Maxwell's House

Laughing Water and the Uglificators

2006-12-31T19:00:00.001+01:00

Common Sense
John Maxwell

Uglification is an ugly word, and uglificator is even uglier, which is why I just invented it, to describe those who would destroy the Cockpit Country for a couple of hundred million American dollars.

I am old enough to remember, as a very small boy, the exuberantly sparkling, splashing riotous incontinence of the acres of rushing water which was the Roaring River Falls. The falls are now simply a green hillside on the southern side of the road at Laughing Water which, of course, was named after the gloriously, uproariously gambolling, gurgling, roaring, slaphappy, carefree waters of the cataract.

It was a fabulous sight and a wonderful natural concert of sound. The only picture I have ever seen that captured the madcap mood of the falls was in a guidebook to Jamaica published by a Mr James B Stark in Boston in 1909. Unfortunately, I lent the book to somebody who never returned it. But the falls live in my memory.

Today, at the head of what used to be the cataract, you can still gather watercress, but I wouldn't do that now. E Coli pollution from unplanned human settlements make it a little too dangerous.

The Jamaica Public Service Company destroyed the Maggoty Falls to eke out another fractional increase in electricity generation, rather than put real money into building real power stations. That false sense of economy led also to the closing down of the Kingston tramway and six decades of public transport chaos in Kingston. It was all in the name of development.

I HAD A HAND IN IT

In 1953 when I had a row with the editor of the Gleaner and walked out of my job at the grand old age of 19, my sympathetic stepfather, Winston Lynch, invited me to a site for which he was the responsible engineer. It was at a place called the White River Falls, and it was being damed by the JPSCo for another minuscule electricity generating plant. That day, I drove a bulldozer, courtesy of Mr Chung, the bulldozer driver, who told me it was simple. It seemed to me to take nerves of steel to control an enormous D-6 Caterpillar earthmover with the aid of four levers and two pedals. But it was great fun. It got the Gleaner completely out of my system and wiped the White River falls off the map.

We have been making bad development decisions in Jamaica for a very long time. Slavery and the plantation economy were among the worst, exterminating the Tainos, brutalising generations of Africans stolen from their nations, which in turn were destroyed by the trade. It all made money, after all, which is what development is supposed to do. So did driving the ex-slaves into the hills, destroying the forests and producing landslides and massive soil erosion and flooding, drying up the rivers and choking the coral reefs.

The Maroons - those left behind by the Spaniards and those recruited from the plantations - didn't think so. For nearly two centuries, they fought for their freedom, managing to extract from the British recognition as an independent autonomous community.

They signed a treaty with the British as between two sovereign entities bound by duties and responsibilities on both sides. The Maroons kept their side of the bargain, the British didn't. And when the Windward Maroons, blackmailed by the British, were forced to capture the remnants of the Bogle rebellion they earned themselves ill-deserved ignominy from later Jamaicans who regarded them as traitors, without understanding why they were forced to do what they were legally bound to do.

After paying that price in reputation and solidarity, their British 'guaranteed' autonomy was snatched from them by a Resident Magistrate in the 1950s who decided that Accompong was no longer autonomous.
In one sense, it doesn't matter, because the deeds of the Maroons cannot ever be wiped from history. One of their members, Bouckman, took the revolution to Haiti and is now one of their national heroes.
In Jamaica, we are planning to destroy the living heart of one of the most potent symbols of resistance to oppression that exists anywhere.

WHAT IS THE COCKPIT COUNTRY

My father was elected in 1934 to represent Trelawny as the parish's Member of the Legislative Council (parliament). My father's irredeemable blackness stimulated his wife's family to refuse to acknowledge their sister and new brother-in-law for seven years.

I made my first entrance onto the public stage when my mother took me as a nursing infant into the Falmouth Court room where powerful forces were determined to deny my father his against-the-odds election victory. In the election, he had beaten the man who had been MLC for 25 years and Custos of Trelawny for 15.

The Hon Guy Ewen was the leading lawyer in the parish and its most potent financier as head of the Trelawny Building Society. He was the attorney or owner of estates comprising one sixth of the arable land in the parish and chairman of the Parochial Board whenever he found the time. And Trelawny was, in those days, the political equivalent of Southern Rhodesia, not quite an apartheid society, but close.

My father lost the case but Mr Ewen, who won, collapsed and died shortly after. My grandmother - a Maroon was widely credited with 'obeahing' the sadly deceased plutocrat.

My father could not pay the legal fees and, though he won the bye-election after Ewen died, he was in danger of debtor's jail if the bailiffs found him before he was sworn in as MLC at Headquarters House.

My father disappeared into the Land of Look Behind after the bailiffs had seized all his furniture, including my baby crib. In this refuge from oppression, there are place names like "Me No Sen, You No Come" and "Waitabit". My father didn't emerge until the day of the opening of the Legislative Council when his friend, Arthur Benjamin Lowe, MLC for St James, picked him up at a secret rendezvous and transported him to Kingston, the last part of the journey covered by a carpet in the back of Lowe's car.

When Lowe arrived at Duke Street the bailiffs were waiting. Mr Lowe, a Baptist lay preacher was obviously a man of truth, so he was to be believed when he told the querulous bailiffs that he had last seen Maxwell near the Beeston Street (back entrance) to Headquarters House.

They dashed off to Beeston Street and my father, freed of carpet, was soon sprinting up the steps of Headquarters House, hotly pursued by bailiffs. It was as they said of another occasion, 'a damned close-run thing'!
I tell this story to partly explain what may be regarded as my intense, 'almost hysterical' attachment to the Cockpit Country - the Land of Look Behind.

THE BOUNDARIES OF IMPERTINENCE

The Hon Dr Carlton Davis, head of the Bauxite Institute for more than 30 years and head of the Cabinet office for almost 20, has, almost proprietorially, asked the environmentalists, to define the Cockpit Country so that he can know what it is they are making such a fuss about.

Without in the least casting any aspersions on Dr Davis, it seems to me indecent that those who intend to despoil a national treasure should be demanding that its defenders should define its boundaries and justify their case.

It is the developers who want to refine bauxite and generate millions of tons of red mud waste that will seriously endanger the Jamaican water supply and it is they who should be defending their predatory position.
The developers, not the environmentalists are the people who want to destroy the priceless biological treasure house of the Cockpit Country by excavation, by caustic atmospheric pollution, by deforestation and other destructive practices.

The developers, not the environmentalists, are the people who want to desecrate the historical and paleoontological treasures of the Cockpit Country.

The developers, not the environmentalists are the people who want to destroy the heritage of the world's first successful guerrilla war against a vastly superior and technologically advanced oppressor;
In any sane and rational democracy, it is the proponents of any violently destructive undertaking such as that proposed by the Jamaica Bauxite Institute, Jamalco, Alcoa and their various transnational partners who would be compelled to present their case to the owners with all the relevant facts;

In any sane and rational democracy, it is the developers who would be required to submit themselves for rigorous examination by qualified experts and by the public so that all decisions could be made in the public interest.
In no sane and rational democracy which has signed on to the principles of the Treaty of Rio - Agenda 21 - would people contemplating biological mayhem be allowed to demand that those who oppose dismemberment and destruction be asked to justify their position.

In the topsy-turvy world of Jamaica, where rape victims are transformed by the courts into defendants, such lunacy is made to seem reasonable. In Jamaica the polluter does not pay for his pollution, the people who are damaged are made to pay. The Precautionary Principle, honoured in most civilised countries is in Jamaica regarded as some esoteric theoretical nonsense imported by 'almost hysterical' pressure groups to stop so-called development.

The developers are in for a shock. They are going to discover that there are millions of Jamaicans who are not stupid, ignorant yokels, not modern day Esaus, ready, willing and eager to trade their birthright for a mess of pottage, to exchange their patrimony for the baubles, bangles and beads produced in Pittsburgh, Geneva or Moscow.

THE BOUNDARIES OF
NATIONAL PATRIMONY

But since they ask, let us consider the boundaries of the Cockpit Country.

If you are talking about history and resistance to oppression, the boundaries are wide and go from Kettering (Duncans) in the north almost to Nain in St Elizabeth; and from beyond Maroon Town in the west almost to Bamboo in the east.

For me, the boundaries would include all the caves from Rio Bueno to Auchtembeddie and points west, to the Queen of Spain's Valley and sites where the Taino lived before Columbus' 'doom-burdened caravels' careened so disastrously into their lives at Rio Bueno. So, if you are talking about archaeology and paleoontology, we need to define different boundaries.

If we are talking about geomorphology, we speak of an even larger area, and it is an area vital to the water supplies of most of western Jamaica. It supplies the water for the nation's largest river, the Black River as well as Dornoch (Rio Bueno), Martha Brae, the Great River in St James and others. Again it would include the Queen of Spain's Valley.

If we are talking about ecology, specifically biodiversity, we are talking about a more diffuse definition but which would probably include most of the karstic landscape of Southern Trelawny, parts of St Ann, St James and St Elizabeth. This Cockpit Country is unique in the world, a largely unexplored treasury of plant and animal life with priceless discoveries almost certainly hidden in its hills, valleys, sinkholes, caves and wild places.

If we are talking about the environment, the value of the Land of Look Behind as a spiritual refuge and a wilderness and a resort away from the world, we are speaking of an almost existential dimension.

As we look back at our unsustainable development achievements, at Roaring River, at White River, at Roselle in St Thomas, at Maggoty, Negril, Long Mountain, Pear Tree Bottom and Kingston Harbour and our near catastrophe at Hope Gardens, we can begin to understand what unsustainable development really means.

We have bureaucrats who have no compunction in disregarding public rights including prescriptive rights, in order to build the moral equivalent of freezones for processing tourists, with concrete beaches underlying illegally mined sand. Who in his right mind acres about reefs and mangroves and the habitats of loons? Who cares about public participation in development planning? Who cares about real democracy?

DEVELOPMENT AND THE PRIME MINISTER

In her campaign for election as president of the People's National Party, Mrs Portia Simpson Miller promised to work for unity and community development by increasing the participation of people in real development planning.

If local people had been consulted about Kennedy Grove, for example, houses would never have been built in a former lake-bed subject to flooding and liable to pollute with sewerage the major aquifer in Clarendon.

If the prime minister wishes to have a second term it seems to me that she needs to get back to her own agenda, as explicated earlier this year, and put a stop to the runaway lunacies of the heavy metal developers.

Perhaps, after the "Developers" have prostituted and devastated the Land of Look Behind, they will tell you, quite correctly, and with perfectly straight faces, that the Cockpit Country then has the potential to be the skateboard capital of the WORLD!!!!

THINK !!! We just don't have the imagination to see what good some old-fashioned constructive uglification can bring. We need to wake up and smell the caustic soda!!!

Government and Environment

2006-12-24T18:51:00.002+01:00

Common Sense
John Maxwell

Before I go any further, I want to thank most sincerely all the leaders and the supporters of the Cockpit Country Stakeholders Group for their achievement so far. We still hve a long way to go to guarantee the protection of the Land of Look Behind and we cannot afford to think that we have managed to protect this priceless national asset.

Most of us have only the foggiest meaning of the word "Environment" and understand even less of the so-called environmental movement. To many, "The Environment" is some mystical abstraction "out there' with no relevance to them. Since I want to use a definition accessible to anyone with access to the Internet, I am choosing wikipedia's definition: "Environment refers to a complex of surrounding circumstances, conditions, or influences in which a thing is situated or is developed."

I use this definition because more people have access to the Internet than to my preferred source, the Shorter Oxford Dictionary. Our environment is everything around us and includes ourselves. It starts at the limits of the universe, if there are such limits, and includes, besides us, the plants and animals seen and unseen, the living cocoon of earth, water and air, which allows us and the plants and animals to exist, and even includes the bacteria in our guts, our world leaders and our Governments.

The bacteria in our guts have just been identified as one probable factor in the tendency for some of us to be plump or overweight, even fat, or, God forbid, obese. The human digestive system is home to between 10 and 100 trillion bacteria - at least 10 times the number of human cells. Excrement is largely composed of dead bacteria, and the one thousand tons of topsoil in the top nine inches of an acre of land are probably more than half bacteria.

Why should bacteria make us fat? Our gastrointestinal tracts, from our throats to our anuses, contain two dominant groups of beneficial bacteria. They are bacteriodetes and Firmicutes, and they break down things like fats and sugars, everything we eat, converting them into forms the body can use for energy.

In people with a tendency to be fat, bacteriodetes are a smaller proportion of the bacteria than in leaner, slimmer people. And, as people lose weight, the proportion of bacteriodetes goes up. No one knows why this is so, but in mice, bacteriodetes transplanted from lean mice help obese mice to lose weight.

Obesity is just as much a form of malnutrition as is kwashiorkor - what we used to call 'bang belly' in children. It seems that the good bacteriodetes are losing out to the not so good Firmicutes. The result is that though two of us may eat exactly the same things in the same proportions, the one with more bacteriodetes will stay slimmer, more svelte, the other will add fat.

The question in my mind is this: I wonder if the epidemic of obesity in the western world over the last 25 years may not be partially due to a changing environment in our guts due to the increasing use of chemical additives and bactericides in the diet fed to the livestock we slaughter for food?

If that is true, we have made an environmental connection of great importance. Sandmining and the Norman Manley Airport. Fifty-two years ago, the governor of Jamaica, Hugh Foot, took a leaf out of the then opposition PNP's Plan For Progress, inaugurating the Agricultural and Industrial Development corporations and later, Land Authorities which were made responsible for the management of agricultural land and watersheds in the Yallahs and Christiana areas.

For 30 years or so, the watersheds were reasonably well cared for, and flourished, and by the 90s, the Yallahs River again flowed strongly enough to give some people the idea that it could provide millions of gallons of water for water-starved Kingston. The result: farmers in the lower Yallahs were gradually starved of water, abandoned their farms to soil erosion and more sand was borne towards the sea.

Fly over Jamaica today and the scene is very different from even 10 years ago. The Yallahs and Johnson rivers are huge slashes of barren sand miles back from their estuaries. This has created a bonanza for sand-miners, who every day mine thousands of tons from the river beds. The mining is now so extensive that, in my opinion and without scientific evidence, I contend it is causing the destruction of the Palisadoes peninsula and threatening the integrity of our major airport.

Beaches are never stable, they are continually changing with wind and weather. Sand moves along the coast with currents, here today, gone tomorrow, but usually replaced by sand from somewhere else. The Palisadoes sand travelled all the way from the Plaintain Garden, Yallahs, Johnson, Hope, Cane and Dry rivers and all the other rivers on the southeast coast.

We are now told that we need groynes, rock or concrete structures to stabilise Palisadoes. They will not work. Groynes slow down the 'littoral drift' - they don't produce sand, they simply interrupt and slow down its progress. Since there is not an unlimited amount of sand, the predation in the river estuaries steals the sand that would normally buttress the ancient coral reefs on which the airport is built. Port Royal, in my opinion, is in serious danger and may disappear beneath the waves long before global warming gets a chance to drown it.

Both the bacteriodetes and the sand are governed by natural processes and by the government. Regulations governing the kind of additives, chemicals and drugs in the food you eat may determine whether you die of heart disease, stroke or hypertension. Since the UN's Stockholm Environmental summit of 1972, and the Rio Summit of 1992, governments have increasingly erected regulatory frameworks to govern our environment, from what we eat and where we live, to where our excrement is deposited.

Increasingly, governments like Jamaica's bought into the idea that regulatory authorities tend to interfere with free trade and are a bad thing. If they are not abolished, they should be made to work more like private sector entities.
The end effect of this philosophy in practice, is to remove distributive politics from the lower classes and put it where it properly belongs, according to the flat earth economists of this world. The rich get richer and the poor get even more miserable, desperate, suicidal and murderous.

Mining and the Cockpit Country

Some of the arguments about the intended rape of the Cockpit Country are derived entirely from the flat earth (level playing field) philosophy: Corporations should have the same rights as human beings, no matter that in the case of Alcoa, General Electric and most transnational companies, the minor shareholders' and workers' interest has been hijacked by the managers and the institutional investors, banks and brokerage firms, and have no responsibility whatever to any democratic process anywhere.

Alcoa was welcomed by certain Jamaicans when it played 'poor-mouth' and asked for a 'bly' - an 'ease-up' on the picayune taxes it paid even after Michael Manley. We gave it to them, to a company whose express aim is to reduce labour cost and human accountability to the barest minima. The Government of Jamaica and Alcoa both know exactly how much bauxite is in the Cockpit Country. Each of them separately, Alcoa directly and the Government through the Jamaica Bauxite Institute (JBI), paid an American company named Hatch Inc to find out.

Hatch was engaged by the JBI in 1993/1994 to manage the preparation of a preliminary environmental impact assessment of the design, construction, operation and closure of the proposed North Coast Bauxite/Alumina project. Three alternative project development scenarios were assessed. Hatch was also engaged at more or less the same time, by Alcoa, for more or less the same purposes. According to Hatch, the JBI study entailed :

"Development of a proposed greenfield bauxite mine site, one million tpy [tons per year] alumina refinery, port and infrastructure within the Trelawny and St Ann parishes of Jamaica.

Scope of Services: Develop a phased environmental impact assessment study programme.
Project Highlights:

First planned use of geographical information system (GIS) tools for Environmental Impact Assessment in Jamaica.
Preparation of study funding from the Canadian International Development Agency.
Preliminary Environmental Impact Assessment study team integrated Canadian, Caribbean and Client specialists.
Local resource training incorporated into study programme.
Programme preparation included a review of industry practices and site visit to all active Jamaican bauxite mining and alumina refinery sites.

Project Cost: US$1.5 billion (1992 dollars)

Hatch are not tyros at this game, they are a huge company and acquired Kaiser Engineers a few years ago and 600 Kaiser Engeneers with it. Less than a year earlier, they acquired another army - of 900 engineers, consultants, support staff and the offices of BHP Engineering from the Broken Hill Pty group, one of the largest mining organisations in the world. They appear to have been the supervisors of the Jamalco 1.5m tpy refinery expansion in Clarendon.

Hatch's skills are considerable, and they boast that "One of Mining Resource Evaluation Unit (MREU)'s core strengths is in Geological Resource Evaluation, including data assessment, geostatistics, computerised geological modelling and resource estimation. MREU also have the in-house expertise required for the geological aspects of bankable feasibility studies, due diligence studies, project audits and technical reviews.

One imagines that the feasibility study of the Cockpit Country was 'bankable" since Alcoa planned to build a 1.5-million ton per year alumina refirnery on the basis of that evaluation. You can find all over the web, reports on the research work already done in the Cockpit Country. There are even tutorials on the web using the Jamaican bauxite information as the baseline. One, by Mike Price of Estrada/San Juan Inc, says that "the data used has been generalised from real data that describes bauxite in Jamaica".

The tutorial is accompanied by a map which shows Jamaican bauxite mining sites and one of them is in the centre of the Cockpit Country. The map's caption says: "Jamaica produces nearly one-third of the primary aluminum ore bauxite consumed in the United States. Incidentally, Dr Lyew Ayee's post-graduate degree is in GIS technology.

Pollution and Mining

A few years ago, there was in Jamaica, a Czech scientist, Dr Jasmino Karanjac, who retired as professor of hydrogeology at UWI, Mona. While he was here he carried out several studies with the co-operation of the Water Resources Authority and its head, Mr Basil Fernandez, who like him is an authority on bauxite refinery contamination. In a paper prepared for a Conference 'Water Resources & Environmental Problems in Karst' in September last year, Professor Karanjac said, inter alia, "About 60 per cent of Jamaica is underlain by the White Limestone Formation. Jamaica is also well known for its "Cockpit Country" - an easily recognised pattern of round-top hills and depressions with internal drainage. White Limestone is, in many places, karstified, its aquifers are covered with thin soil layers that do not offer much of protection against surface pollution. from agricultural practices, seawater intrusion into coastal aquifers . and by the processes of refining bauxite into alumina."

Karanjac conclused his paper by noting: "Today, it appears that Jamaica, which has the size of 10,991 sq km, may have problems developing enough good-quality water for its population of just over 2.7 million.. ground water in Jamaica is very vulnerable. There are no feasible sites for surface water storage and ground water remains the major source of water supply. Along the coast, aquifers are overabstracted and in the interior explorations and drilling are prohibitively expensive..

"In spite of sufficient ground water resources and relatively low level of its utilisation (less than 30 per cent), due to distribution of population, seawater intrusion .industrial, urban and agricultural pollution, and irregular rainfall Jamaica will have to introduce reverse osmosis on a reasonable scale. Rainwater harvesting will be another alternative, same as waste water treatment and reuse."

I quote Dr Karanjac at length to contradict the impression given by some others that the destruction of the Cockpit Country would not be a disaster for Jamaica's water supply. If, as Dr Karanjac says, we may have to go into reverse osmosis - the qualitative equivalent of distilling sea water, we are obviously in trouble. And this is before the Cockpit Country is despoiled.

The Government has announced that it is setting up yet another ministerial subcommittee to study the problem. I would suggest to the prime minister that matters have gone way beyond that: she needs to order a full public inquiry into the whole mess. Until that is done, no decisions can safely be taken.

And I would recommend to the prime minister and to all who love this country, read Clifton Yap's speech to the Montego Bay Rotary Club which was published in last week's edition of the Sunday Observer. It is the clearest exposition I have seen of the real reasons behind our calamitous state.

You can find it here: Jamaica's development - cause for much concern - jamaicaobserver.com

Meanwhile, this is my 555th column for this newspaper, which may mean nothing to anyone else, but gives me a great deal of 'almost hysterical' satisfaction.

A Mess of Pottage?

2006-12-17T18:30:00.003+01:00

Common Sense
John Maxwell

The proponents of unsustainable development have not had a good week. The people of Jamaica and the world are waking up to discover what they stand to lose if the Jamaica Bauxite Institute and the bauxite mining companies get their sweaty hands on the Cockpit Country - The Land of Look Behind.

From all over the world, support has been building for the preservation of this singular treasure. A few letters have been printed in the press and the talk shows are just beginning to reflect public anger. But perhaps the single most damaging fact to the cause of the JBI et al was the announcement, a few days ago, that a new cancer drug has been extracted and developed from an endemic Jamaican plant.

This is much bigger news than the simple fact that this drug is proving effective against certain forms of cancer. It is more important because this is the second major discovery of the treasures hidden in the Jamaican portion of the biosphere.

As I reported 253 columns ago, scientists had discovered "On the roots of the mangroves in Kingston Harbour and perhaps elsewhere in Jamaica, . a tiny animal, smaller than the first joint in the average adult's little finger, an orange-coloured soft-bodied creature which looks more like a flower than an animal. The name of this insignificant beast is Ecteinascidia turbinata - known to its admirers as a sea-squirt.

It is one of a number of marine animals which manufacture proteins that are proving effective in fighting cancer and may yield substances which may be able to defeat other diseases. A big Spanish drug company, PharmaMar, has bought the rights to a new drug derived from one of the sea-squirt's proteins.

"Early trial results have indicated that ET-743 may eventually play a role in treating certain soft tissue sarcomas and other cancers including advanced-stage breast, colon, ovarian and lung cancer, melanoma, mesothelioma and several types of sarcoma. Ecteinascidin not only shrinks and kills tumours, it also restricts cancer's ability to resist other drugs Infinite Injustice" (Infinite Injustice - March 17, 2002)

In another column, nearly a year later, I reported on the government's plans to devastate another priceless, world scientific resource - an unprepossessing wilderness place called Harris Savannah, just off the Doomsday Highway near May Pen, which one of the world's most noted botanists, Dr George Proctor, thinks is a botanical treasury of world importance.

"After rain, Harris Savannah is a botanical bonanza, full of species unknown until Proctor discovered them. Many are new to science. Apart from their intrinsic interest to botanists, some could be of profitable horticultural economic interest; others may contain substances which may lead to important medical or other scientific advances. Most of the world's standard medications are made from compounds first discovered in plants and other 'insignificant' forms of life." - (Treasure in the Badlands November 29, 2003)

In a press release two weeks ago, the head of the Jamaica Bauxite Institute described the campaign against the destruction of the Cockpit Country as 'almost hysterical' - which may or may not be a reference to the fact that so many active environmentalists in Jamaica are women.

I must confess that I too have a long history of 'almost hysteria' dating back, perhaps, to the time when Dr Lyew Ayee was a baby. This year makes 50 years since I led a successful campaign in Public Opinion weekly to force the Caribbean Cement Company to install electrostatic precipitators. These scrubbers recovered seven tons of dust daily, from the smokestack of the company which, until then, had been choking the lungs of Jamaicans high and low.

If that was 'almost hysteria', Dr Lyew Ayee can make as much of it as he wants. Campaigning for a National Minimum Wage (on Public Eye) and for disarming Jamaica and against the death penalty and against the rape of Hope Gardens may also have been 'almost hysterical.' I really don't care what Dr Lyew Ayee calls me or my allies. What we care about is what unsustainable development is likely to do to Jamaica.

For instance: It was reported, some years ago, that the NRCA had turned down a foreign exchange earning development project to build an incinerator in Jamaica to burn imported toxic wastes. I would like to ask Dr Lyew Ayee whether, had he been a member of the NRCA Board at the time, would he have voted for or against the proposal?

I would like to ask the question of several other people, including the former prime minister among others, because it is the sort of question which, in my view, separates the 'almost hysterical' from the sound, sober, reliable forward-thinking people who only have Jamaica's best interest at heart.

Water, water everywhere and .
In the Manifesto of the People's National Party in 1997, the party declared its commitment to "work towards creating a society of high moral values and attitudes; the party best able to unite the people into one common band marching to the goal of creating a better quality of life for all."

Lest it be misunderstood that the party was speaking about foreign exchange, the next sentence makes it clear what the PNP considered the components of a "better life".
"Protecting and conserving our island's resources is an imperative, if we are to preserve its natural features and beauty.
Man is dependent on the integrity of the environment and there is a sacred obligation to protect God's earth and to preserve the quality of life for future generations.

The PNP believes that orderly development can and must co-exist with a healthy respect for the natural resources that sustain development.

We have therefore pursued a collaborative national effort with the private sector and individual communities, to rescue areas of the environment that are under siege." [my emphasis]
The Cockpit Country is one of those areas now under siege and it may be the most important such area, worthy, as the government once believed, of being declared a world heritage site.

In 1997, the government was just four years into a commitment to ratify the SPAW Protocol of the Cartagena Convention. The founder of Greenpeace International, the late David McTaggart, told me he considered SPAW the single most effective piece of international legislation for the protection of habitat and life forms, and he made three visits to Jamaica to be assured by three different ministers of environment, that Jamaica would soon ratify SPAW.

Although the document itself is housed at the International Seabed Authority's Headquarters just a few hundred yards from Gordon House, where our parliament meets, the government has not seen it fit so far to honour its promise.

Jamaica is the only significant signatory not to have ratified SPAW and while the SPAW document lives in Jamaica, Jamaica's representatives to SPAW meetings are observers only, not members.

This is clearly sound, anti-hysterical behaviour.
But the governing party has clearly broken important promises to Jamaica, or at the very least, not remembered to fulfill them.
The PNP manifesto (p 49) made explicit promises in 1997: ". During our third term we will:

. Undertake a comprehensive programme to clean up the physical environment and to protect our beaches, watersheds, reefs and other sensitive ecosystems;

. revitalise our national parks and gardens and establish additional national and marine parks
.The new millennium is the time to reaffirm our responsibility to protect and enhance our environment, so that the country we hand over to future generations will be a better place to live in."
Pretty strong words, but the party was not content with that. On page 71, under the title: "Our Pledge" the party drew a line in the sand:

". . to protect and safeguard our environmental heritage, thereby protecting our fragile ecology for the benefit of future generations.

That, of course, sounds almost hysterical to me, given Hope Gardens and Long Mountain and Harris Savannah and the Doomsday Highway and Bloody Bay and Pear Tree Bottom and Point, and Palmyra and Winniefred Beach.

American Hysteria

On the website of the US Army Corps of Engineers, there is a fascinating document of 118 pages, including appendices etc.
This document is called Water Resources Assessment of Jamaica and is dated February 2001.

As a technical military document the assessment is, as might be expected, a dry, businesslike paper, all 118 pages of it. It even includes the latitude and longitude of every Jamaican locality mentioned in the text and you may be interested to know that the coordinates for Albert Town are 1817 N 07733 W.

The authors are very meticulous. There may be however, some cause for alarm in developer circles. All three specialists who carried out the assessments are geologists but since they are all women, there is clearly some possibility that their conclusions may be regarded as 'almost hysterical".

However: "This information may be used to support current and potential future investments in managing the water resources of the country and to assist military planners during troop engineering exercise and theatre engagement training. . in addition to assisting the military planner, this assessment can aid the host nation by highlighting critical need areas, which in turn serves to support potential water resources development, preservation and enhancement funding programmes.

Highlighted problems are the lack of access to water supply by much of the population, the density of the population in Kingston, the lack of wastewater treatment, and contamination by industrial processes associated with bauxite mining, sugar cane processing and agricultural activities."

As we know, dunder from sugar estates is often pumped into sinkholes, killing fish and causing widespread pollution of what could be drinking water. The fertilizer used on sugar cane in western Jamaica is one of the factors destroying the famous seven miles of Negril Beach and of course, we know, as I reported a few weeks ago, that the head of Jamaica's Water Resources Authority has reported on the pollution of the aquifer, big time, by bauxite effluent in St Elizabeth.

One of the problems with dealing with Dr Lyew Ayee is that some of what he says, if reported correctly, appears to defy common sense, if not science. He appeared to suggest that surface water would not contaminate the underground aquifer. The lady geologists from the Corps of Engineers say that the streams in the Cockpit Country areas "are fed and in some cases feed the interior karstic limestone aquifer." (p.18)
"For instance, the water in the upper reaches of the White River, may, in places disappear into the limestone aquifer and then rise several kilometres downstream. Drainage in this area is primarily underground and any precipitation is quickly channeled or absorbed into the subsurface."

Again, on page 19 they report that in the Cockpit Country "any water that runs off the central mountains is quickly channeled or absorbed into the subsurface" and they instance the Martha Brae River, the largest source of water on the north coast.
"The Moneague Blue Hole, located in the Dry Harbour Mountains Basin, was once a good freshwater source.

However, this has recently become contaminated. The contamination is believed to be from a bauxite lake, Mt Rosser Pond, which has a high sodium effluent.

"While this might seem to put paid to any further bauxite development in the area, we need to consider one additional point made by these highly trained geologists: "Surface water is generally fresh; however, some major threats to the water quality are from industry, human and animal wastes, insecticides, and herbicides. Most of the mineral industry is based on bauxite mining, and some of the bauxite produced is refined into alumina on the island. Bauxite mining is surface mining, which is land-intensive, noisy, and dusty.

Jamaica can produce about three million tons of alumina per year. The refining process creates a thick fluid called "red mud" which has high levels of sodium and hydroxide ions, iron oxides, and organic substances.

About one ton of red mud waste or residue will be produced from each ton of alumina. The land mass cannot accommodate this high volume of waste. This waste is often ponded into lakes, either man-made or karst depressions, with no consideration of the environmental effects.

The effluent is free to seep into the subsurface, or to mix with precipitation, creating caustic ponds. The disposal of the wastes from alumina processing is a major environmental problem. Discoloration, turbidity, and high coliform bacteria counts, due to the high organic content."

I hope you read that extract carefully. When I read it, one line jumped out and bit me:
"The land mass cannot accommodate this high volume of waste."

I think that this is a fact that many Jamaicans have known subconsciously for a long time, but we keep denying it, in the interest of foreign exchange.

I keep on referring to poor, tiny Nauru, that Pacific island composed largely of phosphate, fossilised seabird dung, which has been mined almost into non-existence. Those who are left on Nauru will soon have to leave forever, because their country is about to disappear beneath the waves.

In Jamaica, we have a slightly different problem. If, as they say, water is life, bauxite will soon make life impossible on this island. Life, that is, as we understand it.

If the developers have their way, we will be selling our birthright not for a mess of pottage, but a mess of red mud.
Esau, Esau, wherefore art thou Esau?"

The Next Bad Thing

2006-12-10T18:41:00.002+01:00

Common Sense
John Maxwell

One bright blue day in spring, about five years ago, I was standing in the parking lot of an Amsterdam hospital when I decided to look up at the plane passing above me. I was amazed to see that the sky was literally a checkerboard of cloud, contrails from the planes leaving Schipol airport in an absolutely regular grid pattern. It was one day I didn't carry my camera.

One of my aunts, now departed, used to believe that the trails left behind by high-flying planes must have an effect on the weather. I, full of juvenile cocksureness, attempted to disabuse her of this bizarre idea.

She was right. I was wrong.

In the last half-dozen years or thereabouts, scientists have discovered that the contrails of jet planes and other atmospheric pollutants have serious effects on the weather.

The Dimming of the Earth

The clinching evidence came on September 14, 2001, when, after all commercial planes in the United States had been grounded for three days, a scientist named David Travis discovered that 5,000 weather stations across the United States had recorded the same phenomenon - when the skies were clear, the average ambient temperature went up by more than one degree Celsius.

The Blue Swallowtail was fairly common in parts of the Blue and John Crow mountains
This finding correlated with observations by Dr Gerald Stanhill who had been measuring the amplitude of sunlight in Israel for nearly 50 years. He discovered that over the span of his observations, the average solar energy reaching the ground in Israel had dropped by 22 per cent. Another scientist, a German doctoral candidate named Beate Liepert working independently, found that something of the same sort had happened in Europe where the average decline was nine per cent. Russian scientists found that their solar energy levels had dropped by 30 per cent over five decades.

When scientists put all the pieces of this strange discovery together they realised that there was an explanation: the sun hadn't cooled, but soot, sulphur dioxide and other man-produced particles had reduced the solar radiation reaching the surface of the Earth by a considerable degree in the previous half century.

This realisation is enough to make the blood run cold; if pollution is keeping the temperature artificially low, then the estimates of global warming are far too conservative. The human race and all other living things are in much greater danger than anyone realised.

It soon became obvious that the buffering effect of the enhanced cloud cover was concealing the real extent of global warming. This meant that as we cleaned up our atmosphere, global warming would accelerate.

Scientists discovered that this effect, which Stanhill called the "Dimming of the Earth" held not only future disaster potential, it was already wreaking catastrophic damage here on Earth. The problem was that no one had recognised that because the damage was mainly being done to Africa.

The area south of the Sahara - the Sahel - and a wide swathe across Northern Africa into Ethiopia have always depended on a regime of rainless seasons followed by monsoons which replenish the lakes, watering holes and aquifers of these northern savannahs. Scientists deduced that the "Dimming" effect was the major agent in the African droughts which killed millions of people a decade ago. The human-induced cloudiness, exported from North America and Europe, was shielding the Sahel and Sudanese Africa from their monsoons, pushing the weather further south and condemning millions to death by starvation.

And what is worse, the effect will gradually extend across Asia, eventually displacing or even shutting down the monsoons on which India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and more than half the world's population depend.

Forward the Titanic!

The essential news from all this is that Global Warming is probably moving twice as fast as anyone predicted and that until and unless we manage to put brakes on it, we are headed for disaster in an even shorter time frame than we had thought.
Since cleaning up atmospheric pollution is working and is part of the anti-global-warming campaign, the situation will get worse long before it gets better.

The problem is that in the biosphere, minute changes have large effects over long periods. Global warming was predicted by Svente Aarhenius in 1896 and it was soon realised that any action to reverse warming takes a long time to have an effect. It is rather like the Titanic, propellers powering full astern, but the ship ploughing forward into the iceberg for another mile before it came to a stop. It took a long time for the propellers to overcome the inertial mass of the giant ship.

So too, if all the fires on Earth were turned off today, it would take another couple of hundred years before we were back to the temperatures of 1896. Of course, the situation 200 years from now will have only a passing resemblance to the Earth of 1896.

We have already done so much damage that although we may mitigate it somewhat, the biosphere - the living space or thin skin of the Earth in which all living things feed and breed - will be very different even from today's. Global warming will keep ploughing forward, like the Titanic, ripping great holes in the biosphere and condemning many of us and our descendants to death, as in the Sahel and in Ethiopia.

The results for places like Jamaica and the Caribbean are likely to be dread. If global warming is moving faster than we thought, the Greenland ice-cap may be provoked into terminal meltdown sooner, and together with the melting of the Ross Ice Sheet in Antarctica, an area bigger than France, will raise the sea levels around the world by seven to eight metres before my children reach my age. And it may also stop the Gulf Stream/North Atlantic circulation and produce a new Ice Age in parts of the Northern hemisphere.

This means that in Jamaica, all the beaches we know and desecrate today will be under water, as will the hotels built on them, Most of Savanna-la-Mar, Black River, much of Kingston and Old Harbour and all of Portmore will be visited only by fishermen and scuba divers.

The rise in sea level will affect the groundwaters of Jamaica, poisoning the aquifers of the St Catherine/Clarendon plains - already seriously compromised by over-pumping, and probably also those of South Manchester, St Elizabeth as well as the north coast.

Where I live in Stony Hill, the water has been turned off at night for the last 26 years, because there isn't enough St Catherine water to supply the thirsts and toilets of Havendale and upper St Andrew. Although there isn't enough water for Stony Hill, within a mile of the Hermitage Dam, confident developers are even now preparing to put in dozens of upscale mini-mansions with lots of bathrooms.

During the 1970s, as chairman of the NRCA I engaged in a long-running fight with Moses Matalon, then chairman of the Portmore Land Development Company as well as of the Urban Development Corporation (UDC), urging him to stop developing Portmore because all that I had read told me that the place was a potential deathtrap from flooding, hurricane and earthquake. I tried to enlist Michael Manley in my campaign, but he, unlike his father, was not an environmentalist and didn't see why environmental concerns should stop poor and middle-class people from getting houses.

The highest point in Portmore is the gas station at Independence City - six metres (eight feet) above mean sea level. Sea level rise of six to eight metres will also submerge parts of the Doomsday Highway and most of Kingston below North Street.

The UDC had a particular hostility to mangroves and mowed down many, destroying much of the fertile fish-breeding grounds of Dawkins Pond and Hunts Bay. The Port Authority has carried on where they left off and in addition, has been spreading toxic waste through their dredged landfills for the 'improvement' of Port Kingston, enabling us to manage even larger and more polluting ships.

The Blue Swallowtail

The time for these excesses is now clearly over, no matter what the development experts say. If my children won't be able to visit Savanna-la-Mar or Falmouth when they are my age, I promise that my ghost, if I can manage one, will come back to bedevil those of the guilty who are still alive.

All the information available to me, and I presume to the scientists and other experts employed by the Government, suggest that much of our so-called development is greed-driven and totally unsustainable.

If Mr Parris Lyew Ayee believes that he can relocate the flora and fauna of the Cockpit Country I would ask him to give us an explanation of how he would deal with just one species - the beautiful Blue Swallowtail butterfly.

The Blue Swallowtail is a seriously endangered species. It is one of the world's largest butterflies and is the largest butterfly in the western hemisphere. The nearest thing to it is in New Guinea. They are big enough to cover most of the palm of a normal hand. Once upon a time, the Blue Swallowtail was fairly common in parts of the Blue and John Crow mountains.

One of its favourite hangouts was near Roselle Falls on the St Thomas road, but it has almost completely disappeared from this area because of construction work there and the chopping down of the lancewood trees which are its main food supply. It now exists in significant numbers only in the Cockpit Country. This beautiful animal requires 100 per cent humidity to mature and will die if it is any drier.

Jamaica is a very special place for all sorts of pants and animals. In the Cockpit Country, which is the most special part of a special island, there are also large numbers of species which are found nowhere else. There are more varieties of snails in the Land of Look Behind than in the entire North American continent. The village of Auchtembeddie alone boasts more than 60 species.

The website cockpitcountry.com speaks, for instance, of fireflies or peenies and peeny-wallies as we know them
"Lampyrid fireflies (and Elateridae click beetles, known locally as peeny wallies and headlight beetles) have been a subject of both scientific and popular fascination. The first species of Jamaican fireflies to be mentioned in the literature were described by Patrick Browne in 1756.. at present 48 species are recognised taxonomically; 45 are endemic to Jamaica (94 per cent endemism). During the dry summer months, the hillsides of the Cockpit Country glow with the mate-attracting light dances of males.. [one of these fireflies] - Microdiphot cavernarum is known only from Windsor Great Cave (McDermott and Buck 1959). It is not known how many species of firefly occur in the Cockpit Country because little scientific collecting has been undertaken."

This fact alone should indicate how precious the Cockpit Country is and why we should preserve it in as pristine a state as possible. When I was a teenager I occasionally saw whole fields of 'blinkies' flashing in synch. One of the researchers at the Windosr research centre has also seen this fantastic display. I had thought we had lost it forever.

There is much too much to tell you about here; go to the website and find out more. You will be amazed at how rich the Cockpit Country is and why it is so important.

We have lost important treasures over the years, places like Roaring River Falls, acres of cataracts now tamed for a minuscule hydropower plant, we have lost two phosphorescent lakes, one called the Flashes at Hellshire and more recently, Glistening Waters in Falmouth, largely destroyed by the dredging of the wetlands and the building of a hotel.

There are other questions in my mind, about Lumsden Cave which (according to Patrick Browne) was a tourist attraction in the 18th century; and why Blowfire Hill was so called, and why there appears to be an Olmec pyramid between Point Hill and Moneague, unless a bauxite company has got there first. Some of these are sacred places, in the most universal meaning of the word.

When we were trying to keep the developers out of Hope Gardens a woman wrote from the United States, begging us to save it. She had been born and lived in the 'ghetto' she said, and Hope Gardens was the only place she could find tranquility and the space to study. She had become since then, she said, a full professor at an American university.

