December 16, 2005

World Media Watch

by Gloria R. Lalumia

BuzzFlash Note: WMW provides BuzzFlash readers foreign views and perspectives that are not usually available from the media here in the U.S. The presentation of these articles from these international publications is not an endorsement of their viewpoints.

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WORLD MEDIA WATCH FOR DECEMBER 16, 2005

1//Asia Times Online, Hong Kong--THE DEADLY SKIES OVER IRAQ (The American media continue to ignore the increasingly devastating air war being waged in Iraq against an ever more belligerent Iraqi resistance - and, as usual, Iraqi civilians continue to bear the largely unreported brunt of the bombing. … As a result, aside from reportage by one of the rare Western independent journalists left in Iraq or the many Arab journalists largely ignored in the US, the American air assault on Iraq remains devastatingly ill-covered by larger outlets here. This remains true, even as militarily, air power begins to move center-stage at a moment when large-scale withdrawals of American ground troops are clearly being considered by the Bush administration. I have worked as an independent reporter in Baghdad for over eight months during the US occupation of Iraq thus far and I can confirm that a day never passed in the capital city when the low rumblings of an Apache helicopter or the supersonic thundering roar of an F-16 fighter jet didn't cause me to look up for the source of the noise. … The political climate at home may force a decrease in the number of US troops in Iraq, but the compensatory upswing in air power meant to offset this will be inevitable and will inevitably lead to unexpected problems. Why? Because the Bush administration will still be committed to permanently hanging onto a crucial group of four or five mega-military bases (into which billions of construction and communications dollars have already been poured) along with a massive embassy, directing political and military "traffic" from the heart of Baghdad's Green Zone - and that means an unending occupation of Iraq, something that, air power or not, can only mean endless strife.)

2//The Daily Times, Pakistan--PAKISTAN OPPOSES ATTACK ON IRAN: MUSHARRAF (President Pervez Musharraf said on Thursday that Islamabad opposes any attack on Iran. “Acquisition of nuclear technology for peaceful purposes is the legitimate right of every country, and Pakistan’s nuclear programme is also based on peaceful purposes,” Musharraf said in a meeting with Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki at Army House. He said that Pakistan had extended complete cooperation to the international community on nuclear non-proliferation. “Islamabad wants to cement ties with Tehran in multidimensional areas, as both countries are striving for sustained peace in the region,” he said. He linked regional progress and development to the completion of the India-Pakistan-Iran (IPI) gas pipeline project and said that Pakistan wanted to widen the scope of defence, trade and other areas with Iran.)

3//The Daily Star, Lebanon--AFGHANISTAN’S INTERNAL DRUG PROBLEM RISING (… While much of the world's attention has focused on illegal narcotics being exported from the country, the spot-light has now been turned on Afghanistan's internal drug problem. According to a survey conducted by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime released in November, Afghanistan now has close to one million drug users, or 3.8 percent of the population. This is roughly on par with its neighbors: the figure is slightly higher than the percentage of drug users in Pakistan, but lower than in Iran, say experts in the area. Out of 920,000 users, 740,000 are men. The UN report also estimates that 60,000 children under 15 also use drugs. The substance of choice for the vast majority of these users is hashish, with approximately 520,000 people smoking or ingesting the drug. Another 150,000 use opium, while 50,000 use heroin. … It is the returnees who are introducing intravenous use, and it is on the rise, particularly among young people. Bashir noted that using needles also brings the risk of HIV/AIDS, a growing concern in Afghanistan. "We don't have modern equipment to test patients, so we don't know how many people in Balkh may be infected," he said.)

4//IRINNews.org (UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, US--SIERRA LEONE: BLUE HELMETS QUIT, BUT ‘PEACE ELUSIVE’ (The largest UN peacekeeping operation in its time is about to wind up but despite the broad successes of the mission, war battered Sierra Leone is still at the beginning of the long road to recovery. … During the 1991-2002 war gangs of drugged up fighters –- many of them children barely tall enough to lift their AK-47s -- wreaked a reign of terror on villagers, hacking off the hands, feet, lips and ears at will. The war claimed 20,000 lives, left thousands maimed and displaced half of the five million strong population, according to the government. The barbarity of the Sierra Leonean civil war shocked the world and finally the UN established a 17,500-strong peacekeeping operation with the first troops arriving in October 1999 to restore government control and disarm and demobilise fighters. Fulfilling those duties has not been without difficulties. In the early days of the mission as territories were being wrestled from rebel fighters, the UN suffered a major embarrassment. During a ten day period between end April and early May in 2000, more than 700 UN peacekeepers were abducted by flip-flop wearing rebels from the Revolutionary United Front. … Over the span of the five year mission, UNAMSIL has disarmed and demobilised over 72,000 combatants and collected and destroyed over 30,000 arms, explained head of mission, Mwakawago. UNAMSIL has also built a new police force. Currently 9,200 new officers have been trained and by February, the new force will match pre-war levels of 9,500 officers.)

