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Madcat Leo



Last Updated: 11/17/2009

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City: Catom County
State: Rio de Janeiro
Country: BR
Signup Date: 11/15/2005

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Friday, July 10, 2009 

Current mood:  frustrated
Category: News and Politics

Brazil's scandal-plagued Senate

House of horrors

Jul 9th 2009 | SÃO PAULO
From The Economist print edition

What Britain’s MPs might learn from Brazilian Senators


THE president of Brazil’s Senate sits in a fine blue leather chair designed by Oscar Niemeyer, a celebrated Brazilian architect. Comfortable it may be, but its occupants have also found it to be an insecure perch. Three senate presidents have been suspended or have resigned because of scandals in the past eight years. Now a fourth, José Sarney, a former president of Brazil and part-time novelist, is teetering.
The Senate has just 81 members but somehow they require almost 10,000 staff to take care of them. Many of these are appointed as favours to senators’ friends or political supporters. One former staffer says that his fellow-employees used to say that the senate was like a mother to them. Others liken it to a country club. The benefits of membership include free health insurance for life for all senators and their families, generous pension arrangements and housing allowances. This much was already familiar to Brazilians and, perhaps, not so different from the goings on in many other legislatures around the world.
But the past few months have brought new revelations. The police are investigating some 660 “secret acts” passed since 1995 which have awarded jobs and pay rises to members of staff. Senators have given free air tickets to relatives and claimed housing allowances for houses they did not live in. Senate staff were paid overtime even when the chamber was in recess. The head of the senate administration, Agaciel Maia, was revealed to own a house worth 5m reais ($2.5m) that was registered in his brother’s name and thus not declared to the tax authorities.
Lots of senators, more or less across the political spectrum, are at fault. When the leader of the opposition Party of Brazilian Social Democracy went on a jaunt to Paris, for example, the Senate paid his hotel bill. (He says this was a “loan”.) It therefore might seem unfair that Mr Sarney is under pressure to resign.
Yet he cannot plead ignorance of the Senate’s workings. This is his third spell as its president. During a previous stint in the blue chair he appointed Mr Maia to his lucrative position. A grandchild of Mr Sarney’s received business from the Senate (although he was not its president at the time). Mr Sarney also omitted from his declaration of assets to the federal electoral tribunal a big house he owns in Brasília.
Mr Sarney, who has spent 50 years in public life, is a survivor. He will probably keep his post. He remains a power in the Party of the Brazilian Democratic Movement (PMDB), a catch-all outfit that is an important part of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s governing coalition. Lula wants Mr Sarney to swing the weight of the PMDB, and its patronage machine, behind Dilma Rousseff, the probable candidate of the ruling Workers’ Party in the presidential election next year.
Lula has said that Mr Sarney deserves more respect, and has blamed the press for whipping up scandal. But at a time when the economy is only just emerging from recession, the saga of the “secret acts” has reminded Brazilians that their politicians never impose austerity on themselves. It may also have reminded them of the flaws of some of Lula’s allies, and his willingness to shut his eyes to scandal when it suits him.
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Saturday, April 11, 2009 

Current mood:  cold
Category: News and Politics


Why do firms lobby? A 22,000 percent return.




By Laurent Belsi


The next time an industry asks Congress for a bailout, remember this number:
22,000 percent.
That’s the return that that a new study says US corporations made
off their lobbying efforts in 2003 and 2004 after convincing lawmakers
to let them bring home their overseas earnings at a low tax rate. The
benefits of the American Jobs Creation Act and related provisions were
stunning – for the corporations.
Spend $1, make $220
For every $1 they spent on lobbying for the tax break, corporations
reaped a $220 benefit on their US income taxes, according to three
University of Kansas professors. Some 840 firms – including several of
today’s bailout babies, including Citigroup, JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley,
and Merrill Lynch – repatriated more than $312 billion at a maximum tax
rate of 5.25 percent.
Companies that spent more than $1 million on tax lobbying did even
better: a 24,300 percent return, the researchers found. For example: In
its disclosure statements, drugmaker Eli Lilly & Co. acknowledged
spending $8.52 million in 2003 and 2004 to lobby for the tax break. It
reaped more than $2 billion in return.
“It’s a sign when a corporation’s most profitable enterprise is
lobbying,” said Stephen Mazza, a law professor at the University of
Kansas and coauthor of the study with colleagues Raquel Meyer Alexander
and Susan Scholz.
That return sounds huge, but actually nobody knows if it’s the norm
or not because it’s usually impossible to estimate the direct benefit
of lobbying, Mr. Mazza said. The American Jobs Creation Act was an
exception. If anything, the estimated return is conservative, he added,
because it included all the tax-related lobbying corporations did
during that period, not just what they spent on the 2004 act.
The consequences
Of course, the US reaped some benefits, too, from all that money
that otherwise would have been taxed somewhere else. But here’s the rub.
That onetime benefit in 2004 had a perverse effect, Mr. Mazza said.
The corporations that had done the right thing and had their earnings
taxed at normal US rates suddenly saw other companies rewarded for
their more aggressive tax-saving strategies. So what did those
corporations do?
They pushed more of their earnings offshore, according to recent
research, Mazza said. And they lobbied – unsuccessfully – for another
repatriation tax break in this year’s stimulus package.
The federal government has rightfully intervened in the private
sector to avert a financial collapse and devastating deflation. That
said, the American Jobs Creation Act is a cautionary tale of what can
go wrong when Washington intervenes.csmonitor.com/