From the Frying Pan into the Red Mud

2006-11-26T05:25:00.000+01:00

Common Sense
John Maxwell

We are all Maroons now, whether we know it or not, wherever we are on the face of the Earth, whoever we are, black, white or in-between, male or female, human, as long as we are alive, animal or vegetable, on land or in the sea or the air, our very existence is under attack.

If we want to survive we have to take action. We need to resist the destruction of our own and our planet's integrity, resist degradation and deformity and protect ourselves from extinction.

We are under siege by a system gone mad, an economic system gone berserk, unaccountable to anyone and responsible to nothing because this system has no rules. It can do anything it wants to anyone, any living organism.

It is destroying oceans, mountains and entire ecosystems, and with giant dams, even slowing the revolution of the Earth. It destroys everything in its way, creating deserts out of fertile land, submerging low-lying lands, poisoning the air we breathe, altering weather systems in unpredictable ways and producing more destructive hurricanes and typhoons, even slowing down the mighty Gulf Stream itself, destroying the ice-cover at the North Pole, breaking up the ice continent of Antarctica into icebergs bigger than Jamaica and threatening life itself everywhere on Earth.

It is a system described by George Soros, one of the world's richest men, as "Gangster Capitalism". On the world stage it calls itself 'globalisation'. On the local stage, everywhere, its adherents call it 'Development'.
In this system, everything and everyone is for sale. Human dignity itself becomes a marketable commodity, affordable to those with enough money to buy themselves a little time.

A FATHER KILLS HIS SON

In Vietnam 40 years ago, the Americans thought they were buying time and safeguarding progress. The Domino Theory was ascendant, and South-East Asia was to be made safe for democracy.

This ideal led to the killing and maiming of hundreds of thousands of people, some American, some Vietnamese. Here is the story of three Americans:

The son speaks: "The areas around us were heavily defoliated, so defoliated that they looked like burned-out areas, many of them. You know, almost every day that you were in riverboat patrol, you were being subjected to the Agent Orange factor."

The father speaks: "It is the case that the particular area in Vietnam in which my son's boat operated a great deal of the time was an area that was sprayed up on my recommendation, and in that sense it's particularly ironic that in a sense, if the causal relationship can be established, I have become an instrument of my son's own tragedy."

The son is Elmo Zumwalt III, son of Elmo Zumwalt II, Admiral and Chief of Naval Operations of the USA. Elmo the younger died at 42, destroyed by cancers induced by Agent Orange. His father died 11 years later, aged 79.

While serving as Commander of US naval forces in Vietnam from 1968 to 1970 the elder Zumwalt had ordered the spraying of the defoliant Agent Orange in the Mekong Delta, seeking to deny cover to snipers on the river banks. The older Zumwalt killed his son. His son's genes, deformed by Agent Orange, severely damaged his grandson's nervous system resulting in serious learning disabilities. He is unable to speak for himself.

Hundreds of thousands of South-East Asians were also killed and maimed by Agent Orange and many of their children have been born and are now being born dead, disabled or hideously deformed.

Agent Orange is a mixture of two phenoxyl herbicides 2,4-dichlorophenoxyacetic acid (2,4-D) and 2,4,5 trichlorophenoxyacetic acid (2,4,5-T). These were developed for agro-industry factory farming to control broad-leaved weeds. In broad-leaved plants they induce rapid, uncontrolled growth, eventually killing them. There were used all over the world by the middle of the 1950s. At least one extension officer in Jamaica, my friend 'Buddha' Webster, was killed by exposure to this toxin.

It was later learned that a dioxin, 2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzo-para-dioxin (TCDD), is produced as a by-product of the manufacture of 2,4,5-T, and was thus present in any of the herbicides that used it. This chemical is among those now present in the waters of Kingston Harbour, and as I pointed out five years ago, redistributed in the dredging of the harbour.

TCDD is a carcinogen, frequently associated with soft-tissue sarcoma, Non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, Hodgkin's disease and chronic lymphocytic leukaemia (CLL). 2,4,5-T has since been banned for use in the US and many other countries. Its initial effects include liver damage, loss of energy and diminished sex drive.

During the 1970s, at the height of the destabilisation of the Manley government, I saw at Newport East, a big transformer built for JPS dropped onto the quayside, breaking open and spilling into the harbour gallons of dioxins, which remain there to this day.

THE RESOURCE CURSE

Almost all the countries now described as 'developing' or 'underdeveloped' share one major characteristic: for hundreds of years their people, their lands, their resources have provided the raw materials for the development of the so-called 'developed world'.

As one American comic has said: "What is our oil doing underneath Iraq and Venezuela?"

Almost every war ever fought and most of today's wars and civil wars derive from the idea that the strong are entitled to the resources of the weak because the weak don't know how to use their resources appropriately. In this perspective, Jamaican farmland is not serving its proper purpose by producing food. Jamaican bauxite is necessary for 'progress' to make more planes, more frying pans, more garbage and to stiffen the GDP.

In Rio de Janeiro, 14 years ago, political leaders and bureaucrats from all over the world (including P J Patterson) met to agree on a new compact to define development or 'progress' if you will. They signed the Treaty of Rio, otherwise known as Agenda 21, and it committed the nations of the world to work together to assure the survival of the planet and all the living things which inhabit it by adopting and practising sustainable development.

The first paragraph of the preamble of the treaty is worth remembering: "Humanity stands at a defining moment in history. We are confronted with a perpetuation of disparities between and within nations, a worsening of poverty, hunger, ill health and illiteracy, and the continuing deterioration of the ecosystems on which we depend for our well-being."
Environmentalists put it more crudely: We are living beyond our means, overdrawing our credit from the earth, destroying finite resources for greed.

The oil industry is only now waking up to the prospect that its behaviour may condemn all of us to a future of darkness, disease and destitution; only now beginning to recognise that there is an imminent threat of catastrophic changes because of global warming. Even Mr Bush (USA) and Mr Howard of Australia seem to be seeing the light. The Chinese seem to have some way to go before they emerge from their tunnel of development.

In the Rio statement on sustainable development, the world's leaders acknowledged "the integral and interdependent nature of the Earth, our home" and proclaimed as the first principle of development that: "Human beings are at the centre of concerns for sustainable development. They are entitled to a healthy and productive life in harmony with nature."

THE PREDATOR'S PROGRESS

Progress is today defined by measuring how much of one's patrimony can be safely delivered into the hands of developers. We offer them incentives to come to despoil our patrimony, abuse and deform our social relations and generally disinherit us. In gracious exchange they will make billions of tax-free dollars and demonstrate how different they are to the rest of the miserable and oppressed of the earth. In return we can go live in the Bronx.

All over the world, indigenous populations are counselled to be investor friendly, to assist the despoliation of their holy mountains in Chile; the poisoning of their streams and the deforestation of their landscapes in New Guinea; the displacement, murder and rape of thousands to make way for oil pipelines in Burma (Myanmar). The progress-bringers are destroying the glaciers of Iceland, the Jarrah forests of Western Australia and the communal tranquility of the Cedros peninsula in Trinidad.

The 2005 Yale/Columbia Environmental Sustainability Index (ESI) showed Trinidad and Tobago as having the worst percentage of negative land impacts of 146 countries, yet Trinidad's government is ignoring the protests of its people who don't want any more pollution and degradation of their small and beautiful island.

Public protests in Chile, Brazil and Vietnam have kept proposed aluminum smelters out of those countries. The Trinidadian citizens group Cedros Peninsula United say that when they managed to obtain a copy of Alcoa's (secret) environmental clearance, jointly signed by Alcoa and the government's energy corporation, they found it full of omissions, inaccuracies and outright false statements.

The Barrick Corporation of Canada, like Alcoa, a transnational despoiler of the environment, is proposing to mine 500 tonnes of gold from mountain peaks in Chile. The Barrick corporation intends (Listen to This!) to relocate three glaciers (rivers of ice) to get at the gold.

As you might imagine, the people of Chile are not accepting this proposed rape of their environment.

The proposed assault on the Cockpit Country is not simply an assault on the sensibilities of a few environmentalists. It is an affront to the whole of humanity. When the great devastation comes we won't be saved by bauxite or alumina, but by the species finding shelter in the land of 'Look Behind' and similar refuges around the world.

A hundred years ago Jules Verne described the Gulf Stream as "the sea's greatest river [and] we must pray that this steadiness continues because…if its speed and direction were to change, the climates of Europe would undergo disturbances whose consequences are incalculable".

The sea's greatest river is slowing down, and the consequences have been calculated. A few weeks ago the British government published a report by Sir Nicholas Stern on the economic consequences of climate change. The report says the possibility of avoiding a global catastrophe is "already almost out of reach".

Stern says changes in weather patterns could drive down the output of the world's economies by up to £6 trillion a year by 2050, an amount equivalent to almost the entire output of the EU. This catastrophic prospect is the direct result of 'progress' as defined by people who have more money than conscience.

If the Gulf Stream slows to a stop or even if it simply continues to slow down, the effects on climate, farming and the populations of the world will be in one word, disaster.

Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel Prize economist of 2001 and former chief economist of the World Bank says, "The Stern Review of the Economics of Climate Change makes clear that the question is not whether we can afford to act, but whether we can afford not to act. [The report] provides a comprehensive agenda, one which is economically and politically feasible, behind which the entire world can unite in addressing this most important threat to our future well-being."

Neither Stern nor Stiglitz (nor Soros) is some wool-gathering tree-hugger. They are among the people recognised as the brightest in the world. I prefer to believe them rather than some public relations flack from any aluminium company or the Port Authority or any other agency of the Jamaican government.

The Spanish hotels on the North Coast are disasters in their own right and will soon become catastrophic losses because of sea level rise and hurricanes. And we will pay for that as we will pay for the 'Doomsday Highway' which is already obsolete.

As I pointed out in my column, People at Risk in February 2002, some of the geniuses of the Jamaican 'development' process tolerate no opposition to 'progress'. They will destroy our coral reefs and degrade the harbour to take bigger container ships - themselves extinct within 20 years. At that time I reported that the bottom of Kingston Harbour contained several extremely dangerous substances and warned that PAJ dredging would redistribute them unpredictably and in a manner which would almost certainly be hazardous to health, particularly to the people of Portmore.

I reported that among toxins present were: Arsenic, Cadmium, Dioxins (including derivatives of Agent Orange), Lead, Lindane, Hexachlorobenzene, Tetrachloroethylene and good, old Mad Hatter's Mercury.

"Progress' has brought civil war, genocide and HIV/AIDS to Africa. It has deformed our politics, driven away our best and brightest all in search of the Holy Grail of 'development'.

We can eat Trelawny yam and gungo peas. We can't eat Red Mud, although we may have to drink it, if progress has its way with the 'Land of Look Behind'. Prosit!

My Grandfather's Bones

2006-11-19T05:36:00.000+01:00

Common Sense
John Maxwell

My maternal grandfather's bones lie somewhere underneath the alumina refinery at Nain, safe at least from the caustic soda and soda ash which pollutes the air breathed by his neighbour's descendants, sickens their livestock and corrodes their aluminum roofs.

Beginning six decades ago, bauxite mining companies began to buy up huge areas of land in Jamaica, in areas where the earth was red, as red as blood when newly dug. The people from whom they bought the land were happy. There was no irrigation in St Elizabeth, St Ann and Manchester, and the land they sold was, in their opinion, not really good farmland. That was not true, as my friend Rolly Simms and his neighbours proved in Mocho, in Clarendon, where they grew huge crops of vegetables on bauxite land fertilised by chicken, cow and goat manure as they still do in parts of St Elizabeth.

That was before the bauxite companies came to Mocho in the 1960s, and their coming was in a way providential for the farmers there: they had been bankrupted by the failure of the Marrakech and Arawak hotels which had bought thousands of pounds of vegetables from them and went bankrupt without paying.

In January 1978, when I was chairman of the Natural Resources Conservation Authority, I dislocated my shoulder and nearly broke my neck falling out of a soursop tree in Hayes, Cornpiece, in Clarendon.

I was in the soursop tree because I wanted to see close-up, the damage the people said was caused to their roofs by the toxic and corrosive dust and fumes emanating from the Jamalco alumina refinery. I went to Hayes at the invitation of Hugh Shearer, MP for the constituency and former prime minister, who, in addition to explaining to me the problems of the people, confided to me what he said were the real reasons for the turmoil then rocking the Jamaica Labour party.

I was joking with Shearer as I climbed the tree, and didn't pay enough attention to the branch my foot rested on, which is why I fell out of the tree.

My shoulder was the least of our worries that day or in the weeks that followed. Nothing that Dudley Thompson, then minister of mining, or Shearer or I or could do, could persuade Jamalco to admit that their factory played any part in the misery afflicting the people of Hayes, Cornpiece.

"Even before community concerns escalated to public protest, the complaints of illness caught the attention of University of the West Indies medical student Patrece Charles-Freeman. After an exhaustive study of emissions and medical records within a 10-mile radius of the Halse Hall bauxite-alumina operation in neighbouring Clarendon parish, Charles-Freeman this month submitted a doctoral thesis documenting dramatically elevated incidence of asthma, sinusitis and allergies among those living close to the mining and refining operations.

In her study of 2,559 people, Charles-Freeman found that 37% of adults and 21% of children living within six miles of the facility suffered sinusitis. Asthma afflicted 23% of adults and 26% of children. Allergies, likewise, were markedly more prevalent among those who lived closest to the plant than in control groups seven to 10 miles distant." (Carol J Williams/Los Angeles Times, Oct 14, 2004) The Los Angeles Times story also reports: "One study under way at the International Centre for Environmental and Nuclear Sciences at the University of the West Indies is measuring how deeply bauxite and other heavy metals have penetrated the food chain. The centre's director, Gerald Lalor, notes that the soil around Mandeville is also replete with cadmium, mercury, lead, arsenic, uranium and other elements known to pose health risks to humans."

Jamalco denied liability. They have never admitted any environmental damage as far as I can discover.
They never have and they never will. A few days ago some of their top executives went to Mocho where the mining manager, Mr Driscoll said inter alia: "There are some things that should have been fixed, and I have said it before, a long time ago. But they haven't been (done) and we now have to fix it. I could sit here and try to apologise. I don't think it's going to serve us any purpose now."

Amen.

RED MUD, RED EYES AND RED-HANDED

According to a scientific paper written by the head of Jamaica's Water Resources Authority:

"Jamaica's bauxite/alumina industry produces a waste product known locally as red mud. This waste has been disposed of, for over 30 years since the plants were constructed, in unsealed mined-out pits within the karstic limestone.

The karstic limestone is the principal aquifer in the island and supplies 80% of the island's water supply. The waste is more than 85% water, is highly caustic and rapidly infiltrates to the groundwater table. Groundwater contaminated by red mud shows increased sodium, pH and alkalinity concentrations. Monitoring of groundwater around the four (4) processing plants in the island has indicated contamination of water resources.

Approximately 200 million cubic metres (MCM) of groundwater have been contaminated and another 200 MCM is at risk of contamination. The red mud ponds are in the direct path of groundwater flow and pose a serious threat to groundwater reservoirs and consequently the groundwater reserves of the island. (My bold face.) Relocation of the ponds would not remove the threat " (Abstract: "Contamination of water resources by the bauxite alumina operations in Jamaica -Basil Fernandez.

(For comparison, The Mona Reservoir holds about 800 million gallons of water. 200 million cubic metres is about 40 billion gallons of water, enough to fill 80,000 reservoirs the size of Mona.)

Since they began operations half a century ago, the bauxite companies have mined perhaps five thousand hectares (12,000 acres) of Jamaican soil under laws which theoretically compelled them to restore the land to its original state after the bauxite was extracted. If you fly over Jamaica tomorrow you will be able to see huge wounds in the flesh of our country, from which bauxite was extracted and the topsoil never replaced. That land is sterile, and you can make your own estimates of how much production has been lost in the years since the earth was ripped and torn to make frying pans and planes and lots of money for the financiers who owned the aluminum companies.

If in all those years the bauxite companies have made any unsolicited contribution to the welfare of this country or its people, I would like to know. There have been public relations gestures, such as the establishment of a chair in the Environment at University of the West Indies.

THE WIDOW'S MITE

The displacement of people from bauxite land disturbed not only the bones of our forefathers but also disrupted the cultures of our people. Many flooded into Kingston, to create huge and murderous slums. Some went abroad, taking their energy and skills with them. These days, their widow's mites, repatriated from the United States and Britain, contribute more to our national income than does the bauxite which chased them away. And most of the bauxite contribution is only notional anyway. What actually remains in Jamaica is picayune. More especially since a few years ago a leading light in the trade union movement called for Alcoa to be given a 'bly' by the people of Jamaica. They were paying too much tax!!! Mr Patterson agreed.

The CEO of ALCOA, the world's largest aluminum producer, last year received remuneration of US$4.4 million (J$290 million) a base salary of US$1.3 million, plus a $1.6 million cash bonus, along with $1.5 million in restricted stock. Alcoa's shareholders spent another $200,000 paying for, among other items, some of his taxes and club dues. The company's revenues for 2005 exceeded US$26 billion. It was to this CEO and this company that Jamaica made its essential contribution -the Widow's Mite indeed to support a man who gets one million Jamaican dollars for every day he works.

TO THE UTTERMOST FARTHING?

The mining company does not only destroy the land from which it extracts its wealth. The roads it carves into the mining areas open up the forests to loggers, woodcutters, fire-stick harvesters and charcoal burners. The collateral damage is several times the damage done directly by the mining companies.

In the 1970s when I saw from the air some of the craters created by bauxite mining, I asked Dudley Thompson whether we could not seal the bottoms of some of these excavations so that they could retain water for farmers and function also as public fish farms.

When he asked the Jamaica Bauxite Institute he was told that the mining companies were entitled to all the bauxite in every deposit and that they were determined to extract every last ounce. This meant that no clay would be left to seal the holes and most of the water they caught would simply be lost.

So we lose production and we lose water. But there is more, much more.

According to ALCOA's annual report, plans are in place to double production at Jamalco to at least 2.8 million tons per year of alumina, "making it among the world's lowest-cost refineries". That's why they needed an ease, a 'bly', the widow's mite. Without that, they probably couldn't afford it.

What the annual report does not say is that between the Jamaica Bauxite Institute and ALCOA, there has been a plan kept secret for 13 years, to build a million-ton a year alumina refinery in the middle of Jamaica's most ecologically and environmentally valuable real estate.

This kind of threat is not peculiar to us. In Australia, ALCOA is busy destroying the jarrah forests in Western Australia. In Iceland they are wrecking priceless glaciers, canyons and lakes and blighting the country's unique landscape to build a hydropower plant and aluminum smelter. In Trinidad they want to build power stations and smelters against the will and wishes of the people. And the company's biggest refinery in Rockfield Texas is the worst polluter in Texas and is abstracting the common water supply for sale to townships of its choice. The secret behind ALCOA's dirty air: the Rockfield refinery is located on a huge seam of soft brown coal lignite. And burning lignite is like burning dirt.

Unfortunately for us, and probably unknown to the government, there is a huge deposit of lignite in the Cockpit Country.

INSULTING CHARLES DARWIN

As I pointed out in a previous column (Land of Look Behind) the Cockpit Country is a riot of biodiversity and one of the most precious places on the planet because of this. The Cockpit Country is a living laboratory for the study of evolution and, unlike the Galapagos Islands it is relatively easily accessible to scholars and students and to people who simply want to enjoy the wilderness. Of course, when we protect the Cockpit Country, we need to protect its integrity, limiting access to some parts to scientists and qualified researchers. There is enough of this treasure to go round for millennia but not for bauxite.

What is planned, whatever the developers say, is nothing less than the total destruction of a priceless resource for a polluting alumina refinery, the destruction of Rio Bueno harbour and the world-famous coral cliffs above and below the waterline. Below the waterline are corals and an unimaginable wonderland of aquatic life, already threatened by climate change/global warming, and about to be sentenced to death by so-called development.

Some people just do not understand that some of us are unwilling to swap our culture and scientific treasures for just a few million more frying pans or a few thousand more Boeing 747s.

Unfortunately, what is being planned for the Cockpit Country is part of a massive degradation of the parish of Trelawny in the name of development. The developers are hoping to compromise the prime minister by involving her in such pagan rites as the groundbreaking for the latest Spanish disaster-by-the-sea.

Mrs Simpson Miller needs to advise herself urgently. She needs to round up the developers and force them to disgorge their secret plans and feasibility studies, and to seek advice as well from scientists from Caribbean universities and farther afield. What is at stake is much more important than we know.

We risk making world-class buffoons of ourselves if we continue on this totally anti-environmental, anti-ecological, anti-civilisation course.

The prime minister needs to know that 13 years after we signed it, the SPAW protocol, which forbids such obscenities, is still not ratified by Jamaica. Alone, of all the significant countries of the wider Caribbean, Jamaica has not ratified the protocol. Yet, ironically, the protocol is officially housed at the Seabed Headquarters at the bottom of Duke Street almost within sight of Gordon House.

There is an island (the last I heard) called Nauru, in the South Pacific. Like Jamaica, Nauru was composed almost entirely of a valuable mineral. In the case of Nauru the resource was phosphate, the fossilised excrement of seabirds. The island was ravaged for its guano; its people had no say in what happened. Now, they are looking for a roost somewhere. The mining has reduced Nauru to its bare bones, and global warming and sea level rise will soon conceal the crime.

We have nowhere else to go.

Journalism and Other Strange Practices

2006-10-29T20:00:00.000+01:00

Common Sense
John Maxwell

If you'd asked me two weeks ago how I thought the US midterm elections would go, I would have told you I expected the Democrats to win the House handsomely and the Senate by a small margin. The catalyst, I thought, was the sudden explosive decompression of Mr Jim Foley, the Congressman from Florida's Gold Coast whose sexual harassment of Congressional pages had just hit the fan.
But of course, I was reckoning without that Hippocrates of Sanctimony, President Bush's confidante, chief adviser and fondly nicknamed 'Turd Blossom' - the ineffable Karl Rove.

And of course, I am hobbled by the sad fact that, as Generalissimo Rumsfeld opined this week, "No one can predict the future with absolute certainty". He too is obviously reckoning without Mr Rove, who told a querulous journalist this week that he didn't expect any real change in the electoral geography of the United States anytime soon, as he, unlike the journalist, consulted 68 polls every day as against the mere dozen or so available to journalists and lesser mortals.

According to 16 of the most trusted US polls, samples taken in October put the generic Republican Party vote no higher than 41% with the generic Democratic vote no lower than 49%. In the polls, the percentage lead for the Democrats varies from nine points in the rightwing Fox/Opinion Dynamics poll to 23% in the USAToday/Gallup poll.

According to the RealClear Politics (RCP) blog, its sampling of nine of the major polls puts the average of the Republican vote at 37.3% - and the average democratic vote at 52.3% an advantage for the Democrats of 15.9%. The RCP sample discloses that President Bush's job approval rating ranges from a high of 40% in ABC and Fox polls to a low of 35% in the Newsweek poll. The average approval rating for Mr Bush in the nine majors polls is 38.4%.

One would imagine that with such substantial leads it would be impossible for the Democrats to lose, but, as the Republicans demonstrated in Ohio, two years ago, and in Florida four years before that, a determined Secretary of State can do wonders with bad numbers and rigged voting machines, with a little help from disfranchisement programmes and other ways of circumventing the democratic process.

Most scholars of the US system are clear that the GOP stole both the 2000 and the 2004 Presidential elections. As General Boykin famously said, it was God and not the people who put Mr Bush in the White House, rather like Maradona's claiming the hand of God that won the World Cup match for Argentina against England in 1986.

The science of opinion sampling has developed to the point that voters' intentions may be predicted with a considerable degree of accuracy. And in 2004, the predicted results were apparently confirmed by exit polls, when voters were asked immediately after voting, to say for whom they voted.

It is a curious fact that the longer after voting the voters are questioned, the bigger the likelihood that the result will swing more and more to the actual winner. When people know who has won, they tend to say that they voted for that person even if they hadn't.

According to the exit polls in Florida and Ohio in 2004, Kerry won both states. In exit polls immediately, after voting, most voters said they voted for Kerry but polls taken a few days later gave the electors' choice as George Bush. This result is so unlikely that statisticians consider it impossible.

Part of the problem, and it is a huge part, is the fact that a great many Americans will be voting electronically, that is, by computers. Unfortunately, every study conducted so far has proved that the machines used in the electoral process in the United States are to say the least, unreliable and easily compromised by evildoers.

The software used in the voting is proprietary, so that the states, the clients who are paying for the process, have no right to inspect the machines to see whether they work properly. In addition, in most states the voter does not get a receipt for his vote, so that it is impossible to check whether the votes were properly recorded by the software.

All of this makes the next elections a potentially explosive issue in the United States.
In Mexico some weeks ago, the candidate of the left was able to attract massive crowds to the capital to protest against what they thought was a stolen election. The anger seems to have subsided and Mexico City's streets are once again open to ordinary traffic. But what would happen in the United States, especially in populations so polarised by the president and the arrogant and corrupt behaviour of his party?

There are important and volatile minorities in several cities which may not take too kindly to the prospect of another two years of rule by Mr Hastert and his cronies and there are even bigger constituencies who are angry at the president for the war in Iraq and the inexorably mounting toll of death and human destruction.

When the swing against a party is as wide and deep as it is against the Republicans, ordinary people have a pretty good idea of who is likely to have won; people talk, exchange stories and are well aware of the possibility for crooked manipulation.

An electorate which is bedevilled by rising unemployment, watching their jobs disappear overseas, losing their capital invested in the houses and oversubscribed to the banks, may not behave like a volatile tropical mass, but they may be even more dangerous.

People realise that a large part of their liberty has been taken away by the president who speaks of distributing freedom and liberty abroad, that the money which could be paying for education and health care is being incinerated and atomised by the minute in Iraq and Afghanistan and that their taxes are being frittered away by corrupt politicians and contractors in an unnecessary war which is costing $2,000,000,000 a day.

JOURNALISM SPOKEN HERE

The pathetic behaviour of the US press is, at least, somewhat counterbalanced by a few brave men and women, some of them even in places like the New York Times but mostly in blogs on the internet. In Jamaica we depend on a few radio and TV stations and even fewer newspapers.

The Star, which claims the largest circulation in Jamaica, has never been a paragon of journalistic virtue. This week however, it outdid itself in crass vulgarity and horrific mischief making.

I have personally never seen anything as bone-headedly stupid and irresponsible as Wednesday's Star, which carried a picture of Prime Minister Simpson, apparently at prayer, hands clasped, head bowed, facing a headline which occupied half a page and proclaimed in 120 point type- 1.5 inches high: "Dreamer woman envisions...Portia in a bloody room".

And on page three the headline was repeated in smaller type (inch-high 72 point Tempo) with an unforgivably stupid and mischievous story about some delusional 'evangelist' who alleges that she has been having bad dreams, starring the prime minister.

The dreamer was asked by the incredibly credulous reporter to interpret the dream and the prophet/dreamer/"anointed messenger of God" obliged with a farrago of superstitious garbage, all faithfully reproduced in the Star.

Like most 'prophets', this woman claims to have foreseen various dramatic disasters, except that there is apparently no record of these prophecies.

People in politics can generally expect to be traduced in all sorts of ways, but invoking witchcraft is probably a new departure for this country's newspapers.

That same day a caller to Wilmot Perkins' talk-show alleged that 'Portia' was responsible for the killing of his relatives 20 years ago, when she campaigned near where the caller lived. This idiocy was permitted by the host, no doubt for good and sufficient reason.

After which, it is almost picayune to refer to the high-minded nonsense being talked about attacks by the government on Freedom of the Press.

Press freedom belongs to the people and is supposedly their guarantee that they will be able to share and receive news, which is in their interest, which is accurate and useful and conducive to their survival and prosperity. Spying on the prime minister is not a part of freedom of the press. The press has no right to make mischief or to behave like a 'Peeping Tom'.

I cannot imagine how all the high-minded hypocrisy about this case can be justified. Long ago, reporters were barred from the Hansard box in Gordon House because they interfered with the work of those who recorded the proceedings. Photographers have to get specific permission to take pictures and their vantage points have always been agreed on generally, in consultation with the Clerk of the House.

Parliament is not a street-corner or a park, and there are rules which must be obeyed. When the media bosses some time ago made a demonstration in Gordon House claiming an attack on Press Freedom they were both silly and ill-advised. The Press more than most, damages its real interests by crying wolf at the slightest hint of a lap dog.

MORE ABOUT THE PRESS

Mr Ken Jones, a man I first met when we both worked at Public Opinion as reporters, delivered himself in the Gleaner this week of some opinions on press freedom. I have time to take issue with only two of his allegations.

First, he regards the JLP government's persistent attempts to silence Public Opinion between 1963 and 1965 as petty stuff, and not really an attack on Freedom of the Press. I beg to differ, since I was in the middle of that issue; one of my contributors, a University lecturer named Bill Carr, was being threatened with deportation, while I was threatened with prison and worse by people like the prime minister, the attorney general and others, in Parliament and outside.

When a government goes as far as prohibiting advertising in a newspaper and forbidding civil servants to buy it for their personal use, that seems to me very much like an attack on press freedom. It certainly was an attack on me and on the jobs of the 40 or so others who worked at City Printery, whose excellent services were proscribed by the government. Government-related institutions such as the UWI and the Jamaica Agricultural Society were forbidden to have their printing done by the printery.

More than a dozen years later - in 1978 - when I was editor of the paper for the second time, somebody burned it to the ground. In the 1960s, equally mysterious forces had also burned down the left-wing Abeng.

Having dismissed the trifling incidents at Public Opinion, Ken Jones tells a story, which defies belief. According to him, during the 1970s, PNP types raided the offices of the JLP Voice and" cut out the tongue" of an employee there before "striking him dead".

I believe Mr Jones owes us all further and better particulars. And I believe that the Gleaner and the Star owe Jamaica and the prime minister some serious apologies.

In the public interest and its own self-protection, I belief the Press needs to discover what Press Freedom really means.

Poor People's Politics

2006-10-15T22:00:00.000+02:00

Common Sense
John Maxwell

More than 40 years ago, when I was editor of Public Opinion, I happened to be present on two occasions when my paper was formally, ritually and publicly torn to shreds. One was in Parliament, when the minister of education, Mr Edwin Allen, tore the latest edition of the paper into small shreds as he attacked me for criticising the prime minister, Sir Alexander Bustamante.

A few weeks later, I happened to be present at a meeting of the PNP's National Executive Council (to which I had been elected at the Party's conference) as the leader of the PNP, Mr Norman Manley, ripped the paper into two or three pieces as he denounced "the editor" for my alleged snobbery. The reason was my description of the PNP KSA council as "small men doing small things".

I am reasonably certain that Mr Manley knew perfectly well that when I referred to 'small men' I was referring not to class, but to the petty behaviour of the councillors. He had to say something because I had offended one of the most powerful men in the party, the former mayor and party strongman, Frank Spaulding.

I remember all this because as I watched events unfold over the past two or three weeks, I wondered what Mr Manley would have made of the PNP's recent misfortunes.

He would not, I am certain, have tolerated the behaviour of any minister who managed to bring the party into discredit, as several of them have done recently. He would, I am sure, have used the opportunity to clean house, ruthlessly.

The fact that Mrs Simpson Miller has not done that is probably due to the fact that unlike Norman Manley, she does not yet enjoy the unchallenged authority he did. But it is a missed opportunity because had she fired two more ministers she would have put her authority beyond dispute - at least for the present. The Trafigura affair, no matter how it ends, is a serious indictment of Jamaican politics, not simply of the PNP.

In this country, as in every other, no matter who signs the cheques, the people eventually and inevitably are the ones who pay. Let me explain by an analogy with radio broadcasting. Most people believe that radio broadcasting is a free good, like rain. In fact, the taxpayer/consumer pays at least twice for everything heard on radio. The advertisements are paid for in the cost of the advertised product and the advertising budgets are subsidised by the taxpayer/consumer in the form of income tax allowances.

Similarly, the people who finance political parties do not do it as charitable work, but because they expect some form of return on the money they have invested in the parties. These returns may not be direct benefits to the financier, but may simply result in a friendlier and more profitable atmosphere in which he can operate.

Despite all the hooha, it is clear that all political parties in Jamaican history must have been financed by somebody, and those that survive have been the most successful in attracting contributions.

In the case of the PNP, the group structure does provide some fairly predictable cash for the party, but not enough for the party to survive. The JLP, without any group structure, is forced to rely even more substantially on private donations. The result is that whatever the parties say about what they are going to do for the people, there is built into the system, another set of priorities. Everybody understands this.

What is to me nauseating is the pretence by some politicians that their devotion is totally to the public interest and that the financing of parties should be left to the vagaries of the market. That is a recipe for big man control of the parties. We need to devise a better system now.

The inherent contradiction between the public interest and the private interest has long been recognised in some countries, notably in Europe, India and to a certain extent United States.

But the cost of electioneering in these days of radio, television and the Internet is prohibitive. Most of the people running for office in the United States are millionaires, or nearly so. If they are not millionaires their friends are, and the whole structure of the lobbying industry is based on the 'legal' bribery of politicians as the Abramoff scandal has recently disclosed to those who didn't know.

The people are the ones who pay - either in missing services or misplaced priorities. When planning decisions are made without reference to the public interest, the whole community pays, and in cases like the Spanish hotel-building spree, will continue to pay for generations.

If the people are inevitably and eventually those who really finance elections, I can see no reason for us to interpose between them unelected agents in the form of businessmen who, no matter how high-minded, must put their own interests first. They would be fools not to do so.

It seems therefore clear to me that the people of Jamaica should insist that if they are going to finance the electioneering process, they should have the final say in how it works. It will not be difficult to devise a system which allows controlled private donations to parties while at the same time building in to the process, equity, so that private donations do not swamp the system and end up by buying elections and politicians.

Elections should be financed by the taxpayer/consumer, up front. It will be more economical and certainly more transparent and accountable.

Government and opposition should be allocated the same amount of money based on the number of electors in each constituency. New parties would enter the system if they could prove, by getting voters' signatures, that they have a certain level of support.

Audited accounts of how and where the money is spent must be demanded on pain of swingeing fines and or imprisonment.
All candidates must make public declarations of their assets and income and the successful ones will be required to make such declarations annually. This rule should be extended to the managers and directors of public companies in the public interest.

None of this is new or outlandish. Much of it is already law in the United States, Britain and other countries. Everybody can find out what the pay of university professors or superintendent of police is. Why should it be different for people in Parliament or the private industry?

Ending tribalism

As somebody once said, the struggle for scarce benefits is one of the prime movers of the Jamaican political process. The most vivid manifestation of this is in the formation of 'garrison' constituencies since the 1960s, partisan strongholds which are operated as beachheads from which the party tries to subdue and capture neighbouring areas.

Garrison constituencies are important because we depend on the outmoded notion of constituencies in elections which are really national events, dominated by national issues and parties. "Garrisons" are in fact, a form of do-it-yourself gerrymandering - carving out safe seats by force.

We can get rid of the garrisons by a simple expedient: introducing proportional representation in which the entire island is a constituency for which each party submits a list of candidates. This would mean that while individual politicians would still be able to influence voters, they would not be able to blackmail their way into Parliament.

Such a system would have many advantages, among them:

Useless candidates with no claim except garrison loyalty could be dropped;
Better candidates could be selected, people who would be valuable in policy-making but who may be almost unelectable outside of 'safe' constituencies;
Poor people, workers and intellectuals would have a better chance of being elected to Parliament, making Parliament more representative of Jamaica as a whole; and
There would be no advantage in fortifying and arming neighbourhoods to defend polling stations.

There would be another, huge advantage; no more lopsided victories based on small majorities in key constituencies, as happened in 1967. Parties would be more willing to talk to each other and to bargain in a democratic fashion to secure the real public interest.

A little history

I have a very personal interest in all of this. More than 70 years ago, a poor Baptist parson with Maroon antecedents decided to contest the elections in Trelawny. His opponent was a man who either owned or was the attorney for one-sixth of the arable land in Trelawny, a man who had been custos of the parish for 15 years and member of the Legislative Council for 25.

He ran the local building society and was chairman of the Parochial Board (Parish Council). He was the only lawyer in Falmouth. His name was Ewen and his opponent was my father. Against all the odds, my father won the election. In those days, electors had to be people who paid a certain amount of tax - '10 shilling voters' and their representatives had to pay even more tax - they had to be people of 'substance'.

When my father won, there was widespread consternation. He was known to have been influenced by Marcus Garvey and although he was supported by liberal 'leftwing' figures like Harry and Vernon Arnett, their support was tantamount to class betrayal.

Mr Ewen launched an election petition seeking to have my father's victory nullified on the ground that he was not qualified to be elected. He was too poor. As the petitioner, Ewen had first choice of lawyers and went to NW Manley, KC. After a trial lasting several days the judge found for Mr Ewen, after hearing lots of evidence, including denials by the tax collector that he had ever seen my father. My father's lawyer was JAG Smith, KC, then nearing the end of his life.

Shortly thereafter Mr Ewen dropped dead, an event popularly supposed to have been mysteriously engineered by my grandmother, Miss Kate, whose African connections were thought to be very powerful. My father won the ensuing bye-election, all his opponents losing their deposits. This time he had made sure he was a recognised taxpayer.

After the trial, Norman Manley wrote to the judge declaring that he could not believe that the people should be prevented from choosing their own representative because he was not a wealthy man. That was Norman Manley's first recorded statement on Jamaican politics and may have contributed to his position later when OT Fairclough and some others connected to Public Opinion persuaded him to start and lead the People's National Party.

A Week as Long as the Titanic

2006-10-08T15:00:00.000+02:00

Common Sense
John Maxwell

The behaviour of the Bush Administration and the US Congress has for the past six years obscured the fact that the United States is home to millions of some of the world's brightest people. And this week, when the US is undergoing one of its intermittent spasms of moral outrage, makes it even harder to appreciate the real torments of a great people.

The paladins of the right, moving effortlessly from equivocation to outright lies, are trying desperately to extricate themselves from a self-made quagmire which is threatening to swallow whole the conservative revolution of Gingrich, Bush and Rove.

It has not been an edifying spectacle. The political scene in the US has resembled a solfatara - a mud volcano - spitting steaming gobs of dark matter all over the pristine blueprints of the neocons and the flat-earthers.

What could not be accomplished by the revelations about 9/11, the disasters of Katrina, the unholy bloody mess of the Iraq war is being accomplished by virtual sex - sexual harassment in cyberspace.

All of a sudden, all the sterling hypocrisies of the American right have turned to dross and the hunt is on for a scapegoat to deflect the astonished public examination of the entrails of an unfeeling, uncaring, neo-fascist corporate state.

Astounding and almost incredible facts have been reported unnoticed: 20 American soldiers have been killed in Iraq in the first five days of October; Congress has given itself nine pay rises in 11 years while refusing even one rise in the minimum wage since 1996.

The average pay of CEOs of top corporations is rising 16 times as fast as the average American's pay; the icons of American manufacturing industry, General Motors and Ford, are unable to compete against Japanese cars made in the United States, and the stock market has made its second successive record level in a week while the housing market - one of the real engines of the US economy - is on the point of popping like an over-inflated balloon. Instead, the serious men and women of the American media are mesmerised by the story of a deflated hypocrite, Mark Foley, until this week the representative of one of the safest Republican seats in the US Congress.

There was no such attention given to the meltdown of integrity represented by the indictment of the former majority leader, Mr DeLay, or the collateral disclosures attending the exposure of his sidekick, Mr Abramoff, whose antics caused the transfer of millions of dollars into the hands of DeLay, Cunningham, Ney and those white-haired boys of American fascism, Grover Norquist and Ralph Reed.

And the odd thing about the latest scandal is that it appears to concern only the indiscretions of one hypocrite who lusted after young men while pretending to be their protector. It is hypocrisy that has brought the US to this pass, not the high crimes and misdemeanours of the cold-hearted scoundrels at the heart of the American democracy. And the reason is perhaps both simple and complicated.

It is simple because one set of unwise but hardly criminal actions has exposed, more cruelly than any indictment, the rot at the core of the capitalist counter-revolution. It is complicated because, as in the collapse of any house of cards, it is almost impossible to discern where the weakness lay.

Paul Weyrich, one of the gurus of the rabid right, compares what is happening today to what happened in 1974, when the Democrats won a landslide victory, not because their vote increased, but because embarrassed Republicans were too abashed to support the rascals who had led them - the Agnews, Nizons, Haldemans, Ehrlichmans and the ineffable Charles Colson whose immortal dictum was "When you've got them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow." It is Colson's principle which has got the Republicans into all this trouble.

Rove, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and their megalomaniac accomplices never calculated that anyone would have the guts to say out loud that the Emperor had no clothes. The press was squared, the media were all prepared for the triumphant Thousand Year Reich. Mr DeLay gerrymandered Texas, the biggest and one of the most populous states in the contiguous US, and got away with it.

Two weeks ago, Dr Rice had arrogantly dismissed President Clinton's claim that he had tried manfully to catch Bin Laden. Dr Rice retorted that her crew had done more in 8 months than Clinton in eight years about catching Bin Laden. Yet, one week later she had to confess that she could not remember an emergency briefing by Tenet, head of the CIA, who was close to a panic in trying to focus Dr Rice's attention on Bin Laden just two months before the terrorists hit the fan.

The administration has denied that it was even considered that generalissimo Rumsfeld should get the boot, and, despite his continuing disasters, he has got yet another vote of confidence from his president.

Bob Woodward's book has confirmed what was suspected by many of us and revealed by various people, including former Cabinet member Paul O'Neill and security chief Richard Clarke among others. They had reported that whatever Mr Bush's virtues, his were not a safe pair of hands - as the cricketers say.

A year ago when Cindy Sheehan bearded Bush in his Texan desert, it appeared to set in motion some Sisyphean rock which kept threatening to squash Mr Bush. There was Katrina, which was the sort of emergency that Jamaica and Cuba deal with regularly. A year after the disaster the real recovery effort seems to be just beginning.