5//The Jakarta Post, Indonesia--ASEAN AND CHINA FORM STRATEGIC PARTNERSHIP (A new era has dawned in East Asia. ASEAN and China have forged a Strategic Partnership for Peace and Prosperity. This partnership will have positive implications that go beyond the relationship between ASEAN and China. It will benefit the wider East Asian region and the world. The strategic partnership is a means to making an effective contribution to regional and global peace and prosperity. … The transformation of the economies of ASEAN and China may be one of the major developments in the 21st century. Both sides must make a special effort to prevent misperceptions and misunderstandings regarding their development by the global community.)

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1//Asia Times Online, Hong Kong Dec 16, 2005
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/GL16Ak02.html

THE DEADLY SKIES OVER IRAQ
By Dahr Jamail
(Dahr Jamail is an independent journalist from Anchorage, Alaska. He has spent eight months reporting from occupied Iraq, and recently has been giving presentations about Iraq around the US. He maintains a website at: dahrjamailiraq.com)

The American media continue to ignore the increasingly devastating air war being waged in Iraq against an ever more belligerent Iraqi resistance - and, as usual, Iraqi civilians continue to bear the largely unreported brunt of the bombing.

When the air war shows up at all in the US press, it is never as a campaign, but as scattered bare-bones reports of individual attacks on specific targets, almost invariably based on military announcements. A typical example was reported by Reuters on December 4: "Two US Air Force F-16 jets dropped laser-guided bombs which, according to a military spokesperson, killed two 'insurgents' after they attacked an army patrol near Balad, 37 miles west of Baghdad."

(SNIP)

Curiously enough, US Central Command Air Force (CENTAF) reports are more detailed than anything we normally can read in our papers. On December 6, for example, CENTAF admitted to 46 air missions over Iraq flown on the previous day - in order to provide "support to coalition troops, infrastructure protection, reconstruction activities and operations to deter and disrupt terrorist activities".

Albeit usually broadly (and vaguely) described, and seldom taking possible civilian casualties into account, these daily tabulations by the Air Force often flesh out bare-bones reports with a little extra detail on the nature of the air war. On that December 6, for instance, the report added that "Air Force F-16 Fighting Falcons, an MQ-1 Predator and Navy F/A-18 Hornets provided close-air support to coalition troops in contact with anti-Iraqi forces near Balad and Ramadi."

Not surprisingly, given their source, such reports glide over or under emphasize potentially damaging information like the fact that bombing runs of this sort are regularly conducted in heavily-inhabited areas of Iraq's cities and towns where the resistance may also be strongly embedded. Oblique statements like the following are the best you are likely to get from the military: "Coalition aircraft also supported Iraqi and coalition ground forces operations focused on creating a secure environment for upcoming December parliamentary elections."

As a result, aside from reportage by one of the rare Western independent journalists left in Iraq or the many Arab journalists largely ignored in the US, the American air assault on Iraq remains devastatingly ill-covered by larger outlets here. This remains true, even as militarily, air power begins to move center-stage at a moment when large-scale withdrawals of American ground troops are clearly being considered by the Bush administration.

I have worked as an independent reporter in Baghdad for over eight months during the US occupation of Iraq thus far and I can confirm that a day never passed in the capital city when the low rumblings of an Apache helicopter or the supersonic thundering roar of an F-16 fighter jet didn't cause me to look up for the source of the noise.

(SNIP)

But it has only been thanks to the New Yorker's Seymour Hersh, a journalist who has never even been to Iraq, that the important subject of the air campaign there has finally been brought to public awareness on a wider scale.

(SNIP)

It is important to note that, as in Vietnam, troop morale in Iraq now seems to be plummeting. According to the army's own figures, in a study conducted last summer with all units in Iraq, 56% of them reported either "low" or "very low" morale. Keep in mind that towards the end of the war in Vietnam, the army was in a state of ongoing revolt and incipient collapse. By the time direct US involvement ended with the signing of the Paris Peace Accords in 1973, the sort of mixed morale statistics seen in our military in Iraq last summer would have been an impossible dream.