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Friday, August 08, 2008 

Category: News and Politics
Devils' Advocates

Despots and the lobbyists who love them.

James Kirchick,  The New Republic  Published: Wednesday, August 13, 2008


Joe Szlavik remembers the moment when he began to suspect that his work on behalf of the Kingdom of Swaziland was an enormous waste of time. It was 2006, and Szlavik--a lobbyist who had represented foreign governments ranging from Burundi to Gabon to Uganda, as well as the late Benazir Bhutto of Pakistan--was helping Swaziland, a tiny, landlocked monarchy sandwiched between South Africa and Mozambique, navigate the tricky waters of Washington politics. Swaziland's King Mswati III ("a great guy, one-on-one," says Szlavik, but "real green behind the ears") and his foreign minister ("crusty, old guard, and incompetent") were in town, and the lobbyist met them at the stately Willard InterContinental Hotel. Szlavik, whose firm was pulling in $20,000 per month from its Swaziland account, had some difficult news to deliver about a certain Swazi custom. "You have this reed dance, with these virgins," he explained to me recently. Szlavik's message to his client was simple. "Listen to me," he implored the king. "You got to stop this."

The reed dance, or "umhlanga" in the Swati language, is probably Swaziland's best-known tradition. Every August or September, thousands of girls congregate at Ludzidzini, the King's royal residence, for an eight-day festival of music, dancing, and singing, officially in honor of the king's mother. On the seventh day, the young women--all topless--don skirts made of freshly cut reeds and perform personally for the king, who may decide to choose one of them as a bride. The reed dance had recently been a source of domestic political embarrassment for Mswati. In 2001, troubled by his country's high HIV rate (at least one-third of the population is believed to be infected), Mswati had issued a decree that no girl below the age of 18 would be allowed to have sex for five years. Then, in 2004, at the annual reed dance, Mswati chose a twelfth wife. The problem: She was 16 (and a former Miss Teen Swaziland finalist to boot), meaning that the king was now technically in violation of his own law.

Soon enough, the sex ban was lifted. The reed dance, however, continued--and, back in Washington, it was causing Szlavik no end of problems. Earlier, he had brought the king and Swazi ambassador to meet with Chris Smith, a socially conservative Republican representative from New Jersey and then chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Africa. Smith "understood there was a traditional part to the dance but in light of the gravity of the HIV situation [thought] maybe they could put tradition aside," Szlavik recalls.

Such arguments were lost on King Mswati. "Look Joe, I understand the whole thing with the West, but we look at breasts like you look at feet," the monarch told him. It wasn't an unreasonable point. In some rural African cultures, women refraining from wearing tops is about as common as U.S. postal workers wearing shorts in the summer. But try explaining that to a conservative Republican congressman.

"I like breasts personally," Szlavik, a fast-talking cheerful man of about 40, told the king. "But, you know, there's a sexual undertone to it clearly."

In fact, Szlavik had good reason to think the Swazis might take his advice on reforming the reed dance. Since he began working for the Swazi government the year before, he had helped convince them to sign Article 98 of the Rome Statute--a clause that ensures legal immunity for U.S. government officials (including soldiers) serving abroad--and persuaded the king, Africa's last absolute monarch, to suspend a 1973 decree issued by his father banning political parties. Reforming the reed dance, however, was a step too far.

 

It's easy to dismiss someone like Szlavik as a comic figure. After all, lobbying for the King of Swaziland doesn't sound like the weightiest job in Washington. But, comic or not, lobbying for dictatorships actually has a long history--and, apparently, a thriving present as well. That, at least, is the conclusion you'd have to reach from surveying the members of the McCain campaign, which, in recent months, has seemed to be saturated with men giving advice to dubious foreign leaders. In May, Doug Goodyear quit his position as Republican National Convention chair after Newsweek revealed that his DCI Group had lobbied on behalf of the Burmese military junta for $348,000 in 2002. That same month, Thomas Loeffler, a national co-chairman of the McCain campaign, resigned after The New York Sun reported that he was a registered lobbyist for Saudi Arabia. McCain's original choice for the convention job, Paul Manafort, also got his hands dirty working for brutal foreign clients, particularly the Philippines' Ferdinand Marcos and Vladimir Putin ally Viktor Yanukovich of Ukraine. His firm, Davis Manafort, which he co-directed with McCain campaign manager Rick Davis, had, at various times, represented Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire and Angolan rebel leader Jonas Savimbi, two men infamous for their sadism.