And above all, there is the continuing bloodletting in Iraq, a civil war concurrent with an insurgency which is killing Iraqis at the rate of 30 thousand a year and killing hundreds and maiming thousands of American youth in a war that is unwinnable.

The problem with getting the hearts and minds to follow is that the grip on the gonads has to be consistent, firm and inexorable. No human apparatus of government, not Hitler's, Stalin's nor Franco's or any other has proved to have the sheer remorseless will to maintain the pressure. And when there is the slightest relaxation, whenever people realise that their masters are human after all, there is hell to pay.

It is interesting to note what has happened to one piece of the democratic process in the United States. According to Congresswoman Sanchez, the Republican leadership presented the Congress with just one copy of an omnibus National Security Bill and gave the house one hour to debate and pass it. Naturally, nobody noted that there was in this bill an item of 20 million dollars for a celebration of victory in Iraq and Afghanistan.

With the impending collapse of the coalition war effort in both countries, it would seem a little premature to be setting aside millions for victory celebrations. The problem, of course, is that if no one gets to read the bill, a document of hundreds of pages, no one will ever notice even 20-million dollar mistakes.

But even if anyone had noticed, would it have made any difference?

The Army fired Bunny Greenhouse because she had the temerity to discover billions (with a B) in fraudulent transactions related to the Iraq war. The press and public ignored hair-raising stories of millions of dollars in cash being shipped round Iraq like remaindered books. A million here, a billion there, and pretty soon you are being tiresome.

What will stick in the craw of the average American is the simple callousness revealed by the official inattention to reports of Mr Foley's indiscretions. Billions are being wasted, hundreds of young men are being killed, and now they hear that their kids are being sexually harassed in the Congress!

Somehow, this is the straw that has broken the elephant's back and made even Mr Bush irrelevant. While he is trying to scare the day-lights out of his people by dwelling on the Democrats inability to shoot straight, his speeches are falling into the wind, as irrelevant as flypaper in an igloo.

In the past few weeks, Americans have been startled and saddened by the slaughter of children in schools and I believe that this fact is of powerful importance in the breakdown of confidence. It is a short jump from Lancaster County and the slaughter of little Amish girls by a sex-crazed milkman to the depraving of little boys by one set in authority over them and all America. But is this a sort of unconsidered trifle that sparks revolutions.

JAMAICA: NO PROBLEM?

I was disappointed in the presidential speech at the recently concluded PNP annual conference. I am not alone.

There are a great many Jamaicans who had looked to the prime minister to blow a fresh wind of change through the politics of Jamaica, as she had promised in the speeches before her election. Instead, the prime Minister declared forthrightly that she proposed to continue with the heavy metal development which is now destroying what is left of Jamaica.

In the first place, as someone who says she treasures the Jamaican countryside, Mrs Simpson must know that these developments have never been properly examined before they were put on track. The government of Jamaica is continuing the trend started by Mr Patterson in disobeying, disregarding and ignoring its own rules. What is worse is that if as they say, Mrs Simpson Miller and the PNP are serious about sustainable development, they do not seem to understand what that means.

Last week I reported on the government's intention to destroy the Cockpit Country in the effort to scrape the last pound of bauxitic earth from Trelawny. And there are apparently plans to create some mad theme-park based on the Maroon heritage, no doubt in carefully packaged, plastic and concrete monstrosities built on the bones of some of our heroes.

Mrs Simpson Miller has welcomed Mr Patterson's parachuting himself back into the electoral direction of the PNP. That sends the wrong signal to those who support the new prime minister across party lines. And when Mr Patterson claims to be the dean of election winners in Jamaica, Mrs Simpson should not forget that while she won her seat against the odds in 1980, Mr Patterson lost his - the seat of FLB Evans - to an unknown.

The egregious disclosure of the financing of part of the PNP's campaign by Trafigura SA is another bad sign. I don't care whether Trafigura does not expect a quid pro quo. No foreign body has any business in Jamaican politics. That was my position when the CIA inserted itself into Jamaican politics in 1975 and it is my position now.

And it does matter that Trafigura is currently involved in a noxious affaire in the Ivory Coast in which several people have died. Since Trafigura is not unconnected to Glencore - which mines bauxite in Jamaica, and both are not unconnected with Marc Rich - I find it even more difficult to stomach any connection between them and the governing party of this country.

Political parties should not accept gifts from people with whom they may have to deal later. Whether the dealing is honest or not, justice will never appear to have been done.

Coincidentally, the German word for poison is gift.

The Land of Look Behind

2006-10-01T14:15:00.000+02:00

Common Sense
John Maxwell

There are some places which should be left untouched, some wild places, some serene and tranquil places, some mountains, some forests, some lakes, woods, some ruins.

In the Treaty of Rio Agenda 21, all the countries of the world agreed that there were, in effect, sacred places which should be preserved for the sake of the human spirit so that we can wonder at them, meditate in them, lose ourselves in their spaces and reconnect with the world of nature, of life outside of ourselves, a world from which we are so desperately trying to isolate ourselves in the name of progress.

The United Nations has a programme which designates such sites for protection. They are so special that they are part of the heritage of mankind, not simply of the people living next door. These places are places of refuge from the clamant world outside, the rat race, perhaps even the cell phone.

One such place is the Cockpit Country, or more poetically, The Land of Look Behind. The story is that when the British were trying to subdue the Maroons their soldiers were mounted two to a mule, one facing forward, the other riding shotgun as they used to say in the Wild West.

It is like nowhere else on Earth. The geologists say it is the type or paradigm, the perfect example of its kind, the nec plus ultra. It is a place of wild unearthly shrieks, strange subterranean rumbles and the most numbing silences. It is a place of purple, blue and pink rock, of rugged tortured peaks and the most placid, green and peaceful pasture at the bottom of a precipice miles below you, it seems; a place of echoes and of ghosts, of valiant struggle, of lying and treachery and death. It is a place where you might come upon a plant or animal previously unknown to science or a prehistoric rock carving. It is magic.

It is a place I've been in love with all my life since my father told me stories of our ancestors who fought and died here and of how he, himself, had hidden out from the bailiffs up here, until he could find a way to get to Kingston to be sworn in as a member of the Legislative Council (1935) and therefore immune to the claws of the debt collector.

Nobody has ever asked me where I'd like to be buried, but I believe if I had my druthers, I'd rather like to have my ashes scattered on the Burnt Hill Road, over Barbecue Bottom, so my voice can join the echoes there and my spirit the ghosts of some of my forefathers.

Apart from its magic, the Land of Look Behind is one of the wonders of the world, except that most people do not yet know of it.

The Cockpit Country/Land of Look Behind plays a starring role in Jamaican history. It was one of the last places where the few surviving Arawaks (Tainos) sought refuge from the Spaniards and where the Africans seeking freedom joined them and took shelter from the English and intermarried with them. It was the strategic base from whence they sallied forth to meet and defeat the British from time to time.

Our ancestors thought they were dealing with an honourable foe when they signed treaties with the British. The army might have been honourable, but the governor and the Jamaican elites were certainly not. The land the Maroons thought was theirs by treaty was unceremoniously recaptured by the British in the High Court somewhere about 1957.

The Cockpit Country is not only a historical treasure, it is a geological and biological treasure as well. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature has, for years, been classifying crucial resources of the world for their intrinsic value to humanity. It considers the Land of Look Behind one such place.

Here in Jamaica, the Land of Look Behind is set for a modern makeover, if the technocrats of the Bauxite Institute have their way. They will be destroying a 15 million-year-old landscape of surpassing beauty and utility so that Airbus and Boeing can build more planes to cause more global warming.

The problem is simple. Some people have a one-dimensional view of development. To them, development means bulldozers, steel, concrete and no mosquitos.

Aluminium and Jamaica

I was a very young reporter at The Gleaner in 1952 when the first shipment of Jamaican bauxite left for the United States aboard the SS Carl Schmedeman, an ore carrier built for Reynolds Jamaica Mines. Since that time, we have exported hundreds of millions of tons of bauxite and alumina, we have lost mountains, valleys, churches , graveyards, houses, and schools to the inexorable bite of the bauxite draglines and we've sacrificed children's lungs and the roofs of houses to the pollution from alumina refining.

We don't have much to show for it except some suspect foreign exchange earnings figures and a small class of specially privileged people who are supported by the industry.

One would have thought that in 50 years an industry as profitable as this might have clubbed together to donate a trade school to one of the communities they ravage. Only Kaiser, under Don Tretzel, ever seemed conscious of its community responsibility. The others have simply gone their merry way rejoicing at the fools who let them have their bauxite cheap and do not insist on the proper restoration of mined-out lands as specified in agreements and licences since 1944.

The aluminium industry is one of the worst polluters on earth, and in Jamaica their record is dismal. Alcan, the Canadian twin separated from Alcoa when Alcoa became too big even for the USA, has bequeathed to us two environmental time bombs in the form of red mud lakes at Mount Rosser and Mandeville. There is evidence that the St Catherine groundwater has, for some years, been polluted by Mount Rosser.

In Manchester, bauxite mining has changed the course of underground water supplies and Porus now, from time to time, is the site of a brand new lake.

The problem is that Jamaica, west of the Wag Water River, is either limestone or bauxite and the character of the landscape is determined by these two substances.

I believe, without one shred of scientific backing, that Jamaica was created by the asteroid that destroyed the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. I think that masses of the sea-bottom were pushed up against a small volcanic island (now the Blue Mountain Range) and that over another 40 million years or so, the limestone gradually rose to the surface to become western Jamaica.

The impact of the asteroid had deformed the limestone to produce a feature that puzzles geologists to this day: how come in Jamaica we find older rocks on top of younger rocks? Nothing but an enormous impact could have so distorted the geology, producing the effect of a layer cake thrown against a wall.

This limestone island was relatively level, but some parts were made of denser material than others, and the rain dissolved the softer parts, leaving the harder parts to form what we now see as the characteristic hillocks of the Cockpit Country rising out of terra rossa, red earth bauxite, to which the limestone had degraded.

Whether my fanciful speculations make sense or not, the fact is that the largely karstic landscape of western Jamaica was formed by the dissolution of limestone by rainwater, and this process took place not only above ground but also below it. The result is that Jamaica has an internal plumbing system, with underground rivers and lakes storing and distributing water in a way that is now predictable and dependable. When one of these subsurface conduits becomes blocked we get sudden lakes, such as at Exeter and Chigwell and Newmarket in 1979 and Moneague.

But the Cockpit Country is special; it captures rain from St Ann, Trelawny and St James and this water, cubic miles of it, is stored underground and released through numberless underground caves or conduits. Some of this water goes to the west to the Queen of Spain Valley and provides the water for some of the rivers there, but most of it goes apparently to the Martha Brae, which runs north to Falmouth, and the Black River, which runs south. Some of the water also goes to the Dunn's River and Roaring River in St Ann.

The most noticeable characteristic of all of these rivers is that their volumes are nearly constant all year round, regardless of how much rain falls during the year. The reason is that the Cockpit Country is a huge reservoir with possibly a volume of water greater than Kingston Harbour, and while the level of the aquifer may vary, because of its huge size, the volume of outflow hardly varies at all.

When these conduits become blocked you get lakes such as at Moneague, Chigwell, Exeter, Newmarket and other places. And it seems that the lake in embryo at Porus may have something to do with the operations of the bauxite mining companies. They, of course, are denying all liability and they will continue to deny liability even if Porus disappears with a giant sucking sound.

Porus would be bad enough, but the aquifer underneath the Cockpit Country is vital to the entire North Coast, and not least, to the tourism industry. All the experts on karstic geography agree that it is very dangerous to interfere with karstic landscapes. There are many reasons.

Mining, for instance, brings with it the threat of severe pollution from the activity itself. The red earth, which has stabilised over millions of years, acts as a filter for the water. But when the red earth is disturbed, as it has been in a river in the southern Cockpit Country, you may find the water turning blood red. If bauxite mining were to produce this result, in even one river there would be, as my grandmother used to say, Hell to pay!

Imagine, if you will, the cruise ships being told that our water is perfectly drinkable. It just happens to be red today. Imagine the tourists in the hotels come to Jamaica for an instant tan and imagine the Jamaicans in their homes, washing their clothes in red water. This eventuality may be unlikely, but it is possible. The point is that no one can say for sure. And then, of course, there is hydrogen sulphide, which gives rotten eggs their characteristic aroma. That's sequestered down there too.

There is, of course, much more to the karst topography. The isolated hillocks are in themselves, little islands of biodiversity where the less mobile life forms may mutate to their hearts' content untroubled by any considerations of incest or endogamy. Much the same is true of the caves and sinkholes which are not all connected to each other. Because of this, the Cockpit is a riot of biodiversity for small creatures, and because of its relative inaccessibility, for larger creatures as well.

According to cockpitcountry.com, the place is a rugged, inaccessible area of inland Jamaica:

These very characteristics have given it special importance and it is proposed that it be designated a World Heritage Site. It is an island-within-an-island of specially adapted biodiversity found nowhere else in the world and is a last refuge for some species driven from the rest of Jamaica by humans.

Jamaica's size and diverse physical features presented a wide range of micro-habitats that facilitated within-island radiation and speciation. The present composition of species, both floral and faunal, represents some of the highest rates of endemism in the world, recognised particularly for ferns, birds, reptiles, frogs and land snails. cockpitcountry.com

Snails may not grab your attention or excite your admiration, but apart from those who simply cannot resist them, there are others who understand that the more diverse life is, the more likely we - humans - are to survive.

In a field with 15 crop varieties, an epidemic may kill one or two, it won't kill all because bacteria have their preferred hosts. Similarly in human society, diversity may actually save lives, as in 1724 when an epidemic of smallpox in Boston was defeated by the fact that African slaves understood the rudiments of vaccination before Lister, and saved dozens of those who were crazy enough to trust themselves to the tender mercies of the slaves.

In this connection, remember when I wrote a few years ago about an insignificant little animal known to its friends as Ectinascidia turbinata? This tunicate species produces a class of chemicals called secondary metabolites which have been shown to be effective anti-tumour agents. This squirt is likely to play a starring role in the fight against cancers, having been found to inhibit the growth and even kill certain tumours.

It was seriously threatened by the dredging of Kingston Harbour. If scientists do not succeed in synsthesising the active compounds, we could probably make millions from allowing Ectinascidia turbinata some lebensraum. And who knows whether one of the 500 species of snails found in Jamaica may not have the answer to AIDS or cancer?

Information on the plant species composition and distribution of the Cockpit Country is incomplete and many years of concentrated work will be needed to begin to approach a comprehensive evaluation of the flora. At present, 106 species of vascular plants from 43 families have been found only in the Cockpit Country. This includes 101 Cockpit Country endemics. The remaining five species are not endemic, but in Jamaica occur only in the Cockpit Country.

Scientists say that the features of a karst landscape depend on the interaction between the components of this system: water, air, soil, rock, life, energy and time. The integrity of karst systems depends on the preservation of this interaction. If the balance is upset by sudden changes in one or more components, the whole system may be disrupted.

One of the principles agreed to by the whole world at Rio in 1992 was the Precautionary Principle. It means that in any development, nothing that appears dangerous should be done simply because there is no direct scientific evidence that it is dangerous.

We know that mining the Land of Look Behind is dangerous. The scientific evidence exists. But the geniuses of the Jamaica Bauxite Institute and the Natural Resources Conservation Authority are going to do it anyway if we let them.

Trust the People Every Time

2006-09-24T06:00:00.000+02:00

Common Sense
John Maxwell

We should be grateful to the Gleaner for last week's story on tourism development. Under the headline Too many rooms! Hotel growth pressuring infrastructure it painted a frightening picture of what I call berserker development.

The story was frightening, because it disclosed that what I had suspected was true many of those who are supposedly responsible for guiding and regulating development don't understand what they are doing, or, if they do, are not doing what they should be doing.

Winsome Townsend, director of strategic planning at NEPA, said while the agency stuck to the guidelines, it did not have the legal authority to stop development if the Parish Council permits it.

I have no idea where Miss Townsend got this idea. The local planning authority is and has always been subordinate to the national planning authority. The National Environmental and Planning Agency, NEPA which combines the Natural Resources Conservation Authority and the Town Planning Department has had for a very long time the authority to stop certain kinds of development if they chose to do so.

Thirty years ago when I was chairman of the NRCA we had much less legal authority than the NEPA/NRCA now possesses.

The NRCA can now issue Stop Orders for any development and require Environmental Impact Assessment Reports on a wide range of developments which includes the building of hotels. In the case of the old NRCA, we could stop any kind of development on any beach in Jamaica simply by withholding a licence. This meant we could prohibit wharves, dredging, land reclamation and use of the beaches for any purpose.

The NRCA was an amalgamation of the Beach Control Authority, the Wildlife Protection Authority, the Watersheds Protection Authority which meant we had other recourses should we have needed to fall back on them. We effectively stopped the mining of peat at Negril threatening to invoke the Watersheds Protection Law, among other things, but we campaigned against it so effectively that we did not need to invoke any sanctions.

It seems to me that the new NEPA, a super agency apparently suggested by the World Bank, has powers of which its members must be unaware. But even if it did not have the powers I think it has, the NRCA and the Town Planning Authority should have a great deal of moral weight which could be used to dissuade the more reckless of our development agencies.

The UDC managed in the 1960s to gain Mr Seaga's approval to be a local planning authority in areas over which it had sway, but this still did not allow them to do what they liked, and when we pressured them to install sewerage works to protect Negril's beaches, they at least pretended to obey until the government changed in 1980.

What they did after that can now be seen in the depleted, muddy beaches of Negril, acres of which have been lost because of sewerage and human interference with the seafloor.

The corals are dead, as well.

Part of the problem with Jamaican planning and development is that the people with power are these days, Jamaicans in name only. What they know of Jamaica is the immediate area round their houses and offices and the roads to the airports. But their hearts, minds and wallets are in Cayman, Miami and Lichtenstein.

This is why Jamaican food finds such a hard time getting onto the international menu, because so many Jamaican 'ginnigogs' either don't know the food or think it beneath them.

CARRYING CAPACITY

One of our major problems in Jamaica is carrying capacity. One of the Gleaner's guests at its editor's forum environmental engineer Chris Burgess said the concept of carrying capacity was often misunderstood in Jamaica.

"Carrying capacity is ill defined and there is no study in this country that can come forward and say that our way of determining carrying capacity is absolutely the best way or is well respected or is the way," He added: "I think that the idea that Runaway Bay can only facilitate safely 2000 (hotel room) is crazy and I believe the sustainable number is quite likely higher."

With all due respect to Mr Burgess there are several ways in which carrying capacity can be measured. For instance, the availability of water is clearly a limitation on any development. If Runaway Bay can support 2,000 rooms, as Mr Burgess says, there must be a source for at least eight million gallons of water per day. The Bahia Principe at Mammee Bay, planned to have 2,000 rooms in one place, would require a similar volume of water. Where is it to be found?

All along the North Coast the people who actually live there are in dire straits because they cannot get enough water.

In Duncans, for which my father helped secure the Dornock water supply (from the Rio Bueno) about 80 years ago, there are water problems today because of overdevelopment. At Silver Sands resort there are water shortages and if the crazy new Harmony Cove development is ever built Duncans will probably have to import water from somewhere.

Already, there is severe pressure on the North Coast water supplies from cruise ships and hotels. Some people fool themselves that cruise ships come to Jamaica for in-bond shopping and other gated attractions. I have the feeling they come mainly for fairly cheap water, which is not easily available either in Florida or in the rest of the Caribbean.

Yet the National Water Authority has in its wisdom privatised the water supplies of Ocho Rios and the Runaway Bay/Discovery Bay areas, knowing that there is a huge sellers market for water for cruise ships, hotels and golf courses. And with the NWA's religious principles apparently preventing it from making money, I believe that the prime minister should immediately take back into public ownership these water supplies.

The private owners have not and will never be responsible for the maintenance of the watersheds. It is our sweat and tears which maintain them. And since that is so, it seems to me only fair that when water is to be distributed the people of Jamaica, whose forefathers died for this land, should be entitled to first dibs.

TEARING DOWN JAMAICA

The Prime Minister, Portia Simpson, is, in my view, in danger of being so surrounded by 'apparatchiks' from the previous regime that she will not be able to implement her own policies for some time to come.

In the meantime, the people of Jamaica have a pretty good idea of what Portia wants; they simply want to hear her summon them to action.

For a start, in her pre-election speeches, Portia made it clear that her version of development was based on people and not on concrete.

She spoke about mobilising volunteer effort and in helping people take charge of their own destinies. The berserker development now afoot in tourism is diametrically opposed to Portia's vision.

The same is true of developments in the bauxite industry. Jamaica is approximately half bauxite and half limestone with a smattering of volcanic and other rocks to sweeten the geological pie. If the Bauxite Institute and Marc Rich have their way we will be tearing down the entire country to get at bauxite an enterprise which has already disfigured the green face of Jamaica. At Marlborough in Manchester, birthplace of Norman Manley, the bauxite companies have created a moonscape out of what should be a tranquil national park.

The government of Mr Patterson approved plans to let these predators loose in the Cockpit Country, without any regard for the incredible beauty of that Land of Look Behind or the biological treasures contained therein.

We can't eat bauxite and what we get from it doesn't feed anyone. When it is gone it is gone, and when it is gone it will leave huge craters instead of land on which we could grow food and show off the beauty of our country to ourselves and our visitors for millennia to come.

The current berserker development is designed for one thing only to make sure that the coupon clippers who own the Jamaican debt will be repaid. It will contribute nothing to the development of our people and will ravage the landscape and destroy and foreclose all sorts of prospects for real, continuing and sustainable development.

In Anguilla, a tiny island about the size of Kingston Harbour, the government has decided to put a moratorium on development. The reason is that the people fear that Anguilla will become like Jamaica, an island completely surrounded by hotels, in which the locals are there only on sufferance and to provide cheap labour.

The UDC's programme of beach stealing must be stopped in the public interest, or else there will soon be war between the people and the tourism industry.

We need to devise, with the wisdom of the ordinary people, a plan to make Jamaica at least as attractive a place for its own citizens as it is for visitors. We need to decide what we mean by development.

Development cannot mean the continue exploitation of the people for the benefit of foreigners. Bauxite mining needs to be reined in before it destroys our country.

There is an island called Nauru in the South Pacific which was formed almost entirely out of the excrement of seabirds guano a complete fertiliser, mined profitably for more than a 100 years. The problem with once beautiful Nauru is that it has almost vanished.

Most of Nauru has been exported to fertilise gardens in Europe and America and the rest will soon be consumed by the rising tide which lifts all globally warmed economic jackasses.

We have seen some of the attempts of ignoramuses to develop Jamaica. The destruction of Long Mountain is a standing reproach to our planners and politicians. We saved Hope Gardens, but it has been placed in the hands of people who didn't give a damn about it when it was menaced by Messrs Cartade and Patterson.

And of course, a few years ago we frightened off the bozos who wanted to build a facility in Jamaica to burn PCBs imported from the US. By burning their toxic waste, we would earn lots of money so said the wise men of the Bauxite Institute that is, if any of us was alive and healthy enough to have survived this crazy experiment.

Over the last few weeks in the Ivory Coast, in West Africa, two senior French officials of a Dutch-based commodities company have been arrested and their passports confiscated in connection with a toxic waste scandal. More than 44,000 people have sought assistance at hospitals and clinics since the toxic waste was dumped from a Panamanian ship last month. Seven people have died but autopsies have not determined the cause of death.

What happened? Somebody had the bright idea that the Ivory Coast could earn some foreign exchange by accepting toxic waste from abroad for dumping. They were no doubt following the infamous reasoning of Mr Lawrence Summers, who, while a vice-president of the World Bank attempted to change the bank's thinking on the environment.

According to Summers, since the costs of pollution depend on the foregone earnings from increased morbidity and mortality.health impairing pollution should be done in the country with the lowest cost, which will be the country with the lowest wages. I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that.

Summers wrote:

I've always thought those under-populated countries in Africa are vastly nuder-polluted; their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low (sic) compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City. Only the lamentable facts that so much pollution is generated by non-tradable industries (transport, electrical generation) and that the unit transport costs of solid waste are so high prevent world welfare-enhancing trade in air pollution and waste.

The demand for a clean environment for aesthetic and health reasons is likely to have very high income elasticity. The concern over an agent that causes a one in a million change in the odds of prostrate (sic) cancer is obviously going to be much higher in a country where people survive to get prostrate cancer than in a country where under five mortality is 200 per thousand.

The problem with the arguments against all of these proposals for more pollution in LDCs (intrinsic rights to certain goods, moral reasons, social concerns, lack of adequate markets, etc.) could be turned around and used more or less effectively against every Bank proposal for liberalisation.

Our homegrown developers seem to think along the same lines as Dr Summers. After all, his last job was as President of Harvard where he behaved in a very Jamaican fashion; he couldn't get along with women or with black professors.

I, being an undereducated yahoo, prefer Michael Manley's words, Trust the people every time. We need to find out what we really want our country to mean to us and what we want to represent to the world.

Elephant in Musth

2006-09-17T11:00:00.000+02:00

Common Sense
John Maxwell

It is apparent, looking at Florida, that the most perfect system can be subverted by determined saboteurs with enough money - as long as good people keep quiet. The real George Bush, if he is appointed president, will use his time to destroy the integrity of the country he rules, starting with the Supreme Court.

Then he can start on dealing with the rest of us. That's his job, and as the American Press has made plain, nothing needs to be known about him and his multifarious incapacities because Big Brother in the giant corporations will tell him what to do. We are all in a for a very rough ride.

"Democracy! Enough Already!" - Common Sense, Dec 10 2000.

The good people seem at last to be coming awake.
After six years of conspicuous slumber and inexplicable silence, influential actors in the United States are at last finding the courage to defy the miasma threatening all of us.

All over the world, it seems, people are beginning to realise that we are being led down the road to Armageddon by a US Administration lacking either moral sensibilities, strategic reasoning or elementary common sense.

The Republican Party in the US Senate has at last rebelled against Mr Bush's maleficient defiance of International Law and world opinion. They have been joined by the one-time designated adult in the Bush Administration, Colin Powell. They have rejected George Bush's attempt to circumvent his own Supreme Court in order to authorise the torture of foreigners in US custody and to backdate forgiveness for all those who obeyed his corrupt instructions to flout the Geneva Conventions.

Last week, as Carl Hulse says in the New York Times, "On one side are the Republican veterans of the uniformed services, arguing that the president's proposal would effectively gut the nearly 60-year-old Geneva Conventions, sending a dark signal to the rest of the world and leaving the United States military without adequate protection against torture and mistreatment."
On the other side are the dinosaurs of the Republican Party and the president and his White House cabal.

The British establishment has long been clear about what Mr Bush has been up to.

Lord Steyn, perhaps Britain's most respected judge, two years ago described the US concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay as a scandalous, "Law-free zone". A few months ago, the Lords of Appeal unequivocally denounced the US gulag system, declaring it an uncivilised affront to humanity and justice. And, a few days ago, the head of Britain's Judiciary, the Lord Chancellor, Lord Falconer, excoriated the American position in the following words:

"It is a part of the acceptance of the rule of law that the courts will be able to exercise jurisdiction over the executive.
"Otherwise the conduct of the executive is not defined and restrained by law.
"It is because of that principle that the USA, deliberately seeking to put the detainees beyond the reach of the law in Guantanamo Bay, is so shocking an affront to the principles of democracy.
"Without independent judicial control, we cannot give effect to the essential values of our society."

It was the second time Lord Falconer had spoken out about the controversial camp, where 450 terror suspects are thought to be detained. In June this year, the Lord Chancellor denounced Guantanamo Bay as a "recruiting agent" for terrorism, and described the existence of the base as "intolerable and wrong".

In Brussels, the European Parliament last week heard the Spanish foreign minister Miguel Moratinos report that "[Spanish] territory may have been used not to commit crimes as such but as a stopover on the way to commit crimes in other territories".

He added that 66 suspect flights had made stops in Spain. What is so shocking is that the president has boldly, flagrantly and contemptuously attempted to defy and make meaningless, the decisions of his country's Supreme Court.

It is a court most of whose members were appointed by Republican presidents wanting to castrate the power of the judiciary to exercise the constitutionally decreed checks and balances which were thought to guarantee democracy in the United States. The present Supreme Court is even more Republican than the one which sanctified George Bush in the presidency of the United States despite his losing the presidential election in 2000.

When I predicted that George Bush would use his time to destroy the integrity of his country many people told me that I was simply prejudiced against the man; but I had observed his behaviour and came to the conclusion that he was going to be a disaster for the United States and a catastrophe for the rest of us.

The starving, brutalised people of Palestine, Darfur and Haiti, the terrorised millions in Iraq and the opium growers of Afghanistan are eloquent testimony to the accuracy of my prediction.

In addition to the attempt to subvert the law, the Bush administration has openly attempted to samfi the world into believing all sorts of impossible things.

Last week the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) blasted the US Administration indirectly and Congress directly for a brazen attempt to sell a monumental lie as a pretext for their anticipated war against Iran.

In an unprecedented broadside from a UN agency, the IAEA denounced a US Congressional report as "outrageous and dishonest" including "serious distortions" and "erroneous, misleading and unsubstantiated statements".

The letter from the IAEA was addressed to Peter Hoekstra, the Republican chairman of the committee that issued the report. The IAEA said the report contained a litany of misleading statements, and falsely (and fantastically) suggested that the IAEA sidelined an inspector who believed that Iran was deceiving the IAEA about the character of its nuclear ambitions. The IAEA suggested that Congress should check its facts.

When the congressional report was released last month, Hoekstra said his intent was "to help increase the American public's understanding of Iran as a threat". As a substantial minority still understand Saddam to have been behind 9/11.

According to the Washington Post, "Privately, several [American] intelligence officials said the committee report included at least a dozen claims that were either demonstrably wrong or impossible to substantiate. Hoekstra's office said the report was reviewed by the office of John D Negroponte, the director of national intelligence.

The committee report entitled 'Recognising Iran as a Strategic Threat: An Intelligence Challenge for the United States', was published on August 23.

The report is a classic piece of Republican propaganda. It is reminiscent of the administration's attempts to con world opinion to believe that Saddam Hussein, against the odds and all his protestations, possessed weapons of mass destruction and was an accessory to 9/11. The report's author, Frederick Fleitz, was a senior adviser to the United States' UN ambassador, John Bolton, until 2005.

John Bolton in orbit

One of the most dangerous identified lying objects in the Bush firmament is a short, self-important man named John Bolton. Like many of the Bush neo-con brains trust, Bolton has a murky history. His most dangerous exploit up to now was his attempt to con the world into believing that the US would be justified in attacking Cuba. He falsely alleged, in official documents, that Cuba possessed biological weapons of mass destruction and was peddling them to terrorist organisations and regimes.

This outrageous lie was finally exploded by President Jimmy Carter and a consortium of experts who visited Cuba to disprove Bolton's fantasies.

If war is politics by other means, as Clausewitz said, the Bolton doctrine does not admit that war is failed politics, it holds rather that war is preferable to politics. Bolton has been the lead agitator in attempting to blackmail the Security Council into adopting sanctions against Iran, justifying an American attack on that country.

Bolton has a Napoleonic complex, some would say a Superman complex, believing that the rest of the world epitomised in the United Nations, is utterly useless except when it acts as the servant of, and cleaner-up for the United States. His appointment to the United Nations was not simply a studied insult by Bush and Cheney, it was a deliberate provocation.

Even in the Republican-dominated Congress the move was unacceptable, and a scheduled, second hearing to confirm his nomination as ambassador had to be postponed because at least one Republican senator was prepared to speak out and vote against this misguided messenger.

The hearing will now await the new Congress, and if my instincts are accurate, it will fail ignominiously in a Senate newly dominated by Democrats with the support of disenchanted Republicans.

Subverting democracy

The Republican Administration in the United States could easily pass as a creation of George Orwell. Democracy is spread by invasion and war and almost every statement of any importance conceals somewhere within it a lie.

Right now, a galaxy of Republican Congressmen is either under lock and key ('Duke' Cunningham) under indictment (Ney and Delay) or under investigation for criminal misfeasance and malfeasance. The Senate majority leader (Frist) is himself under investigation, and if the Democrats win in November, as I expect, bogus voting or no, even Mr Bush may find himself impeached.

In its last two tenancies of the White House the GOP contributed an impressive list of malefactors up to and including the national security adviser McFarlane and the secretary of defence Weinberger who were saved from jail only by presidential pardon. Lesser lights, starlets like Elliott Abrams, Otto Reich, and Roger Noriega have contributed more than their share to the brutalisation and suffering of Latin America. Those who contributed to the stealing of the 2000 election were handsomely rewarded and let loose to wreak more havoc. The emblem of the Republicans, the Grand Old Party (GOP) is, aptly, an elephant.

Male elephants over a certain age periodically go into a condition known as musth, characterised by a huge excess of testosterone. Elephants in musth are as eager to fight as to mate, and they are so aggressive that the normal tribe hierarchy is disrupted, because even the most senior and biggest bulls will avoid smaller, younger bulls in musth because they are so dangerous - like teenage gunmen.

Musth is the Hindi rendering of the Urdu word mast, meaning intoxicated, which comes from an earlier Persian expression, which means poisoned. An elephant in musth will kill anything in its way - humans, including its keepers, other elephants or any other animal. Musth elephants are sometimes known as rogue elephants.

The behaviour of the Bush administration is, in my view, similar to the behaviour of an elephant in musth. John Bolton expresses the metaphor perfectly. He is the United States' senior diplomat though he does not believe in diplomacy. He is US Ambassador to the UN - which he believes is an unnecessary nuisance.

He deals with problems not by dialogue, but by threats and aggressive behaviour. He is the frontman for Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld, as dangerous a group of human beings as a whole herd of elephants in musth. They will not take "Yes" for an answer. Nothing but total submission will do.

And in their mad career they are fortified by the support of the American media.

Last week, the giant media network ABC, broadcast what it claimed was a documentary, entitled The Road to 9/11.
Before the so-called documentary was broadcast, there were several complaints about the accuracy of the script and it was soon clear that the enterprise was an assault on history and the truth; it was the opening black propaganda broadside against the Democrats in advance of the crucial November elections. When the Clinton administration left office, they made sure to warn the Bush administration about the nature of al-Qaeda and the intentions of Bin Laden.

Bush was asleep at the wheel on September 11, 2001, but the documentary blames Clinton and his crew for 9/11 and claimed that its conclusions were based on the official 9/11 Report.

The ABC documentary is reminiscent of the Swift Boat affair of the last Presidential election, when the Vietnam war hero John Kerry was painted as an unworthy coward and Bush, who spent most of the war in 'undisclosed locations' in Texas and Alabama, was painted as the hero.

In the 1970s, we used to be blasted when we complained about the malign attentions paid us by the foreign - mostly American - Press.

When one sees what they will do to their own heroes and others, we must consider ourselves fortunate to have escaped without greater damage. The Haitians, the Palestinians, the Guatemalans and the Chileans were not so lucky.

Of course, we also forget that September 11 was the anniversary of the American-sponsored coup which killed Allende and thousands of Chileans and subjected Chile to two decades of terror and bloodshed. The current President of Chile, Mme Bachelet, was herself a victim of Mr Kissinger's surrogates.

Five Years Later

2006-09-10T11:00:00.000+02:00

Common Sense
John Maxwell

Five years ago tomorrow, 19 youngish men, middle-class Arabs, mostly from Saudi Arabia, commandeered four commercial airplanes and flew them into the World Trade Centre buildings in New York City, into the Pentagon in Washington and into the ground in Pennsylvania.

The twin towers of the World Trade Centre billow smoke after hijacked airliners crashed into them early September 11, 2001. The terrorist attack caused the collapse of both towers. (Photo: AFP)

I want to look back, however briefly, at my own reactions to that horrific event.

In my column that week I wrote:

'On Tuesday, I, like you, watched in fascinated horror as airliners slammed into the World Trade Centre, and desperate people threw themselves off the buildings to certain death, preferring to kill themselves than to await destruction by fire.

The catastrophe brought the United States of America face to face with a reality which had always existed, but which most Americans had never faced before: American behaviour has stimulated many people around the world to hate the USA to the point where they will sacrifice themselves to damage the nation and its interests.'

I thought at the time that those who were urging immediate violent reaction were wrong: 'On the day of the latest outrage, it was easy to understand the anger and bitterness of those who want to "declare war", those who spoke of a second Pearl Harbour, those who looked for identifiable enemies and found the usual suspects.'

In a column in Wednesday's New York Times, William Safire lashed out: "Waiting for absolute proof is dangerous...when we reasonably determine our attacker's bases and camps, we must pulverise them - minimising but accepting the risk of collateral damage".

Safire forgets that collateral damage is unlikely to be limited to one side.

Clyde Haberman, in the same edition of the New York Times, tried to explain to Americans the nature of the enemy in the "War against America". Haberman instanced the suicide bombers whose efforts have brought misery, terror and suffering to hundreds of Israelis. Haberman suggests that what has happened in Jerusalem will happen in America.

Five years later, a few days ago, Mr Bush was repeating the same mantra: If Americans don't fight the terrorists abroad, they will have to fight them in American cities.

The basic outlines of the war on terror were, it is hard to believe, established within days of 9/11, as if somehow, God had vouchsafed to certain people truths unfathomable by ordinary people. I thought at the time that the world needed to spend a little time trying to understand what had happened.

No matter how violent and horrific, the terrorist action on Tuesday remains an act of criminal violence, not an act of war. Various spokesmen and supporters of the US government, including Tony Blair, the British PM, speak of attacking and defeating terrorism as if there were some central directorate, a sort of Terror International, with identifiable officials and institutions. Retired Israeli General Efi Eitam said: "This is a declaration of war by a consortium of terrorism with an infrastructure from Sudan to Afghanistan, and this passes through Gaza, Lebanon and the West Bank."

Mr Bush, whose own legitimacy has been questioned, speaks, even more ominously, of "ending states" that support terror, as if politics were a video game in which the baddies can simply be zapped into non-existence. One of his spokesmen, a Mr Wolfowitz, is even scouting the possibility of targeted assassinations of foreign leaders. Dead terrorists, of course, can't be punished. Someone else must therefore pay.

Extremism was the order of the day. Erstwhile-civilised people like Jonathan Alter of Newsweek and the civil rights lawyer Alan Dershowitz, were publicly advocating torture as an investigative technique.

This week Mr Bush denied that the United States had used torture to get various Al-Qaeda biggies to spill the beans. He was announcing his intention to comply with the US Supreme Court ruling that all those held in secret CIA dungeons should be brought before the courts and tried. Mr Bush would not explain how the CIA had got these tough criminals to babble like babies. The method was classified, but it was clearly safe and humane!

At the time, I said that we really needed to find out why these horrific acts had been committed. For the past few weeks Mr Blair, Mr Bush and Mr Rumsfeld have been talking about 'Islamofascism', which apparently is dangerously contagious and is seen as the ultimate challenge to Western Civilisation.

Five years ago, I suggested another possibility.

GLOBALISING DESPERATION

"Much of the horror of last Tuesday is caused by the grisly fact that the most peaceful symbols of international trade, passenger aeroplanes, were turned into high explosive weapons of mass destruction against the most potent symbols and Crown Jewels of the very culture which produced them.

The system was turned against itself, a kind of political HIV/AIDS in which the body is made to self-destruct. Imperial arrogance has globalised desperation.

'In all the millions of words about Tuesday's horrific tragedy, few have been used to ask Why? to seek the real reasons. Blasting the visible manifestations of a cancer may achieve cosmetic improvement, but the concealed body of the parasitic tumour will not disappear.

'Injustice is the most eloquent recruiter for terrorism. Injustice breeds desperation. Suicidal behaviour is almost always a desperate call for help. People who are willing to destroy themselves along with randomly selected groups of innocents are speaking the language of violence, which they know their enemies understand. Unfortunately, while their enemies understand the language, they do not usually listen to the message.'

And finally, I said at the time that what was needed to deal with terrorism was not war, but good police work. Mr Bush's speech this week and the news from Scotland Yard over the last several weeks, suggest that I may have been right.

ANOTHER GULAG

Now that Mr Bush has officially admitted the existence of an American-run international system of secret prisons, he may find it useful to disclose the existence of another gulag, even larger and even more oppressive than the system used to confine the Al-Qaeda suspects. And the disclosure may even lead to the closing down of the best known gulag in the Caribbean, at Guantanamo Bay. But there is another, much larger gulag in the Caribbean, also run by the United States, this one not by the CIA but by USAID and elements of the Republican Party's National Committee.

This gulag is called Haiti, and it has a long and often miserable history. It wasn't always so. Two hundred years ago, after a war of independence lasting nearly 20 years, the mainly African people of Haiti, most of them slaves, managed to free themselves from the bondage of the French.

In the process, they also had to beat back the armies of the British and Spanish and so, by the time they declared their independence they had driven off the three superpowers of the time. In modern terms, the closest parallel is with the Vietnamese who chased both the French and the Americans out of their country.

The French were more formidable in the 18th century than they were in the 20th and the Vietnamese had external support and arms supplies. The Haitians won their freedom on their own. If Vietnam were to equal the Haitian performance they would have to have beaten the Americans, the Russians and the Chinese.

The Americans have never been able to come to terms with the idea that the Caribbean archipelago is not an extension of the United States and they have been particularly irritated by the independence of Cuba, Haiti and Jamaica. Cuba and Haiti particularly offended them: Cuba, when it declared its political and economic independence of the US in 1959, and Haiti, when it elected a black, socialist Roman Catholic priest as its president in 1991.

The little black priest, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, has been twice elected and twice overthrown by surrogates of the United States. The first occasion was by the army. On the second occasion the coup was carried out by what the Americans hoped would be a more externally palatable combination of "civil society" organised by USAID and the CIA, and a bunch of cutthroats left over from the Duvalier dictatorship.