Getting large numbers of troops out while intensifying the air war might seem then like a reasonable formula for solving certain of this administration's problems without abandoning its basic Iraq policies, but this will undoubtedly prove a perilous undertaking in its own right, as Hersh recently pointed out: A key element of the drawdown plans, not mentioned in the president's public statements, is that the departing American troops will be replaced by American airpower. The danger, military experts have told me, is that, while the number of American casualties would decrease as ground troops are withdrawn, the over-all level of violence and the number of Iraqi fatalities would increase unless there are stringent controls over who bombs what.

One can easily imagine the potential for disaster at a future moment when Shi'ite and Kurdish militia members in Iraqi army uniforms would be calling down air strikes on Sunni neighborhoods, settling old scores as civilian casualties went through the roof.

Current trends

But visions of a frightful future in Iraq should not be overshadowed by the devastation already caused by present levels of American air power loosed, in particular, on heavily populated urban areas of that country.

(SNIP)

But if current trends continue, the end of the US occupation in Iraq may more closely resemble the ending in Vietnam - a view (US Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Karen) Kwiatkowski agrees with. The political climate at home may force a decrease in the number of US troops in Iraq, but the compensatory upswing in air power meant to offset this will be inevitable and will inevitably lead to unexpected problems.

Why? Because the Bush administration will still be committed to permanently hanging onto a crucial group of four or five mega-military bases (into which billions of construction and communications dollars have already been poured) along with a massive embassy, directing political and military "traffic" from the heart of Baghdad's Green Zone - and that means an unending occupation of Iraq, something that, air power or not, can only mean endless strife.

2//The Daily Times, Pakistan Friday, December 16, 2005
http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2005...

PAKISTAN OPPOSES ATTACK ON IRAN: MUSHARRAF

ISLAMABAD: President Pervez Musharraf said on Thursday that Islamabad opposes any attack on Iran.

“Acquisition of nuclear technology for peaceful purposes is the legitimate right of every country, and Pakistan’s nuclear programme is also based on peaceful purposes,” Musharraf said in a meeting with Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki at Army House.

He said that Pakistan had extended complete cooperation to the international community on nuclear non-proliferation. “Islamabad wants to cement ties with Tehran in multidimensional areas, as both countries are striving for sustained peace in the region,” he said. He linked regional progress and development to the completion of the India-Pakistan-Iran (IPI) gas pipeline project and said that Pakistan wanted to widen the scope of defence, trade and other areas with Iran.

Musharraf said that work on the IPI gas pipeline project should be initiated. He praised the expansion of bilateral trade volume and stressed that Pakistan and Iran should strive for sustained peace in the region.

The Iranian foreign minister called his visit to Pakistan “successful”, adding that negotiations on the multibillion-dollar gas line project were in the final stages.

(MORE)

3//The Daily Star, Lebanon Friday, December 16, 2005
http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition...

AFGHANISTAN’S INTERNAL DRUG PROBLEM RISING

KABUL: After a long day of carpet weaving, Abdullah, 48, likes to relax with a nice cup of tea - and some opium. "I have been eating opium for as long as I can remember," said Abdullah, who lives in the northern province of Jowjan. "People say it is harmful, but it isn't true. My father and grandfather ate opium. Everyone in our village does."

While much of the world's attention has focused on illegal narcotics being exported from the country, the spot-light has now been turned on Afghanistan's internal drug problem.

According to a survey conducted by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime released in November, Afghanistan now has close to one million drug users, or 3.8 percent of the population. This is roughly on par with its neighbors: the figure is slightly higher than the percentage of drug users in Pakistan, but lower than in Iran, say experts in the area.

Out of 920,000 users, 740,000 are men. The UN report also estimates that 60,000 children under 15 also use drugs.

The substance of choice for the vast majority of these users is hashish, with approximately 520,000 people smoking or ingesting the drug. Another 150,000 use opium, while 50,000 use heroin.

Jehanzeb Khan, international project coordinator for UNODC, says many of Afghanistan's addicts were first introduced to drugs while living abroad as refugees. "I would say that 35 percent of our male addicts and 25 percent of our female addicts became addicted in Iran," he said.

Large numbers of Afghans fled the wars and conflicts of the past three decades and sought refuge in neighboring Iran and Pakistan. Now they are flooding home and, according to Jehanzeb, bringing their drug habits with them.

(SNIP)

But it would be difficult to blame the bulk of the drug problem on returning refugees, according to other medical professionals. Opium use in particular is traditional in Afghanistan, with the number of drug users disproportionately high in northern provinces such as Balkh, Jowjan and Kunduz.