Under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) of 1938, anyone who "acts at the order, request, or under the direction or control of a foreign principal" must register with the Justice Department. Congress passed FARA in response to Nazi Germany's attempts, through hired hands, to propagandize in the United States. If shilling for odious foreign governments shouldn't be illegal, lawmakers figured, it could at least be a matter of public record. In addition to those flacking for foreign governments, individuals representing foreign political parties, leaders, and state-owned entities (like tourism boards or nationalized industries) must also register.

Some of the countries that manage to find representation in Washington make Swaziland look like a liberal paradise. Mississippi governor Haley Barbour's old lobbying firm, Barbour Griffith & Rogers, has represented Equatorial Guinea, a totalitarian state in West Africa. Former Congressional Black Caucus chairman Mervyn Dymally briefly represented Mauritania, a country where slavery is still practiced. And topping them all for sheer gall was William Keyes, a former Reagan White House staffer, who lobbied for apartheid South Africa in the 1980s. Keyes, no relation to Alan, is black.

What could possibly drive lobbyists to represent such awful governments? The obvious answer is that the money is sometimes quite good. In March, for instance, ex-Louisiana Republican Representative Bob Livingston's firm signed a contract with Muammar Qaddafi's Libya worth $2.4 million. But that can't be the only explanation, as tin-pot dictatorships are notoriously fickle when it comes to paying up. "They're very unreliable clients," says George Denison, a former Ford administration staffer who has lobbied for various foreign governments, some of them pretty low on Freedom House's annual ranking of worldwide liberty. "Frequently, they pay you once, and that's the last time." In Szlavik's case, the reed dance may have been a huge headache, but so was the country's delinquency in payment. "They were late; they didn't pay their bills on time," he complains.

So, if it isn't money that motivates these lobbyists, what is it? True, lobbying for dictators sounds like a caricature of the lobbying profession as a whole--people with no morals shilling for the world's least savory people. But it isn't that simple. In fact, there may be a darker psychological explanation for why Americans would lobby for such awful governments.

 

Consider the most infamous of Washington's dictator lobbyists, the late Edward von Kloberg III. A character out of a Washington novel, the flamboyantly gay Kloberg represented men too despicable for most of the big-time lobbying firms--Saddam Hussein and Nicolae Ceauescu, among others. Kloberg threw lavish parties, wore a black opera cape, and ferried himself around Washington in a limousine. In 1992, Spy magazine launched a sting operation in which a writer disguised as a neo-Nazi leader of a group advocating the German annexation of Poland asked Kloberg to represent him for $1 million. Kloberg accepted. "Shame is for sissies," he would often say.

Kloberg was certainly well compensated for his efforts--$10,000 per month from the Burmese, $15,000 per month from Gambia, and so on--and he needed the money to sustain his outrageous style of living. (Even with his substantial income, "I heard Kloberg was always going bankrupt," says Denison.) Yet he was clearly driven by something more than money. Partly, it was an appetite for drama--of which Third World politics contains no shortage, and of which Kloberg could not get enough, even in death. "I am going to drink a pint of brandy tonight and go to the twelfth floor of my building and jump to my death," he told a friend in early 2005. On May 1 of that year, he more or less delivered on his promise-- committing suicide by jumping off the top of the same castle in Rome from which Tosca, the namesake of a Puccini opera, had leapt to her demise.

But Kloberg's love of theatrics was only part of the story. He seems to have been living out a fantasy that Westerners have indulged since colonial times: the possibility that, in a faraway land, a man who is a mere commoner in the West might get to play at being royalty--at exercising a level of power and influence he would never even get close to at home. Perhaps that is why Kloberg, like many of the dictators he represented, adorned himself in phony medals. Or why he added "von" to his last name, at the suggestion of former Washington Times editor Arnaud de Borchgrave, and printed up business cards with the title "Baron." Or why he boasted of the influence he exercised over the regimes he advised: He liked to note that he convinced a Saddam Hussein-era Iraqi ambassador to the United States to meet with Jews for the first time in his life and that he attached a condition to a trade deal he won for Ceauescu stipulating that the Romanian leader permit the printing of Bibles. "We attempt to balance and even change the situation," he said, "by offering realistic advice to our clients and facts that are often ignored by the press." In other words, Kloberg wasn't always doing the bidding of dictators; sometimes, they did his.