In an attempt to make the bondage of Haiti less visible and offensive to the civilised world, the corrupt puppets installed to replace Aristide two years ago were sent packing three months ago after arranging an election which was designed to elect a titular president owned by the United States. Unfortunately, the plan did not work as designed and the election was won by a onetime protégé of Aristide, René Préval.

Préval is the titular president, but it is clear that he is not the de facto president of Haiti.

During the American interregnum, the fledgling institutions intended to restore democracy in Haiti were destroyed by the US puppets.

And the same cutthroats who had supported the Duvaliers and the usurpers after them were allowed to return to Haiti and be ceremonially cleared of the horrific crimes for which they were responsible - rapes, torture and massacres.

The people of Haiti know they are not free and continue to try to express their dissatisfaction with the situation. They are inhibited by the presence of an imported force assembled by the UN Security Council and mandated to restore order and good government. The UN Force in Haiti, known by the (French) acronym MINUSTAH, has proved to be a force for repression rather than law and order.

There is considerable evidence that MINUSTAH, in the guise of restoring peace and dealing with bandits, have been attacking and killing the leaders of the poor Aristide supporters in the huge slums around Port-au-Prince.

The people of the slums fear the MINUSTAH, considering them to be an extension of the armed paramilitary gangs organised by the light-skinned elite. The slum-dwellers are continually libelled. They are accused of being lawless gangsters and their habitats are frequently free fire zones. The slum dwellers say that their so-called gang leaders are in fact political leaders targeted by the elite.

In addition to the persecution by MINUSTAH, during the La Tortue regime ordinary Haitians were mercilessly persecuted by the returned gang-leaders and their private armies.

A survey conducted by US social workers and published in the English medical journal, The Lancet two weeks ago, confirmed a massive campaign of repression against the poor who support President Aristide. According to the Lancet study, under La Tortue, more than 8,000 Haitians were murdered in and around the capital, Port-au-Prince, almost half them killed by government forces or "outside political actors" - mostly armed gangs opposed to Mr Aristide and his Lavalas political party.

When Aristide was first overthrown, the murder and rape of his supporters created such a stink in the United States that it provoked intervention by President Clinton. This time the terror was just as fierce, but provoked no reaction from the 'civilised world'.

The Lancet study estimated that 35,000 women and girls were sexually assaulted, more than half of them younger than 18 years old, mostly by criminals, by the Haitian National Police (14 per cent) and armed anti-Lavalas groups (11 per cent). Many of the victims were "restaveks" - unpaid child domestic servants from rural areas who work and live in the city.

The study reported that kidnappings and extra-judicial detentions, physical assaults and death threats and threats of sexual violence were also common. Fourteen per cent of the people interviewed accused foreign soldiers and police, including UN personnel, of all three types of threats.

Because President Preval is not in control of his country's administration a number of outrageous abuses committed under the La Tortue regime still remain unresolved. As Brian Concannon, director of the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti reports, "Three months into constitutional President René Préval's term, most of the high-profile members of Haiti's Lavalas movement jailed by the brutal Interim Government of Haiti over two years have been released. But if the cases demonstrate the democratic transition's promise, they also illustrate its pitfalls.

"The high-profile cases were all easy calls from a legal standpoint. They were in some ways easy from a political standpoint as well, because President Préval comes from the same Lavalas movement. Nevertheless, the new government took three months to release the prisoners, because of strong resistance within both the justice system and Haitian civil society.

That resistance spells delays, and trouble, as Préval's government tackles the much harder and more numerous cases of low-profile political prisoners." (JURIST - Forum: Haiti's Political Prisoners: Not Preval's Fault, But His Problem).

The scandalous arrests and false imprisonment of the former prime minister and other Lavalas officials and of "Sister Anne" Auguste, (the Haitian Louise Bennett) and Fr Gérard Jean-Juste are fairly well known. But there are hundreds of others languishing for no good reason in Haitian hellholes. And massacres by elite-sponsored murderers such as Lame Timanchet (Small Machetes), continue.

There is more, much more to complain about, but I believe that what I have reported here should give Mr Bush something to get his teeth into, and a chance to make a really serious impression on one gulag situation about which he, perhaps, is less well informed.

A Trap Door to Hell

2006-09-03T13:30:00.000+02:00

Common Sense
John Maxwell

It was a real groin sniffers' week. The paladins of the US media were up to their armpits in emotional frottage and editorial voyeurism. It was not entirely inappropriate for a week which included the anniversary of the death-by-paparazzi of Princess Diana. There won't be another cannibal media banquet like hers for a long time.

In the meantime, we had to make do with the poor, deluded John Mark Karr, caught like a wounded deer in the headlights of a speeding press, accompanied on his long trip back from Thailand by newsmen - and newswomen I presume - all hanging on his every gesture, as if he were some prince, taking no one knows how many photographs of his weak, expressionless visage as he was triumphantly headed home to face the music.

Except, of course, there was no music to face. Karr's notes were quickly wiped from the score when his DNA came back innocent and his sad and mad delusions were exposed for what they were. A more careful media might have listened more intently to the father of JonBenet Ramsay, who, interviewed when Karr was located in Thailand, counselled the press not to jump to conclusions, having himself experienced the results of such media cannibalism.

All the usual suspects were out in force, with CNN's harpy eagle, Nancy Grace, thwarted as she came in for the kill, thrown back on wondering whether there was in fact an intruder in the Ramsay house the night of the murder, in effect pointing fingers back at Mr Ramsay, notwithstanding his prior clearance by DNA.

The harpy eagle and King would be back for another bite of the cherry, with the arrest of the serial polygamist and alleged child molester Warren Steed Jeffs. There was Larry King interviewing two of Jeffs' victims, and to my mind, just itching to ask whether there was group sex and so on. I say this knowing that it is not a nice thing to say, but because of a prior experience with this doyen of necrophiliac interviewers.

A couple of years ago, two young women were abducted by a man who was killed by police after a wild chase in the countryside of some western state. Larry King, knowing that the abductor was dead and could not be charged with any crime, nevertheless made it his business to ask a hospital administrator who had care of the two young women, whether they had been raped.

The hospital administrator, bless him, turned King down flat, explaining that it was no business of King's or the press. But King persisted; in another interview, this time with a sheriff, he pestered the man until he was informed that yes, at least one of the girls had been sexually assaulted.

I still cannot figure out what was the importance of this fact to the general public or to Larry King, but later that night, again on CNN, a then famous woman anchor, Connie Chung, did the same thing.

As a journalist two thousand miles away, I felt soiled.

Transcontinental frenzy

The week's media excitement went transcontinental with the story of the Austrian girl who had been abducted eight years ago as a child of 10 and kept prisoner by another sick soul. The Austrian authorities were more discreet, and did their best to protect the young woman's privacy against the long, quivering noses of the press who wanted details of her abuse. We must presume that the child was kidnapped to be sexually abused.

We don't know, but what on earth did the press want to know about her abuse? Did she enjoy it? How often did he do IT? Was her abductor into weird practices? S/M? witchcraft? fetishism perhaps? The mind boggles.

Some reports managed to convey the idea that the young woman was being churlish in not stripping herself naked for the delectation and entertainment of readers and viewers. Fortunately, if Miss Kampusch is as sensible as she seems, we will never know.

But reporters appeared to have been amazed by the fact that someone who had been solitarily confined for nearly half her life, whose attentions had been totally monopolised by one adult for that time, whose very life depended on that person, could have chosen to 'mourn' the death of her jailer. Where have they been?

During her time in that dungeon she must have prayed for her captor's safe return, because if anything happened to him she would have perished alone and miserably. Pavlov's dogs were luckier.

Various worthy people have been trying to get the press to focus on less important matters, like war and the brutalisation of large sections of the human race. Messrs Rumsfeld and Bush, having shed their Field Marshals' uniforms, have taken up lecturing. Mr Rumsfeld is pretending to be an historian, attempting to slander peacemakers as cowards.

The appeasers of Hitler were, in fact, people like Mr Rumsfeld and Mr Cheney and some of the more corrupt examples of the British and American capitalist classes. They thought they could do business with Hitler, as Rumsfeld and his cohorts did with Saddam Hussein when he was fighting Iran.

Mr Bush, who still cannot pronounce the word 'nuclear', is nevertheless lecturing the world on what he calls Islamofascism, and in a speech on Thursday seemed to link all Muslin militants to Al-Qaeda, despite the fact that at least two of the groups he named are reputedly bitter enemies of Bin Laden's movement.

Mr Bush has now managed to smear most of the population of Lebanon as terrorists because, according to him, the resistance movement Hezbollah are terrorists and whoever supports them is a terrorist too.

The fact which is ignored by almost all the American and British media is that the resistance movements are direct responses to Israel. They arose because of Israeli provocation and brutality and they are fuelled by Israeli provocation and brutality.

Israel is painted as being the helpless victim of swarming hordes of terrorists, killing and maiming Israelis by the minute. The fact is that while CNN reports that two primitive rockets were fired into Israel on Thursday, Israel has been firing rockets and cannon and destroying houses and public works in Gaza every day. While the highly publicised war was in train in Lebanon, 200 Palestinians died in Gaza as a result of Israeli action.

The Israeli/Palestinian kill ratio is nearly 10 to one in Israel's favour. And nearly half the Hamas government has been kidnapped and now languish in Israeli prisons.

Palestinian officials say more than half of those killed in the past two months have been civilians - among them 39 children killed in July alone. Even the UN secretary-general, Mr Kofi Annan, has noticed.

After a visit last week to Gaza where he met with Palestinian officials in the occupied West Bank, Mr Annan said: "Over 200 Palestinians have been killed since the end of June. This must stop immediately. I have made my feelings known in talks with Israeli officials. Beyond preserving life, we have to sustain life, the closure of Gaza must be lifted, the crossing points must be opened, not just to allow goods but to allow Palestinian exports out as well."

What he means is that Israel should open the gates of the Palestinian concentration camp.

As I have pointed out before, what is happening in Gaza is nothing less than genocide - a continuing, persistent. murderous persecution of the people by intimidation, kidnapping and killing with a background of psychological warfare against a largely defenceless population. In the West Bank, more than a million people are squeezed into an area slightly larger than the Jamaican parish of St Catherine, and more than half of them are children or youths.

'Completely immoral'

In Lebanon, on the other side of Israel, another UN official, the human rights co-ordinator, Mr Jan Egeland, was more forthright than Mr Annan.

Jan Egeland said civilians were facing "massive problems" returning home, because of as many as 100,000 unexploded cluster bombs, most of which were dropped in the last days of the war.

"What's shocking - and I would say to me completely immoral - is that 90 per cent of the cluster bomb strikes occurred in the last 72 hours of the conflict, when we knew there would be a resolution," Mr Egeland said. "Every day people are maimed, wounded and are killed by these ordinance."

It does seem to me that there is something dark in the Israeli spirit these days. Knowing that a ceasefire was imminent, the Israelis went and hauled out cluster bombs dating from the Vietnam era and showered them on southern Lebanon. Whoever ordered this cannot be described as civilised, although the Israeli government has claimed that the cluster bombs are legitimate tools of war.

They are legitimate, if used against soldiers and military positions. They are illegal if used against civilians or civilian targets. The Israelis want to get rid of Prime Minister Olmert. There can be no better reason than this.

In southern Lebanon there are cluster bomblets on the roofs of people's houses, in their gardens and inside the houses themselves, in shops, parks and schools. The bomblets are neat little canisters, just the sort of thing an inquisitive child will pick up and blow himself to kingdom come or maim himself and others.

The United Nations has counted nearly 300 sites contaminated by the cluster bombs. By last week Sunday, after the ceasefire, the cluster bombs had killed at least a dozen people and injured many more. They continue to explode and kill and maim.

The United States says it is investigating whether Israel violated US guidelines for the US-made cluster bombs. Their use is prohibited in residential areas. But that is exactly where the UN technicians and the Lebanese children are finding them. What action will the US take? Don't hold your breath.

Four years ago in my column, I compared then Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to Rehoboam, the ancient king of Israel who threatened his enemies that while "my father has beaten you with whips I will chastise you with scorpions".

I said then: "In his perverse search for a final solution to the 'Palestinian Question', Sharon may not manage like Rehoboam, to destroy Israel, or like Samson to destroy himself, but he has certainly managed to damage Israel's reputation as one of the world's more civilised nations".

His successor, Mr Olmert, has gone even farther down that path. It is a very long way from Theodor Herzl's Zionist ideal that Israel should be a light unto the nations of the world.

When Iran's President Ahmadinejab engages in his virulent rodomontade, calling for Israel to be wiped off the map, I don't believe that there is anyone who really believes that he means literally what he says.

He is using classic negotiating techniques, demanding far more than he expects in the hope that his opponent will be quicker to make concessions. The Egyptians once did the same. No sane person believes that Israel either should be, or can be erased. Two of Israel's four closest neighbours - Egypt and Jordan - have already accepted Israel's right to exist. Only the most fanatical fundamentalist can believe that the rest of the Arab world is ready to fight to the death to destroy Israel.

What has happened is that the Arabs, having been defeated thrice already by Israel, are not eager for further bashing which would come from Israel and from the United States if Israel were really in trouble. The Arabs and their fellow Muslims are not fools, nor are most of them mad.

But, if cluster bombs can provoke the normally docile Lebanese prime minister, Mr Siniora, to declare that Lebanon will be the last Arab state to make peace with Israel, one can imagine that Israel's continuing insults seem almost designed to provoke the Armageddon so devoutly anticipated by the fundamentalist religious lunatics in the United States.

Last week, Israel bought two more nuclear submarines.

As I said immediately after 9/11, terrorism is not the weapon of the strong, it is the last, desperate resort of the weak, the defeated and demoralised.

The real danger to Israel is that it has trained the weak and defeated to organise, à la Hezbollah, until entire populations become militant. When Israel refused to deal with Arafat, what they got in his place was Hamas. When they tried to control Lebanon they got Hezbollah.

Time is running out for the forces of reason and peace.

The Duty of a Leader

2006-08-27T19:00:00.000+02:00

Common Sense
John Maxwell

On February 8, 2003 I wrote: "Never fear, the PNP can produce, at a moment's notice, someone as irrelevant to our problems as Mr Seaga. They will be doing their damnedest to thwart Portia Simpson Miller, the only top politician who shows any signs of being able to listen to the people or to understand what they say.

"In my view, and I am clearly prejudiced, Portia Simpson is the only Jamaican politician now capable of leading a movement for the building of a nation out of the atomised parts of what was once a proud and honest people. If we do not return to that path, 'dog nyam we supper'."

That was three years ago. My opinion has not changed.

On Monday, Jamaica's fastest-growing and most vital city, May Pen, was closed for business. It was shut down by what the Press described as a mob, bands of people outraged by the behaviour of the police, demanding justice for four alleged gunmen, shot dead by the police on Saturday.

According to the police, they carried out a "targeted operation" in Alexandria, on the Chapelton Road, where they killed two brothers, one 21, the other a year older, and two teenagers. According to the police, they recovered three pistols from the four corpses. Not one surrendered.

The demonstrators said it was murder. According to them, there was no shoot-out, and the guns had been planted by the police.

It isn't easy or wise to contradict the police version of violent confrontations - as I am aware from more than 40 years of writing about such encounters. In the first place, the presumption is that the police, being a fine, upstanding body of men and women, sworn to uphold the law and acting in the best interests of the community, have a decided advantage when they testify in court.

Judges, juries and the public they represent are normally on the side of law and order and deplore criminal behaviour of any kind. On the other hand, the people usually shot by the police are almost always described as 'wanted men", even if nobody inside or outside of the force knew that they were wanted before they died. In fact, they are usually the unwanted members of the society, dropouts, no-hopers, usually with few friends and no money.

According to the police, many of these young men, some no more than boys, are so hardened in vice and so desperate, that as soon as they see policemen they open fire at them. Some of the behaviours described by the police are so outlandish as to verge on the fantastic.

In Grants Pen Four Roads a few years ago, the police described shooting two boys who, according to them, had ridden past the police on bicycles and when challenged, had leapt off their bicycles and began firing at the police. As I commented at the time, the young men seemed to be kamikaze acrobats, rather than, as proved later, just two ordinary boys walking home (not riding) after 'liming' at Half-way-Tree.

Even if the police's May Pen story is true in every particular, the society should be really alarmed at two things:

First, that there are people in this society so desperate and depraved that they only need to see a cop to begin hostilities; and
Second, that there are people willing to violently and publicly demonstrate their solidarity with such despicable desperadoes.

If the young men are so terminally desperate, how did they get that way?

What is it in their lives that makes them so careless of death that they will continually confront superior forces of heavily-armed police, knowing that there is no recent record of the police losing any of the shoot-outs in which they have been engaged?

Why are our youth so keen on police-assisted suicide?

Do they consider themselves so worthless and so lost that anything is better than life?

Don't the people who show solidarity with these men understand that eliminating criminals is good for them and the rest of the society?

Don't they understand that the more criminals killed by the police, the happier and orderly will their societies be?

If the police story is correct, if it is the truth as they continually insist it is, there is something very wrong - dangerously wrong with this society.

If the police story is wrong, if it is a lie, there is something very wrong - dangerously wrong with this society. Whichever of the stories is true is immaterial. Whichever of the stories is true demonstrates that this society is sick, diseased, and in urgent need of fixing.

Waiting for Portia

I have been an admirer of Portia Simpson Miller almost from the first day I met her, more than 30 years ago. Although she was hardly more than a schoolgirl at the time, she struck me as a very clear-eyed, straight and straightforward woman with a developing vision of what Jamaica could be.

She didn't believe in airy-fairy solutions. She understood that development was about people, not about concrete and steel. She knew that people wanted work, not simply jobs, but work to fulfil their ideas of themselves. She understood that creative work which involved the whole person was the answer to many of the problems of alienation, exclusion and misery which beset the people of whom she was so unapologetically representative.

She was not afraid to stand, almost alone, in defending her people when they were savagely attacked in the 1970s. I remember one weekend in July 1980 when she had to find from God knows where, the funds to bury 17 of her constituents, gunned down in partisan warfare.

She did not flinch, she did not run away. Despite the fact that her constituency was viciously polarised and as badly neglected by her own government as it had been by the JLP, she built a community of interest there in which former enemies became reconciled to each other and a measure of peace introduced into what was a battleground created by others.

While most Jamaicans do not know the details of her work, there is an intuitive sense of who Portia is among most people. Which is why there was such unbounded celebration at all levels of the society when she triumphed in the leadership contest in the PNP earlier this year.

What she inherited was a national movement which had lost its way and forgotten its historic purpose. Patterson had recreated the PNP as a more efficient and globally serviceable version of the JLP. It was more efficient and ruthless about liberalisation, privatisation and retrenchment than the JLP would ever have dared to be. Its policies have created more millionaires in the last 14 years than existed in the entire Caribbean before then.

The transfer of wealth from poor to rich proceeded at a pace unmatched even in the satellites of the former Soviet Union. In one of the most economically unequal and savagely unjust societies on the planet it is now chic to speak about "wealth creation" without admitting that wealth creation goes hand-in-hand with poverty creation.

Most Jamaicans know very well what has been happening. They know that, like a smouldering dung heap, Jamaica is ready to erupt into flames. And they believe that Portia Simpson Miller can put out the fire, and redirect our energies to building a Jamaica of the heart and soul, instead of an embattled collection of gated communities sitting on top of a degraded environment from which all hope has fled and where joy is a refugee.

Most of us, with the exception of the political classes, know that Jamaica's course cannot continue to be business as usual. It cannot make sense for the government to steal beaches, destroy green spaces, provide inadequate schools and keep people from growing their own food.

In a country of just over 1,500 arable square miles, it is in my view a scandal that one family can own nearly seven square miles and an even bigger scandal that the government can contemplate handing over to that family another couple of square miles for factory farms. It is a scandal that the government can even contemplate covering farmland with concrete, so-called housing solutions.

It is a scandal that we have raided the national pension scheme to build highways whose real purpose is to celebrate the soon-to-be-defunct internal combustion engine. It is utter madness to build thousands of hotel rooms in a climate of fear which will, in a few years, destroy mass tourism. It is even crazier to build these hotels in areas which will be destroyed by increasingly frequent and violent hurricanes and subverted by climate change.

In Hanover, the parish council is braying for another super hotel. Why? Because it will produce a few jobs for a few labourers and mass profits for a few contractors. But such hotels will not be about Jamaica, they will be about processing visitors like hogs in a 19th century Chicago slaughterhouse. The only thing they won't capture is the squeal of the processed animals.

Meanwhile, no thought is given to a different kind of agriculture, one based on the care of the land by people and not on the brutalisation of the land by pesticides, herbicides and expensive machinery.

If we began to think, it would be plain to us that the tourism industry, if intelligently designed and operated, could provide not only jobs for waiters and housekeepers, but a huge export market for Jamaican produce, organically grown and nurtured with love by people with real stakes in a peaceful, prosperous society.

A Jamaica of the heart

There are people of all classes waiting for Portia to summon them to sacrifice and work. There are people waiting for Portia to tell them how they can help re-think, redirect and refashion Jamaica, how they can help to develop their brothers and sisters, how they can teach the illiterate to read and to grow food, lead scout troops, teach children music, dancing, gymnastics and swimming and how they can bring Jamaica back from the brink of disaster.

Sadly, it seems to me, Portia is being purposefully entangled in a bureaucratic spider's web of 'heavy metal development' in which people wax eloquent about trickle-down theory without understanding that education and better domestic environments will not only reduce crime and HIV/AIDS but increase the GDP and public safety. And that the politics of love and care can produce Marcus Garveys and Harry Belafontes out of 'wanted men' and Mary Seacoles and Louise Bennetts out of 'teggeregs' and 'bad girls'.

When Portia Simpson Miller was campaigning for the presidency of the People's National Party she told us, famously and presciently, that we needed to elect not a manager but a leader.

As her paradigm, Norman Manley said nearly half-a-century ago, in 1958 when Portia was still a little girl: "The duty of a leader is to lead."

A few years later, he advised us to 'dis-enthrall' ourselves - to emancipate ourselves from mental slavery. And then he died, but his movement did not die, nor did his ideas.

Giving Genocide a Bad Name

2006-08-20T12:00:00.000+02:00

Common Sense
John Maxwell

According to me, the most important piece of news last week was not about the Middle East conflict. Nor was it about the arrest of dozens of people in England on suspicion of plotting to blow up aeroplanes. Nor was it the arrest in the United States of brown-skinned people with dozens of cell phones in their cars.

My story affects the prospects of life and death for millions of people, so it is clearly of "transcendental significance" to old time news editors like me. But to my successors, the story has proved to be of no interest whatsoever.

What is of transcendental importance this week in the US is the fact that someone has been arrested for the 1996 murder of six year-old JonBenet Ramsay, a person obviously of immense geopolitical significance in the North American scheme of things.

My significant story was one that wasn't even new, in fact; it's been around for years. But when I saw that the subject was due to be discussed at an important international conference I thought, at last, its significance would be recognised and everybody, everywhere, would learn about it and would begin to do something about it.

I was wrong, of course. Who gives a damn if six million fewer Africans or Asians die of AIDS in the next few years? In 1995, some researchers in Australia (Donovan B, Bassett I, Bodsworth NJ) found no connection between circumcision and reduced rates of HIV or any other Sexually Transmitted Infection (STI).

The researchers did warn, however, that research in other cultures might give different results. Whatever the researchers thought, their findings were seized upon by a claque of medical fundamentalists who were out to prove that the male foreskin had invaluable prophylactic properties and was, anyway, more natural.

A frenzied counterattack was launched on the proponents of circumcision, declaring that they were backward, old wives tales' believers, caught up in the remains of a 19th century frenzy to keep little boys from masturbating. A few years ago, it was noticed that among Jews and Muslims the rate of cervical cancer in women was much lower, and this was traced to circumcision. Uncircumcised men were capable of carrying a virus harmless to them, but inducing cancer in their wives.

At the same time it began to be noticed that among the circumcised West Africans, HIV infection was much lower than among southern Africans in Zimbabwe, Botswana and South Africa itself. Soon, studies confirmed that circumcision was a crucial factor in making unprotected sex less of a lethal lottery.

In Swaziland a century-and-a-half-ago, the king decreed an end to the coming-of-age rituals involving circumcision. He thought the ritual would interfere with his nation's preparedness to fight off the Dutch and British invaders. Today, circumcision is back in fashion in Swaziland.

According to the Washington Post (December 26, 2006): "Even now, with life-saving retroviral drugs increasingly available, the AIDS rate in Swaziland remains extremely high. The United Nations estimates that two of every five working-age adults are infected with HIV. An estimated 20,000 people here last year died of complications caused by AIDS, and in the past decade the disease has lowered life expectancy from 57 years to 33. There is worry that AIDS could severely depopulate Swaziland, a tiny nation of 1.2 million people on the border between South Africa and Mozambique."

Six years ago, at the International AIDS conference in Durban, South Africa, Robert Bailey, a researcher from the University of Illinois, said "I believe the evidence is now compelling enough to consider adding circumcision to the limited armament we already have against HIV/AIDS". Millions have died since.

Several other researchers have produced studies showing the same thing - that circumcision will prevent more than half the probable infections among men and ever more important - prevent them passing it on to their partners.

Last week, Richard Feachem, executive director of the Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria, predicted that circumcision would increasingly be seen as a lifesaving procedure which all parents would want for their sons. And it would be discussed at this year's AIDS conference. Again.

To end the endless discussion and get action, I think we have to convince the new fundamentalists that the procedure is not evil. We may be more effective if we sell the procedure as an anti-masturbation tool since they are much more interested in our 'morals' than our lives.

As one who had no choice in the matter, I'm very happy my parents made the right decision. Having been around for a long time, I know that I've been - shall we say - luckier than many of my friends; but perhaps it was not luck but management.

Genocide in Haiti

Nobody knows how many thousands of Haitians were slaughtered by the forces of the Duvalier dictatorship and the forces of evil which followed them. In 1994, President Clinton was expressing horror at the number of people "having their faces chopped off" by the licensed murderers of the American-supported, elite-backed Cedras regime.

And on the two occasions on which those same professional assassins succeeded, with US government help, in driving President Aristide from office, the dirty work continued.

Even after the recent so-called elections, when even the Americans were embarrassed by the antics of their puppets in Haiti, the professional murderers are still at work.

On the 215th anniversary of the Bwa Kayiman summons to revolution by the Jamaican-born Bouckman inspired by the female spirit Ezili Danto, on August 14, Haiti's most famous folklorist, 'So Anne' Auguste, was freed after 826 days - 27 months of false and malicious imprisonment. The prosecutors conceded that there was no evidence against Ms Auguste (as they had to), and the judge accordingly set her free.

In 2004, 'So Anne' was taken from her home at midnight on Mother's Day by American marines who blasted her gate open with explosives, shot her dog and arrested and shackled her and her grandchildren - one only six years old - dragging them all off to jail. Meanwhile, people like Otto Reich, Roger Noriega and other Bush spokesmen were talking about Aristide's 'terrorists' and the threat they posed to civilisation. 'So Anne' is a Lavalas activist.

According to the Haitian Press Agency (AHP), President Preval has now threatened the armed bandits whose bloody rampages have continued to terrorise the Haitian people.

The president said that either the terrorists put down their weapons and join the DDR Programme (Disarmament, Demobilisation and Reintegration), or else they die. The unanswered question is whether the United States and the United Nations will allow the legally elected head of state to exercise his legal functions, or whether they will continue to sabotage the 'populist' government as in the past, by withholding emergency aid, by blocking the country from other foreign assistance, by sabotage, bribery and subversion of the institutions of the state.

Messrs Cheney and Bush still exercise an unspoken veto over Haitian democracy, insisting that President Aristide should not return to the country. Since Haitian law does not permit the exclusion of any Haitian from Haiti, it is clear that Bush and Cheney comprise the real constitution of Haiti.

Anyone they declare a terrorist is fair game, and it does not matter what your countrymen think... unless, of course, you happen to be in Lebanon.

Genocide, as defined by the United Nations in 1948, means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, including:

killing members of the group;

causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group

deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; and

forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Genocide in Palestine

If the UN definition of genocide means what it seems to mean, it is clear that what is happening in Palestine constitutes genocide within the meaning of the Convention.

As I have related before, the Israeli Air Force on a regular schedule orders its supersonic fighter-bombers to break the sound barrier, creating sonic booms (in the dead of night) over Palestine and post-traumatic stress disorder in children and their parents. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has publicly fantasised about driving all the Palestinians mad by this sonic terrorism.

Here are examples of what seem to me to be other acts which appear to be genocidal. The reports are from the Israeli Human Rights group B'Tslem.

killing members of the group
At about 4:00 am on July 12, an Israeli air force plane bombed a three-storey building in the Sheikh Radwan neighbourhood in Gaza city.

The bomb caused the building to collapse and killed Nabil and Salwah Abu Salmiya , who lived in the building that was bombed, and seven of their children: Nasrallah, age 4; Aya, age 7; Yihya, age 9; Ayman, age 12; Huda, age 14; Sumayah, age 16; and Basma, age 17. Another son, Awad, age 19, was moderately injured. In addition, another 40 people who lived in the adjacent buildings were injured.

According the IDF spokesperson's statement, the house that was shelled "served as a hideout for senior activists in the Hamas military wing, including Muhammad Deif, who was in the building at the time of the attack. At the time, those present were planning the continued military activity of Hamas".

According to media reports, the father of the family, Nabil Abu Salmiya, who was killed, was a lecturer at the Islamic University and a Hamas activist. As in similar cases in the past, the military has not provided evidence or additional details to explain or justify the killing of innocent civilians.

causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group
"Rubber bullets come in packs of three encased in nylon. The Open-Fire Regulations state that, 'A pack of rubber cylinders is to be fired when encased with the original and intact covering'." An IDF soldier's testimony helps to explain the unusual injuries.

The commanding officer "taught us about rubber bullets, he said that they are fired bound in threes, which is ineffective for the most part, because they are too heavy. But if we separate them, they can kill. He added, winking, I am not hinting at anything. The guys laughed and said to him: 'You're not hinting - you're telling us.' He did not correct them."

deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part

July 11, 2006, six [Israeli] human rights groups petitioned the Israeli High Court demanding that the crossings in Gaza be opened to allow for the steady and regular supply of fuel, food, medicine and equipment, including spare parts needed to operate generators.

Since Gaza's power station was destroyed on June 28, there is an increased need for fuel to power the generators in Gaza and for spare parts to keep the generators running at such a high capacity.

Without a steady supply of fuel and parts, hospitals cannot perform life-saving surgery and treatment plants cannot pump and treat sewage in Gaza. Gaza hospitals have reduced their activities to life-saving procedures. Since the bombing of the power plant, Gaza's water utility has been dumping 60,000 cubic meters of raw sewage into the sea each day. There is concern that untreated sewage will pollute the aquifer or spill into the streets.

Because of the electricity shortages, stores in Gaza have stopped selling meat and dairy products. Trucks laden with food and medicine, including 230 containers from international aid organisations, have been stuck at Karni Crossing, which has been closed since July 6.

Withholding fuel, food, and equipment from Gaza residents constitutes collective punishment, in violation of international law. The petition argues that Israel is not fulfilling its legal obligations to provide for the needs of the civilian population and to distinguish between military and civilian targets.

imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group

forcibly transferring children of the group to another group

For almost six years, since the beginning of the second intifada, in September 2000, Israel has forbidden Palestinians of the Occupied Territories from living with their spouses who are foreign residents. Israel also prohibits the foreign family members from visiting the Occupied Territories, and refuses to process the more than 120,000 requests for family unification that have been submitted during this period.

The freeze policy severely infringes the right to marry and found a family of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians: spouses are unable to live under the same roof; children are forced to grow up in single-parent families; people do not leave the Occupied Territories because Israel will not allow them to return; women who are foreign residents live in the Occupied Territories with no legal status and thus face the constant threat of deportation.

Survival these days is perfectly straightforward. If HIV/AIDS doesn't get you, some bureaucrat will.

The Donkey Carts of War

2006-08-13T12:00:00.000+02:00

Common Sense
John Maxwell

When I heard they'd rocketed a donkey cart in Gaza and killed an old woman and her grandchild as well, I thought that it must have been a mistake.

That was about two weeks ago, so this week I was a little surprised to hear an Israeli spokesman saying that even donkey-carts were now military targets in Lebanon. And when, as I write this, I hear President Bush calling his enemies 'fascists' I know that the world has turned, perhaps in concert with my stomach. Or maybe not.

As Nicholas Kristof says in Thursday's New York Times, the killing of children, even when they lack geopolitical significance, is a tragedy. He was writing about Darfur and Arab genocide. I was also thinking about Haiti, which lacks geopolitical significance at this moment - if one concedes that justice and human rights are of no geopolitical significance.

In Nazareth, so dear to Christianity, an Israeli Arab forgave Hezbollah for the death of his sons from rocket fire, because, he said, it would not have been fired had Israel behaved itself.

People have forgotten, if they were ever conscious, of the suffering of the eight million Haitians, who have been for several years the victims of a slow-motion genocide; and in Gaza what looks remarkably like genocide is going almost entirely unnoticed.

The new Middle East, according to Dr Condoleezza Rice, is, as we speak, undergoing its bloody birth pangs in Lebanon, overshadowing all else.

There may in fact be a new Middle East a-borning, and perhaps even a new world, but there is the distinct possibility that the presumptive parents may well be disappointed in the newborn. It may be a 'jacket', as we say in Jamaica, or a 'throwback', as they used to claim in late nineteenth-century English novels, to explain children who didn't look at all like their fathers.

The intended birth certificate for the newborn was being prepared at the United Nations until the godparents were rudely interrupted by the news that there were interested parties who were apparently disputing paternity.

The document, a so-called ceasefire agreement, was an attempt to repartition the Middle East by slicing off part of Lebanon in a Solomonic judgment and giving it to Israel. That was not how it was described, of course, but that's what it would have been. The government of Lebanon and Hezbollah were among those who objected. Even France, one of the putative parents, realised that the original plan was a non-starter because it ignored Lebanese interests.

The problem really is that neither the Americans, British nor the Israelis, regard Lebanon as a serious country whose interests are of some import. The Lebanese army is laughable. With its 60,000 soldiers, it cannot do as much as Hezbollah can with 2,500 fighters.

And, since Hezbollah has prevented Israel from dismembering Lebanon and confined their advance to a few miles across the border, Hezbollah must certainly have an interest in the planning. But there is more.

Nearly 90% of Lebanese now support Hezbollah, somewhat more than support either the president or the prime minister. The fact that Hezbollah does not formally control the parliament may be a delicious merry-thought for the US but the facts on the ground, as the Israelis like to describe them, are that Hezbollah must be a major player in any settlement or attempted settlement of this crisis. The state, after all, is the party, which possesses a monopoly of armed force.

Hezbollah, backed by 87% of the Lebanese and blocking Israel's conquest of the country, must satisfy anyone who deals in facts. Only Hezbollah can disarm Hezbollah.

The West, including Israel, prefer to see Hezbollah as 'terrorists' rather than what they really are - a legitimate resistance to the occupation of their country by Israel. Their role is recognised by international law, custom, and practice. And they are a natural and predictable response to Israel's behaviour over the last half-century.

In Gaza too, Hamas is the homegrown response to Israeli oppression. It too is a resistance movement, termed terrorist by the US, Britain and much of the European Union. In Europe, partisan groups like Hamas and Hezbollah were crucial in driving the Germans out of France, Italy and other occupied countries. And the epic story of the (illegal?) Jewish resistance in Warsaw can still make your hair stand on end.

The Palestinians, like the Haitians, are not considered mature enough to govern themselves or perhaps, they happen to be standing just where the Christians are intending to shoot, in the words of the old 'joke'.

The Israeli establishment have it as an article of faith that Arabs and Muslims cannot be trusted. They are enormously grateful to Iran's President Ahmedinejab for his persistent imprecations against Israel and portray him as an anti-Semite, like Hitler and the Nazis, and he is presumed to want to wipe Jews off the face of the earth. This claim has enormous resonance among those Jews and non-Jews who believe that every politician says exactly what he means.

It is not frivolous to describe the Middle East as almost as much a semantic problem as a political and religious problem. One important question is, what is the difference between Jews, Israel, and Zionism?

Originally, Zionism was an idea to find a home for the Jews where they would be safe from persecution and employ their genius to provide a 'light for the world'. The nationalist movement was not originally religious although it was based on faith. Not all Jews can be described as ethnically Semitic, while Palestinians and most other 'Arabs' are considered Semitic.

The Iranians or Persians may be largely Muslim but they are neither Semitic, nor Arabs. The so-called Arabs of the Sudan seem to the naked eye to be black, whatever that signifies. This welter of conflicting definitions is fertile ground for anyone who wants to make trouble. It is not so productive for those who wish to make peace.

The current crisis may, paradoxically, provide a serious opportunity for peacemaking, particularly because the other possibilities are so potentially catastrophic.

The fact that Hezbollah has not only survived but fought off the world's fifth most powerful army is going to make life more dangerous for us all - at least initially - but it also has within it the seeds of a more peaceful world.

It is now freely admitted that Hassan Nasrallah has more authority in the Middle East at this time than any other Arab - including Mubarak and Assad. The example of Hezbollah is bound to suggest new strategies to the oppressed of Saudi Arabia, Syria, Jordan, Iraq and the Maghreb. It really doesn't matter if the populations are Shia or Sunni. Hezbollah shows what can be achieved by commitment, discipline, and application and you may be sure that many in North Africa and the Middle East are absorbing that lesson.

This in turn signals serious trouble for the West and its oil companies, for a start, whose fortunes depend on the corrupt sheiks and princelings who share the wealth with them and not with their people.

Israel realises some of the danger in the present crisis. They need to get out of Lebanon quickly without further humiliation or casualties. Hezbollah has now sterilised nearly half of Israel for four weeks, with nearly a million people in bomb shelters and unable to work. At the same time, Israel's destruction of Lebanese infrastructure and wealth has the potential to create a really dangerous enemy right next door.

Wise statesmen should be able to realise that the current upheaval provides a huge and never to be repeated opportunity to encourage serious economic development in the whole region, beginning with the Palestinian state and Lebanon. Prosperous, autonomous states, no matter who governs them, are always more reliable neighbours than desperate, revenge-seeking paupers.

The Arabs have conceded Israel's right to exist. What is necessary is for the West and Israel to concede that the Arabs too, have the right to exist and to develop themselves in their own way, without interference and disruption.

The major problem is that the people of Palestine and the other Arab states neighbouring Israel are continually, incessantly and purposefully libelled as incompetent, shiftless good-for-nothings, only interested in blowing up things and in praying to Mecca several times a day.

It is more or less the same treatment dealt to black Americans openly up to the sixties and more discreetly since then. It is the same kind of treatment accorded to the Haitian people whose ancestors were the first in the world to promulgate universal human rights. Mathematics and writing may have evolved in North Africa and the Middle East, but the peoples of these areas, having lost imperial power, appear to have simultaneously lost their capacity to think.

The Olmecs of Mexico had the curious habit of carving monumental statues of black people - whom European scholars agree they obviously could never have seen - and managed to develop systems of writing and a calendar more accurate than any developed in the 'civilised world' for a thousand years after they went missing from history.

A cursory glance at the history of civilisation and power makes it apparent that theories of race, ethnicity and racism have been mainly developed as means for one set of people to assert their hegemony over another - especially important when both sets of people lay claim to the same resources.

Notwithstanding the effortless superiority of European civilisation, as represented by the Israelis, it seems clear from the events of this week that their hapless opponents, Hezbollah, have been observing what may be called more civilised practices in their war.

Hezbollah has apparently aimed its notoriously unreliable Katyushas at areas containing military targets and, possessed of an unknown but fearsome range of other rockets, have refrained from aiming them at major population centres.

Those aimed at Haifa, for instance, are mainly aimed at the port and the military installations round it, and not at households. Nasrallah has, however, threatened to aim them at Israel's capital Tel Aviv, if Israel attacks central Beirut.

And despite the Israelis' contention that they are engaging in precision destruction, they have managed to kill a thousand Lebanese, mainly civilians, and make a million refugees. In Gaza, precision armaments managed to destroy a donkey cart and kill an old woman and her granddaughter two weeks ago. They were of no geopolitical significance.

While Hezbollah's rockets have paralysed northern Israel, they have killed just over a hundred Israelis, about half of them soldiers killed in action.

To report these facts is dangerous, because people will say that doing so is anti-Semitic and pro-terrorist. But there must come a time for the truth, when avoidable conflict is creating so much grief, agony, anxiety, destruction and devastating the natural and cultural environment of the region and the world.

It is necessary to ask why, for instance, has Israel kidnapped half of the government of Palestine? Why has it since the defeat of Fatah, tried to starve the Palestinians into submission? Why has it been bombing the infrastructure of Gaza, including the power stations, and why does the Israeli army telephone people to inform them that their houses will be bombed in two hours and they had better get out? And what, pray, are targeted assassinations but state murder?

Tactics such as these would do enormous damage to the reputation of Israel and its sponsors if they ever became widely known. The problem is that the western Press, as it is called, conceals these facts in what is clearly a public relations exercise.

Finally, it was entertaining (I can't think of another word) to watch CNN as it discredited a photographer who had doctored a photograph of Beirut bombing to make it seem more dramatic. If the photographer had had any practice in doctoring photos he could simply have increased the contrast and decreased the brightness of the picture on his computer. Poor bastard. He is now an object of abject scorn.

What I don't understand though, is why the US Press has so far not acknowledged the deliberate and damaging doctoring of a video in 2004, which was widely used to discredit Howard Dean, then a presidential candidate. Dean was speaking in a large, noisy hall and had to shout to make himself heard.

The paragons of purity in the US Press used sophisticated techniques to strip out the noise and amplify Dean's voice, with the result that he appeared to be screaming and out of control. He didn't make the cut, of course.