According to Dr. Mohammad Bashir, head of the drug treatment center in Mazar-e-Sharif, some addicts quite literally get started at their mothers' knee.

"Eating opium is a tradition in the north, particularly the districts around the river Amu Darya," he said. "Women engaged in the carpet-weaving trade give their children opium to keep them quiet. "

Parents also use opium as a treatment for childhood coughs and colds.

(SNIP)

Local people traditionally eat opium, he said. It is the returnees who are introducing intravenous use, and it is on the rise, particularly among young people.

Bashir noted that using needles also brings the risk of HIV/AIDS, a growing concern in Afghanistan.

"We don't have modern equipment to test patients, so we don't know how many people in Balkh may be infected," he said.

(SNIP)

Dr. Abdullah Fahim, a spokesman for the Public Health Ministry, said his ministry will work with foreign organizations to establish hospitals for addicts in those provinces where drug use is highest. At present there are only two hospitals that provide such treatment, one in Kabul and one in Herat. But according to Fahim, the ministry intends to establish another 150-bed hospital in Kabul, and six 50-bed hospitals in other high-risk provinces.

The ministry will also launch a campaign to discourage drug use. But first, they'll need to convince some people that drug use is a problem.

4//IRINNews.org (UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, US Thursday 15 December 2005
http://www.irinnews.org/report.asp?ReportID=50685&SelectRegion...

SIERRA LEONE: BLUE HELMETS QUIT, BUT ‘PEACE ELUSIVE’

[This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations]

GODERICH, 14 Dec 2005 (IRIN) - The largest UN peacekeeping operation in its time is about to wind up but despite the broad successes of the mission, war battered Sierra Leone is still at the beginning of the long road to recovery.

“If you imagine that UNAMSIL was spread over the country like a beautiful carpet, well now the time has come to roll that carpet back, and what you might find underneath may not be very good,” said Daudi Ngelautwa Mwakawago, head of the United Nations Mission in Sierra Leone, UNAMSIL.

In the village of Goderich, on the outskirts of the capital Freetown, blue helmets are packing up for UNAMSIL’s end of December departure after successfully restoring peace to a country wracked by a decade of the most brutal civil warfare in West Africa.

(SNIP)

During the 1991-2002 war gangs of drugged up fighters –- many of them children barely tall enough to lift their AK-47s -- wreaked a reign of terror on villagers, hacking off the hands, feet, lips and ears at will. The war claimed 20,000 lives, left thousands maimed and displaced half of the five million strong population, according to the government.

The barbarity of the Sierra Leonean civil war shocked the world and finally the UN established a 17,500-strong peacekeeping operation with the first troops arriving in October 1999 to restore government control and disarm and demobilise fighters.

Fulfilling those duties has not been without difficulties. In the early days of the mission as territories were being wrestled from rebel fighters, the UN suffered a major embarrassment. During a ten day period between end April and early May in 2000, more than 700 UN peacekeepers were abducted by flip-flop wearing rebels from the Revolutionary United Front (RUF).

And in August 2000, 11 British troops were taken hostage by militia group the West Side Boys, prompting a sweeping rescue operation that all but wiped out the West Side Boys fighters.

(SNIP)

Over the span of the five year mission, UNAMSIL has disarmed and demobilised over 72,000 combatants and collected and destroyed over 30,000 arms, explained head of mission, Mwakawago.

UNAMSIL has also built a new police force. Currently 9,200 new officers have been trained and by February, the new force will match pre-war levels of 9,500 officers.

“We were supposed to help the government extend its authority throughout the country,” Mwakawago told IRIN in his Mammy Yoko office overlooking the sea. “That has been achieved. There is not one pocket of territory you can say is a no-go area, the government is in total control over its territory.”

(SNIP)

The international force is leaving behind schools, hospitals, clinics, laboratories and newly built bridges which are being handed over to the peacetime government in a series of small ceremonies.

UNAMSIL has also made strides in restoring the country’s diamond mines to government control.

The control and sale of the valuable and easily mined alluvial gems or “blood diamonds” of eastern Sierra Leone were the driving force of the civil war.

Through UNAMSIL’s efforts, official government earnings from diamonds increased have from US $10 m in 2000, to US $130 m in 2004 and could top US $200 m in 2005, according to Mwakawago.

(SNIP)

Post UNAMSIL, the support continues

UNAMSIL will be followed by a 300-strong UN Integrated Office in Sierra Leone (UNIOSIL), provided for under a Security Council resolution earlier this year.

