is a clear signal of the will of these countries to put the world on a more sustainable growth.”
“There’s still a lot of work to be done but the progress is quite impressive,” Kammen concluded. “The challenge is to move along.”
This month, Argentina will join the growing list of Latin American countries that compel tobacco companies to display health warnings about the dangers of smoking on cigarette packs, illustrated with graphic images.
The country is one of six in Latin America and the Caribbean that have not yet ratified the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, but a national law enacted Jun. 13, 2011 provides a route to smoking prevention.
The law stipulates that from now on, cigarette packs must display a health warning message on the lower half of the front or back of the pack, and a picture of the same size illustrating smoking harm on the other side.
Along one of the edges of the pack, the Health Ministry also ordered the display of the free telephone number of one of its departments that will advise people on therapeutic approaches for quitting smoking.
This is a great improvement on the current timid warning, introduced in 1986, reading “Smoking is detrimental to health”. From now on the messages will be more specific, saying for example: “Smoking causes cancer”, or “Smoking causes heart disease and respiratory illnesses”.
Other warnings include: “Smoking causes addiction”, “Smoking causes death by suffocation”, “Pregnant women who smoke cause irreparable harm to their babies”, “Smoking causes pulmonary emphysema” and “Smoking causes sexual impotence”.
“Health warnings, together with smoke-free areas and a ban on tobacco advertising, are measures that, if properly implemented, have a large impact,” Dr. Marita Pizarro told IPS.
Pizarro is the national coordinator of the Smoke-Free Alliance of Argentina (ALIAR), a grouping of close to 100 associations working to promote anti-smoking regulations in order to protect human health and the environment.
According to ALIAR, one person dies every 12 minutes in Argentina from a preventable illness attributable to tobacco consumption, a phenomenon that particularly affects “men and women living in poverty, who leave their families completely unprotected.”
A 2010 survey by the Health Ministry found that in this country of 40.2 million people, 27.2 percent of people in the 18-65 age range smoke regularly. What is even more worrying is that in the 12-17 age range, the figure is 50 percent.
Pizarro said Argentina has made “significant advances” on the issue, but stressed that nevertheless, “we are still concerned that the detailed regulations for the law have not been issued, which means there are no bodies to monitor and enforce, for instance, the smoke-free environments.”
She recalled that the new law will also define “points of sale”, the only places where tobacco advertising will be allowed.
The legislation, whose official name is Law 26687 on Advertising, Promotion and Consumption of Tobacco Products, is currently in the process of being adapted locally in the country’s 23 provinces, and has only been fully adopted in half of them, while the rest are drawing up adaptive regulations.
But the Argentine capital and 10 provinces have declared themselves smoke-free zones, and have forbidden smoking in enclosed public spaces.
Moreover, the cigarette packs with the new text and pictorial warnings will become compulsory nationwide. “Someone who smokes 20 cigarettes a day will read the warnings 20 times a day, and illiterate people will see and learn from the photographs,” Pizarro said.
According to a research study titled “Políticas de Etiquetado en los Paquetes de Cigarrillos: Situación actual en América Latina y el Caribe” (Cigarette Labelling Policies: Current Situation in Latin America and the Caribbean), the first Latin American country to require pictorial warnings was Brazil, 10 years ago.
The study, by Argentine researcher Dr. Ernesto Sebrié at the Roswell Park Cancer Institute in the United States, was published in April in the journal Salud Pública de México and gives an overview of the regional situation.
Sebrié says that after Brazil, nine other countries added photos and warnings to cigarette packs: Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Honduras, Mexico, Panama, Peru, Uruguay and Venezuela.
Uruguay requires the largest surface space on packs to be devoted to the warning and picture: 80 percent of each side, the highest proportion in the world, according to Sebrié.
The law in Uruguay was pushed through by the government of former president Tabaré Vázquez (2005-2010), a distinguished oncologist, and also adopted the legend “Toxic Product” and the image of a skull and crossbones on the packs.
Another six countries have approved laws to incorporate text and pictorial warnings on packs. Of these, Argentina is the first to put the measures into effect, while the rest are still at an earlier stage of the process. The study says the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, adopted in 2005, has been ratified by the majority of countries in the region, except for Argentina, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Haiti and St. Vincent and the Grenadines.