Now, that's what I call terrorism.

An Eye for an Eye?

2006-08-06T10:00:00.000+02:00

Common Sense
John Maxwell

I never got as far as Tacitus; Virgil's Aeneid was the rock on which my Latin foundered, which tells you how long ago I was last in school.

Apart from everything else, Hector was my hero, not Ulysses, and I must confess that when Ulysses ran into the Cyclops, I had a sneaking hope that he would end up as dinner for Polyphemus and friends.

Alas, that was not to be, and it was the noble and endlessly patient Penelope who got him in the end. I mention Tacitus because he is the author of two of my favourite quotations; the first:

"A shocking crime was committed on the unscrupulous initiative of few individuals, with the blessing of more, and amid the passive acquiescence of all." Which I believe pretty well summarises the fate of the Palestinian people, at least, according to the story so far. The second quotation will appear in its own time.

The British, having been mandated by the League of Nations to safeguard the interests of Palestine and its people, both Palestinians and Jews, threw in the towel in 1948 when people whom the British officially described as 'terrorists' and 'criminals', forced the Empire out of Palestine and declared the state of Israel, the legitimacy of which was recognised almost immediately by the "Great Powers" bequeathing the world a problem which more than half-a-century later has only become more intractable.

Part of the reason lies in what seems to be essential qualifications for First World statesmen: an infinite capacity to delude themselves.

So we hear people like Tony Blair, George Bush and Condoleezza Rice proclaiming vapidly, that the present crisis will be solved when the Israelis - or whoever - succeed in disarming Hezbollah in Lebanon. The problem is that this disarming of Hezbollah is likely to take a very long time and cost oceans of blood on all sides. Innocent Israelis, Palestinians, Lebanese and others will be slaughtered before the statesmen's appetite for blood is sated.

The Israelis are not irrational when they say that they dread the proclamations of President Ahmadinejab of Iran, Sheik Nasrallah of Hezbollah and the Hamas leaders in Palestine. And those leaders are in turn, not being irrational when they call for the extinction of Israel.

As they all see it, there is an inexorable logic to their fears. And part of this logic is inherent in the behaviour of the western powers who, paralysed by guilt, have found it impossible to deny Israel anything. And Israel, having lost six million of its kith and kin to European lunacy, holds, quite rationally, that nobody is going to do anything like that to it again.

In pursuit of this entirely legitimate sense of self-preservation Israel has armed itself to the teeth, with the enthusiastic cooperation of the United States, Britain and France and even Apartheid South Africa. Unfortunately for all of us, the motives behind the Europeans's defence of Israel had nothing to do with morality or justice, or even of Israel's best interests. It has mainly to do with oil.

In pursuit of their interests, the West saw Israel as an essential factor in the destabilisation of the Arab world to the greater profit of the oil companies. These companies used to be called the Seven Sisters but are more like four, these days, and getting immeasurably richer. More powerful and unaccountable by the minute.

The Palestinians had been scattered after Israel's War of Independence and the few remaining in Palestine were, it was thought, a fairly negligible factor. Israel carved Palestine into a collection of settlements most aptly described as Bantustans, in a Palestine in which the Palestinians were powerless share-croppers on what used to be their own land.

As Israel has grown mightier, so Palestine has become more abridged. Walls are even now being built in Jerusalem, enforcing a new apartheid. The 1949 walls in Jerusalem were torn down by the Israelis after the Six Day War.

On Thursday, the Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman derided Sheikh Nasrullah for saying that Tel Aviv was the capital of Israel and that if the Israelis bombed Beirut, the Lebanesee capital, Hezbollah would bomb Tel Aviv, the Israeli capital. Mark Regev, the Israeli spokesman, said Nasrallah should read his history books. Jerusalem was Israel's capital, not Tel Aviv.

The Palestine problem is not only about establishing a viable Palestinian state, it is also about the fate of Jerusalem, the holiest city of the Jews and the Christians and after Mecca and Medinah, the third holiest city of Islam and the official capital of Palestine. No one except Israel, Costa Rica and El Salvador regards Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.

In resolution 478 the UN declared that Israel's purported annexation of East Jerusalem was contrary to international Law. In 1997, the United Nations Division for Palestinian Rights report entitled "The Status Of Jerusalem" confirmed the UN plan to declare all Jerusalem an international city.

It is ironic that during the Muslim occupation of Jerusalem from the year 638, Christians and Jews living in the city were granted autonomy. And while the Byzantine Christian authorities had not tolerated the presence of Jews within the walls of the city, the Muslim rulers allowed the re-establishment of a Jewish community.

Since the establishment of Israel, as the Arabs have become more fragmented and comparatively weaker, Israel has become stronger and its appetite has grown sharper. As more and more Jews have migrated to Israel from Russia, Eastern Europe and the United States, the pressure has grown to settle the Palestinian problem on Israeli terms - preferably by relocation to some other Arab country.

The Palestinians regard Jaffa oranges as theirs, and the olive groves and other productive areas of Israel were productive before there was Israel. The Palestinians have not only patriotic claims to Palestine, but property rights claims as well. It drives them into insensate fury then, to be constantly told that they are to be driven from the land they and their ancestors have occupied, loved and nurtured for millennia.

Effectively, Israel has converted Palestine into a concentration camp and the Palestinians effectively into prisoners. Although the world through the United Nations has recognised the Palestinian right to independent statehood, the Israelis have refused to allow this development on the ground that they cannot trust the Palestinians and the rest of the Arab world, who have held, as an article of faith for 60 years, that Israel is an illegitimate foreign intrusion into Arab territory.

This belief, expressed most offensively by the Iranian president, has until now largely been the only Arab compensation available to a nationalism which has proved inferior in force to Israel. It is, however, as Sadat proved, more of an empty shibboleth than a serious proposition. It seems fairly clear that if Yasser Arafat and Fatah could come as they did, to accept the legitimacy of Israel, almost any Palestinian could.

The sticking point has always been that Israel continues to change its basic demands, and it is now in the peculiar position of saying it wants peace but is unwilling to trade land for peace. The problem here is the Palestinians are insisting on the right of return to their ancestral holdings as well as to Palestine, but, with the enormous oil wealth of the Arab nations and the unspoken reparations owed by Europe to the Jews, there is no doubt that a way could be found to satisfy both the Israelis' demand for living space and the Palestinians'.

Unfortunately for all of us, the current American administration is even more beholden (some might say hog-tied) to the Israeli lobby in the United States than any of its predecessors. American Jews vote, and American politicians feel that they cannot afford to offend them in any way, even so far as telling them the truth.

The result is that Israel has a lock on American politics and that translates, among other things, into an American subsidy of more than US$6 billion annually, almost one-third of the American aid programme to its allies. Another crucial factor is an automatic US veto of any United Nations consensus which does not favour Israel. And, of course, a steady flow of sophisticated weapons of destruction.

As Kissinger said, the United States has no friends, only interests; Israel is by far the most important of all those interests. It has not hurt Israel that two of the most recent US secretaries of state have been Jewish, either by religion or background (Kissinger and Albright), or that two others have important connections to defence industries and oil - Schultz and Baker - not to mention Vice-President Dick Cheney and his connections.

And then, there is of course, the neo-con brains-trust which, in its Project for a New American Century and other publications, sees the United States as a client of Israel, rather than the other way round. Israel for them is the cutting edge of a more fundamentalist American crusade against all pretenders to world power and the guarantor of American hegemony in the arena of Middle Eastern politics and oil.

It was clear - as I said last week, that the latest offensive was long planned, just waiting for a convenient and credible casus belli. By christening any resistance to Israeli hegemony as 'terrorist', Israel could also get into the 'War on Terror' and clean up the inconvenient and pestiferous Hezbollah in Lebanon. After that, Hamas.

When Mr Bush and the Israeli government speak of spreading democracy, the word has a very special meaning. Hamas, which is a social movement, albeit one armed to the teeth, is seen as nothing but a bunch of terrorists.

They occupy in Palestine something of the same space occupied in France during World War II by the French resistance - the maquis. But resistance to Nazi Germans in France cannot, obviously, be compared to resistance to Israel and the United States. These are civilised states. Germany - although producing Beethoven and Karl Marx, was obviously not. To outsiders the difference is difficult to discern.

So, back to Tacitus, who famously declared (and pardon my ignorance of whom he spoke) "They make a wilderness and call it peace". He must have been speaking of Israel's plans for Lebanon. A wilderness right now seems the only possible result of the present conflict.

The brutal destruction of Lebanon in pursuit of 'terrorists' is clearly not going to extinguish 'terrorism'. What has already happened, as I predicted last week, is that the Lebanese people have been radicalised by Israel's blitzkrieg and that radicalisation is spreading like a California wildfire. Hezbollah, which is Shia, has managed to impress al-Qaeda, which is Sunni and normally hates the guts of the Shia. The war on terror appears most spectacularly in Lebanon, to have ignited a Pan Arab nationalism which transcends religious sectarianism.

The possibility of catastrophe in this should be obvious. If the Shia and the Sunni in Iraq begin to see a common enemy because of what happens in Lebanon, the American attempt to tame Iraq is even more surely doomed. The shift by the leaders of Egypt, Jordan and most spectacularly of all, Saudi Arabia, suggests that the neo-cons and their satellites have disastrously overplayed their hand.

According to all reports, Nasrallah is now more popular in Egypt than Mubarak, more popular in Jordan than King Abdullah, more popular in Syria than Assad. The idea of a real, and infinitely more dangerous Muslim Brotherhood becomes every day more possible.

Fundamentalist Americans - the Christian Taliban - are right now joyously urging Bush to push Israel even further, hoping literally to precipitate Armageddon, and accelerate the return of their Messiah and the ascent of the faithful to Heaven - naked and shriven of sin and impurity.

The problem is that the Anti-Christ they fear, being a devious fellow, may be closer to home than they might imagine. And the Bible, whatever its virtues, is not a grammar of modern politics.

Tacitus may be more useful: he warned against the dangers of unaccountable power, against power untempered by principle, and against popular apathy and corruption, engendered by the wealth of the empire which allows such evils to flourish.

In Britain and the United States, the major casualty of the war on terror has been the civil liberties of the citizen. The terrorists, on the other hand, seem to be having a whale of a time. Sadly, some of us, in the days after 9/11, forecast just such a possibility.

The Human Factor

2006-07-30T14:30:00.000+02:00

Common Sense
John Maxwell

Even the notoriously noncommittal Kofi Annan must have been surprised when a journalist questioned his credentials for refereeing the current Mideast free-for-all.

At a press conference in Rome after the failed Middle East peacekeeping talks, an English-speaking journalist drove hard at Mr Annan. Didn't the UN secretary-general think that his condemnation of Israel for deliberately bombing the UN position undermined his qualifications to be an honest broker in the conflict?

Annan pointed out that the questioner misquoted him. He did not say "deliberate bombing" but "apparently deliberate bombing".

It was a little hard to understand why the questioner chose to tackle Annan on that point, since it had been clear for some time that there was no question that Israel had bombed the UN outpost after having been warned several times that they were firing perilously close to the UN position.

In fact, Israel's commander in the field, who could see the UN position, was warned at least 10 times, at least six of those times by an Irish member of the UNIFIL team. And when Israel finally destroyed the post, it was done by way of a bomb and a precision-guided missile. If that doesn't sound at least like an "apparently deliberate" act I can't imagine what could.

Israel's frustration is showing

The plan was to teach its enemies a short, sharp lesson, to castrate Hezbollah and to punish the Lebanese for allowing 'terrorists' to hijack their country. Even the Lebanese government seemed to agree at the beginning of the conflict. It might be a good thing to discipline Hezbollah, it suggested. But that soon turned to something else.

The Lebanese prime minister and foreign minister were soon saying that Hezbollah were Lebanese, patriotically defending their homeland. In fact, Hezbollah is a party and is included in the Lebanese Cabinet. The turnaround in attitude came when it became clear that far from being taught a short, sharp lesson, Hezbollah was fulfilling its promise to surprise Israel and the world.

In two weeks of relentless bombardment, the Israeli incursion has still not got past first base in Lebanon, and on Wednesday, at Bint Jabayl, a town they said they had surrounded, if not captured, the Israel Defence Force suffered a brutal setback, losing nine troops and many more wounded in intense fighting. The Israelis have admitted losing 33 soldiers; Hezbollah have said they have lost 35.

The Israelis have said that their assault was precisely aimed at Hezbollah assets, not at the civilian population. Clearly, civilian losses included 600 people (according to the Lebanese government), about 200 of them children; 5,000 homes, one toilet paper factory, one bottle factory and 150 other businesses. Nearly one million Lebanese have been driven from their homes.

By Thursday afternoon, a partial list of other important Lebanese assets destroyed by Israel included: The Beirut Lighthouse and the ports of Beirut, Tripoli and Jounieh; three dams, two power stations and one sewage plant; 62 bridges, 22 gas stations, 72 road overpasses, and 600 kilometres of road.

In the realm of communications, Hezbollah's Al Manar TV station was one of two TV stations destroyed, along with two mobile phone networks.

And finally, in addition to this impressive list of presumably military targets, we must add one military airport, two civil airports, four radar installations and one army barrack.

According to ReliefWeb:

"As of July 26, WHO reported . more than 1,267 people are injured. The conflict has affected an estimated 800,000 people, including internally displaced, individuals under siege, refugees, and asylum seekers.

"OCHA estimated that 710,000 people have fled their homes, and the majority are now located in Beirut, Tyre, Sidon, the Chouf mountains, and the Alea region. Although the majority of displaced are staying with relatives and friends, approximately 125,000 are staying in schools and public institutions in Lebanon, and 150,000 have crossed the border into Syria. According to international media reports, remaining residents in southern Lebanon cannot leave due to ongoing attacks and damaged infrastructure."

The UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) estimates that 45 per cent of the displaced population are children. Approximately half of them - about 125,000 - are living in 587 schools and shelters and are in urgent need of water storage and tankers, improved sanitation, and health kits.

UNICEF says: "....the insecure situation, especially in southern Lebanon, has severely restricted UNICEF's ability to reach the affected population outside of Beirut. UNICEF joins the rest of the UN family in its call for safe corridors for the delivery of aid to all affected children."

Israel's security Cabinet decided to step up its air campaign against Lebanon on Thursday, but said it would not expand its ground offensive after the death of nine of its soldiers in fighting for Bint Jabayl the day before.

The Beirut Daily Star reports: "According to Elias Hanna, a researcher of military affairs, the decision to limit the ground campaigns was made because "Israelis are traumatised by their negative experience during the invasion of Lebanon in 1982."

"They are afraid of suffering more losses in every village they try to conquer," Hanna added.

The researcher said internal political calculations are also affecting Israel's military strategy.

"The ruling coalition includes the conservative Likud Party, which is constantly trying to prove that the withdrawal from Southern Lebanon in 2000 was a mistake in the first place," Hanna said. The Israeli daily Haaretz said Israeli consensus over a large-scale offensive in Lebanon is beginning to "crack".

"...critics are starting to say the government launched the offensive hastily, with no exit strategy, and many fear the country is again being dragged into a quagmire across its northern border."

The truth is that Israel has got itself into an unholy mess from which it has no easy exit. Since its initial strategy seemed to be based on an easy, lossless victory, a sort of war college setpiece, driving back Hezbollah to its caves, the fact that they have taken nearly two weeks to make any impression in their ground offensive frightens many Israelis. Rockets are still hitting Haifa and there is no progress on the ground in Lebanon. The script was not supposed to be going this way.

Israel is now in a position where 'winning' seems implausible, and anything less will look suspiciously like defeat. Too many IDF soldiers are being killed and the Israeli nation does not want to accept massive casualties.

Having totally destabilised the Hamas government of Palestine, Lebanon seemed a nice bit of icing to add to that cake. Israel, the script went, would then be able, from a position of strength, to impose its solutions on the rest of the Middle East, backed by its invincible partner, the United States.

They felt so confident that they spoke of enforcing UN resolution 1559 demanding the surrender of Lebanon and the disarmament of Hezbollah. This demand is especially poignant, when it is remembered that Israel has, for 50 years, defied scores of UN Security Council resolutions about the settlement of the Palestinian question and the establishment of a Palestinian state.

The Israeli calculus was based on the doctrines of Ariel Sharon - who saw no reason to obey any law which did not suit him - and a long line of Israeli statesmen who have nibbled away at Palestinian rights and Palestinian property without fear of successful challenge.

This all depended on Arab armies which would fire a few rounds in the air and then retreat, honour satisfied. Hezbollah, it turns out, is made of sterner stuff. But Hezbollah should not have taken Israel by surprise. It was that organisation after all, which drove the Israelis to vacate Lebanon 20 years ago after Sharon's bloody and unsuccessful attempt to settle Palestine by way of Lebanon.

This time the defeat will be more easily visible on a larger stage, particularly because the United States and Israel have postured so grandly and played their cards so badly.

It was clear, as some Arab commentators have said, that the mere kidnapping of three Israeli soldiers was not the real reason for the start of these hostilities. Soldiers have been kidnapped before and exchanged for prisoners kidnapped by Israel. The original kidnapping was, after all, an attempt to pressure Israel into returning several hundred civilians, including dozens of women and children, held by Israel without charge.

Somehow, the Western Press, in reporting the Palestine conflict, finds it difficult to see Palestinian grievances as real and substantial. They proclaim the illegitimate expression of the grievances but ignore the legitimate grievances themselves. Israel's arrogant kidnapping of several Hamas Cabinet ministers was meant to teach a lesson - a lesson perilously close to the dictum stated some years ago by a Jewish rabbi at the funeral of a Jewish terrorist named Dr Baruch Goldstein.

Goldstein walked into a mosque in Jerusalem with a machine-gun and killed 29 Palestinians and wounded 125 others before he was torn to pieces by the congregation. At his funeral the rabbi, one Yacov Perin, declared "One million Arab lives are not worth a Jewish fingernail".

Western commentators and the Israeli government, echoed by Ms Condoleezza Rice and her president, suggest that the real problem is the support of terrorists by Syria and Iran. In calling for the enforcement of the UN resolution it does not seem to have crossed their minds that there are other, even more relevant resolutions of the UN Security Council.

Whether the Israelis and the US Press believe so or not, the UN resolutions were not anti-semitic, nor anti-Zionist, nor anti-Jewish, but were the world's sincere attempts to deliver justice to both sides - to people who have been holding the sharp end of the stick ever since Joshua smote the Amalekites and the Amorites, David smote the Philistines, and the Romans smote the Jews.

The problem is that the Israelis, grievously wronged by European peoples, cannot believe that they can live peacefully and occupy the same general space as any other people. It is an exaggeration to describe the attitude of the Zionists as believing that the Bible is a title to Palestinian real estate, but the behaviour of Ehud Olmert and those Israelis who follow him make it seem very much that way. Olmert is reported to have said he would drive Palestinians mad with sonic booms.

Olmert and many, but not all his predecessors, have behaved as if might is right, that facts on the ground are tantamount to eternal truths. Which is why some 'democrats' were so surprised that the Palestinians, given a chance at democracy, elected Hamas to be their government, and that the Lebanese have now been radicalised, not by Hezbollah, but by the Israel Defence Force. It does not seem to matter that Hamas are Palestinians and Hezbollah are Lebanese, legitimate expressions of their people, not imported from anywhere else.

There is, of course, another difficulty. To attempt to separate Hamas from Palestine and Hezbollah from Lebanon on the ground that they are terrorists would require the dismemberment of the countries. The "Terrorists" have become integral with the populations because they express the terrible grievances of the people.

Many Israelis over the years have realised that you cannot impose peace through war and injustice. Wise Israelis and others have been pointing out for years that every Israeli victory seems to produce a new and larger crop of enemies. The process seems endless.

If we were to calculate the suffering, the number of lives lost and destroyed on all sides, the amount of treasure and culture lost, we would be appalled, horrified, struck dumb, perhaps. It seems acceptable in small doses, until we realise how corroded our souls have become and how much of our civilisations we have thrown into the trash along with the truth.

Any attempt to tell the truth in this conflict is almost immediately denounced as anti-semitic or pro-terrorist and invites violence of one sort or another. But the much larger violences which are ignored by propaganda are likely to be apocalyptic in scale when they do happen, and are inevitable unless we begin to face facts and tell ourselves the truth.

I cannot do my duty to my friend by telling him the lies he wants to hear. If I do that, I am setting him up for his enemy.

'God' Buck Him Toe!

2006-07-23T14:00:00.000+02:00

Common Sense
John Maxwell

I was talking to man who works as a waiter in a Kingston hotel. "You know," he said, "there are people who would rather knock you down in the street than risk their expensive car being damaged by a pothole. Rather than hitting the pothole they will hit you and drive off - figuring the cops will never trace them.

"They don't realise that they should be nice to the people they meet on the way up because they're going to meet them again on the way down."

I'm not sure that I have the same faith in divine justice as he, but I couldn't help thinking about what he said as I watched the images of Israel's destruction of Lebanon and Palestine and read about the unravelling of the power of the man many in Jamaica have for the past several years referred to only half-jokingly as 'God'.

Israel is spending a great deal of time, effort and money in buying itself enemies. People on the Jamaican streets, knowing what I do for a living, come up to me and ask me to explain what's going on in the Middle East. And they are not just seeking my opinion, they are giving me theirs.

The major question is why Israel believes it makes sense to slaughter hundreds of Palestinians and Lebanese civilians in the effort to recover three Israeli soldiers captured by Palestinians and by Hezbollah. It seemed totally out of proportion to them.

The Israelis wouldn't be doing it, they tell me, if the Americans weren't giving them the money and the arms to do it. "Don't they believe," they ask, "that one day the money will come to an end? That one day the shoe might be on the other foot?"

Jamaicans have always had a lively and intelligent interest in what happens in the rest of the world. In small countries, people tend to be very attentive to anything that might conceivably affect them; the behaviour of our powerful neighbour to the north is one such factor, partly because Jamaicans realise that we could not possibly defend ourselves against any attack from that quarter, but also because most Jamaicans have a - fast disappearing - tradition of respect and affection for the USA. There are so many Jamaicans there. Many Jamaicans serve and have served in the US armed forces.

In my daily peregrinations I increasingly encounter people who formerly would have been partisans of the United States. I meet them in supermarkets and such places, middle-aged, middle-class women who want to know why the US believes that it makes sense to be buying new enemies, as one put it to me last week. I had not realised how many Palestinians there are in Jamaica and how many of them - who are mainly middle- and upper-class - hate the United States.

"Buying enemies" is an apt description of the process. They see the destruction of Palestine as a process which began 60 years ago, when some of them were first displaced. They know that their ancestors had given shelter and succour to the Jews and do not understand why Middle Eastern people should now be paying for the sins of European racists.

And they tell me that they think the Israelis are behaving just like the Nazis who persecuted and murdered them by the millions not so long ago. Although few of them are Muslim and most are Christian, Jamaican Palestinian and Lebanese people identify strongly with the Islamic resistance to Israeli hegemony. One businessman told me a few months ago that the memories of Palestinians are just as long as the memories of the Jews. "We still remember Saladin," he said.

And he reminded me that 60 years ago, people like Yitzhak Shamir and Menachem Begin were officially described by the British as terrorists; just as Hamas and Hezbollah are now described by the Americans, the British and the Israelis. And, don't even begin to talk about Iraq!

Some Palestinian, Lebanese and other Middle Eastern people in Jamaica muse on the cost of the current destruction - wouldn't the money spent on missiles and bombs, on F-16s and missile-firing warships make more sense being spent on the development of the whole area?

Wouldn't it make Israel safer if they were to try buying friends rather than enemies? Wouldn't it be cheaper?

And my Middle Eastern friends, turning away from the United States, slowly but increasingly more surely, have a particular contempt for the American Press. My businessman friend asked me to explain what was the essential difference between CNN and Pravda or Izvestia? Even the British BBC, he said, could no longer be trusted.

'God' buck him toe!

The major Jamaican story of the week (and of several weeks to come) is the scandal surrounding the Sandals Whitehouse hotel development.

The Urban Development Corporation (UDC), which has never been about urban development, is now at the centre of a dispute about their management of the construction of a hotel on Jamaica's south coast, which was supposed to inaugurate a new era in Jamaican tourism. The hotel was being built for the Sandals group, headed by 'Butch' Stewart, who also happens to be the owner of this newspaper.

Several months ago, it transpired that Sandals and the UDC were involved in a dispute about who was responsible for horrendous cost overruns in the construction of the hotel. The project was originally scheduled to cost about US$70 million. The final cost is somewhere north of US$110 million, a cost overrun of more than 60 per cent.

I do not have the space to go into the details of the corporate arrangements surrounding the project management, except to say that, according to 'Butch' Stewart, the Sandals group, who were supposed to be joint venture partners, were never made aware of the exact financial position.

Despite trying to find out what was the position, Sandals kept getting the run-around from the UDC and its nominee on site, a project management company headed by Mr Alston Stewart, a journalist and public relations practitioner who suddenly became an all-purpose expert, running the National Solid Waste Management Authority as well as the Sandals Whitehouse construction project.

The contractor-general's office has now issued a report on the Sandals project, and the contents so far are mind-boggling. According to the contractor-general, the UDC has been unco-operative in providing the facts required for a proper investigation of the scheme. It is apparently at this moment, impossible to accurately trace what happened to nearly US$40 million.

As in every story, there are several sides. In this case, the contractor-general insists that the UDC had contravened the Government's mandatory requirements for the procurement of services and goods, including the hiring of consultants. The UDC, on the other hand, says that it has provided full access to all the information it has in its possession and that the contractor-general had never asked for additional information, nor did he indicate dissatisfaction with the quality or timeliness of the information provided.

One of the more curious aspects has been the contention of Vin Lawrence that government guidelines about the hiring of consultants were not in place when he hired them for the project. Whether there were guidelines or not, wouldn't any sensible businessman make sure that the process was transparent and ethical? You don't need official guidelines for that.

The Sandals group, through director Chris Zacca, who is also deputy chairman of the Observer newspaper, says the contractor-general was misinformed about the part Sandals' affiliates played, but the group shared the concerns expressed by the C-G about the lack of transparency and accountability in the construction project. They have promised their side of the story shortly.

All of this seems to lead inevitably to the former chairman of the UDC, the man formerly known as 'God' - the man some believed was the real deputy prime minister to Mr Patterson - Vin Lawrence Jnr. While Mr Patterson reigned, it was said, Mr Lawrence ruled. He was the man to see if you wanted anything done. Without his say-so, supplicants could wait a very long time.

My own problems with Mr Lawrence were simpler. The word "Environment" was to him an incendiary device, and he made sure that 'development' - as the UDC saw it - had nothing to do with sustainability or the Precautionary Principle.

Thirty years ago, long before Mr Lawrence became chairman of the UDC, I convinced Michael Manley to hand over a portion of the Hellshire (Halfmoon Bay) beach to the fishermen who had originally colonised it. It seemed to me that in addition to their fishing they should also be permitted to run the beach as a public recreational park, and initially, 32 acres were set aside for this.

The UDC, led by Moses Matalon, then chairman, and Gloria Knight, managing director, fought every step of the way to prevent the transfer of ownership. The original 32 acres were cut to 10.

They also fought my proposal to accept the advice of a high-level UWI scientific team that Hellshire should be handled with kid gloves because it was ecologically important, sensitive and potentially a huge scientific and touristic asset if properly protected.

The UDC saw Hellshire as another step in the urbanisation of Jamaica concentrated on Kingston and premised on massive hotel developments. I was famously denounced as a dreamer for saying that iguanas still existed in Hellshire. They were wrong.

The UWI and the NRCA (of which I was chair at the time) were happy to give up eastern Hellshire to housing but wanted the rest of it for a wilderness park and a scientific reserve. There was space, we thought, for all of this in Hellshire's 17 square miles.

In the first place, the UDC refused to surrender its claims to Halfmoon Bay, allowing the construction of a monstrous edifice on the western side of the beach and sending in bulldozers to flatten the houses of the fishermen. They were squatters, the UDC said.
It was only later, two years ago, that the Hellshire Bay community learned that even while the UDC had been demolishing their houses, the title for the land had already been passed from the UDC to the fishermen's co-operative. The UDC was in fact criminally trespassing on their land.

Mr Lawrence was chair of the UDC at this time, and after the demolitions he undertook an eventually fruitless attempt to get the fishermen to surrender their land in exchange for 30 or so barrack houses away from the beach.

It took us nearly 30 years to get what had been promised by Michael Manley, Prime Minister of Jamaica, in 1978. Since then, the UDC has gone from strength to strength. It has claimed that the 50-year leases granted to farmers on the Winnifred Beach property at Fairy Hill in Portland are null and void. It has better things to do with the land and the beach.

The UDC intends to wall off the beach and the property from Jamaica, to make it an exclusive ghetto for foreigners. The same solution is to be applied to the Trelawny coastline, taking away public beaches for the pleasure of the UDC's rich friends abroad.

If the UDC were allowed to continue its mad career, pretty soon Jamaicans won't be able to find a decent public beach in their own country.

There cannot be a better reason for the prime minister to order an immediate and full-scale forensic audit of the UDC as a preliminary to abolishing the corporation in the public interest.

No accountability for decades

In 1973, I was invited to a press conference by the then minister of mining and natural resources, Allan Isaacs, to hear about the UDC's plan to rebuild downtown Kingston. During the course of the press conference I asked Mr Matalon whether I could have the UDC's last annual report. It wasn't available yet, I was told. Could I have the previous annual report? That too was unavailable. Could I have any of the corporation's annual reports? None were available.

Allan Isaacs, listening to this exchange with bafflement and increasing fury, asked Moses Matalon whether the UDC had published any annual reports since its inception five years before? Matalon said 'no'. Isaacs then ordered the UDC to let him have the annual reports on his desks within some reasonable time, and the press conference was at an end.

Several weeks later, the UDC produced a document which was said to contain the annual reports from 1968 to 1973. Among other things it revealed that the UDC had been financing itself with promissory notes from local and foreign banks, all without the knowledge of the ministry of finance. It would be interesting to discover how many other annual reports have been published since 1973.

Since then, the UDC has, instead of urban development, gone into the business of property development. It has built two condo hotels - Seacastles and Sandcastles - and earns a substantial but undisclosed share of its revenue from the (US$) fees it charges at the Dunn's River Falls.

Nobody really knows what the UDC is up to. What we do know is that it is not, in any sense, an Urban Development Corporation.

Busha Blockhead

2006-07-16T13:00:00.000+02:00

Common Sense
John Maxwell

There are one or two important things in this life of which we must always be aware. One is that you can kill as many Haitians as you like, you can rape as many Haitians as you like, you can chop off the faces of as many Haitians as satisfies your blood lust, and you can still live like a king in Queens, New York, as long as you remember that you mustn't mess with Uncle Sam's financial system.

Not even a teensy weensy bit.
You don't have to rob Fort Knox or deprive 50,000 people of their pensions and life savings, or like Al Capone, avoid income tax. All you need to get into real trouble is to work a simple little scheme to relieve a bank of some of its surplus cash. That will get you the attention of New York's finest. You will go to jail, be fingerprinted, mug-shotted and become a person of interest to the FBI.

Cocaine trafficking? Rape? Murder? Terrorism? Crimes against humanity ? Bagatelles!!! Who remembers them? But making a banker look stupid? Now that's really serious.
You're gonna swing for that. That is a crime against the Holy Greenback itself.

Emanuel Toto Constant, like Baron Savimbi of Angola, was a friend of the CIA and various Higher Powers. He had not, as far as is known, yet been invited to the White House like Savimbi, but he was doing very well, thank you, as long as he confined his depredations to the Haitians, as long as his attachés with machetes, machine guns and murder in their hearts carved their bloody way through Haitian democracy with lavish fascism.
Toto, living the life in Queens, New York, just didn't know the rules.

While he danced, his president was in exile 5,000 miles away, his country's prime minister languishing in jail for no good reason, along with Haiti's foremost folklorist, a sexagenarian lady named Anne August, and thousands more like them are dead, or in prison, or in exile, because of the machinations and macheteros of Good Ol' Toto, friend of the CIA and Mr (Deadeye) Dick Cheney.

And other friends, like Louis Jodel Chamblain and other assassins, walk freely in Haiti, shooting and chopping up as they please. One of them ran for president a few months ago. They even have anniversary Massacres! They had one last week.

It all goes to show that, contrary to what some people believe, some of us don't have to await the Rapture; Heaven is right here on earth as long as you don't mess with the Feds.

In Haiti itself, God has at long last deigned to speak - through the American ambassador, one Ms Sanderson. This oracle has delivered herself of the message that perhaps Prime Minister Yvon Neptun has been in jail long enough. She thought it was because of Haiti's "flawed judicial system" that he was still there, after two years without charge or trial.

Which is strange, since it was her government which elevated the head of that same judicial system to the post of "President" of Haiti, from which eyrie he and another American carpetbagger, one Gerard Latortue, dispatched Mr Neptun to jail.

The charade now taking place in Haiti is not a Haitian production, it is an American production, like "The Emperor Jones". In this American version of Grand Guignol theatre, an important walk-on part is played by black people who have the temerity not only to speak French but to anticipate the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by 144 years.

The real actors are Americans - a whole panoply of eminent fellows, steel-jawed and gimlet-eyed, full of 'resolve' - from Thomas Jefferson to Woodrow Wilson, to George (the least) Bush, from William Jennings Bryan, a failed Presidential candidate, to Colin Powell, a failed Jamaican.

In their polished diplomatic phrases they all express themselves satisfied when the Haitians, the first and only people to abolish the servitude which chained them, are reduced to their proper status as less-than-people, undeserving of even as much democracy as Iraqis or Palestinians. The Nanny-in-Chief, a failed African-American named Condoleezza Rice, was quite within her rights to inform them last year that their vote was all-important. It was the most important thing they could do.

Because, no matter which way they voted, they were not going to get the leader they wanted. He would have to stay in South Africa while Uncle Dick scouted the waters round Haiti for oil.

There must be oil in Haiti. Just read the CV of the latest prophetess, Ms Sanderson. Her minor qualifications seem to have been her alleged intimate involvement in the illegal detention of two dozen Algerian nationals at the US Naval base in Guantanamo Bay in 2002.

She completed an honours thesis, "The Arab Oil Weapon", the year before joining the State Department as a career diplomat in August 1977. She later served as the petroleum attaché to Kuwait. During the first Gulf War, Sanderson was working as economic counsellor at the US Embassy in Jordan.

As ambassador to Algeria she was most famous for her attitude to the arrest of 24 Algerians working for aid organisations in occupied Bosnia. They were accused of "planning terrorist attacks on the American and UK embassies in Sarajevo". Two of the men are computer programmers, while the other 22 held administrative positions in several different NGOs.

The men were detained without bail for three months before the Bosnian Supreme Court acquitted them. However, in the early morning hours on the day they were to be released, the men were hooded, shackled and taken away to an unknown destination. They wouldn't be located for over a month. Eventually they were found to be in Guantanamo Bay.

After a year in custody, all 24 Algerian aid workers were released. Strangely, Miss Sanderson refused to lift a finger to help their families locate them, referring them to the Algerian authorities although she must have known they were in American custody. (Thanks to Lynn Duff for this info).

During a Senate hearing in 2000, Sanderson was gung-ho about the so-called drawdown programme, under which favoured US allies are allowed to receive, free of cost, unused US weaponry to control unruly trade unionists and pesky journalists, for example. "The drawdown programme, like the rest of our foreign assistance programmes, underscores the importance we attach to [the country we give weapons to] and to our ongoing political, military and security relationship."

That connection, and her little noticed expertise in petroleum matters, suggests to me that Mr Cheney knows that there is oil off the coast of Haiti and that he wants Halliburton to retrieve it for its rightful owner, the USA. Sanderson's human rights and petroleum background would seem to fit her perfectly for this critical mission.

Meanwhile, in the Middle East, the slaughter goes on. It is a fair fight, with the Palestinians using their concrete schools, hospitals and power stations to damage Israeli bombs and tank-shells and employing their formidable skulls against Israeli bullets. Children's sleep patterns repel sonic booms at 4 o'clock in the morning, no doubt damaging the Israeli F16s.

Mr George Bush, recognising a championship fight when he sees one, has called on both sides for restraint. He has vetoed a Security Council resolution encouraging Israel to behave herself. Not evenhanded enough.

As I have said, ad nauseam, the ruling classes of the world, but especially in Jamaica, have no class and cannot rule. Just as the Israeli rockets and shells are powerless against Palestinian civilians, so are our own rulers powerless against the public they say they serve.

If this were not so we would not have people like Mr Dennis Morrison whining about the all-powerful Jamaican NGOs, some of them intimidating entities boasting two women and a WMD fax machine.

These are dangerous adversaries indeed, which is why such powerless bureaucracies as the Ultimate Degradation Conglomerate (UDC) and various ministries are forced to do good by stealth.

In the all-important race to curtain Jamaica off from its seacoast, the poor, helpless Cyclops-like JAMPRO, the Ministry of Production, the Ministry of Transport, the UDC and various other enervated entities must find ways round the law, ways to evade the public's due diligence, ways to diddle the public out of its beaches, its national parks and its sadly neglected cultural assets.

The government entities are giving privileged positions on the seaside to such as the RIU hotels, who, if all goes according to form, will soon produce in Jamaica a massive scandal which will tarnish the image of the entire Jamaican hotel industry. The RIU chain owns two hotels in Jamaica, forcing-houses in which tourists are processed for a few days and sent back whence they fled with nothing to show that they have been in a faraway country of which they knew nothing before coming and about which they remain blissfully ignorant after having been.

In the Dominican Republic RIU owns at least three hotels and since last year, according to several firms of English lawyers, the Financial Times and the Daily Mail, droves of English guests in RIU hotels have come down with serious and debilitating gastric afflictions.

According to Financial Times information services, quoted in the Daily Mail:

"Hundreds of British holidaymakers have been struck down by a severe vomiting bug at a luxury Caribbean resort - a year after an identical outbreak.

More than 200 guests have fallen ill at a five-star hotel in the Dominican Republic, which closed for five weeks in June last year to eradicate the highly contagious virus. Many of the sick, including dozens of children, had intravenous drips hooked up in their rooms and one 18-month-old baby was hospitalised for a fortnight.

Some of the guests asked to be transferred to another hotel, but say their requests were rejected. Others were simply too ill to be moved."

But the story, judging from travelblogs, is not new: "29 year-old Nicola Piercy from Mansfield was affected by the outbreak of the virus at the same resort in 2005 and says, "I think it's absolutely disgraceful that this has happened again. I travelled to the resort in March 2005 for what I hoped would be my dream wedding, and instead had to endure seeing my fiancé placed on a drip on our wedding day and most of our family, including myself, suffering from severe gastric symptoms".

The personal injury law firm of Pannone in Manchester, England, says, "Hotels in the Dominican Republic have suffered similar problems over recent years with the Riu chain featuring in newspaper articles last year regarding complaints of poor standards of hygiene. Identical complaints are surfacing again this year as well as reports of vermin in hotel bars and restaurants, tour operator reps denying there were problems, unsupervised groups of Puerto Rican teenagers, some of whom were seen urinating in the swimming pool and medical staff treating patients without washing their hands."

If anything like this were to happen in Jamaica, you know that the entire hotel industry would be shut down within a week or two. The US Press would roast us, the British Press would trot out its favourite template about Trouble in Paradise and the dollar would probably be devalued.

Have the Jamaican government agencies done their due diligence? Do they really understand what is at stake? I have my doubts.

God Speaks, Again

The founding prophetess of the Church Dayton Diamond Ridge has lashed out at those people in her church who informed the Press and others about the case of the violated teenager. And, before we go any further, a child cannot consent to sexual intercourse, and sexual intercourse without consent is rape.

I don't want to say too much about this strange and increasingly noxious case, except to point out that it is an offence to conceal knowledge of a felony, which carnal abuse is. The founder of the church should have sought legal advice before making a fool of herself in public.

But she had legal advice available; her pastor is a Queen's Counsel, a former Deputy Director of Public Prosecutions, former High Court Judge and former Justice of the Court of Appeal.

He is a bona fide member of the ruling classes.

By Order, Management

2006-07-09T13:00:00.000+02:00

Common Sense
John Maxwell

It is enough to make your hair stand on end. A child is screaming - a teenage girl is being gang-raped in the back seat of a moving car. The car is being driven by the deacon of a church. The rapists are the girl's schoolmates.

There is a voice apparently giving instructions to the hysterical girl although it is not clear that the hysterical child can hear anything but the sound of her own terror.

The car is being driven by a man, the deacon of a church to which all the participants in this obscene drama are connected. We do not know whether it is his voice giving instructions to the girl. We do know that his pastor says that the deacon has admitted doing wrong, that in the pastor's words, "he has disciplined himself".

The pastor is a retired judge of the Jamaican High Court. Mr Martin Wright does not apparently know that as someone who knows of a felony, it is his duty to report it to the police. The felon cannot discipline himself. In Mr Justice Wright's court, there must have been hundreds of cases where expressed remorse did not prevent the law from taking its course.

But perhaps the church has different rules. Perhaps the church's law is now superior to the law of the land. Perhaps the Director of Public Prosecutions should seek to establish this fact by bringing a prosecution against Mr Wright - simply, of course, to test whose law is supreme in this instance.

Recently, so-called Christian lawyers have been claiming that human rights should be subject to the over-riding doctrines of sectarian fundamentalist Christianity. The Jamaican version of the Taliban believes that human rights to privacy should be reduced to allow them or their agents to penetrate the bedrooms of consenting adults to view and perhaps prosecute instances of what they may deem to be unnatural behaviour.

Their view of what is unnatural is not derived from scientific observation but taken from the oral histories of nomadic tribes whose social mores reflected the times in which they lived, four or five thousand years ago.