UNIOSIL, still has much to do in promoting a culture of security and peace, guiding the nation to free and fair elections in 2007 and providing technical support to a country that ranks second from bottom in the UN’s human development index.

“You have the peace, but it is elusive. People can go to sleep and wake up unmolested, but they do not know where their next meal will come from, and what kind of meal they will get,” Mwakawango said.

Some 75 percent of Sierra Leoneans live on less than 2 dollars a day, and one in four of the population is food poor, meaning they cannot afford a basic diet, according to the World Bank.

Two thirds of the population is illiterate and unemployment hovers at seventy percent, with 2 million jobless young people. These include a large pool of ex-combatants who could take up arms again.

High unemployment rates and low expectations of a better future are a major cause of instability in West Africa, according to a December report by the UN’s Office for West Africa (UNOWA).

5//The Jakarta Post, Indonesia December 16, 2005
http://www.thejakartapost.com/yesterdaydetail.asp?fileid=20051215.B08

ASEAN AND CHINA FORM STRATEGIC PARTNERSHIP
Jusuf Wanandi, Jakarta
(The writer is vice chairman of the Board of Trustees and a senior fellow at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), Jakarta.)

A new era has dawned in East Asia. ASEAN and China have forged a Strategic Partnership for Peace and Prosperity. This partnership will have positive implications that go beyond the relationship between ASEAN and China. It will benefit the wider East Asian region and the world. The strategic partnership is a means to making an effective contribution to regional and global peace and prosperity.

ASEAN and China will play an increasingly important role in global affairs. They also have a growing stake in global developments. They are open economies and are rapidly integrating into the global economy. They want to cooperate with each other so that their full integration into the global economy can proceed smoothly -- for each of them and without causing major dislocations within the global economy.

The economies of ASEAN, and particularly China, because of its size, will assume a more prominent place in the global economy within the next two decades. The ASEAN countries will continuously reform, restructure and integrate their economies toward the creation of a single market and production base in 2020.

China, on its part, is making the same effort, and is doing that at a remarkably rapid pace. ASEAN and China can benefit from each other's experiments and experiences. The Framework Agreement for ASEAN-China Closer Economic Relations provides a forum for such productive and open exchanges. They should be undertaken on a regular basis with the involvement of experts from academia, business and the policy community -- from both sides as well as from the wider region.

The transformation of the economies of ASEAN and China may be one of the major developments in the 21st century. Both sides must make a special effort to prevent misperceptions and misunderstandings regarding their development by the global community.

(SNIP)

To be effective, ASEAN and China have to develop and nurture good relations with other powers in the region, in particular Japan, the United States and India. In this context, ASEAN is in a favorable position, because it has excellent economic and political relations with other regional countries, Japan, Korea, India, Australia and New Zealand, as well as the United States and the European Union.

ASEAN has pursued regional cooperation and integration in Southeast Asia and, at the same time, deepened its relations with all its partners. This reflects its policy of open regionalism, which should also characterize the ASEAN-China strategic partnership. In building an ASEAN Community, ASEAN governments have agreed to intensify the engagement of civil society in regional community building.

(SNIP)

Economic, political and security issues have become intertwined. Many new cross-border security issues directly affect the people. Although ASEAN and China need to give attention to traditional security issues, such as on the Korean Peninsula, it is the new security issues that require their priority attention. These include trans-border environmental problems, cross-border health issues, drug and people trafficking, smuggling and piracy.

(SNIP)

ASEAN and China are also faced with the common challenge of political development so as to be able to sustain their longer-term economic and national developments. Their open economies need to be accompanied by a gradual opening up of political systems. Some ASEAN countries have begun this process and can share their experience with other ASEAN countries and China.

Recent experience in the region has shown that nations that are ill-prepared to undergo political transformation have experienced great and costly disruptions. Open exchanges on these challenges can be facilitated by the second-track. Such exchanges can make important contributions to political development in the two parties because of the mutual trust and mutual understanding that have developed between them.

ASEAN and China must not forgo this historic moment in their relationship. They have produced a variety of initiatives that can further strengthen their mutual trust and mutual understanding. However, they must rightly focus on the strategic initiatives of working together to deepen their relations and at the same time be actively engaged to promote cooperation, peace and prosperity in the wider region.

The vehicles for doing so are there. They must be willing to make the investment to develop mechanisms to realize the East Asian regional objectives, strengthening of trans-Pacific relations through APEC, and productive interactions with other regions in the world through ASEM and FEALAC.