In accordance with the obligations imposed under the convention, 33 countries in the region adopted warnings on cigarette packs, although most were only text warnings, and not all the countries required them to appear on the front and back of the pack.
However, they did all ban misleading information about smoking, as well as “brand descriptors” on the pack, such as “light”, “mild” or “low tar”, that seek to play down the harm cigarettes do.
According to Pizarro, a recent study carried out in Brazil showed that 76 percent of respondents agreed with the use of graphic images, and 67 percent of smokers said they planned to give up, after picture warnings came into use.
The survey also indicated that 50 percent of interviewees said they had changed their mind about the harm smoking could do to their health.
Six weeks of talks between Pakistan and the United States have been halted, a Defence Department official stated here on Monday.
“A decision was reached that it was time to bring the (negotiations) team home,” Pentagon spokesperson George Little said, noting that the move was based on a U.S. decision.
Little suggested that the negotiators were simply in need of a rest, and added that they “are prepared to return to Islamabad at any moment to continue discussions in person”.
The news comes just days after the U.S. assistant secretary of defence, Peter Lavoy, arrived in Islamabad in an attempt to shore up the flagging talks process, aimed at re-opening critical supply routes for international military forces in Afghanistan. According to reports, the head of the Pakistan Army, General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, refused to meet Lavoy.
The supply routes have been closed since November, when a U.S. missile killed 24 Pakistani soldiers at Salala, along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.
Since that time, the Islamabad government, backed by a unanimous Parliament resolution, has called for an unconditional apology for the attack as well as a cessation of U.S.-controlled drone strikes within Pakistani territory. While Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has expressed regret for the soldiers’ deaths, the United States has refused apologise.
Prior to November, some 5,000 NATO trucks used the Pakistan route every month. The closure is said to cost the United States an extra billion dollars per month, as its military is forced to rely on trucking in supplies through a more circuitous route via Central Asia, known as the Northern Distribution Network.
The White House has made re-opening the supply routes a top military priority, and forward movement seemed to be taking place prior to the NATO summit in Chicago in mid-May.
At that time, President Barack Obama extended a last-minute summit invitation to Islamabad, evidently in the hopes of using the high-profile event to force President Asif Ali Zardari’s hand.
Both Zardari and Obama will be fighting elections in the next several months, and the opposition in Pakistan has made the supply routes – and, by extension, the apology – into a central political plank.
In the event, Obama’s summit gambit failed, with the Pakistanis reiterating their previous position and suddenly demanding a massive increase in transit fees.
Honour or Tactic?
Since November, the centrality of the apology issue has been confusing for many observers. After all, Washington has expressed official apology for several other such incidents.
“There are differing accounts of what actually happened in November at Salala, basic questions of who fired first,” Colin Cookman, with the Center for American Progress, a think tank here, told IPS. “This may be part of the U.S. reluctance to apologise, though coupled with a long history of mistrust.”
Cookman cautions against reading too much into the current halt in negotiations, though he warns that the longer this phase goes on, the harder any resolution will become.
“Both sides have been hedging for quite some time now, but there’s still recognition that working around or more directly confronting Pakistan would be very costly courses of action,” he says. “To the extent that both sides can see the costs of a breakup, it’s still possible to rein back.”
In Pakistan, the apology has come to strike a deeper chord – speaking to an issue that, some say, the U.S. has never quite understood.
“It’s not about money; it’s about ‘honour’,” an editorial consultant based in Karachi told IPS, on condition of anonymity.
“At a cultural level, the U.S. has just failed to understand this all along – the inner concept of honour and its place in the national psyche. If the U.S. had been canny and apologised quickly, we could have moved way past this by now.”
By this analysis, then, the Salala apology may have become a line in the sand indicative of broad frustration over issues of national sovereignty, exacerbated in recent years by U.S. drone strikes within Pakistani territory.
The Other Route
Meanwhile, some say the big story here is the newfound ability of the military effort in Afghanistan to continue to function without the Pakistan supply routes.
“A year or two ago, if you had predicted to strategists that there could be a six-month cut-off in these supply routes and we would be fine, they would have been stunned,” Michael O’Hanlon, a defence expert with the Brookings Institution, a think tank here, told IPS. “The development of the Northern Distribution Network has made all this possible – we don’t need any other ways.”