At that time, of course, there was no such thing as universal human rights; women were the property of their men and anyone who took the name of God "in vain" was legally liable to be stoned to death.
Cherry picking the Bible to satisfy their lust for revenge and blood is, of course, superior to any other lust. It does not occur to the Taliban that any diminution of the privacy enjoyed by Jamaicans at this moment might be enough to get them into trouble with the law in another time, should there for instance, be a government, which supported a different religion.

If human rights are to mean anything, they must mean that all humans are entitled to the same rights. But the Jamaican Taliban has eminent precedent: certain elements of the Caribbean Press would wish to enshrine sectoral rights.

Freedom of the press, according to these worthies, does not belong to the People but to the Press. And, pretty soon, freedom of religion will only apply to those religions approved by the Taliban.

By order, management I

The Tinson Pen airport has been closed, on the orders and authority of the Port Authority. These are the same people who, without a care in the world, employed a Belgian dredging company three years ago to redistribute toxic waste from the bottom of the Kingston harbour to produce new land. The fact that these wastes included:

'Arsenic, Benzene, Cadmium, Chlordane, Chloroform, Chromium, Cresols, 2,4-D9 (aka Agent Orange) dichlorobenzene, dichlorethane, dinitrotoluene, Endrin, Heptachlor, Hexachlorobutadiene, lead, lindane, mercury, nitrobenzene, pentachlorophenol, pyridine, selenium, tetrachloroethylene, toxaphene, 4,5 Trichlorophenol and vinyl chloride.

'Many PBTs are associated with a range of adverse human health effects, including damage to nervous system and deformities of the sex organs and reproductive system generally, and associated developmental problems, cancer, plus genetic impacts.

They not only deform people now living, but may deform people not yet conceived. Particular risks may be posed to the developing foetus or young child where critical organs, such as the central nervous system and the reproductive system, are under development. (Commonsense: People at Risk, February 2002).

The incredibly dangerous movement of these poisons was, apparently, to provide space for the storage of containers. Unfortunately for all of us, the Port Authority's planning was faulty and so, in their wisdom, the Authority has decided to close down the country's busiest domestic airport at Tinson Pen, in order to store cargo containers.

So, having endangered the health of generations yet unborn as well as the present-day inhabitants of the areas round the harbour, the Port Authority is increasing our general risk by adding 50% to the traffic to be handled by the Norman Manley International airport - NMIA

This is not a small matter. In 2004, Norman Manley handled 39,296 flights (arrivals and departures) while Tinson Pen handled 20,186.

This bold decision of the Port Authority, without public consultation, means that Norman Manley's flight load will go up 50%, to 60,000 flights a year on one runway. This would not be so dangerous if all the flights were commercial jets with highly experienced pilots and state of the art navigation equipment. Among the new NMIA load will be student pilots and countless small aeroplanes flown for sport.

I plan to restrict my aeroplane time as much as possible in the future. Certainly, the new arrangements should provide for considerable excitement during rush periods like the World Cup of cricket.

By order, management II

We are all familiar with the signs by which Imperial Jamaica keeps its distance from the hoi polloi. Some absolutely arrogant notice is posted, arrogating all sorts of rights to some unnamed authority, ending in the words: 'By Order, management.'

This is an instruction that these directions are not to be questioned. They are the product of 'higher authority' and perhaps, a higher intelligence, answerable, one suspects, only to God. The Port Authority is only one of several QUANGOs (quasi non-governmental organisations aka statutory corporations or more recently, executive agencies) in which the role of the plantation boss is assumed by newly empowered and overpaid bureaucrats masquerading as underpaid geniuses.

Apart from the Port Authority, there are three more, which should put the fear of God into Jamaicans. These include the Urban Development Corporation, (UDC) the Jamaica Promotions Corporation (JAMPRO) and the National Environmental Protection Agency, (NEPA) all of whom are engaged, in my opinion, in reducing Jamaican human rights to the Statutory Globalised Minimum.

The NEPA was formed by the conglomeration of the Town Planning Department (TPD) and the Natural Resources Conservation Authority (NRCA). Among its duties are the safeguarding of the Jamaican natural patrimony and the planning of safe communities. Effectively, the combination of the NRCA and the TPD has meant a serious diminution in the protections afforded by the laws supposedly governing these bodies.

The understaffed and widely ignored TPD is effectively outranked by the NRCA, which means that its recommendations are not taken seriously. The NRCA apparently believes that its function is to get out of the way of 'development' no matter how unsustainable such development might be.

One way the NRCA gets round the rules is to regard any development as relevant only to the small populations nearest to it. Environmental Impact Assessments which should be on the public agenda, are discussed in small, obscure meetings, called at short notice in some backwoods meeting hall.

The so-called EIA for the horrendous Doomsday Highway was publicly discussed by a few dozen people in a restaurant in Spanish Town. The Northcoast Highway was never publicly discussed, as far as I can ascertain. The dispute over the Portmore connection to Kingston would not have happened had the government been forced to follow its own rules.

The destruction of Harris Savannah, one of the biological treasures of the world, is now imminent for the same reason.
Also imminent is the destruction of the Winniefred (sic) Beach in Portland, the last public beach for several miles in any direction and one of the first public beaches to be established by the Beach Control Authority 50 years ago.

The Winniefred Rest Home at Fairy Hill was the gift of Frederick Barnet Brown and his wife, Mrs Annie Brown, and was named, it is said, after their faithful retainer of many years, one Winniefred. In Brown's will, dated May 14, 1918, the Fairy Hill property was given as a rest home for missionary workers, teachers and responsible poor persons. When the Jamaican Poor law was revised the home fell into disuse. In the 1970s the land was leased to small farmers. The beach was left to the public.

Using some legal or illegal legerdemain, the UDC has managed to evict the holders of the 50 year leases on the property and is now seeking to capture the beach where, they say, they will be building an 'eco-tourist attraction', consisting mainly of an all-inclusive hotel and expensive cottages.

The gloriously unspoiled beach will no doubt be enhanced, a la Bahia Principe. The people who have managed the beach for years will be expelled. The beach is to be globalised. And you wonder why I describe the UDC as the Universal Degradation Conglomerate?

All of this would be of course impossible without the collusion of JAMPRO and the NRCA, who will make sure that there is no hindrance to the sequestration of the Jamaican patrimony into the safe hands of some foreign coupon clipper.

On Wednesday, on Disclosure on Hot 102, I received anguished telephone calls from Jamaicans and from Canada, Belgium, and the Netherlands, from people who love the beach as it is and keep coming back year after year. One woman spends three months a year in Jamaica, on Winniefred beach and she has been doing it for 15 years.

Environmental Impact Assessments are, in the real world, examinations made on behalf of the public but paid for by developers. They are supposed to allow a rational discussion of whether any development should be allowed and if so, how it should be regulated. It is clear that the NRCA exists solely to rubberstamp EIAs, submitted in support of the development, thus eliminating the public interest from the start.

The character of EIAs may be gathered from the following quotation: "Previous EIAs reviewed have been notoriously negligent in the review of impacts associated with drainage, particularly impacts resulting from the development changes that will be imposed on previously undeveloped land and impacts associated with building layouts in flood-prone areas."

I don't have space for the rest of the quotation but basically, the NRCA is telling ESTECH: "Look, chaps, give us a plausible reason for approving this without further questions, OK?"

This quotation is from an EIA for another concrete avalanche on the beach. This time in one of the most gorgeous spots in Jamaica, the cove at Point, in Hanover.

The result of this hotel development will be an "enhanced beach", destroyed corals, a seriously diminished water supply for the natives and the end of informal sea bathing for the people near Point. Just as in Pear Tree Bottom, Mammee Bay, Lilliput, Bloody Bay and of course, Winniefred beach.

The moral is simple, If you are a Jamaican resident with a deep dream of surf, you had better get going now, or you may have to pursue your dream in Barbados or Miami.

'Trespassers will be prosecuted; pigs and goats will be shot."
By order, management.

...and Swallowing a Whale

2006-06-25T13:00:00.000+02:00

Common Sense
John Maxwell

The whale-killers have a new heroine. She is a a pretty, petite lawyer, Joanne Massiah, a senator in the Antigua Parliament who possesses a sharp mind and an even sharper tongue.

At the International Whaling Commission (IWC) meeting in St Kitts last week, Ms Massiah led the Caribbean delegations in a fierce rhetorical attack on their perceived enemies - countries like Britain, France, the United States, India, Mexico and Brazil. These countries are all opposed to the legalisation of whaling as demanded by Japan and her Caribbean and other allies.

All were tarred by the Caribbean orators with the same brush. They were perceived to be racist, imperialist and dismissive of the cultures of small nations. The Brazilians and their 'like-minded' friends protested time and again about the language used to describe them, but this did not stop the fiercely eloquent Caribbean partisans.

They were roused to particular fury when the black delegate from Martinique, Mme Grandmaison, announced that Martinique and Guadeloupe, part of France, would establish a whale sanctuary in their exclusive economic zones, bordering on several Eastern Caribbean nations.

Wada, Japan - Japanese spectators watch a Beard's Beaked whale being slaughtered in the Japanese port city of Wada on June 21, 2006. The whaling firm is one of eight coastal whaling operations in Japan that hunt Beard's Beaked and pilot whales, species not subject to the International Whaling Commission's 1986 ban on commercial whaling. Pro-whaling nations, including Japan, last week edged closer toward their goal of resuming commercial whale hunts at the IWC's annual meeting in St Kitts, passing a symbolic resolution to support ending a 20-year-old ban on commercial whaling. (Photo: AP)

According to Barbadian journalist Tony Best, Senator Massiah had become known at the IWC "for using the most eloquent of phrases and a calm tone to get her points across; so much so that even opponents of sustainable use of the world's marine resources, a policy she champions, felt compelled the other day in Basseterre to cheer her intervention, not because they agreed with her arguments but because of the sheer force of her words and their own inability to muster a comeback".

The problem was that the like-minded nations saw no point in making a comeback against arguments which were largely irrelevant, if often entertaining and provoking and not at all calm.

It was odd to hear Senator Massiah, who is alleged to be a vegetarian, defending the sacred right of people to eat whales, justifying the Biblical warning about "straining at a gnat and swallowing a camel" or in this case, a whale. But neither Miss Massiah nor her associates will be legally able to eat whale meat just yet.

That is despite the widely proclaimed victory of the whale-killing lobby on the second to last day of the conference. Many of the world's leading news agencies were hornswoggled by the whale-killers' propaganda. Interpress services reported: "TOKYO, Jun 20 (IPS) - A closely contested vote on Sunday that gave whaling countries led by Japan, an edge over opponents, has been hailed here as a landmark in turning the tide against an international ban and boosting the domestic fisheries industry."

Since IPS was writing from Japan, one may forgive them, but the Independent of London also got it wrong, as did several other reporters who listened too closely to the whale-killers' anti-siren songs.

What happened on Sunday was a masterpiece in mischief and double-dealing. The Caribbean delegates suggested that it would be nice to have a terminal "declaration" that everyone could sign on to. It would be a "Declaration of St Kitts" in the style of other international meetings, representing a consensus. It would, the 'like-minded' countries were told, be non-controversial and harmless.

When it came to the floor, after at least one revision, the Declaration was a straightforward denunciation of the anti-legalisation group. Some countries protested at the deception and at the presentation of the declaration as a resolution. It was however accepted by the chair as a resolution and voted on.

The result, the whale-killers won by one vote.

But the Declaration was meaningless. All it represented was Japan's ability to get its automatic voting bloc in line. The real result of the conference was contained in four policy resolutions, all of which were lost by the whale-killers. And, even if they had won those votes, it would have changed nothing, since overturning the moratorium on whaling requires a three-quarters majority which the Japanese clearly cannot muster without recruiting another dozen or so destitute nations to vote on their behalf.

There was an interesting sidelight to this recuitment. People witnessed a Japanese delegate rushing to the Secretariat to hand over piles of cash to register the late-coming delegate from Togo, whose vote gave the whale-killers their 'victory' in the Declaration of St Kitts.

It is the destitution of the Third World which should have been the real concern of the whale-killing lobby. The Caribbean delegates, having declared war on the anti-legalisation group, had one more trick up their sleeves.

According to another resolution by St Kitts, the Commission was urged to note "the urgent nature of the economic difficulties of the Government of St Kitts and Nevis resulting from the closure of its sugar industry and the failed materialisation of promised financial aid" and to realise that St Kitts, unable to meet some of the financial obligations related to the hosting of the conference, asked the Commission for a grant of £385,406 from the IWC to St Kitts. That is J$46 million or EC$15 million. The amount was required to "meet some of the financial obligations related to the hosting of the IWC".

The St Kitts request would effectively more than double the IWC's normal cost for holding its annual meetings. As someone unkindly pointed out, St Kitts had competed vigorously and successfully against La Rochelle, France, for the chance to hold this meeting.

As it happened, the vote on increasing the subsidy was a tie, so St Kitts will have to appeal either to Caricom or to its Japanese friends for the money.

It is possible, I believe, that notwithstanding St Kitts' position on whaling they might have got the money had the Caribbean spokesmen not been so gratuitously offensive to the like-minded group, who, I beg you to remember, includes such as India, Mexico and Brazil.

The urge to eat whale meat or to be allowed to slaughter whales comes out of a misconception. The Caribbean and Pacific clients of Japan appealed piteously for the legalisation of whaling to restore the rights of local communities to their coastal resources. "We want to eat, we want to survive," one South Pacific delegate whined.

The problem is that whales are not the coastal resource of any nation. They roam the oceans without passports and are part of the natural heritage of life. Despite this, the Japanese insist on their right to 'scientific whaling' - an enterprise, they say, which will give them information allowing them to harvest whales more sustainably.

Japanese sustainability

Japanese ideas of sustainability may be gauged from the following paragraph, taken from the Japanese's own report on one of their scientific expeditions - JARPN II.

"Based on results from the two-year feasibility study carried out in 2002 and 2003 the coastal component was revised to be conducted twice a year and to sample 60 common minke whales in each spring and autumn.

"During the whale sampling, almost 5,250 nautical miles were surveyed, 202 schools (205 individuals) of common minke whales were detected and 60 animals were caught (23 males and 37 females). Of the males eight were sexually mature while 14 of the females had attained sexual maturity and all but one was pregnant."

We are talking about sustainability, which means using resources without wasting them, making sure that the species will continue to reproduce and maintain itself. Sustainability must clearly include allowing the species time to breed and allowing the young to come to maturity and breed. How can it be sustainable to kill 15 immature males, nearly two-thirds of the male catch?

But worse follows: only 14 of the females were sexually mature - just over one in three, and all of the mature females, except for ONE, were pregnant.

The Japanese have been "scientifically" slaughtering whales now for two decades. Is it possible that after that period of scientific enquiry and thousands of whales killed, they still cannot tell the difference between mature and immature whales, or more important, between mature and immature females, and most important and baffling of all, between pregnant and fallow females?

We have to find something more expressive than 'boggle' for the contortions the mind undergoes on apprehending these facts, provided by the Japanese themselves.

The IWC forbids the killing of whale calves and their nursing mothers, except that this is how they kill whales in Becquia, St Vincent. But Becquia is allowed just two whales a year on the ground of 'aboriginal tradition' going back all of 148 years. The Japanese have been whaling for millennia, and began factory ship whaling relatively recently, to supplement diets deficient in protein after the debacle of the Second World War.

The Japanese are among the richest nations on earth, and no longer need whale meat. Some of what they catch goes for pet food, some is warehoused. The real reason for their intransigence on whaling is to finesse the possibility of restrictions on fishing.

The Japanese and many European countries and the Canadians have already strip-mined the ocean, vacuuming it of several species including the Canadian cod. Now, some of these same nations send out pirate vessels to steal fish from the Atlantic fisheries of West African nations.

Recently Greenpeace has been helping these West African nations defend their local marine assets and have helped arrest European pirate ships and confiscated their cargo for the benefit of the plundered nations. Some of these same plundered nations want to terminate Greenpeace's 'Observer' status at the IWC, while neglecting to lobby on behalf of their own fisheries, which produce food their people actually eat. Instead, they are swinging along with Japan, advancing arguments which are eventually counter-productive to their own real interest.

In the Caribbean, it is clear that the people of the islands do not agree with their politicians and bureaucrats in supporting the legalisation of whaling. As I reported last week, in Miss Massiah's Antigua, 80 per cent of the people polled disagreed with their government and there were absolute majorities against whaling in St Kitts and St Lucia. Only in Grenada did whale-killing sentiments come close to prevailing with 40 per cent for and 39 per cent against legalisation.

Curiously, in St Kitts, the people we met were either against whaling or non-committal, saying they didn't know enough to express an opinion. In a highly literate, extremely rational population it was strange therefore that many people did not wish to be quoted and appeared to be afraid of something when I spoke to them.

Perhaps it was my face that frightened them.

We will probably never know. But I wonder where St Kitts is going to find EC$15 million. Will Caricom oblige? And if it does, will the like-minded nations regard that as an endorsement of the behaviour of their smaller brethren?

One of the Eastern Caribbean delegates told me that part of their problem was that the Marriott hotel had overcharged them for the conference facilities. I would have thought that such a modern, God-fearing company as the Marriott should find this particular whale a lot easier to swallow than the people of St Kitts or of Caricom.

Or perhaps Mr Sanford, Antigua's resident Texas millionaire, might oblige?

STAY TUNED!

The Japanese Water Carrier and the Caribbean Ants

2006-06-18T13:00:00.000+02:00

Common Sense
John Maxwell

"You must understand," the man said, "a drop of water is a mockery to a thirsty horse. To an ant it is enough to swim in." He was attempting to explain to me the importance of Japan's Overseas Development Aid programme to the small island states of the Eastern Caribbean, which are, as I write, expected to be an integral component of Japan's attempt to take control of the International Whaling Commission (IWC).

Here in Frigate Bay, in St Kitts, at the very grand marble and concrete extravaganza called the Marriott Resort and Casino it is possible to imagine oneself almost anywhere but in a poor, tropical Caribbean island. Waterfalls cascade, rocks emit Bob Marley's music and there is a Jacuzzi in my suite.

Power is the motif here and this place is power-intensive.

Japan is well represented here. No one knows how many, but there are lots of them. Greenpeace is not so well represented. Their presence has been deemed a threat to the national security of St Kitts.

The Yushin Maru catcher ship of the Japanese whaling fleet injures a whale with its first harpoon attempt before taking a further three harpoon shots to finally kill the whale in the Southern Ocean off Antarctica on January 7, 2006. (Photo: AFP)

The Greenpeace ship was denied free passage into the waters of St Kitts, largely, one assumes, because of the fact that it was used to harass and embarrass Japanese whaling ships in the Southern Ocean during the last whaling season. Japan and Greenpeace represent two poles of the increasingly acrimonious argument about commercial whaling.

The Japanese want to legalise commercial whaling 20 years after it was banned by the IWC. The Japanese population is the main market for whale meat, and they objected to the 'indefinite moratorium' on whale killing and decided to continue harvesting whales through what the Japanese government called "scientific whaling" for research into the effect of whales on the life of the ocean.

The Japanese have since come up with the novel idea that whales are competing with humans for fish and that competition should be eliminated or reduced. There is unfortunately, a lamentable lack of evidence to support the Japanese viewpoint and most reputable scientists are of the view that scientific whaling is not science.

A group of eminent lawyers consulted by the International Fund for Animal Welfare concluded that "scientific whaling" is a subterfuge for commercial whaling and is an illegal enterprise under international law, specifically against the Law of the Sea, the Biodiversity Convention and the Convention Against Trade in Endangered Species, CITES.

Against these opinions, the Japanese are joined by a motley collection of mainly small island developing countries, but also including developing countries in Africa, and surprisingly, Outer Mongolia - which is completely landlocked and with no readily apparent interest in whaling.

Six of these countries are from the Caribbean: Antigua/Barbuda, Grenada, Dominica, St Kitts/Nevis, St Lucia, and St Vincent and the Grenadines.

The world's largest environmental NGO is the Worldwide Fund for Nature (formerly the World Wildlife Fund). In May this year, the WWF sponsored public opinion surveys in five states of the Caribbean and five from the Pacific to find out what the people of these islands really think about whaling.

The results were surprising. Of the 10 populations surveyed, at opposite ends of the world, nine were opposed to their government's stance on whaling. Only in Grenada did the pro-whaling viewpoint prevail over the anti-whaling element, and even there there was no absolute majority. In Grenada sentiment was almost equally balanced - 40-39 per cent.

Strangest of all, Antigua and Barbuda, the Caribbean bellwether for whaling, was overwhelmingly opposed to whaling, with nearly eight in 10 people against (79 per cent). There were absolute majorities against whaling in St Kitts and St Lucia while in the others, anti-whaling sentiment prevailed. In the Pacific islands, the results were even more dramatic. In reply to the question: "Do you think your country should vote for or against a return to commercial whaling?" the populations were almost uniformly anti-whaling, with 76 per cent in Palau, 72 per cent in the Solomon Islands, 64 per cent in the Marshall Islands, 64 per cent in Tuvalu, while in Kiribati the vote against was 47 per cent against to 40 per cent pro.

It is difficult to make sense of the Eastern Caribbean position. Their representatives repeat well-rehearsed lines about the sustainable development of marine resources, but are unable or unwilling to provide any evidence of any programme of work in this direction.

What there is plenty of is the opposition of Caribbean conservationists and tourism and allied interests to the legalisation of whaling. They appear to reflect the opinions of the population better than the politicians.

In a statement called "The declaration of St Kitts", Caribbean stakeholders urged Caribbean politicians to "Vote for the Caribbean", to vote for the interest of their own people instead of the interest of Japan.

In support of their position, the stakeholders brought witnesses from the whale watching industry to make the point that whales were more profitable to the Caribbean alive than dead. As some people say, Whales should be seen, not hurt. A stakeholder from the Dominican Republic related how in one locality, Samana, whale watching, in an annual 65-day season, brings in more than US$15 million in direct and indirect revenue.

And half of the whale watching operators are former fishermen. The DR has created a whale sanctuary in 20,000 sq km of its exclusive economic zone - effectively forbidding whaling. The French in Martinique and Guadeloupe are expected to announce, as I write, sanctuaries around Martinique and Guadeloupe, which will certainly make life difficult for the pro-legalisation forces.

The IWC is one stepping stone for Japan on its way to a permanent seat on the UN Security Council. They are quite open about it.

The Japanese Foreign Ministry's Fourth Consultation with their Caribbean clients in Barbados in 1996 concluded that Japan clearly recognised the importance of bagging the then 13-member Caricom bloc "and are determined to court that vote, especially in relation to the long-term goal of securing permanent membership of the UN Security Council".

We in Jamaica can recall the building of a fishery facility in Prime Minister P J Patterson's constituency a few years ago. As the Japanese proverb says: "Charity is a good investment."

What is seriously missing from all these development projects, often placed in Prime Ministerial Constituencies in the Caribbean, is any record of how they have helped local fishermen or the local economy.

Several years ago, Japanese long line fishermen did a very effective job of denuding the Caribbean of its pelagic fish. When I was last in Grenada the long line fishing vessel donated by the Japanese had not been to sea for years.

There were no fish to catch. Other Japanese facilities are being used, according to my informants, as community cold stores for beer and other perishable goods. This, I reiterate, is second-hand information, and if it is not correct I would like to know.

In a way it is appropriate that the IWC meeting is taking place in this Marriott palace. It is a vast pleasure dome, lavishly caparisoned in marble and stone. The painful realities of whaling seem as far away as St Kitts itself seems from the room in which I write.

The hotel, like those Spanish monstrosities on the Jamaican north coast, are emphatic statements of the power of capitalism, imposing its personality on the landscape regardless of the beauty it disfigures.

The Haitians and the Palestinians are intimately aware of this power, in which big power politics and interests inevitably trump the will of the people and common sense. In Palestine, the European Union is going to great lengths to frustrate the will of the Palestinians; in Haiti the United Nations Security Council is going to great lengths to frustrate the will of the Haitians.

So too, Palau, Antigua, Kiribati and St Kitts may not want to kill whales. But if Japan tells their governments how to vote, and they obey, what exactly is the value of that commodity called the will of the people?

Vandalising the Future

2006-06-11T13:00:00.000+02:00

Common Sense
John Maxwell

Almost exactly half a century ago, on June 1, 1956, Norman Manley's Beach Control Act became part of the laws of Jamaica. The Beach Control Act (BCA) was an attempt to preserve for the Jamaican people, their rights to access and to use the beaches of Jamaica for recreation and fishing.

On the day the law came into force, I went to the offices of the new Beach Control Authority to interview the secretary of the authority Mr LV Dujon, and the assistant secretary, Jacob Taylor. Jacob Taylor was my friend until he died, four decades later. He was also an indefatigable warrior in the struggle to preserve the Jamaican seacoast for the people of Jamaica.

The BCA had become necessary, Manley told Parliament, because Jamaicans were being prevented from the peaceful enjoyment of their beaches by landowners whose land bordered the beaches. These people had suddenly discovered that there was a new phenomenon called tourism and that tourists wanted to sun themselves on the beaches. Suddenly, the formerly free beaches of Jamaica were being fenced off and claimed to be private property.

Many of these beaches were not only said to be private property, but were refusing entry to Jamaicans of the wrong colour. Norman Manley's son, Michael, and Michael's wife, Thelma, were chased off the Shaw Park Beach in Ocho Rios for that reason.This incident, coming as it did during the public controversy over beaches, lent an inflammatory new angle to the argument.

Nevertheless, Norman Manley's new law was very accommodating to those owning land adjacent to the beaches, allowing them to apply for licences for the exclusive use of the beach for certain private and business purposes.

Thirty years later the Beach Control Authority, the Wildlife Protection Act and the Watersheds Protection Act became the foundation stones of a new authority, the Natural Resources Conservation Authority, which was given the authority and responsibility for the protection of the Jamaican environment and of the rights of Jamaicans to enjoy that environment.

A little before the Beach Control law was drafted, another significant development was beginning on Jamaica's north coast. A young scientist, Thomas L Goreau, had just been appointed the first professor of Marine Sciences at the fledgling University of the West Indies. That scientist's son, Tom Goreau Jr, told me the bones of the story in an email this week.

Tom Goreau the younger is himself one of the world's most eminent marine scientists and is the President of the Global Coral Reef Alliance, dedicated to the study and protection of coral reefs all around the world.

"The reefs at Pear Tree Bottom had the most spectacular vertical coral covered canyons, nearly a hundred feet deep with some of the largest and healthiest corals on the island. It was my father's favourite dive site, and as you know he was the world's first diving marine scientist and the first Professor of Marine Science at UWI, founder of the Port Royal and Discovery Bay Marine Labs, co-founder with Jacob Taylor of the Beach Control Authority (which later evolved into NRCA), and the person who knew more about coral reefs than anyone who has ever lived.

The entire part of Pear Tree Bottom from the road to the sea was given to my father by the owner of Pear Tree Bottom Estate, Major Abbey, to build the UWI Marine Lab in the early 1960s.

Although the reefs, the sea grasses, and the inland ecosystems were about the finest in Jamaica, my father agonised over the site due to it being so low, vulnerable in a hurricane, and because the reefs had grown right up to sea level, making it very difficult to get even a small boat to shore unless corals were destroyed to make a channel, which he was not willing to do. Later in the 1960s Kaiser Bauxite donated the land at the western end of Discovery Bay, which was much better suited for boat diving (after Kaiser had dynamited the reef to make the channel so bauxite boats could enter.

Goreau continues: "Remember that Columbus was so disgusted to find no water at all that he named it Puerto Seco, or Dry Harbour, before nearly dying running the reef getting out and reaching the next bay, which had a river full of sweet water that he named Rio Bueno, Good River, and slaughtered the Arawaks in the huge village that stood there, which still has never been properly excavated even though it is perhaps the most important Arawak archeological site in Jamaica.

When Kaiser donated the land for the Discovery Bay Marine Lab, my father returned the entire shore of Pear Tree Bottom to Major Abbey. The site remained beautiful for a long time, containing unique blue hole springs and remarkable wetlands as well as Jamaica's best reefs, until the beaches attracted the cupidity of developers who destroyed almost everything."

Tom Goreau has an understandable, almost proprietorial interest in the area, because with his father and his mother - a self-taught marine biologist - he began diving there almost before he could walk. He last dived at Pear Tree Bottom in the 1980s when the corals were in very bad condition.

He is much more critical of the state of the corals there than many scientists who are still diving at the reef, because he knew them in their pristine glory. Professor Rena Bonem of Baylor University in Texas, who has been diving there since the 1970s and Professor Ivan Goodbody, who became Professor of Marine Sciences when Tom's father died young, speak of glorious vistas and a reef largely recovered from the die-offs or bleachings of the coral and the damage from hurricanes.

Professor Bonem told me this week that she had recently discovered on the reef, species of sclerotic sponges - very ancient life forms - which were previously unknown in this region. She said that the construction at Pear Tree Bottom has obscured the canyons between the reefs and obliterated any view of the once spectacular corals.

The reefs obviously still have the capacity to surprise, or at least they had until the Spanish hotel groups, JAMPRO and the Ministry of Development discovered that there were in Jamaica still ecological treasures requiring devastation.

The northcoast reefs from Mammee Bay, outside of Ocho Rios to Pear Tree Bottom, a few miles to the west, are now threatened as never before by two hotel developments and a golf course due to be developed, I'm told, by a well-known Jamaican politician.

Mammee Bay was one of Jacob Taylor's most intransigent problems.

Sixty years ago, the colonial government of Jamaica gave the Jamaica Public Service Company permission to destroy Jamaica's most spectacular waterfall, the Roaring River Falls outside Ocho Rios, to create a small hydroelectric plant. This waterfall, or more accurately, cataract, covered at least thirty acres (10 ha) and flowed to the sea at Laughing Water, one of Jamaica's most beautiful beaches.

This beach was reserved as a Public Bathing beach in the 1950s, but the reservation has always been challenged by successive owners of the adjoining land - to the fury of the people of Steer Town who maintain that the beach is theirs.

Thirty years ago, in an attempt to settle the question, as chairman of the Beach Control Authority and NRCA, I initiated talks with the American millionaire shopkeeper, George Farkas, to buy the property. I wanted to transform it into a place of public resort, an arboretum for the display of Jamaican orchids and bromeliads, many of which were native to the place.

The 1980 elections interrupted the negotiations, but John Issa, the incoming chairman of the Tourist Board, bought Laughing Water for the nation. During Mr Patterson's time as prime minister the house was used as a sort of protocol house where the government and the titular owners, the UDC, entertained favoured guests.

The people of Jamaica are still excluded from the beach.

Next door, at Mammee Bay, Jampro facilitated the acquisition of another disputed public beach and the land behind it, for the construction of a 900-room hotel for the Spanish Riu group.

On Wednesday on Disclosure (Hot 102) members of the Mammee Bay community related horrific tales of berserker development which has degraded the health and amenity of the area with broken sewer mains and broken promises.

The hotel has not honoured the promises made in the EIA and in meetings with the residents. There were promises to build a sophisticated sewage disposal plant, but residents report stinking kitchen waste and other sewage, running in a drain to the sea.

Repeated complaints to all the relevant authorities have not eased their pain nor abated the nuisance. They would even be content with the promised tertiary treatment plant with chlorinated effluent.

The problem is that chlorinated effluent, while harmless to the human community, are lethal to the coral reefs just offshore and would probably damage the fresh groundwater. The constructors of Riu committed another ecological crime and an offence against the laws of Jamaica: they illegally removed more than 700 tons of sand from the Whitehouse property in Westmoreland to 'enhance the Riu beach and smother the corals just offshore.

Developers generally, the UDC specifically and Jampro, do not understand that beaches are moveable feasts. Beaches are created and maintained by the so-called 'littoral drift' of sand along the coastline and does not stay in one place like tethered goats. In Negril, my predecessor in the chair of the NRCA told the UDC that they should not build their hotel (then Negril Beach Village, now Hedonism II) so near to the beach.

I told them that they should not try to build a beach by creating a groyne, a stone structure which was meant to trap sand for the beach. The groyne hasn't worked and is probably responsible for the massive erosion to the leeward side of the beach. Added to that, the UDC did not believe our scientists when we told them that they should not dump sewage into the Negril Morass (wetlands) and the South Negril River because that would kill off many life forms, including the argillaceous seaweeds which secrete flakes of calcium carbonate.

These plants make the powdery sand which made the Negril beach so attractive. These days the Negril seven-mile stretch is in many places, more mud than sand and is considerably narrower than it used to be.

And at Bloody Bay, which would have made a great public recreational beach and park, the UDC allowed another massive Riu hotel.

'Short pass bring blood'

There is a Jamaican saying "Short pass bring blood" whih means that short cuts often lead to disaster.

This saying exemplifies much of what Jamaican politicians deem to be development. I have often remarked that Jamaica has given a unique twist to the Precautionary Principle: whenever we discover some natural phenomenon of great intrinsic value, we take immediate steps to destroy or degrade it.

The precautionary principle in its strictest form says that whenever the outcome of any action is uncertain, we should refrain from taking that action.

Article 15 of the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development states: "Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation." In other words, if damage is likely but not certain, the lack of absolute certainty is no excuse for failing to mitigate the damage.

In 1992, Mr Patterson signed that Declaration and all the other components of Agenda 21, the Treaty of Rio. He then came back to Jamaica to act in ways which repudiated every commitment he had made to sustainable development.

Sustainable development is, briefly, development which while enriching us, will not impoverish or degrade the prospects of our children. The fable of the Golden Goose is a metaphor for the precautionary principle. We are not content to wait for the goose to lay its golden eggs; we kill the goose to get rich quick.

A large part of Jamaica's beauty is due to its riotous vegetation, its green and pleasant face. To protect the island's face, Norman Manley decreed that hotels along the seaside should never be higher than a coconut tree. The development should blend into the landscape, not overpower it. Jampro and its Spanish clients, among others, believe in making statements which disfigure the face of Jamaica, imposing concrete cataracts in place of the natural landscape.

These hotels claim to contribute to Jamaica's development, but they have as much connection to the country as cruise ships. They employ half as many Jamaicans as most Jamaican hotels. They are in my view, the hospitality industry's version of a human car wash, where visitors are inserted at one end and emerge at the other, tanned, tired, hungover and broke.

In the process, they have seen nothing of our country or its culture, have met few Jamaicans outside of the hotel, buy very little of the handicraft or art of the country before going home with souvenirs made in Taiwan, three-packs of Mexican tequila or Spanish brandy and perhaps, a Japanese camera. But they claim to have been to Jamaica.

Greedy Jamaicans tell us that we will scare away investors by blocking the construction of monstrosities such as the Pear Tree Bottom Development. We will be cutting into their agency fees, preventing them from selling imported goodies to imported people. I say: Right On!

Pear Tree Bottom is not development, and is not sustainable, and whatever it is, it is not in the public interest of the people of Jamaica.

In his email to me this week, Tom Goreau said: Pear Tree Bottom was one of the most remarkable properties in Jamaica from a natural history standpoint, both on land and in the sea. Jamaica was one of the most beautiful islands I have seen in my travels through most of the small island nations around the world, but it is one of the worst destroyed by human greed. Sadly, the horse has long run out of the gate, and to close the gate now will not bring the horse back."

I think that if Tom still lived in Jamaica, he would agree with me and most Jamaicans that if the horse is not dead, we should still try to find him and entice him back.

Beyond the Pale

2006-06-04T13:00:00.000+02:00

Common Sense
John Maxwell

Katherine Dunham, who died last week at 97, was one of the most important figures of 20th century culture. The daughter of a black father and a French Canadian mother, she immersed herself in scholarly explorations of African/Caribbean cultures, particularly among the Maroons of Jamaica and the people of Haiti. She even became a voudun 'priestess' while completing her master's degree in anthropology.Katherine Dunham's life was a century of struggle to restore the dignities of the peoples who resided in her soul. She was not only a major figure and powerful influence in modern dance but was, at the same time, a leader in the struggle for civil rights in the United States and in Haiti. Fourteen years ago, at the age of 82, she survived a seven-week hunger strike in protest at her government's treatment of Haiti.

She must have died of a broken heart.

There are eight million Haitians in a country turned into a concentration camp. Their leader was stolen from them and transported as cargo to the heart of darkness where he was no doubt expected to be killed and perhaps, eaten.

After two years of brutal repression - supervised by the United Nations Security Council on behalf of the civilised world - the people of Haiti have been reduced to a condition in which they are less free than they were 200 years ago. Their legitimate leaders are in exile or in jail, and the civilised world looks on approvingly as these uppity blacks are starved and coerced into good behaviour.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, to which they were among the original signatories 60 years ago, obviously cannot apply to them. They have elected a president, under rules set by people who don't believe in rules and scorn elections.

The omniscient and all wise president of the United States, Mr Bush, says the Haitians are not entitled to freedom and his judgment is backed up by that certified black intellectual, Dr Condoleezza Rice and by Mr Annan, the world's Commissioner of Police cum Ombudsman - also a black person, and a citizen of Ghana.

These two, who undoubtedly benefited from the struggles of Katherine Dunham and people like Martin Luther King and Marcus Garvey, provide American racism with all the legitimacy it needs to cancel the human rights of the Haitian people and millions of others.

It was the Haitian people after all, who were the first nation in the world, before the Americans, the French and the British, to proclaim and promulgate the universal rights of all human beings, whatever their sex, race or economic condition, to democratic equality.

Cultures of Abuse

The Haitians were, of course, premature and presumptuous. As William Jennings Bryan, Woodrow Wilson's secretary of state, famously said 90 years ago: "Imagine! Niggers speaking French!" That, plus their democratic pretensions, was enough to damn them forever.

Some people have rights; most of us have nothing more than the illusion of freedom. It's been obvious for 500 years, long before Kipling wrote about 'lesser breeds without the law'.

Generalissimo von Rumsfeld put everything into perspective three years ago as platoons of looters ravaged the history of civilisation, stealing to order, priceless artefacts protected over 8,000 years by the people of Iraq. They, too, were presumptuous. The free market rules - or as the generalissimo said: "Stuff happens."

Stuff happens

On my computer, filed on March 15, 2006, under 'War crimes/Massacres', is a Reuters story "US accused of killings, Saddam urges resistance" in which it is reported: "Iraqi police accused US troops of killing five children in a raid on an al-Qaeda suspect on Wednesday as ousted leader Saddam Hussein used his televised trial to call on people to "resist the invaders".

It is an odd story, because details of a massacre are entangled with a report of an incident at the trial of Saddam Hussein. But the story is clear enough.

'[Iraqi] Police and witnesses said 11 members of one family were killed in a US raid overnight in Ishaqi, a town in Saddam's home province north of Baghdad. The US military said two women and a child died as troops arrested an al-Qaeda militant.

'A senior Iraqi police officer said autopsies on the bodies, which included five children, showed each had been shot in the head. Community leaders said they were outraged.

'Television footage showed the bodies of five children, two men and four women in the Tikrit morgue. One infant had a gaping head wound. All the children seemed younger than school age.'

The American Press has just last week discovered this story, which is strange, since it was carried in the New York Times a day after the Reuters story. In a bylined piece by Jeffrey Gettleman the incident was relocated to Balad:

'American soldiers demolished a farmhouse near the Sunni Arab town of Balad on Wednesday after encountering unexpectedly heated resistance from insurgents, killing a number of civilians in the process.

'The American military said that only three civilians had been killed, while Iraqi officials said an entire 11-member family - from a 75-year-old grandmother to a 6-month-old baby - had died in the attack.

'Major Tim Keefe, a military spokesman, said American troops were on their way to capture an insurgent in a rural area north of Baghdad when insurgents opened fire from the farmhouse.

'Coalition forces returned fire, utilising both air and ground assets,' Major Keefe said.

'The results were devastating, according to images broadcast on Arab TV: dead cows, scorched cars, a smashed house and 11 bodies rolled up in blankets.'

Last week, the US media 'discovered' the story. What has obviously happened is that the Iraqi 'government' has been raising a stink about the incident to the point where the US Army has been pushed to arrest several soldiers and is charging them with murder.

As in previous cases, only ordinary servicemen are charged, only ordinary 'grunts' - no officers, although it is clear from both stories that Major Keefe was involved.

This replicates the pattern of Abu Ghraib where it was clear that senior officers, including General Jeffrey Miller and the senior commander in Iraq, General Sanchez, must have been involved. A number of grunts are serving time for their aberrant behaviour at Abu Ghraib. One wonders if any of them speak French, like Haitians.

We don't do torture, President Bush has said. American soldiers do not commit atrocities; except of course for a few underprivileged peasants from places like West Virginia who obviously got into the army on false pretences.

Three years ago I wrote in one of these columns:

'It is the contempt that is so obvious, and so offensive. The total disregard of public opinion, the failure to make even a gesture toward the norms of civilised behaviour. Even more amazing, is the disrespect for their own Anglo-American traditions, norms and law.

'It is the absolute setting aside of any idea of a duty to act according to law, or custom, or convention; the arrogation of authority to do, and to try to get away with, whatever one wishes to do; to do whatever is necessary to get one's way; to impose one's will, to kill, to destroy, to humiliate, and finally, to abrogate the human and property rights of others.

'Dexter Filkins of the New York Times, reporting on March 29, [2003] provided a vivid picture of the Allied mind-set:
"At the base camp of the Fifth Marine Regiment here, two sharpshooters, Sgt Eric Schrumpf, 28, and Cpl Mikael McIntosh, 20, sat on a sand berm and swapped combat tales.

The marines said they had little trouble dispatching their foes, most of whom they characterised as ill-trained and cowardly. "We had a great day," Sergeant Schrumpf said. "We killed a lot of people.... We dropped [sic] a few civilians," Sergeant Schrumpf said, "but what do you do?" [In one incident], he recalled watching one of the women standing near [an] Iraqi soldier go down. "I'm sorry," the sergeant said. "But the chick was in the way."'

It is as if the Marine was apologising for running over a cat in the road."

I wrote that on April 12, 2003.