Indeed, the breakdown in talks comes just days after NATO arrived at a new slate of deals with three Central Asian countries to allow for a more streamlined process by which Western countries in Afghanistan can move equipment back out of the country – a major concern as foreign forces prepare to move out of Afghanistan.
On Jun. 4, NATO chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen announced agreements on “reverse transit” from Afghanistan with Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan. An additional route through Russia is also currently in the offing.
And on Tuesday, a high-level State Department official en route to Afghanistan will be in Uzbekistan for a two-day meeting that observers say will be part of longstanding talks over the Northern Distribution Network.
Where does that leave the U.S.-Pakistan negotiations? During an Asia trip last week, U.S. Defence Secretary Leon Panetta suggested that the United States was “reaching the limits of our patience”.
But according to O’Hanlon, Panetta spoke “a little too casually”.
“What do you do next? Let it cool down, avoid trying to force the issue, and remember that diplomacy is the act of making the best of a situation,” O’Hanlon says. “Ultimately, cooler heads must prevail and ultimately we keep trying.”
The imposing stronghold is almost transparent, barely noticeable, in the pitch-black desert. On top of the stands, with a thousand kilowatts at his finger’s tip, Avi Yona Bueno turns the night into lights, revealing sets, sites, and sounds. “I’m god,” smiles the lighting designer. “I’m god to my children.”
For five summer nights this week, George Bizet’s ‘Carmen’ is transported from the bull arena of Seville to the lowest point on earth, at the foot of the ancient fortress, a UNESCO World Heritage site of majestic beauty that rises from the Judean desert and dominates the Dead Sea.
The popular opera tells the story of the free and fiery Spanish gypsy torn between her love for Don Jose, a dragoon soldier, and for Escamillo the toreador.
Who doesn’t know that “love’s a gypsy’s child that’s never known the law”? Seductive arias and wild flamenco choreography are performed in extravagant costumes in this grandiose celebration of passion and hatred. “It’s like being on a movie set!” exclaims Nancy Fabiola Herera, ‘Carmen’, while putting a final touch of powder on her beaming face in the make-up tent.
On stage, the Venezuelan diva enflames the audience – in turn temptress eating a red apple; temple of seduction cajoling ‘Don Jose’; femme fatale pointing a knife at the dragoon’s crotch; rebellious and liberated, as she frees herself from her gaoler’s infatuation, swirling around him with a rope like a lasso, catching his neck – or is it his heart? “It’s the ultimate job holiday!” marvels Marco Berti, who interprets the mesmerised ‘Don Jose’.
“You’d best beware!” sings ‘Carmen’, to the Cuban dance Habanera – lest you lose your head and heart to the most stunning opera performance ever produced in Israel. Berti is bewildered: “Who thinks of staging an opera in the desert, nobody in the world!”
But not all is wonderful. “Sometimes with the desert wind, it gets very dusty; and with the scorching heat, it’s not easy for us,” complains Herera. “But it makes it very real.” Anna Malavesi, her back-up, fell ill during the rehearsals.
For a night at the opera purists might indeed prefer the enclosed venue of a theatre, where recitalists act less and sing without microphones. “It’s not only about the voices – it’s about the show, the whole thing. It’s more striking. For that, it’s better. For us as singers, it’s a challenge,” acknowledges Herera with a smile.
The challenge by numbers: 750 local and international performers in 3,000 costumes including the soloists, the flamenco dancers, the musicians of the Israeli Opera Symphony Orchestra, the Israeli Opera Choir and the Encore Youth Choir. All in all, 2,500 participate in this lavish production.
Not to mention the horses. “The crowd, the lights, the smoke, the castanets – there’s a lot of pressure on them,” explains Dubby Selman, the animal coordinator. “I’m very loose on the reins when I don’t want anything; and I’m very tight when I want something. I teach them how to swallow their fear,” he demonstrates on the neighing Goldstar.
Fear of losing her voice had Herera perform more like a cabaret singer than an opera recitalist during the dress rehearsal – with occasional mezzo-soprano bursts.
A 66-metre deep by 60-metre wide stage covers a full 4,000 square metres; specially-erected stands with 7,500 aficionados every night – in total, 40,000 are expected to attend this festival of lights and sounds, including 4,000 cultural tourists. “What better way to celebrate our honeymoon than to watch Carmen!” a British visitor says exuberantly during the entr’acte.
It’s taken a whole year of preparations to produce such a sumptuous show. “The reward is huge. First of all, the hotels’ occupancy – the hotels in the area and in Jerusalem are full,” explains Dov Litvinov, head of the Dead Sea Regional Council. “For us, it’s better than a worldwide advertising campaign.”
Call it a hall of culture or a hall of nature, ‘Carmen’ in Masada adds to the trend of producing major cultural events in archaeological and other biblical sites. This week, the Israeli opera also performs Verdi’s ‘La Traviata’ at Zedeqiyah’s Cave, a huge antique grotto located near Nablus Gate, under the walls of the Old City of Jerusalem.
“We receive – everybody, the audience, the performers – a very special energy. Masada is like a second Jerusalem!” the theatrical Berti emphasises, his tenor voice ringing out at the mirror of the dressing tent.
The “second Jerusalem” is in fact the closing chapter of the Great Revolt of the Jews against the Romans in the first century CE. The besieged rebels killed themselves to escape slavery. Now 2,000 years on, the last stand of the rebels has become the national symbol of a long struggle for liberation and independence. Masada personifies their people’s resolve to live freely in their own land, say Israelis.
Performing an opera comique about lust, desire and temptation in such tragic decor would seem incongruous. Not for Litvinov. “So many years have passed since the Masada tragedy. Yet, we, the Jews, are still here, staging a mega-production. This is the main thing – we are here – not the kind of opera we bring here.”
Giuseppe Verdi’s ‘Nabucco’ and ‘Aida’ were staged here over the last two years. “It shows an unknown cultural facet of Israel to the world,” adds Hanna Munitz, the Israeli Opera director.
Notwithstanding the pride – national and cultural – shared by the organisers, Herera finds common ground between her ‘Carmen’ and Masada. “At the end, there’s redemption, somehow. The Masada people died because they believed in their liberty. Before being captured by the Romans, they decided to die free, and ‘Carmen’ is the same. She prefers death before she compromises herself to anything else that is not her freedom.”
All signs are pointing to a more polarised, less moderate U.S. Congress in the near future.
These include some of the recent Congressional primary elections in states throughout the U.S.; the retirement of longtime senator Olympia Snowe, a moderate Republican from Maine; and the decline of the Blue Dog Coalition of centrist Democrats.
A recent book, “The Last Great Senate” by Ira Shapiro, reminisces about decades past such as the 1970s and 1980s where Democrats and Republicans in the U.S. Senate seemed better able to work together for the good of the country.
“The pattern that has been present since the 1930s where you had a big conservative element in the Democratic Party and a big moderate element in the Republican Party, those days are pretty well gone,” Randall Strahan, a professor of political science at Emory University, told IPS.
Now, “the parties are more consistent in their programmatic and ideological views. It’s unrealistic to think any time in the near future partisan conflict will go away,” he said.
But Strahan argues that it is not entirely a bad thing.
“Some people say partisan conflict turns off voters. The evidence is just the opposite; hotly contested politics turns out voters. It (polarisation) clarifies choices for voters. When you have a Democratic Party all over the map, conservative segregationists in the South and liberals in the North, it’s very ambiguous when you vote for a Democrat what that means,” he said.
In fact, a highly polarised U.S. Congress has been typical throughout U.S. history, with the last several decades of moderation as the anomaly, Strahan said.
The conservative Tea Party celebrated last month when Thomas Massie, a Tea Party-backed Republican candidate for U.S. House in Kentucky, won the Republican primary there. He is expected to win in November’s general election.
Massie was backed by U.S. Sen. Rand Paul, a Republican with libertarian ideology, also from Kentucky, who is attempting to strengthen the Tea Party Caucus. Rand Paul is the son of Representative Ron Paul, a libertarian Republican who has served Texas in the U.S. House for decades and ran for president multiple times. Rep. Paul is retiring this year.
Currently, there are four U.S. senators and 62 U.S. House members who are part of the Tea Party Caucus, including Senator Paul, as well as Senators Jim DeMint of South Carolina, Mike Lee of Utah, and Jerry Moran of Kansas, all Republicans.
Another Tea Party-backed candidate, Richard Murdoch, created a big upset last month when he defeated Senator Richard Lugar, a moderate Republican from Indiana.