I reprint it here because it is so easy to say that you knew that all the time. I reprint it to demonstrate that not only did we 'know' about these abuses, we wrote about them. And no one did anything.

We heard the lies, the transparent pretexts, knew about the subhuman savages transported to Guantanamo Bay, straight-jacketed, blindfolded, gagged and shackled to the bare floor of the C-130 transport planes to prevent them chewing their way through the plane's hydraulic lines; about the German Arab whose fortuitous liberation enabled him to tell of his kidnapping, torture, rape and imprisonment as a suspected terrorist.

We know of the gulags where 'invisible' prisoners' brains are systematically turned to blancmange; we know about people too demoralised to want to live, choosing not to eat but force-fed like Strasbourg geese. All in a place described by a British High Court judge as a 'law-free zone' presided over by the President of the United States. We know about the levelling of Fallujah, destroyed in order to save it from the insurgents. And we have now heard about the massacre in Haditha.

We know about the Palestinians in their concentration camp, essaying democracy, only to be told that they can have any government they may choose, as long as they do not choose the one they want. We know that Israel claims the right to kill whomsoever it chooses and has defied more UN resolutions than all other countries put together.

So, why are we whining about a few more dead Iraqis? Half a million babies died in the run-up to the war, hundreds of thousands were maimed or died from the effects of depleted uranium so that the civilised world may be assured of oil for air conditioning, for ATVs, SUVs and cruise shipping and the US vice-president can be guaranteed against loss from his public service.

What is all the fuss about 24 dead Iraqis in Haditha? They were killed by young men who thought they were doing their duty, scared out of their wits by the knowledge that insurgents were everywhere, coming out of the woodwork - unable to distinguish between friend and foe when everybody is on the other side.

The US military insists that these are all isolated incidents. The troops are to be lectured on "core values" - Loyalty, Duty, Respect and Iraqi cultural values.

A few will be court-martialed as an example to the others and life and war will go on, as after Abu Ghraib and all the other 'few, isolated incidents'.

Stuff happens!

So! What else is new?

Why, there is the huge story about the Americans deigning to offer the Iranians the chance to talk to Mr John Bolton, the American ambassador to the United Nations. The Americans and their noble allies in the rest of the civilised world are offering the Iranians a choice between the most delicious carrot and the most punishing stick, a choice usually offered only to donkeys.

The US will talk to the Iranians if the Iranians surrender, in advance, their right to process uranium fuel for power generation. It is, according to the US media, a hugely significant breakthrough.

The Americans don't believe the Iranians only want to generate power.

They believe the Iranians want to go much further, to produce nuclear weapons of mass destruction. In this, they resemble the Cubans, whose biochemical industry is not geared to produce medicine, according to Mr Bolton, but to manufacture bio-terrorist materials.

The Iranians have, as the Americans calculated, rejected the carrot and the stick. The Americans and their noble allies can now proceed to Stage Two - designing an elaborate pavane to lead Iran to the punishment table, and if possible, to the fate of Iraq.

Nearly a decade ago, General Lee Butler, head (1992-94) of the US Strategic Air Command, declared that it was "dangerous in the extreme that in the cauldron of animosities that we call the Middle East, one nation [Israel] has armed itself, [with] nuclear weapons, perhaps numbering in the hundreds, and that inspires other nations to do so.

An October 1998 "Memorandum of Agreement" between the US and Israel, upgrading their military and strategic relationship, was widely interpreted to mean that the US regards Israel's nuclear arsenal "not only as a positive factor in the regional balance of power, but also as one it should support and enhance" (Foundation for Middle East Peace - Special Report, Winter 1999).

It is such a pity that people like the Cubans, Venezuelans, Haitians, Hamas and the Iranians persist in believing that universal human rights apply to them, that justice is for all and that people like John Bolton, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and George Bush are not prophets of God.

Five hundred years of history have obviously taught them nothing. As my grandmother used to say: "If you can't hear, you must feel."

The Selling of Jamaica

2006-05-28T13:00:00.000+02:00

Common Sense
John Maxwell

The Spanish are becoming extremely protective about the integrity of their coastline. After 40 years of breakneck tourism development, the Spaniards have looked at their 8,000 km of sea coast and they don't like what they see.

Spain is the world's second most popular tourist destination after the United States, annually attracting 10 million more tourists than the 40 million people of the country. Tourism, as in Jamaica, produces about 10 per cent of GDP, but in Spain most of the money remains in the country, unlike Jamaica where much of it leaks back out to the United States for supplies and to Cayman and other such havens for numbered bank accounts.

Cheap air fares were the stimulus for the Spanish hotel boom, and the result is a wall of concrete cutting off the Spaniards from their coast. Forty years of uncontrolled building of tourist hotels have left Spaniards agonising about the beauty and amenity they have lost.

Isabel Soto, writing 17 years ago in the New York Times, complained that "the idyllic Spanish Mediterranean coast [has been transformed] into an often nightmarish urban wall of big, unattractive hotels and apartment blocks, often with scant attention to environmental basics like clean beaches".

Since then, it has simply got worse, to the point where the Spanish environmentalists are complaining that their coasts have been almost completely destroyed. Instead of rocky headlands, bird-filled marshes, long sweeps of beach and wilderness, the coast is now a wall of hotels and apartments, massive avalanches of concrete-occluding hillsides, fronted by beaches pullulating in bodies like a St Elizabeth rice field under attack by the fall army worm.

The European tourism market is increasingly a mass escape from anywhere to anywhere, with young people looking for surcease from the McDonaldisation of the workplace. What is important is sun, sex and booze, and some people will only be able to say where they spent their holidays by checking their credit card records.

But never mind, pouring concrete was the simplest make to coin money, in hotels and apartments which replicate the banal frenzy for kilometre after boozy kilometre. Nothing about the experience is Spanish - even the gigolos have been globalised.

It is no wonder that an increasing number of Spaniards want their country back, want to preserve some of what was there before the attack of unsustainable tourist mega-development. They have begun to organise to stop the triumph of concrete over common sense.

The same thing is beginning to happen at the other end of Europe. In Bulgaria's Black Sea coast, growing ever more popular as a destination of those in the know, the construction of hotels and apartments is proceeding apace, rather like Spain a decade-and-a-half ago.

Writing for the Environmental News Service, Tatyana Dimitrova says:

"...not all of the rapid development has been viable or well-planned. Lax state control and imperfect legislation have resulted in massive overbuilding on the Black Sea coast, and recently also in mountain ski resorts.

"While much effort has gone into the building of hotels, restaurants and other tourist buildings, little care has been taken of the urban infrastructure or the remaining green spaces.

"The gloomy precedent of Spain's Costa del Sol is increasingly spoken about as a warning of what can happen to a tourist industry if it is allowed to develop with no controls. Wholesale construction of densely packed high-rises all along the Costa del Sol in the 1960s and '70s resulted in a flight of better-off visitors to less "spoiled" resorts, leaving hoteliers in charge of empty buildings - a phenomenon known as 'dead zones'."

The point is, of course, that people, whether visitors or natives, are people first, and in travelling, they are most stimulated by meeting and interacting with people of other cultures. The Jamaican experience is what draws people to Jamaica, but most often they are short-changed and given an ersatz version of the Jamaican reality, complete with fire eaters and limbo dancers while Choucoune, aka 'Yellow Bird', has died a million deaths at the hands of mento bands.

There is another Jamaica, in fact several other Jamaicas, but the competitive pressure does not allow most of our resorts to give foreign visitors any taste of them any more than the visitors to Spain gain any insight into the rich cultures of that country.

The Spaniards are getting so tired of the misrepresentation of their country that a backlash has set in. In several places on the Spanish coasts, municipalities, pressured by the citizenry, are making more stringent regulations governing the number and size of hotels and pushing them back from the beach, which is being reclaimed for the public.

There is news to give Jamaican capitalists fits: the Spanish municipalities are condemning some of these hotels, some only half-built, and are demolishing them, blowing them up with dynamite and flattening them with bulldozers. They want their beaches, their environment and their culture back.

Pear Tree Bottom

In his judicial review of the Pear Tree Bottom debacle, Mr Justice Sykes made several unassailable points as to the almost absolute worthlessness of the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA). An EIA is a mechanism by which the society decides whether it wants to do some work that will have serious effects on the lives of its members.

The first function of an EIA is to advise on whether there are alternatives to the proposed development, and to evaluate those alternatives. In Jamaica, a developer contracts an EIA, which is submitted in support of the development. What is required instead, is an objective assessment of the costs and benefits, short-term and long-term, of any development and it should point out, as well as the benefits, the possible deleterious consequences of the development.

People are blaming the technical officers of NEPA/NRCA for what happened, but as a former chairman of the NRCA I know that with a body of dedicated professionals, you will get what you ask for, no matter how difficult it is to get.

It is the board of the organisation that must be faulted, because they have proved beyond doubt that they have no business being the arbiters of our environmental development. I doubt that most of them could tell you what the meaning was of sustainable development. As Judge Sykes pointed out, without a Marine Biological Assessment, the EIA was worthless.

But Jampro and the minister of development should get most of the blame. In pressuring the NEPA/NRCA to deliver a development at Pear Tree Bottom, they corrupted the entire process, whether out of ignorance or some other fault is not clear.

In development, as in any commercial transaction, the maxim 'caveat emptor' applies and it is a foolish developer who does not do his environmental due diligence. But the developer was samfied. As were the Jamaican people, all of whom are stakeholders in Pear Tree Bottom.

The Government is developing mega-disasters by stealth, pretending that only the closest neighbours have any cause for concern. I have enjoyed the water at Pear Tree Grove starting at the age of seven. Beyond that is a whole world of small wonders, on land and below the water.

The Government of Jamaica under P J Patterson disregarded its solemn obligations to the Jamaican environment, despite all the sonorous promises in its Manifesto. They deliberately avoided ratifying the SPAW protocol (for the protection of species and habitat) with the excuse that 'laws needed to be changed'.

It has taken 16 years to decide what laws needed to be changed. Meanwhile countries as disparate as the US and St Lucia have found no problem in ratifying the Protocol.

The real reason, in my view, is that the absence of SPAW appeared to give them a clear run at stealing beaches and destroying ecologically sensitive areas.

The notorious cases of the Doomsday Highway, the North Coast Highway, the Hope Gardens attempted rape and Long Mountain came to mind, but the vandals' eyes are even now on Hayes Savannah, Reach Falls, Winnifred Beach and Canoe Valley, a nature reserve designed and built by the NRCA during my tenure there.

Instead of a nature reserve where children can learn about manatees, the vandals intend to build another deep water port there, when there are already facilities nearby at Port Esquivel and Salt River that can serve equally well. But the vandals in and out of government, like Columbus' conquistadors, feel that any jewel of nature on which their eyes light is theirs. "I claim this land in the name of Globalisation and Development."

Many of our governors have never taken the time to find out about their country. I once wrote that many of our cultural assets which could be translated into riches, are blushing unseen by those who think that environment is a sissy concern.

Then they ask me how come I know so much about Jamaica. I am not rude enough yet to ask them how come they know so little. Hayes Savannah is a place most Jamaicans have never heard of, but it is an ecological jewel in danger of being devastated by the developments consequent on the Doomsday Highway.

Dr George Proctor, the world renowned botanist, describes Hayes Savannah as a world-class scientific treasure house - and he knows what he is talking about.

As I wrote in January 2003: "After rain, Harris Savannah is a botanical bonanza, full of species unknown until Proctor discovered them. Many are new to science. Apart from their intrinsic interest to botanists, some could be of profitable horticultural economic interest, others may contain substances which may lead to important medical or other scientific advances. Most of the world's standard medications are made from compounds first discovered in plants and other 'insignificant' forms of life."

In that column (Treasure in the Badlands) I referred to a column written nearly a year earlier in which I pointed out that the (then proposed) dredging in Kingston Harbour threatened to destroy the habitat of another insignificant but important species: "Ecteinascidia turbinata, one of a number of marine animals which manufacture proteins that are proving effective in fighting cancer and may yield substances which may be able to defeat other diseases. A big Spanish drug company, PharmaMar, has bought the rights to a new drug derived from one of the sea-squirt's proteins."

Hayes Savannah, like Pear Tree Bottom, is threatened by the same constellation of geniuses responsible for brutalising Kingston Harbour and Long Mountain. Pear Tree Bottom is another treasury of terrestrial and marine species, including one of the world's oldest, deepest and most complex coral reefs.

These are just three of the atrocities the Jamaican environment has been made to suffer recently. The Turtle Crawle reserve is next on the list. There are others, and most of them may be found in the Jamaican government Green Paper on proposed Protected Areas. I sometimes uncharitably believe that people like Jampro and the Ministry of Development use this Green Paper as a source book for their environmental outrages.

And they are assisted by a document on beach policy, prepared by an outside expert for the NRCA, which treats the Jamaican Beach Control Act as a hostile witness, providing principles to be destroyed in the hunt for the Golden Goose.

We have given a uniquely Jamaican twist to the Precautionary Principle. Whenever we find something that may be scientifically valuable, we take immediate steps to destroy it. Norman Manley, H D Tucker, Harold Cahusac, Jacob Taylor and others who worked so hard to protect our patrimony could not have had any idea that their work would be so denigrated, so quickly, by posterity.

There is a final consideration: Water. Part of the race to build enormous new hotels is fueled by the fact that people who play golf spend six times as much on their holidays as those who don't. Golf courses demand millions of gallons of water.

Patterson's government, in its wisdom, privatised the water supplies of Ocho Rios and Runaway Bay, guaranteeing the concessionaires millions far into the future. We need to take these assets back. We sow, they reap. That is unfair and unconscionable.

We are plagued by the most miserable slums in tourist areas, where there is no provision for workers' housing. The workers and other people in the area have no sanitary conveniences, and to add insult to injury, the Bahia Principé development has filled in the waterhole which once supplied the people of Pear Tree Bottom.

That, for me, encapsulates more than any other single thing, the brainlessness, cruelty, irresponsibility and social illiteracy of all those who defend the unsustainable development of Pear Tree Bottom and our other endangered treasures.

Portia Simpson Miller needs to get moving with her plans for community development planning. It is the only way the people of Jamaica will be able to identify and protect the legacies of their progenitors and the essential heritage of the human race.

The Public Interest and the Environment

2006-05-21T12:00:00.000+02:00

Common Sense
John Maxwell

We tend to treat our environment like most men treat their wives. She's there, so what? We assign no value to her work or, even, to her presence. She is expected to perform general, unspecified duties; to take care of the children, cooking and things, and most important, to clean up after us.

In Jamaica, for more than 80 years, Kingston has daily pumped up to 20 million gallons of its sewage into Kingston Harbour, untreated and full of pathogens. We've also dumped our solid waste into our harbour, motor car tyres, lead acid batteries and even entire vehicles.

The detritus of our productivity washes into the harbour, contaminating it with acids and caustics, with heavy metals like cadmium and mercury, with pesticides and herbicides like DDT, lindane and Agent Orange and a variety of noxious and toxic wastes that make most of the water in the harbour dangerous to our health and lethal to the life forms which once made the harbour one of the world's single most productive pieces of sea water.

The assumption was that the sea cleans up everything, like a wife. A little over 30 years ago, we in Jamaica began to discover that this was not so. The trigger was a doctoral study of Kingston Harbour done by Barry Wade for his tutor, Professor Ivan Goodbody, who had for years been vainly warning about the mess we were making of the harbour.

I happened to have been appointed chairman of the Natural Resources Conservation Authority (NRCA) a year or two after Wade's study was published. As part of my own preparation for that job I ransacked the NRCA library for everything I could find that was current and important. When I read Wade's study I was astonished and horrified. Astonished and horrified that the conditions he described could exist and astonished and horrified that my colleagues in journalism had seen fit to completely ignore the report.

I brought the report to the attention of my board. NRCA was really four boards: the Beach Control Authority, the Watersheds Protection Commission, the Wildlife Protection Committee and the Kingston Harbour Water Quality Monitoring group set up a few years earlier at Goodbody's insistence.

When I presented the report to the Authority, they were as alarmed as I was. Within a week we had assembled a group of experts, including Wade and Goodbody, and within about three weeks we had produced an action plan for rescuing Kingston Harbour.

We were concerned that the people of Jamaica, and particularly Kingston, had been stealthily deprived of an abundant source of protein food as well as their most accessible recreational area. We wanted to fix it as quickly as possible. Our solutions were basically low-tech and not capital intensive.

The plan was to begin by cleaning up the gullies - former streams - which carried enormous quantities of waste into the harbour. We were going to reforest the mountains behind Kingston, to reduce soil erosion, which we estimated was costing us more than US$30 million annually in lost agricultural production (coffee and other crops which did not disturb the soil).

We would create a real solution to the problem of domestic and industrial waste, and we were going to build a passive sewage recycling system which would provide water for irrigation and restore the depleted and salt-infused aquifers of the Liguanea, St Catherine and Clarendon plains.

Two factors derailed our plans: the IMF restrictions on government spending and the inability of politicians to understand the huge returns from the plan.

We recognised that if Kingston Harbour's recreational potential were restored we would once again have public bathing beaches in the harbour, sport fishing and yachting. The clean-up would provide lots of jobs for unskilled people who could thereby be absorbed and trained into a more highly skilled workforce.

We would be relocating the hillside farmers who destroyed hundreds of acres of land every year, trying to get a patch of land on which to grow food. And, to cut a long story short, we would reinvigorate the public spirit of the people, mainly through a sort of parliament of the harbour's users and increase the environmental and spiritual value of this beautiful 21 sq mile lagoon turned cesspool.

We were stymied by the IMF strictures and political ignorance. On the day our plan was published, the IMF demanded and got the head of Finance Minister David Coore, who I knew would have understood the value of our plan.

Fast forward three decades. Two new plans have been developed for the resuscitation of Kingston Harbour, financed by external donors, secure in the knowledge that Jamaica has surrendered to the Washington consensus. Each of these plans has cost more to design than the entire cost, including the sewage ponds, of our plan.

Twenty years later, in its 1997 Manifesto, the PNP appealed to the people to re-elect the party because it would safeguard the "God-given" environment and would do everything to protect the Jamaican patrimony.

Three years after that Manifesto was launched, we caught the government in the act of trying to destroy Hope Botanical Gardens to give a developer the right to construct palazzos for the rich with the public gardens as their front yards.

While we managed to derail that piece of vandalism, we were unable to stop them doing something at least as bad and perhaps worse, handing over to that same developer one of the most precious pieces of property in the world to build a gated community which now creeps like a cancer over Long Mountain.

The world's bio-scientists and environmentalists have selected a few special areas round the world as biodiversity 'hot spots' - areas of immeasurable importance to the survival of humanity since they contain examples of some of the rarest and most endangered species of plants and animals.

The Greater Antilles, including Jamaica, is one such hot spot. Within Jamaica, Wareika Hill was one hot spot, valuable not only for the variety of its species, mainly of small life forms, but including one plant, Portlandia albiflora, found nowhere else in Jamaica and not anywhere else in the world.

In addition to its importance in biodiversity, Wareika Hill is the site of ancient Taino/Arawak settlements, which have never been examined by serious scientists. This suits some people, of course, because the less we know of pre-Colombian history, the better for us. The Patterson administration's environmental record, besmirched by Wareika, is even worse.

For several years the NRCA, transformed into the National Environmental and Planning Agency, has failed to protect the public interest.

It has allowed the Urban Development Corporation and the tourist industry to capture public beaches, it has gone ahead with major landscape destruction schemes like the Doomsday (Millennium) Highway and the North Coast Highway without allowing the people they are supposed to serve any real input into the decision making.

The "Strategic" EIA for the Doomsday Highway is a classic. As I pointed out in a previous column [Divine Right, Jan 2003] :
'The concept is so breathtakingly simple, so straightforward, so elegant, if you will, that I cannot imagine why nobody thought of it before:

"Birds located in the modified vegetative communities will relocate when their habitat is removed. Species along the proposed alignment such as reptiles are also highly mobile and should also relocate to adjacent similar habitats."

Of course. Why protect habitat when you can simply inform the birds, lizards, frogs and other highly mobile life-forms that they must "relocate".

"Govament waan de lan!" - that's all you have to tell them, and like gypsies, they will pick up their bags and baggage, pots, pans and household effects and decamp to less valuable real estate.

The government allowed a Belgian dredging company, at the behest of the Port Authority, to dredge up and relocate toxic wastes from the bottom of Kingston Harbour to a new landfill off Portmore, and the deleterious and possibly fatal effects of this new Minimata will probably not be evident for decades.

There are other high crimes, but the most egregious of all may be the fact that while the SPAW Protocol to the Cartagena Convention resides in a building at the bottom of Duke Street, Jamaica is the only significant country which has not ratified the protocol. David McTaggart, founder of Greenpeace International, told me that SPAW was the single most important legal instrument anywhere for the protection of biodiversity.

SPAW is a detailed treaty for the protection of sensitive and important species and habitats. This means that if SPAW had been ratified by Jamaica, the government would have found it almost impossible to plan and carry out its environmental depredations of the last few years.

Enthusiasm is great, but without a little moolah, it is difficult to stop a determined bureaucracy on its destructive path through the environment. Two Jamaican environmental NGOs and two individuals managed to scrape together enough money to drag the government before the High Court and to call a halt to the environmental rape of Pear Tree Bottom near Runaway Bay in St Ann.

Last week, High Court Judge Brian Sykes made several rulings which:

quashed the permit granted by the NRCA to Hotels Jamaica Pinero Ltd, (a Spanish group);
ordered the NRCA to reconsider its grant of the permit; and
declared that the NRCA had not followed its own rules in granting the permit.

The 'Development' lobby is up in arms. The judgment, they say, will hinder 'development' and scare off foreign investors. It has not occurred to them that in their native countries, most developers would not be able to even propose the kind of developments we routinely approve.

European authorities and courts have consistently ruled against granting permissions without public participation. In 1998, 35 countries and the European Union signed the Aarhus "Convention on Access to Information, Public Participation in Decison-Making and Access to Justice in Environmental Matters".

The convention is intended to provide an innovative model of multilateral policymaking and promises to create a new operating environment for public agencies and the corporate world.

"It promotes citizen involvement as a key to preventing environmental mismanagement.

"Its principles of transparency and public accountability are integral to the meaningful practice of democratic governance. The Convention furthermore takes the first steps in promoting environmental transparency and accountability norms beyond the nation state.

"It establishes common regional disclosure and participation standards as well as what could be called horizontal accountability by governments and corporations to NGOs and citizens 'irrespective of their citizenship, nationality or domicile'" (from a commentary by Elena Petkova and Peter Veit of the World Resources Institute.)

This in essence means that the Spaniards may as well accept the Jamaican judgment, because if they appeal, the NGOs can appeal to the European Commission, which will certainly enforce the Aarhus Convention and, perhaps, impose even stricter sanctions against the hoteliers.

The lesson to be learnt is that everything we do is eventually of global importance. We live in a world without borders, in which justice will not be restricted by jurisdictions, because whatever we do here either increases or decreases the global prospects for survival.

If we destroy wetlands and kill million-year-old reefs in Runaway Bay, we are damaging the heritage of mankind, not just the prospect of a few tourists. And the tourists are becoming more scrupulous about where they take their vacations, and if they know that their hostelry was built at the expense of the environment, many will find other places to stay.

Our captive dolphins, then, are an affront not only to scientists and environmentalists in Jamaica, they are an affront to the world. But in the Caribbean, we are preparing an even bigger insult to the world community.

"Timeo Danaos et donae ferentes" translated is "I fear of the Greeks, even when they bring gifts". In Virgil's Aenid, Laocoon, priest of Apollo, warns the Trojans not to accept the wooden horse 'donated' to them by the Greeks. He was blinded for his pains and the Wooden Horse in due time discharged its cargo of Greek soldiers who then proceed to rape and destroy the city which had withstood their siege for so long.

Our modern Greeks are the Japanese, who have presented many Caribbean islands with fishing equipment and other baubles. Five hundred years ago, the Manikongo, king of the Congo, complained bitterly to the King of Portugal - who he thought was his friend - asking him to stop the operations of the Portuguese traders whose bangles and beads were corrupting the weak and entrapping the unwary:

"The merchants are taking every day our natives, sons of the lands and the sons of noblemen and vassals and our relatives, because the thieves and men of bad conscience grab them wishing to have the things and wares of this Kingdom which they are so ambitious of; they grab them and get them to be sold; and so great is the corruption and licentiousness that our country is being completely depopulated, and You, Highness, should not agree with this nor accept it as in your service."

The Japanese aren't buying slaves; they are buying votes. They are buying votes to overturn the moratorium on whaling for profit. This question will come up next month at the International Whaling Commission's meeting in St Kitts.

There, the Japanese are expected to score a coup, with the votes of Antigua, St Kitts, Dominica, St Vincent & the Grenadines and St Lucia, together less than half-a-million people, the Japanese will turn back the rest of the world which wants to outlaw whaling altogether.

Monday is International Biodiversity Day. We in the Caribbean will be celebrating it with the best of them.

The Politics of Love and the Politics of Spite

2006-05-14T22:30:00.000+02:00

Common Sense
John Maxwell

People who did not know Portia Simpson Miller were stunned by her performance in the Budget Debate on Tuesday. Watching on television it was clear that among those who didn't really know her were some of her close colleagues as well as her parliamentary opponents, who, apart from a brief, ill-considered bout of heckling, appeared transfixed as the country's first woman Prime Minister outlined her plans for the first year. It is clear that she is a master of the House.

It was a remarkable performance, not least because she was operating under the policy overhang from the previous administration. When PJ Patterson retired, he left not only the budget but also a host of pending actions which would have been accepted 'whole hog' by any of the other contenders for the leadership of the PNP and the government.

That she has managed to put her stamp on some important initiatives in the short time available to her is perhaps the most significant sign of Portia Simpson resolve, her persuasiveness and her ability to get more work out of people than they thought themselves capable.

While the Prime Minister managed to make the budget do some of what she wanted it to do, clearly she has not had the time to rework it to deliver the concrete results of the vision she outlined in Parliament.

Portia spoke from her head and her heart, the first time I've heard a Jamaican PM do that since Michael Manley was in his 'ackee'. She made it clear that she has a fully formed vision of what she intends to do and the rationale behind it.

As she said, her position is not simply political but philosophical; it is a vision of Jamaica as it can be and a preliminary sketch of the roadmap to get there.

The well-being of any society depends on the well-being of all its people. The measure of a good society, therefore, is how it treats the poor, the aged, those with disabilities and our women and children.

She recognises that if we are to achieve a good society we need to remove the negative impacts of violence, corruption, natural disasters and other unplanned events. In other words, a good society can only be achieved by promoting a good environment, social, cultural, political and ecological.

As simple as this mix sounds, it is the first time I have heard a Jamaican politician attempt to connect them and to view them as a whole, requiring attention in a comprehensive campaign against disfranchisement, disempowerment, poverty, misery and squalor.

"We must remind ourselves that people are the ultimate end, and not means to the political and personal ambitions of others. If Portia manages to get this one concept across to her fellow Jamaicans, she will have changed the grammar of our politics.

Her vision begins as it should with the mundane: universal literacy, and rapidly moves toward a Jamaica of first-class human beings able to compete anywhere with anyone on at least equal terms. Her Jamaica which "fully allows the release of the potential of a powerful people".

Up front, she sees the main obstacle as disunity and she intends to break down the partisan and sectarian walls which constrain our progress: "It is time to break down those walls" to produce a community in which all will participate in the national decision making, in which citizens take responsibility for the management of their economic, health, educational, cultural and recreational needs supported and facilitated by the government.

She spoke boldly of the ultimate aim being the elimination of poverty and the elevation of the welfare of ordinary people to the centre of our concerns and development policy.

Those who are old enough will hear in these words, echoes of the original vision of the PNP as expressed by Norman Manley and his colleagues. Then, the vision was blasted by the shallow partisanship of those who preached that socialism meant the forcible seizure and distribution of real and personal property, and did not understand that it was really about the equitable distribution of power and rights.

We must acknowledge that how we manage presently leaves far too many of our people out of the process, disconnecting them from power, alienated from each other and the wider society.

Portia Simpson Miller has been Prime Minister since February 26, slightly more than six weeks. In that short time she has electrified the hopes of the poorest and most helpless Jamaicans and ignited in all classes of Jamaicans the idea that real change is not only possible but likely.

It is not going to be business as usual.

The Prime Minister needs to seize the time now to begin recruiting her army for change from all sectors of the society. The most powerful and the most wealthy have to understand that if this country is going to be worth inhabiting, fundamental changes are necessary.

It is probably too much to ask of many people that, for instance, they should be content with smaller returns from their bonds, that crime and violence flow out of usury and extortionate interest rates, that competitive consumption provokes envy, greed and criminal behaviour at all levels of the society.

Gates and burglar bars may protect you from burglars and housebreakers, but they cannot protect your bank account or guarantee the interests of your children.

I believe I know Portia Simpson Miller well enough to say that I believe that when she speaks of 'unity' she speaks not simply of an end to internecine partisan conflict, but of a society which recognises that its private interests and the public interest must be harmonised and that we all need to work together to achieve a good and just society. In Jamaica there are hundreds, perhaps thousands of well-off people who are already contributing to the welfare of the "less fortunate" but largely, their contribution is sporadic and limited.

To judge from some of the feedback I have got, there must be thousands of others who are waiting to be asked to make the kind of intelligent sacrifices which can help to rescue Jamaica from stagnation and strife and put the nation once more on course to maximising the safety and prosperity and happiness of all.

Michael Manley had the same opportunity in 1972, when an exhausted country, scared and at its wits' end, waited to be asked to make the sacrifices which might have put us firmly on track to the good society. He told me then that to ask Jamaicans to undergo programmed sacrifice, as I suggested, was unthinkable after the people had so overwhelmingly put their trust in the PNP.

I argued that what I heard from all levels was the wish to be asked to work for Jamaica, to sacrifice advantage for community peace and security, to volunteer to help in any way they could, teaching literacy classes, cleaning up garbage in communities, whatever.

The time is ripe for Portia to begin to organise her forces for the good society, to spell out in greater detail how she proposes to harvest the community knowledge, to discover what needs to be fixed, to organise community analysis, community discovery, community planning, community decision making and community self-government. The earlier she begins to ask for help in this process is the greater the response will be. Perhaps National Labour Day, just 10 days away, would be a good platform for that.

Speaking of Labour Day, I remember how successful that first working Labour Day turned out to be. I was one of those who organised a hugely successful drive to collect books for people in prison. I am thinking this year that I will ask a pastor friend of mine (there are such people) and my fellow journalists to organise the collection of school books for distribution to children in need.

Three decades ago Munn's Yellow Cab Company helped us by collecting the books and delivering them to our central collection point. Perhaps other people might volunteer to help in the collection this time. SUVs would be very useful although any vehicle would be welcome. Cell phones would simplify the logistics. If you have any ideas, email me or call me on Disclosure (Hot 102) next Wednesday.

Finally, the PM mentioned in her speech that the government will be developing Winnifred Beach and Reach Falls in Portland. I think she should be advised to look closely at the proposals for these inherited schemes.

Winnifred Beach at Fairy Hill is part of the former administration's programme to take away public beaches from the public and to chase away the people who make their living there. If our community tourism is to mean anything it must mean that our few public beaches must remain public.

While nobody can be more than 25 miles from the sea anywhere in Jamaica, Jamaicans are increasingly being walled off from their recreational heritage. Most have never been to a beach!

The Politics of Spite

As I forecast last week, Mr John Bolton, the US ambassador to the UN has come a cropper in his attempt to bully the Iranian government into giving up its nuclear power research programme.

Mr Bolton cannot be convinced that the Iranians are speaking the truth when they say that they are not interested in nuclear weaponry, just as he and others in the Bush administration could not be convinced that Iraq was speaking the truth before the disastrous decision to invade.

Fortunately, wiser counsel has prevailed and the question is to be returned to the International Atomic Energy Authority, where - as the Iranians contended - it belonged all along. The US press has refrained from pointing out the facts of the case, behaving instead like the Soviet press of a few decades back.

Mr Bolton's pratfall must be shielded from public view as must the sheer fatuity of the president who said last week that the Iranian president's letter to him was "missing the point . it looks like it did not answer the main question that the world is asking and that is, "When will you get rid of your nuclear programme?"

Of course, Mr Bush is probably blissfully unaware that a 'nukular' weapons programme is not the same as a nuclear power generation project. If the US decides that you have weapons of mass destruction then, ergo, you must have weapons of mass destruction.

The 'Civilised World' - the US, Britain, Israel and the international banking system have quietly decided that spite and malice are not sound bases for foreign policy.

This week, faced with the ignominious failure of what I call the 'Haitian Starvation Model' in Palestine, there has been a frantic reworking of the policy. As I reported last week, Mr James Wolfensohn, a Jew, resigned in disgust at the policy he had been asked to navigate in Palestine. He has become a hero to the Palestinians.

Wolfensohn's departure has precipitated a rethink, aided of course by reports from Palestine that the 'Haitian Model' was causing a humanitarian catastrophe. Israel's withholding Palestinian taxes and its barring of fuel supplies to Palestine was bringing the native Bantustans to the verge of chaos.

There was no fuel for ambulances and other essential vehicles, hospital supplies ran out; four patients apparently perished because their dialysis treatments had to be rationed. Cancer patients have had their chemotherapy treatments curtailed.

The Israeli NGO, Physicians for Human Rights - IPHR - warned on Tuesday that the Palestinian health services were near collapse. IPHR called for an end to the starvation policy; for Israel to stop preventing Palestinians from reaching hospitals in East Jerusalem and to stop curbing the activities of international organisations attempting to deliver humanitarian aid to the Palestine health ministry.

The World Bank has warned that the crisis in Palestine is worse than it had imagined and could render the West Bank and Gaza ungovernable. The US position is simple. It regards Hamas as a terrorist organisation and threatens to sanction banks which pass on money from other Arab nations to the Palestinian Authority.

A Washington Post survey of international press comment on the crisis finds that the US press is not carrying the same news as the rest of the world press. President Jimmy Carter said "Innocent Palestinians are being treated like animals" in a piece for the International Herald Tribune, not carried by its parent the New York Times.

The liberal Israeli daily, Ha'aretz reports some unexpected outcomes of the 'Haiti Model'. Danny Rubenstein, Haaretz' veteran West bank correspondent says "The Bush policy to starve Hamas financially is tacitly supported by unelected Arab regimes resisting Bush's calls for democratisation.

"In their view, the successful functioning of the Hamas government sends a message of encouragement to opposition groups in their countries, proof that an Islamic government can rule." Rubenstein doubts that the US-European aid cut-off will persuade Palestinians to abandon Hamas.

"It is clear to everyone now that whatever Fatah, Israel, the Arab states and the entire world do to undermine the Hamas government will not work," he writes. "The Palestinian public is loyal to it. So it is best to look for a way to live with it."

Groucho Does Nureyev

2006-05-07T23:00:00.000+02:00

Common Sense
John Maxwell

The United States is represented at the United Nations by a man named John Bolton, with a white, Groucho Marx moustache and a serious propensity both to embroider the truth and to invent new truths. Take this example, for instance: "While treaties may be politically or even morally binding, they are not legally obligatory. They are just not law as we apprehend the term."

Breathtaking - isn't it? Mr John Bolton was, at the time he said that, doing his damnedest to ensure that the United States did not join 150 other countries in signing the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. His efforts, and those of others, proved successful. The US Senate did not ratify the treaty.

Because of this sort of behaviour, Senator Brian Dorgan said two years ago that President Bush's nomination of Mr Bolton to be undersecretary for arms control was "a terrible nomination".
Senator Dorgan went further:

"To nominate Mr John Bolton to be undersecretary of state for arms control defies logic. Are we going to be a world leader in stopping the spread of nuclear weapons or not? Are we going to be a leader in trying to make this a safer world? Are we going to be a leader in trying to reduce the number of nuclear weapons that exist in this world?

The answer from the president, it seems to me, in sending this nomination to the Senate is no; we don't intend to lead on anything.

We intend to do our own thing notwithstanding what anybody else thinks about it, and notwithstanding the consequences with respect to the reduction of additional nuclear weapons and delivery systems."

Mr Bolton's specialty in the State Department was, according to American authorities on the subject, to block initiatives designed to lessen international tension. According to the Washington Post's Peter Baker and Dafna Linzer "...a key US programme intended to keep Russian nuclear fuel out of terrorist hands has been frozen by an arcane legal dispute. As undersecretary of state, John R Bolton was charged with fixing the problem, but critics complained he was the roadblock."

Baker and Linzer quoted Rose Gottemoeller, a Clinton administration expert on nonproliferation issues. "Throughout his career in the first Bush administration, he was always playing the stopper role for a lot of different issues and even when there was obvious interest by the president in moving things forward, Bolton often found ways of stopping things by tying the inter-agency process in knots."

Many people in the State Department were therefore pleased when Bolton was shifted by Condoleezza Rice and sent to be the resident firebug at the UN. It was a position he was well qualified for, having stated publicly that the UN building could well do without its top 40 floors. Senator Dorgan thought the US would live to rue Bolton's nomination:

"All I know about this nominee is what he has said, what he has established as a public record. It is, in my judgment, antithetical to what we ought to aspire to be and what we ought to aspire to see from someone in the position we expect to provide leadership on arms control.

In my judgment, if this Senate sees fit today to vote positively on this nomination, we will have taken a significant step backwards. We will have impeded the efforts of this country to be a world leader in areas that really matter."

When Condoleezza Rice moved Bolton to the UN, she also moved him out of the circles dealing with a number of arms control issues in which he had played his usual obstructionist role.

Baker and Linzer reported that "As the administration's point man confronting Iran's nuclear programme, Bolton had blocked US support for a European bid to negotiate a settlement with Tehran, arguing that such talks would legitimise Iran's clerical regime without stopping any secret weapons development.

"But Bolton was shut out of Iran after Rice's ascension, according to two US officials, and his policy was reversed. In early January, officials from France, Britain and Germany flew secretly to Washington for a brainstorming session on Iran. Bolton was not invited, European diplomats said. Instead, they met with Elliott Abrams of the National Security Council.

"We weren't the ones who wanted to keep the meeting secret," one European diplomat said. "It was the American side that didn't want him there."

Unfortunately, the Americans weren't able to keep him out of the continuing discussion, and Mr Bolton apparently got his president's approval to move the subject of Iran from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to the Security Council where Mr Bolton feels more comfortable with the other North Atlantic representatives of the 'civilised world'.

That is not simply a cheap shot at Mr Bolton. As an acolyte of Senator Jesse Helms his résumé would seem to qualify him to be described as a racist. His performance in relation to Cuba would seem to disqualify him from ever being regarded as a witness of truth.

During his confirmation hearings before the senate last year it transpired that Bolton had deliberately perverted a CIA memorandum on Cuba to make it state, falsely, that Cuba was in the process of making and testing biological and chemical weapons of mass destruction.

It took former President Jimmy Carter's visiting Cuba with a bunch of American experts to nail that particularly dangerous and noisome lie. Mr Bolton has been doing a carefully choreographed dance around the truth for the last several weeks, his pas de seul and arabesques being faithfully recorded by a craven Press, trying to make it appear that the Iranians are even more intransigent and unreasonable than they actually are.

Mr Bolton believes that Iran wants nuclear weapons to destroy Israel, and nothing the Iranians can say will change his belief. With a president who has such a contempt for the language and for science that he will not properly pronounce the word 'nuclear', Bolton is unlikely to face any challenges from the direction of the White House.

Additionally, Mr Bush is woefully in need of a triumph of some kind, and the unconditional surrender of the Iranians and the removal of President Ahmedinejad would do nicely, thank you. The Iranians are firm.

They realise that nuclear war is out of the question and that for logistical and internal political reasons, the United States cannot launch any realistic invasion of their country. They see no reason to back down. They are prepared to deal with the IAEA, not the Security Council and John Bolton.

Their position is simple. They are entitled under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty - which Mr Bolton despises - to carry out programmes of nuclear research for peaceful purposes. They did not tell the whole truth about the programme in the beginning, for good reason: they were then being attacked by Iraq, armed and egged on by the United States, and they had seen what happened to Iraq's nuclear reactor at the hands of Israel. The construction of nuclear weapons is not a simple or cheap process and it takes time. There is no way that Iran could possibly make nuclear weapons without the world being aware.

Similarly, there was no possibility that Israel could have done that either, but Israel and Apartheid South Africa were allowed to collaborate in making and testing nuclear weapons without a peep from the 'civilised world'.

Israel now has submarines equipped with nuclear missiles and can take out any country it wishes at a few hours' notice.
The Iranians say that the proper forum for discussion of their programme is in the IAEA, not the Security Council, where Mr Bolton expects his 'civilised friends' to support him, as they supported the US in Haiti and in Palestine.

The stakes in Iran are somewhat more critical, since they include the possibility of an oil crisis and global economic meltdown.
And Mr Bolton dances on, Groucho doing Nureyev. There is a pratfall in the script, but he doesn't know that, yet.

Ironist does Manolete

The annual White House Correspondents dinner is, under President Bush, a normally cosy affair, unlike the sometimes acerbic occasions when Democrats are in the White House. This year, to end the proceedings, someone had the wit - or misfortune - to hire a comic named Stephen Colbert.

Mr Colbert, posing, as is his wont, as a friend of the president's, proceeded to unmask himself as the Little Boy in the fable about the Emperor's New Clothes.

Having unfrocked the Emperor, Colbert then turned into an intellectual Manolete, producing elegant passes against two targets, the Presidential bull and the Judas Goat Press, placing his barbed banderillas with savage precision, provoking open-mouthed amazement from an increasingly abashed crowd of dinner guests. Some journalists walked out. They didn't find their defrocking funny. Nobody knows whether President Bush got the message.

They all should be reminded, as Colbert did remind them, that reality has a leftist bias, and that in the good old days, kings and emperors carried their own 'Fools' around with them, to remind them that they were not in fact Gods. Mr Bush has gone too long without a Fool at his side. Which is why Mr Colbert is on his way to becoming an American national folk hero.

Patterson turns Lobbyist

Last week's announcement that the former prime minister, Mr Patterson, is to become a lobbyist alarms me, though it does not surprise me. His choice of partners is even more alarming than his choice of occupation. Mr Patterson is to join a firm of international consultants named GoodWorks International, headed by Mr Andrew Young.

I met Andrew Young about 1978 when he came to Jamaica as the guest of Prime Minister Michael Manley. He was then President Carter's Ambassador to the UN and came with all the cachet of having been an associate of Martin Luther King and a pillar of the civil rights movement.

I confess that we took an instant dislike to each other, and on a television programme in which I was one of the journalists, we got into a short, sharp row about the direction poor countries like Jamaica should be taking. We were, at the time, under attack from the IMF and World Bank and I thought it was unreasonable for those worthies to demand that Jamaica should collapse its pretensions to any programme of self-reliance and poor people's politics. Young was all for dissolving all state-owned enterprise and simply turning to capitalism as the engine of development.

My position was that a people disfranchised by their history of slavery and colonial exploitation could not drag themselves up by their own bootstraps and that dependence on foreign investment would simply be another form of slavery.

Michael Manley was somewhat angry with me for treating this big 'Benefactor' from the US so roughly. I don't think Michael disagreed with my position, more, perhaps with the vigour with which it was expressed.

Since then, Mr Young has gone on to bigger and better things. In February 2005 he became chairman of 'Working Families for Walmart', an organisation sponsored by Walmart in response to public criticism that Walmart is anti-people and anti-minority.

Mr Patterson is still being paid the salary of a Jamaican Prime Minister, which I would have thought would satisfy anyone who was not an oil industry 'ginnigog'. That he should join Mr young and company alarms me. Despite his protestation that he will not involve himself in any deal involving Jamaica, I am afraid that I cannot believe his disclaimers, because he has broken too many promises to the Jamaican people.

I believe that the Jamaican government should take action to forbid any former high official of government from representing any company which has contractual dealings with this country. And I believe that if former prime ministers are to be paid as if they were still in office, the law should prohibit them from engaging in any enterprise of profit. He should be out doing good works if only as penance for his failures.

Palestine & the Haitian Solution

I do not have the space this week to reply to my friend Ainsley Henriques, who counselled me to confine my human rights concerns to Darfur. I simply wish to point out that much of his complaint is based on discredited Israeli versions of history.

Additionally, he should check the BBC website, where a recent study has highlighted the BBC's "failure to convey adequately the disparity in the Israeli and Palestinian experience, reflecting the fact that one side is in control and the other lives under occupation".

On the emotive issue of whether acts of violence perpetrated against either side should be called "terrorism", the review said the BBC should use the term because it is "clear and well understood" and that once it had decided on a policy for the correct use of language it should be more consistent in applying it.

Since the BBC is probably the least obviously biased Western news agency reporting from Palestine, its deficiencies should cause others to question their reporting.

Ainsley should also consult the Israeli human rights websites dealing with Palestinian issues, such as B'Tselem. Finally, the former head of the World Bank, Mr James Wolfensohn, has resigned as envoy from the Quartet group to the Palestinians, because of restrictions on dealing with the Hamas government.

Wolfensohn said: "It would surprise me if one could win by getting all the kids out of school or starving the Palestinians. And I don't think anyone in the Quartet believes that to be the policy. I think that's a losing gambit."

Oil and Survival

2006-04-30T19:00:00.000+02:00

Common Sense
John Maxwell

Eight months ago when Cindy Sheehan put George Bush into check in Crawford, Texas, the US public generally were about equally divided on the performance and virtues of the American president. They had been that way for several months before the great non-confrontation.

Since then, it's been downhill all the way for the president. I thought, correctly, that Sheehan's initiative was going to break the public opinion logjam and produce a flood of negatives for Mr Bush. Although most other commentators may disagree about Sheehan's responsibility, I have no doubt that her action touched a deep chord in the American psyche, recalling people to consciousness and waking them from a PR-induced trance.

Somehow, I believe, Cindy Sheehan's camping out on the president's doorstep and his refusal to meet her challenged American values at a very deep level. I sense that the American sense of propriety, of genteel obligation, received a severe blow from the president's unchivalrous behaviour.

Whatever people said about his lying, his capacity for self-deception, his oilman separation from the ordinary folks, his bad manners broke a last connecting link between him and people who wanted to believe in his essential goodness and sense of honour.

The military death rate has resumed its climb and the White House is racked by the scandal of the Plame leak and the Abramoff connection and the DeLay scandal and a host of other large and small crimes and misdemeanours which seem somehow, to be connected to the White House and the Republican Party.

Along came Jones

I keep remembering the chorus of a song from the 1950s, mocking the American B-movie cliff-hanger heroics in which some unfortunate damsel was foully betrayed and in danger of unspeakable death or other horror, only to be rescued in the nick of time and the final reel by Our Hero.

In the song, the heroine is captured by the mustachioed, patent-haired villain, tied up and left on the railway tracks to be deconstructed by the next train "Salty Sam was a tryin' to stuff Sweet Sue in a burlap sack
He said if you don't give me the deed to your ranch
I'm gonna throw you on the railroad track

And then he grabbed her .and then. he tied her up . and then.
A train started coming .and then, and then .He! He! . and then, AND THEN, AND THEN. along came Jones tall, thin Jones, slow-walkin' Jones, slow-talkin' Jones, Along came long-legged, lanky Jones." who in the nick of time, would cut the grateful heroine loose and all would suddenly be for the best in the best of all possible worlds.

Mr Bush's version of "The perils of Pauline" could do with a Jones right now. In fact, it could do with two or three Joneses, but there are, alas, none in sight and none hiding anywhere.

Bush is, as they say, 'up the crick withouten a paddle' and even some of his stoutest defenders have adopted a discreet, if uncomfortable silence. Others, like Francis Fukuyama (The End of History) are in full headlong, retreat.

Meanwhile, critics who Republicans believe should be preserving a decent reticence, senior military officers, among them Generals, have been calling for the head of Generalissimo Donald "Stuff Happens" Rumsfeld.

Mr Bush's own favourite 'turd-blossom', Karl Rove, is like Peril-prone Pauline, clinging by his fingernails to the White House cliffs, widely expected to be indicted - like his former associate 'Scooter Libby' - for lying to a grand jury.

In Baghdad, meanwhile, the US is building a stadium-sized so-called Embassy, from which it is intended that the future of the Middle East shall, in the future, be directed.

The alleged Ahmad al Zarqawi has finally shown a face, threatening dire consequences to the Americans while Osama bin Laden has been content with an audio tape "mocking the Americans".

Because the situation in Iraq and elsewhere is so dire, it is not too crazy to imagine that instead of Rumsfeld's head on a platter, the refrigerated remains of bin Laden and Zarqawi may turn up in the nick of time to provide Mr Bush with his Jones. But even if that happened, I cannot imagine that it will cause anything but another small dead-cat bounce in a presidency from which all inspiration, all honour and all life have departed.

The CIA has just fired a senior manager ostensibly for leaking classified information about the agency's international law-breaking in the extraordinary rendition, torture and illegal imprisonment and murder of an unknown number of people, many of them citizens of other countries. There is a nice legal point here.

If the fired CIA officer had in fact leaked the news, she would in fact be doing her duty, in exposing high crimes and misdemeanours. To be fired for that exposes the depths of amorality to which the Bush administration has descended.

Three days ago, the European Union's special inquiry revealed that the CIA had carried out at least 1,000 illegal flights into and out of Europe, transporting the nameless victims of its worldwide policy of 'scraping-up' suspects and then torturing them until they confessed to something.

Some are undoubtedly guilty of something but others are equally clearly innocent of any wrongdoing. It appears to me that the CIA cannot release many of these people because their mental condition would reveal instantly, the corruption, violence and wickedness of the system which entrapped them.

The Bush presidency is the first US administration in my memory which it is possible to imagine bumbling into war by accident. They seem to have no sense of proportion; they start any argument by brandishing the big stick, leaving their opponents no choice but to put on the full armour and panoply of war.

The North Koreans and now the Iranians have sussed out these tactics and have turned to their own version of brinkmanship. When Mr Dulles was employing his brinksmanship, he could proceed, knowing that his opponents were rational men and unwilling to risk everything on the throw of the nuclear dice. The Iranians do not have this assurance, and their posturing, however justified, has the potential to bring the world closer to war than any crisis since the Berlin airlift.

Global warming, Hot Air and Gasolene

A petard is a small bomb, and to be hoisted by your own petard is to blow yourself up like some of the Nihilists in Imperial Russia who had the unfortunate tendency to blow themselves up in their attempts to bring down the government. Mr Bush is an oilman, or at least, a pretend oilman; he talks like an oilman, walks like an oilman and selected another oilman to be his vice-president.

It is my opinion that the notorious and still secret energy policy consultations held by Mr Cheney at the start of the Bush presidency were, in fact, all about the coming Iraq war, which would have, he thought, secured energy sufficiency for the United States for the next century or so.

Unfortunately, Messrs Cheney, Wolfowitz, Feith, Rumsfeld and Company reckoned without the possibility of Iraqi resistance, but even more crucially, they forgot about China and her voraciously growing appetite for oil.

Most countries - outside of the oil-producers - have been calculating for several years, that there will come a time, sooner rather than later, when there will either be no oil available, or that it will be so expensive that they needed to find alternative sources of energy.

Even countries like Norway, the world's largest gas exporter, and Iran, the number three exporter of petroleum, have been planning for the day when 'water more than flour'. That is the motive behind Iran's nuclear research. The US has, however, chosen to treat Iran as it treated Iraq - as a totally untrustworthy, dishonourable entity, incapable of telling the truth and with a mindless, implacable hatred for Israel. The hatred is a fact, but there do seem to be rational leaders in Iran who have no intention of destroying their world by attempting to destroy Israel.

The problem with Israel is that the United States, its patron, has signed on to the Israeli belief that nothing short of unconditional surrender by the Palestinians and the Arab and Muslim world will satisfy Israel's demand for lebensraum. At no point since Sadat's journey to Jerusalem 30 years ago have the 'west' and Israel been willing to deal with the Palestinians as if they had any rights worth noticing.

In such a scenario, a reasonable onlooker would be hard-pressed to decide that the Palestinian/Arab/Muslim recalcitrance is totally unjustified. Unfortunately for the rest of the world, the United States, and possibly Israel, are the only countries which still have the capacity and the will to try to make their rhetoric into reality.

In the meantime, as we were forcibly reminded 30 years ago, the Arabs and other oil producers have, in the ground, a potent answer to aggression. The petroleum situation is becoming less and less fluid - as the economists say.

China is busy signing supply contracts with Nigeria and any other oil producer in sight. Saudi Arabia, once a reliable bastion of US support, is a shaky kingdom, almost entirely dependent on American military force to guarantee the regime in power.

Iraq, once ruled by the pragmatist Saddam, is about to become an intellectual protectorate of Iran; and Iran, whose people tend to admire the United States, also tend to value their independence more. Venezuela is busy signing gas distribution agreements with Brazil and Argentina and the world market in oil, if there ever was such a thing, is becoming even more restricted.

This controlled market explains why Exxon (Esso) has been able to make a profit of more than US$8 billion in the first quarter of this year and is well on the way to exceeding its record profits of last year. Exxon's profit last year exceeded the Gross National Income of Nigeria, one of the world's largest oil producers.

This year, like last year, the oil companies will probably make as high profits in the first nine months of the year as they made in the whole of the previous year. Last October, the New York Times reported the outrage of US politicians at the prospects of higher prices. The Republican leader of the senate, Dr Bill Frist, said: "If there are those who abuse the free enterprise system to advantage themselves and their businesses at the expense of all Americans, they ought to be exposed, and they ought to be ashamed."

Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York, was even more heated: "Big Oil behemoths are making out like bandits, while the average American family is getting killed by high gas prices, and soon-to-be-record heating oil prices."

What they feared then has happened. The head bandit, Mr Lee Raymond of Exxon, has got a retirement benefit of US$400 million. Dr Frist is very quiet, having just signed off on a budget granting the oil companies US$7 billion in 'incentives'.

Meanwhile, television is showing Americans pawning precious possessions to buy gas. Their country was built by General Motors and Ford and depends on cars as no other in the world. Even the unemployed need cars. With gas at over US$3 per gallon, life is getting more interesting for those who thought this time last year, that they would be voting for Republicans this year.

Here in Jamaica, we are clearly immune to such things as petroleum prices. Those of us who said, five years ago, that the Milennium Highway would never be able to pay its way because of the rising cost of petroleum get little satisfaction out of saying we told you so. What is more painful is that 50 years from now when the idiots and bandits responsible for our Doomsday Highway are long dead, our grandchildren and their grandchildren will still be paying for this misbegotten monstrosity.

Meanwhile, Mr Paulwell speaks of selling off our remaining publicly owned assets, which were accumulated by good sense and conservative economics employed mainly by people who called themselves socialists. Like the man pawning his watch to drive his Jaguar, we are on the road to bankruptcy.

We do have the means to avoid total wreck. If we get out of sugar and turn the factories over to the production of ethanol, we can use sugar cane, elephant grass and all kinds of other biomass, which grow wild in Jamaica, to rescue ourselves from the Lee Raymonds of this world.

We can develop wind-power to supplement and eventually supplant all the thermally generated power we consume. We can set up any number of industries to exploit solar energy and the skills of small producers.

We can actually make Jamaica work again by abandoning the stupid, heavy metal policies of the recent past and by understanding that we can develop fastest by developing our people. "Infrastructure" produces nothing; it is people who produce.

Racism and Bird Flu

2006-04-23T12:00:00.000+02:00

Common Sense
John Maxwell

The US Press is in the throes of two of its annual rituals: first, the celebration of the latest crop of Pulitzer prizes for journalistic excellence; second: the selection of a suitable candidate for the year's high profile public lynching.

In past years they have sacrificed O J Simpson, Michael Jackson and Kobe Bryant, to name only the most prominent.

Candidates for lynching are not always obvious; since September last and Hurricane Katrina, Kanye West, Harry Belafonte and New Orleans Mayor Roy Nagin were all considered and discarded. Belafonte was too smart, Kanye West was too popular and Roy Nagin was right about the Bush administration and its failures in the disaster. The Mexican illegal immigrants are too diffuse for a really impressive auto da fé. A simpler, more easily stereotyped candidate is needed.

This month, two relatively new candidates presented themselves: Barry Bonds, the home run hitter accused of lying about steroid use, and Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, who punched a Congressional security guard she accused of an inappropriate attempt to restrain her as she rushed into the Congress without passing through the metal detectors.

At the same time, two of three suspects in the violent rape of a young black woman by members of an almost all white university sports team are getting the benefit of a 'full court press' to provide character evidence for them before they have even entered the courtroom. Their alleged victim is meanwhile traduced as drunk and delusional.

Clearly, high-class young white men could not possibly have raped a black woman, a university student herself - from a black university - who is not only a single mother but was working her way through college by moonlighting as a stripper.
While the rich, young white athletes are having their sterling praises sung by the media, Cynthia McKinney is being investigated by a Washington, D.C. Grand Jury.

Hamas and Palestine

HEBRON, West Bank - A Palestinian driver places items to be searched in front of an Israeli army explosives robot at a checkpoint in the West Bank town of Hebron last Friday. (Photo: AP)

Hamas and Palestine are getting the Haiti Democracy treatment. Having had the temerity to vote for the people they thought might best represent them, the Palestinians are to be blackmailed into good behaviour.

In response to US and Israeli pressure "Several EU nations, including Britain, Denmark and the Netherlands have already frozen their aid to the new government and more may follow. Aid from the EU and its 25 member nations averages $615 million per year, about half of which has been suspended. The EU decision to freeze payments affects an immediate instalment of $36.5 million, compounding an already dire financial situation for the Palestinian government. Canada, Norway and other non-EU member nations have also cancelled funding."

The US secretary of state explained why: "Because the new Hamas-led Palestinian government has failed to accept the Quartet principles of non-violence, recognition of Israel and respect for previous agreements between the parties, the US is suspending assistance to the Palestinian government's Cabinet and ministries."

No similar pressure has been put on the Israelis, whose attitude to the Palestinians is reflected faithfully in the Hamas attitude to Israel. And while Israel is commended for not blasting the Palestinians in revenge for the latest suicide bombing, no one has remarked that the suicide bombing in Tel Aviv was preceded by the Israelis killing 15 Palestinians and wounding dozens more the previous weekend.

In a commentary printed in Cairo's Al Ahram, prime minister of the Palestinian Authority, Ismail Haniyeh, outlines what he says is the basis for comprehensive peace. It is worth quoting at some length:

"From time immemorial, Palestine was the peaceful homeland of native Muslims, Christians and Jews who lived together in peace and harmony, sharing a common history and heritage. In fact, it was only after Palestine was placed under the British mandate following World War I, and when the British colonialist authorities subsequently decided to illegally give Palestine, our ancestral homeland, to Zionism, that inter-communal and inter-religious harmony was disturbed.

"As result of that wanton injustice, we find ourselves today as prisoners in our own homeland, enslaved and tormented by an illegal and immoral occupier who is treating our people as children of a lesser God, or even as if we were animals.

"In fact, the criminal nature of this occupation transcends reality. The ugly scenes of murder, home demolitions, and humiliation to which our people are subjected on a daily basis and which people outside Palestine watch on their TV screens, are but a small part of what is really happening on the ground.

"Needless to say, the Israeli occupiers wouldn't be perpetrating their crimes against a helpless people whose only "crime" is its enduring yearning for freedom and justice were it not for the disgraceful apathy of the international community towards my people's plight. "Hence, I call on the international community to pressure the Israeli state to stop its systematic oppression and institutionalised persecution of my people."

Haniyeh says his people want peace and they believe peace is possible, but "for a just peace to materialise in Palestine, the world community must adopt an honest approach to this conflict. We say so because we are tired of the international community's hypocrisy and double standards in dealing with both parties to the conflict.

"Indeed, we would like to know why the UN has allowed Israel to repeatedly fly in the face of more than 100 UN resolutions aimed at ending the illegal occupation of my country? Are there two sets of international law, one for the weak and another for the strong?

"Is Israel above international law? Is Israel entitled to a special treatment by the international community whereby it can kill our children with impunity, steal our land with impunity, and expel us to the four corners of the world with impunity?"

Prime Minister Haniyeh concludes with a simple appeal for justice:

"It is time that all men and women of conscience and rectitude speak up in support of justice for the Palestinians. We have suffered too much, and it is time that we are allowed to reclaim our usurped freedom and dignity. We are not demanding the impossible. We only challenge the world community to be faithful to the UN Charter and international conventions that prohibit the acquisition of land by force."

In a world whose agenda is set by an increasingly corrupt and self-serving media, public opinion on the side of justice will never be able to have any effect if it continues to be systematically denied the truth. If the world does not know of the injustices of Palestine or Haiti, we can never be moved to do anything to redress the prevailing wickedness. We cannot oppose evil if we do not know that it exists.

Bird Flu

Egypt is in the throes of a bird flu epidemic. Apparently, the Egyptian poultry industry has been destroyed but backyard rearing of chickens is making the pandemic impossible to control. Galal Nassar, writing in Al Ahram, says an unpublished study suggests that "the avian flu virus is now endemic in Egypt and will remain so for years because of the bungling of health authorities at every step of the way".

It is suspected that the virus entered Egypt by the illegal importation of infected birds, which implies, according to Nassar "on top of gross negligence, gross corruption motivated by a greed so voracious that it had no compunction at letting the interest of immediate gain override the dangers to which it was exposing society".

Nassar points out that the Egyptian pandemic has occurred despite sensible precautions taken early on; a state of emergency had been declared, there was wholesale slaughter of industrial poultry, but little attention was paid to backyard poultry rearing or to the possibility that unscrupulous people might import infected poultry into the country. So, despite enormous early sacrifice, Egypt is again threatened by a pandemic to which the government's response is to blame the backyard chicken rearers.

It appears that Egypt is increasingly likely to be gripped by panic and confusion unless the government begins to take serious, organised action to find and destroy the sources of infection, because the longer the virus is allowed to survive and spread is the more likely that the disease will mutate, make the jump and begin to spread from human to human, instead of from birds to humans. At that point, there will not be much that anyone can do.

In Jamaica, we need to realise that if bird flu becomes endemic here, as it has in Egypt, despite the fact that only a few people have died, it will mean the end of the tourism industry and wholesale unemployment. At that point we will have not only a public health emergency but a public security emergency. Before we are very much older we need to begin, and urgently, to devise a food security programme, diverting some of the millions we are spending on highways to nowhere to importing and planting food.

We really need to begin turning some of our sugar land over to peas and beans, to begin programmes to promote backyard gardening and to develop new strategies to guarantee reliable supplies of protein foods for the population. I believe it would make sense for us to begin to convert some of the enormous craters left by bauxite mining into fish ponds. It may make sense right now to forbid bauxite companies to mine out all the bauxite and instead to leave a lining of bauxite clay in the ground so that we can seal the ponds without too much expense.

It may also make sense to begin developing cottage industries around these ponds for the salting/pickling of freshwater fish, because if the pandemic really gets a grip even our electricity supplies will be in danger. We may not be able to import the oil to drive the generators to provide power for refrigerators and freezers. We need to begin a completely new look at our survival techniques and a completely new understanding of what it means to be civilised.

We can be certain of only one thing: we have no idea how desperate our situation may become. But even if it does not become desperate we need to begin to understand the meaning of sustainable development and to prepare for future threats.

The lives we save may be our own.

No Time to Lose

2006-04-16T11:00:00.000+02:00

Common Sense
John Maxwell

"A robin redbreast in a cage," according to William Blake, "puts all heaven in a rage." A nation in a cage - eight million people in prison - does not disturb too many people; certainly not the Great White Fathers who control our world.

These Great White hypocrites were much moved, it was reported, by the plight of a single Christian proselyte in Afghanistan who stood to lose his head for abandoning his faith.

Nearer home, in Haiti, thousands of innocent people in jail, put there by outlaws, gangsters, professional murderers and rapists, could not stir the lively consciences of these leaders of the free world in Washington, London, Paris and Ottawa. The fate of innocent schoolgirls, sodomised by soldiers in the street, was of no account to these bozos in their ivory towers.
It was a different country, and besides, there are no votes there.

Parsons and Politics

I don't have a problem with parsons in politics, partly because my father was one, and a good one. He must have been good, since he was almost a pauper when he died.

That was then.

Today, preachers have an entirely different public image, not so cuddly or altruistic, more inclined, like bankers, to keep a sharp eye out for souls "worth saving".

Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller has called for preachers to be given special privilege in the affairs of state. She wants them put on as many authorities as possible, to lend "probity" or at least the appearance of probity.

The PM must realise that while people respect her own religious views, Jamaica is only nominally a Christian country and that she cannot, like the current US administration, attempt to inflict her beliefs on everyone else. Crucially, it appears that many so-called Christians don't seem to be able to agree on very much and tend to give the impression that religion is, for too many, a means to get rich quickly.

Jamaica is littered with enormous, grandiose structures, built by community savings but no longer serving any community purpose. The development progression is as follows: first there is a small tent and a few chairs, followed in a few months by a bigger tent, more chairs and an enormous sound system.

Then construction begins on a very large structure, then somehow the construction work ends and the building remains unfinished, the pastor has gone abroad to "look more money" while the people's savings remain entombed in a totally useless concrete monstrosity.

For many Jamaicans, myself included, parsons must put their money where their mouths are. If we are all in the development process we all need to demonstrate that we deserve a seat at the table, parsons deserve respect to the extent that they earn it - just like anyone else. And nothing can so quickly discredit an administration as the appearance of probity and integrity without the substance.

I remember 40 years ago, when we were faced with an acute shortage of school space, suggesting in Public Opinion that we could partially solve the problem if the churches would lend some of their buildings for schools during the week. The Roman Catholics were the only denomination to respond positively. There was a total lack of response from the thousands of evangelical churches whose buildings were much more conveniently situated than the Catholics'.

I am really scared by the idea of parsons on the National Family Planning Board, for instance, or the National Environmental & Planning Agency deciding, purely on principle, you understand, whether children are entitled to be taught the elements of human reproduction, or whether a cemetery is a serious threat to the environment.

The PM is in a crucial phase of her administration. The overwhelming majority of Jamaicans want her to do well, while others are praying for disaster. The window of her opportunity is narrow and she has a great deal of work to do.

People want to know about her plans for community consultation and development and that's what she needs to explain now. We have two looming crises which need to be prepared for on the community level. The first major crisis is the hurricane season; the second, the possibility of an epidemic of avian flu.

Building Social Capital

We have, over several years, managed to produce a pretty adequate system to deal with the immediate after-effects of a hurricane. We have not yet produced anything like the Cuban system which moves entire cities out of harm's way before the hurricane strikes.

As hurricanes become more frequent and much more dangerous, we need to mobilise the society to respond more quickly and effectively to the threat of disaster - that is, we must make ourselves more able to avert disaster by moving people and movable assets out of the path of destruction before the crisis arrives.

The development of such responses will be crucial in avoiding the worst economic and social losses produced by hurricanes. Obviously we cannot develop such capacities overnight; among the necessary and missing factors now are high levels of community trust and comradeship.

But there is a bright spot: the Jamaican community is, at this moment, very receptive to initiatives which will summon people to a higher level of social concern and responsibility. If Portia is really going to make a difference, here is one area which begs for mobilisation. And it is an area in which most people have some level of experience and expertise - an area in which the wisdom of the people waits to be harvested and co-ordinated.

I believe that the Office of Disaster Preparedness and Emergency Management mobilising volunteers and in co-operation with the Army, the Red Cross and with advice and help from the Cubans would, in a few months, be able to make enormous differences in minimising loss from predictable natural disasters. At the end of the hurricane season, as communities evaluated their work, they would also be able to better understand the value of their co-operation and to appreciate the meaning of the social capital they have accumulated.

Bird Flu Threat

According to the best estimates, people in the Americas may have up to nine months to prepare to deal with an outbreak of the Asian bird flu. What worries health experts is the possibility that the H5N1 avian flu virus will combine with a human flu virus and trigger a global flu pandemic.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) has warned that if this happens, the world would have just weeks to contain the virus before it spreads, possibly killing millions of people.

H5N1 is an avian flu strain that emerged in Hong Kong in 1997, killing or forcing the destruction of 1.5 million chickens, ducks and geese, infecting 18 people and killing six. The WHO says the quick slaughter of all potentially infected birds may have averted a pandemic. However, the virus reappeared in a deadlier form last year and has caused havoc among poultry in Asia, Europe and Africa this year.

Now, according to the world's leading expert, the spread of bird flu across Europe, Asia and Africa suggests that the virus is moving more rapidly than anyone predicted and is closer to a critical mutation that would make it more easily transmissible between humans.

"We expected it to move, but not many of us thought it would move quite like this," said Dr David Nabarro, co-ordinator on bird flu efforts at the United Nations. "Something generally disturbing is going on at the moment. It's certainly in the bird world, and it's pushing up against the human world in a serious way."

Nabarro describes himself as "quite scared", especially since the disease has broken out of Eastern Asia and reached birds in Africa, Europe and India much faster than he expected it to.

"That rampant, explosive spread, and the dramatic way it's killing poultry so rapidly suggests that we've got a very beastly virus in our midst." According to Dr Nabarro: "The infection of millions more birds in many more countries "has led to an exponential increase of the load of virus in the world".

And influenza is a fast-mutating virus. Each infected bird and person is actually awash in minutely different strains, and it takes lengthy genetic testing to sequence each one. So if a pandemic strain were to appear, "it might be quite difficult for us to pick up that change when it happens". Birds that survive infection with H5N1 excrete the virus for at least 10 days, orally and in faeces, making it highly likely to spread.

Overall 103 people have succumbed to it, but experts fear that if the critical mutation occurs, it will spread like wildfire and kill millions of people the world over. Dr Robert Webster, who has been studying the virus since 1997, says that the virus can no longer be controlled. "Nature is in control," he said.

Jamaica and other island nations are in some ways, naturally quarantined against certain diseases, but bird flu is not one of them. Migratory birds, usually wild ducks, are the natural "reservoir" of avian influenza viruses, and usually do not become sick when infected. Domestic poultry, including chickens and turkeys, die quickly when infected.

If a human pandemic does begin, anywhere in the world, most experts forecast widespread economic disaster. The first casualty of a pandemic will be international travel; tourism worldwide will shut down overnight and the vast populations which depend on tourism will need to find some other way to subsist.

Second, if bird flu is discovered in one chicken in Jamaica, the entire poultry stock will have to be destroyed. It will not be easy to explain to people who own a chicken or two that their apparently healthy birds must not only be killed, but burned or buried in the public interest. We should probably ban the bird pet trade now and get ready to stop all poultry imports.

So even if we don't lose thousands of people to the virus, we will almost certainly suffer enormous economic damage by the destruction of the poultry industry - economic disaster for thousands of people, from poultry farmers to sidewalk 'jerkers' - unless we prepare to mitigate the damage. We need to start now.

There are some things we can do while there still appears to be time. The Chinese, who grow one-fifth of all the world's poultry, have begun a highly efficient effort to vaccinate the country's 14 billion birds of all kinds. It may make sense for us to try either to buy some of this vaccine or to ask the Chinese for help in producing our own vaccine.

Again, in such a scenario, the help of the Cubans would be vital, because they are among the very few countries in this hemisphere with the scientific manufacturing capability to produce the high quality products needed in such an enterprise. We should begin a co-ordinated regional response, including all of our neighbours, whatever language they speak.

We need to make major contingency plans for the pandemic. We will not be able to import food, because travel and world trade will come to a standstill. We will therefore need to prepare food contingency plans. These should include the development of the kind of measures used during the second World War.

These programmes need to be started now and the government should, in my view, immediately begin to buy and/or import seed for easily grown garden vegetables and perhaps begin a programme for the rapid expansion of the small livestock industry. Chicken farmers need to be given incentives for growing pigs, goats, sheep and rabbits. School farming programmes must be introduced and stimulated.

Whether there is a pandemic or not, diversifying our domestic food supply will certainly make us safer and probably healthier.

Finally, we should immediately compel cane farmers to convert 10 per cent of their productive land to domestic food crops, to plant corn, cassava, potato, yam and other crops. If we begin now, we have enough time to make ourselves relatively safe while raising the social capital. Whether there is an epidemic or not, we are certain to be better off. And we need to prepare for running a country in which most shops, offices, schools and other public buildings will be closed and people will need to work from home and be taught at home.

The time to begin solving these problems is now.

No Column This Week

2006-04-09T21:30:00.000+02:00

Common Sense
John Maxwell

Making Jamaica Work

2006-04-02T20:00:00.000+02:00

Common Sense
John Maxwell

The richer and more powerful we are, it seems, is the greater our capacity for self-delusion. The long-drawn-out departure of the former prime minister has apparently given hordes of privileged Jamaicans licence to speak about the enormous blessings his 14-year stint has brought us.

He has, we are told, brought a new civility to the affairs of the country, notwithstanding the almost tripling of the murder rate. He has, we are told, brought unexampled prosperity to this country, if we ignore the fact that despite all the heavy investment, the Gross Domestic Product of Jamaica in real terms has risen, perhaps, by two per cent since 1990; the rich have become immeasurably richer, the poor have got poorer and more desperate and are sustained more by remittances from abroad than by any other single factor.

The National Public Debt has risen by almost 50 per cent, while, despite all the redundancies, privatisations and other free market nostrums, government expenditures have risen to more than one-third of GDP, and more than 60 cents of every devalued dollar is paid to bankers and so-called 'investors'.

The only growth sector is financial services, which do nothing but accelerate the transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich. The result is a country in which the reverse Robin Hood syndrome is more significant than at any time since the abolition of slavery.

As the World Bank has pointed out in several studies of the region, economic inequality and collaterally perceived injustice are the main factors driving violent crime. According to the Bank (Determinants of crime rates in Latin America and the World):

"Greater inequality is associated with higher intentional homicide and robbery rates but the level of per capita income is not a significant determinant...contrary to our expectations, national enrolment rates in secondary education and the average number of years of schooling of the population appear to be positively (but weakly) associated with higher homicide rates."

Simpson Miller: seen by so many people as the answer to their prayers

That makes perfect sense to me. The level of frustration will go up among the better educated but unemployed youth. The promise of education is blasted by the sense of social and economic oppression and unfairness.

And in another publication, the World Bank declares that, "The costs of risky adolescent behaviour in the Caribbean in terms of direct expenditures and forgone productivity reach billions of dollars. It has been calculated that: ...a one per cent decrease in youth crime would directly increase tourist receipts by four per cent in Jamaica. (Caribbean Youth Development: Issues and Policy Directions).

In other publications, the bank suggests that improved education combined with crime reduction might contribute to another six per cent rise in GDP, triple the current rate of GDP increase and more than the Doomsday Highway and Harmony Cove combined.

So what are we waiting for? Conventional wisdom, expounded by conservatives like Don Robotham, suggests that all we need is more of the same Washington Consensus policies so ably promulgated by Omar Davies. This, despite the fact that the strategy clearly does not work anywhere, not in Jamaica or in any other Caribbean nation nor perhaps anywhere in the world outside of Singapore and one or two other specially privileged small nations. (See A Time to Choose: Caribbean development in the 21st century - World Bank 2006).

Recent studies in the United States have produced what the late John Hearne would have called a "brute fact": The share of young black men without jobs has climbed relentlessly, with only a slight pause during the economic peak of the late 1990s. In 2000, 65 per cent of black male high school dropouts in their 20s were jobless - that is, unable to find work, not seeking it or incarcerated. By 2004, the share had grown to 72 per cent, compared with 34 per cent of white and 19 per cent of Hispanic dropouts.

Even when high school graduates were included, half the number of black men in their 20s were jobless in 2004, up from 46 per cent in 2000.

Incarceration rates climbed in the 1990s and reached historic highs in the past few years. In 1995, 16 per cent of black men in their 20s who did not attend college were in jail or prison; by 2004, 21 per cent were incarcerated. By their mid-30s, six in 10 black men who had dropped out of school had spent time in prison.

One further US statistic is of interest - the fact that of all the men in prison, black or white, 76 per cent were 'fatherless' - i.e. they came from single-mother families.

These facts tell me that the centuries of dispossession and disinheritance of blacks in the New World has created a climate in which the normal rules of development do not apply, and I am sure that if the Jamaican situation were examined, similar proportions of fatherlessness would be found associated with delinquency.

Migration has been the vehicle for black development since the end of slavery. Jamaicans built the Panama Canal, created the railways and started the banana plantations of Central America, harvested the sugar cane during the 'Dance of the Millions' in Cuba early in the third decade of the 20th century, and provided the farm labour on American plantations during the second world war and after. Since then, Kingston has been simply a way-station on the road to 'prosperity' in Belle Glade and points north.

The current American xenophobia directed against Mexican illegal immigrants, might, if successful, perhaps improve the theoretical employability of native blacks, but it is highly unlikely to succeed because American business knows that it can get away with paying 'illegals' much less than it could offer American citizens of whatever colour.

In Jamaica, we have to wake up to some degree of reality. Jamaica now presents to itself and the world a picture of a supremely investor-friendly destination, the broad smile of invitation subverted only by the cutlass concealed behind the back.

Despite this threat, some investors do buy into the seductive promise of multimillion dollar rewards. A short trip along the North Coast will make it plain that Jamaica is becoming an island completely surrounded by all-inclusive hotels complete with all-inclusive shops and attractions, walled off from native predation. And if water is privatised they, of course, expect to get as much as they want for golf-courses and saunas - and who cares about the thirsty villagers down the road?

The tourism industry, which serves more higher-income visitors than the population of Jamaica, contains within itself the potential to provide a market which could easily demand twice the national farm production, if properly organised and if the industry could persuade itself to buy more Jamaican instead of finding convenient channels for the export of money.

Doubling farm production would require at least two new initiatives, the first being an agrarian reform programme and the second being massive investment in people instead of concrete.

Portia Simpson Miller's expressed intention to harvest the wisdom of the people will surely inform Jamaica of some unpalatable truths: despite the buoyant economic climate in the air-conditioned boardrooms of Kingston, most Jamaicans see no way out of their present hopelessness.

If we read the Horace Levy-edited report They Cry Respect, now more than a decade old, we would find that the people do know what they want.

They understand very clearly that they have been abandoned by the state, and hence feel only a residual loyalty to it. They want an end to the disinheritance, they want to be reconnected to a caring society which understands their history of oppression and misery. That is why Portia Simpson Miller is seen by so many as the answer to their prayers. They know that she knows the troubles they've seen, that she shares their sorrows. They know they can talk to her, and hope she can struggle with the Great Economic Determinists in the sky to bring them a modicum of joy and content.

Between these entreaties and the demands of the rich and super-rich stand a few obstacles, not least the idea that economic development is an exercise in selfishness and greed, in which it is every man for himself and the devil take the women and children.

The Matalon Committee's suggestion that the tax burden should be shifted even more onerously onto the shoulders of the poor is a good example of the level of self-deception in the society. In a small country in which one family can own six-and-a-half square miles of land while large numbers depend on the kindness of friends for the clothes they wear, it is clear that many cannot conceive of the parameters of the perils we confront.

People know, from Sam Sharpe, Bogle, Garvey and the two Manleys, that they are entitled at least to a fair chance. They know from their everyday experience that they do not get one. They intuitively understand that every human being is entitled to development and they seize whatever chances are on offer. If sports, cricket and athletics are the only openings available, they seize the chances and prove that they can excel.

All real sports, including bobsledding, tennis and golf, depend on brains as well as muscle. But not all of us are athletes, and for those, the opportunities are severely limited.

The University of the West Indies recently de-registered 500 undergraduates, not because they were dumb, but because they could not pay their full fees. That meant that the university, at one stroke, lost more than three per cent of its enrolment. We can no more afford such a rate of attrition than we can afford a tsunami.

No duty to be poor

No one has a duty to be poor, and no one has a right to be rich. Most people really do understand that we are all in the same boat and that we swim or sink together. There are some of us, however, who believe that God, or some other external agency, will warn us when we are coming too close to the edge of disaster. History does not disclose any such warnings to any other society. As we were in 1972, we are back on the precipice's edge right now, and the fact that Portia is in charge is only one way of buying time. If we are to avoid the predictable disasters which lurk round the corner, we need to commit ourselves to a different idea of Jamaica. We have to begin to face facts and embrace them.

Two major resources

What Jamaica needs to understand now is that the country, the society, the nation are broken and that we need to fix them. We need to turn away from the heavy metal developments, from the stealing of public goods, beaches, land, institutions and wealth. We need to invest at the base of our societies, in making real families possible and in making them work.

We need to send all our children to school and to make sure that they are not afflicted with asthma and emphysema provoked by burning plastic and other garbage. We need to understand that those who have much must be expected to give most; and above all, we need to understand that the national interest is our personal interest.

We need to understand that our major resources are our people and our land, and we need to put them both into productive, creative employment. Casual labour is not enough; 'independent contractors' and organised hustling or 'scuffling' cannot work. People must have security of environment in family and community, in work, in health, culture and governance.

We need to understand that it is not only unpatriotic but self-destructive in every sense, to demand more from a poor and almost destitute society so that we can salt away millions in unproductive bank accounts. If half our debt repayment - now 63 per cent of revenue - were spent in education and other social investment we would recoup our investment in a very short time.

We don't need foreign investors - we need only to convince ourselves of the truism that we can only get out of life and Jamaica, as much as we put into them. Our very lives depend on it. What, may I ask, is the point of being rich if we are then forced to live in gated, grilled air-conditioned prisons at half-a-million US$ a pop? Greed is unsustainable.

We can make Jamaica work again, but we need to work on it, in it and for it.

We need to invest our work, our wealth, our confidence and trust and our respect in our people. And we need to remember the famous question: What shall it profit anyone to gain the whole world but to lose his own soul?

Maxwell's House

Laughing Water and the Uglificators

I HAD A HAND IN IT

WHAT IS THE COCKPIT COUNTRY

THE BOUNDARIES OF IMPERTINENCE

THE BOUNDARIES OF NATIONAL PATRIMONY

DEVELOPMENT AND THE PRIME MINISTER

Government and Environment

Mining and the Cockpit Country

Pollution and Mining

A Mess of Pottage?

American Hysteria

The Next Bad Thing

The Dimming of the Earth

Forward the Titanic!

The Blue Swallowtail

From the Frying Pan into the Red Mud

A FATHER KILLS HIS SON

THE RESOURCE CURSE

THE PREDATOR'S PROGRESS

My Grandfather's Bones

RED MUD, RED EYES AND RED-HANDED

THE WIDOW'S MITE

TO THE UTTERMOST FARTHING?

INSULTING CHARLES DARWIN

Journalism and Other Strange Practices

JOURNALISM SPOKEN HERE

MORE ABOUT THE PRESS

Poor People's Politics

Ending tribalism

A little history

A Week as Long as the Titanic

JAMAICA: NO PROBLEM?

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The Land of Look Behind

Aluminium and Jamaica

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Trust the People Every Time

CARRYING CAPACITY

TEARING DOWN JAMAICA

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John Bolton in orbit

Subverting democracy

Five Years Later

GLOBALISING DESPERATION

ANOTHER GULAG

A Trap Door to Hell

Transcontinental frenzy

'Completely immoral'

The Duty of a Leader

Waiting for Portia

A Jamaica of the heart

Giving Genocide a Bad Name

Genocide in Haiti

Genocide in Palestine

The Donkey Carts of War

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The Human Factor

Israel's frustration is showing

'God' Buck Him Toe!

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No accountability for decades

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THE BOUNDARIES OF
NATIONAL PATRIMONY