Murdoch may have a difficult time winning in the general election. He faces U.S. Rep. Joe Donnelly, a Democrat from Indiana, this November, and the polls are currently tied.
On the left, progressive Democrats have made a some inroads by defeating moderate Democratic incumbents.
In late April 2012, Matt Cartwright and Rep. Mark Critz of Pennsylvania, progressive Democrats, defeated Tim Holden and Rep. Jason Altmire, centrist Democrats, respectively.
But progressive Democrats have not done well in all their races this year. State Senator Eric Griego, a progressive Democrat from New Mexico who had received the support of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, lost to a centrist Democrat earlier this week.
And U.S. Rep. Dennis Kucinich, a progressive Democrat from Ohio who made multiple runs for president of the U.S., was ousted from his Congressional seat by a moderate Democrat, Rep. Marcy Kaptur, in March. They had been redistricted to run against each other this year.
The Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC) currently has 73 voting U.S. House members, two non-voting House embers, and one U.S. senator, Bernie Sanders, an independent from Vermont.
The CPC is likely to gain senators this year, as CPC members U.S. Rep. Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin and Mazie Hirono of Hawaii are both running for open Senate seats.
The Progressive Caucus and Tea Party Caucus are currently about the same size.
However, the once powerful Blue Dog Coalition (BDC), a group of centrist Democrats in the U.S. House, is seeing its members dwindling.
The Blue Dog Coalition’s membership was nearly cut in half in the 2010 election, in which 28 out of 54 members were defeated or chose not to run again.
The group’s membership is now down to 27 with the resignation of Rep. Jane Harman, a centrist Democrat from California. Rep. Janice Hahn was elected to fill the vacancy, and Hahn is now a member of the CPC.
Several of the remaining BDC members have said they will not run again; others, like Atmire and Holden, have already been defeated in Primaries.
Meanwhile, Rep. John Barrow of Georgia, the last remaining white Democrat in the U.S. south, and a BDC moderate, has been targeted for defeat by Republicans this year.
David Swanson, an activist who has supported numerous progressive candidates for Congress in the past, says that while he sees increasing polarisation in the legislature, overall, he believes Congress is moving to the right.
“I buy the right-warding of Congress, not necessarily the left-warding of Congress,” Swanson told IPS.
“I’m thrilled to have Rand Paul putting locks on measures that would start wars with Iran, regardless of what ideologies that’s coming from,” he added.
“You see a handful of liberals taking positions against wars and presidential power abuses, but not enough to make a real difference,” he said.
And he said that, despite partisan gridlock on many issues such as the federal budget, he sees Congress largely working together.
“When it comes to increasing military spending every goddamn year, enlarged war powers, letting presidents make lists of who they want to murder, sanctions on Iran… refusing to raise the minimum wage or protect the rights to organise or clean out the money and undo Citizens United, there’s pretty large bipartisan agreement,” he said.
The landmark and controversial Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United vs. the Federal Election Commission overturned longstanding election finance laws and permitted unlimited spending by corporations in elections.
The much-anticipated U.S. “pivot” from the Greater Middle East to the Asia/Pacific accelerated this week, which began with Pentagon chief Leon Panetta’s high-profile, nine-day swing through the region and ended with a White House summit between Barack Obama and Philippine President Benigno Aquino.
For the first time, Panetta put some meat on the bones of the promised military “rebalancing” – the new phrase favoured by the administration – by declaring at a major regional military meeting in Singapore that the U.S. Navy will deploy 60 percent of its global forces, including six aircraft carrier battle groups, to the Asia/Pacific region by 2020, as compared to the current 50 percent.
In addition, Washington intends to increase the number and size of its military exercises and port visits to friendly countries in the region, according to Panetta.
“Make no mistake – in a steady, deliberate, and sustainable way, the United States military is rebalancing and bringing an enhanced capability to this vital region,” he declared. “We were there then, we are here now, and we will be here for the future.”
True to his word, Panetta concluded an agreement in principle with Singapore to deploy up to four Littoral Combat Ships (LCS) within the city-state’s territorial waters and then travelled on to Cam Ranh Bay, Vietnam, the port through which most of the more than two million U.S. servicemen and women entered the country during the Vietnam War.
While Hanoi has permitted the Navy to dock ships for repairs and maintenance at Cam Ranh Bay for several years, Panetta’s visit there was the first by a U.S. defence secretary in four decades.
“It will be particularly important to work with partners like Vietnam to use harbours like this as we move our ships from our ports on the west coast to our stations here in the Pacific,” Panetta said as he inspected a Navy supply ship that was anchored in the deep-water bay.
His presence, according to the Washington Post, was “intended to highlight a deepening partnership between the United States and its former foe as both seek to counter the growing influence and military assertiveness of China.”
Panetta’s visit to Cam Ranh Bay was not only the event this week that evoked fond memories of Washington’s post-World War II domination of the Pacific, as well as the way the U.S. has sought to take advantage of rising tensions between China and some of its southeastern neighbours, particularly those which, like Vietnam and the Philippines, claim a right to exploit the rich fisheries and undersea resources of the South China Sea.
Even as Panetta flew on from Vietnam to pursue Washington’s intensifying military courtship of India, his chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the U.S. Armed Forces, Gen. Martin Dempsey, was informed in Manila that U.S. forces were once again welcome to use their old bases at Clark Field and Subic Bay, so long as they received prior permission from the Philippine government.
Those facilities, the Washington’s two biggest military bases outside the territorial United States, were closed to U.S. use in 1992 by a Philippine Senate intent on ending perhaps the most sensitive symbol of the country’s colonial past.
But, with Manila embroiled in a simmering territorial dispute with Beijing over rival claims in the South China Sea, the Aquino government appears more than eager to deepen military engagement with Washington – an objective that Aquino’s meetings here Friday served to highlight.
Thus, the two leaders reaffirmed their mutual commitment to the 61-year-old U.S.-Philippines Mutual Defence Treaty.
In addition, according to a statement issued by the White House after the summit, “President Obama reaffirmed the U.S. Government’s support for Philippine efforts to build a minimum credible defense posture, as evidenced by our transfer of a second U.S. Coast Guard Cutter to the Philippine Navy, support for the Philippine National Coast Watch System, and the growing number of bilateral exercises and training programs.”
Washington’s latest moves follow a series of bilateral and multilateral agreements that, among other things, have increased the frequency and size of joint manoeuvres with most of the states of the region, including an accord last year with Australia to deploy 2,500 U.S. marines on a rotational basis at a base in the northern part of the country.
Pentagon officials have suggested such an arrangement could be replicated in the Philippines where, in any event, several hundred U.S. Special Forces have been working with the Philippine army in hunting down Islamist rebels in the southern islands for the past decade.
U.S. officials stress that Washington does not seek to establish, or, in the case of Vietnam and the Philippines, re-establish major bases in the region and thus avoid the kind of “heavy footprint” that provokes resentment in the host countries.
Rather, it wants access to what the Bush Pentagon referred to as “lily pads”, forward-deployed outposts within quick striking distance of likely hotspots. Given the latest chain of events, it appears that the administration has the South China Sea uppermost on its mind.
Yet the administration stressed this week that its latest moves were not directed against China.
The White House communiqué issued after Obama’s meeting with Aquino avoided any mention of China in the context of building Manila’s “minimum credible defense posture”.
Instead, it noted Obama’s support for efforts by the ASEAN nations “to reach an agreement with China on a code of Conduct for the South China Sea that creates a rules-based framework for managing and regulating the conduct of parties, including preventing and managing disputes.”
“Some view the increased emphasis by the United States on the Asia-Pacific region as some kind of challenge to China,” Panetta said in Singapore. “I reject that view entirely. Our effort to renew and intensify our involvement in Asia is fully compatible – fully compatible – with the development and growth of China,” he insisted.
That explanation was not shared in Beijing which, in contrast to recent years, sent a low-level delegation to the Singapore meeting.
“The United States verbally denies it is containing China’s rise, but while establishing a new security array across the Asia-Pacific, it has invariably made China its target,” according to the state newspaper, the Jun. 4 edition of the People’s Daily.
Some analysts here took a more nuanced position. The latest initiatives “send a message of reassurance to Asian countries which want the United States to balance a newly powerful and sometimes bullying China,” wrote Nicholas Burns, a former top U.S. diplomat who current teaches at Harvard University, in the Boston Globe Friday.
“But Obama and Panetta are also sending an unmistakable message to the Chinese leadership (that) the United States intends to remain the predominant power in the Pacific.”
*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.
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