You can see similar instincts at work in far more staid individuals. Take Hank Cohen, assistant secretary of state for African affairs in the first Bush administration, who, for two years beginning in September 2000, represented Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe as a lobbyist. Cohen's relationship with Mugabe stretched back to January 1991, when, on the eve of the first Gulf war, Secretary of State James Baker dispatched him to Harare to convince the Zimbabwean government to back a Security Council resolution authorizing the use of force. (At the time, Zimbabwe held one of Africa's three rotating seats on the Council.) Cohen was apprehensive about his assignment, given that Mugabe was deeply suspicious of the West. Going into his face-to-face meeting with Mugabe, Cohen recalls, "I was expecting a tirade." Instead, the Zimbabwean dictator said, "Tell Secretary Baker that I'm with you 100 percent. We don't want big countries swallowing up small countries."

And that wasn't the only act of cooperation that endeared Mugabe to Cohen. In retaliation for the Gulf war, the Iraqi government planned a series of terrorist attacks against U.S. targets around the world. Not long after Cohen secured Zimbabwe's vote on the Security Council, Iraqi agents traveled to Harare with high-powered artillery and booked a room in the Sheraton Hotel overlooking the U.S. Embassy. Zimbabwean intelligence officials, however, got a tip about the suspicious Middle Eastern visitors and apprehended them. The State Department requested that Zimbabwe turn the men over to the CIA, which promptly flew them to a base in Cyprus for interrogation. "After a guy does something like that," Cohen told me, "how can you be angry at them?"

No wonder Cohen was convinced that Mugabe could be controlled. When he took the account in 2000, Cohen, who frequently works with Denison on lobbying projects (including the ill-fated Zimbabwe account), hoped to convince the Zimbabwean government to see the error of its ways, he tells me. "Our theory on that was to try to get them to do the right thing," Denison recalls. Within two years, however, the pair had given up. Mugabe was bent on confiscating farms owned by whites, and no one was going to convince him he was wrong. "It quickly became clear that his intentions were not honorable," Cohen says.

Mugabe isn't the only shady character Cohen has represented in Washington. In April 1999, his firm filed to represent Charles Taylor of Liberia, who now sits before an International Criminal Court tribunal on war crimes charges regarding his involvement in the Sierra Leone civil war, a conflict infamous for the thousands of people whose limbs were amputated on Taylor's orders. "Do this, do that, clean up your act"--that is how Denison describes his and Cohen's relationship with Taylor. "We tried to convince him not to fool around with the rebellion in Sierra Leone," Denison says, adding, "But he's just a big liar."

Cohen and Denison, it seems, believed they had more power over their clients than they actually did. "At the end of the day, the client does what the client wants to do," one lobbyist told me. "They don't pay us to take our advice. They pay us to listen to it." But the prospect of influence, even if it is only imagined, is undeniably part of the allure of lobbying for small-time despots. Washington lobbyists love to think of themselves as power brokers. And what better fulfills the fantasy of power than telling rulers with absolute power how to run their country? Call it colonialism via K Street.

 

There is a handful of dictatorships that nobody represents. Since Kloberg's arrangement with the government of Hafez Assad ended in 1994, no one has represented Syria. And no one has ever registered to represent North Korea (though this isn't for lack of trying; according to his New York Times obituary, Kloberg courted Kim Jong Il, but to no avail).

As tempting as it may be to work on behalf of dictatorships, some Washington lobbyists can't stomach the moral dilemma. One former White House staffer, now working as a freelance consultant, told me that he was recently asked through an intermediary if he would advise the government of Yemen. He had one question: "Where are they cooperating on the war on terror?" He asked a former colleague in the Bush administration who "was less than confident that the Yemenites were completely good actors," which led him to reject the offer. The lobbyist who complained that dictators never listen says that it isn't always lofty moral concerns that prevent his peers from representing dictatorships, but the inherently futile nature of the task. "I can't represent these people because they're so bad that going out there and putting lipstick on a pig isn't going to work," he says.

And as for those who do give it a try? More often than not, they seem to end up disappointed. That's what happened to Szlavik. Having failed to negotiate reforms to the reed dance, he nevertheless soldiered on with the Swaziland account. In late 2007, he secured the (literally) royal treatment for King Mswati and his entourage at a Kennedy Center performance by Roberta Flack. The center provided the trustees box and arranged an introduction from its executive director, all for the king's pleasure. The U.S. government provided Secret Service protection. On the evening of the performance, however, the king was a no-show. "The foreign minister sabotaged it. ... I'm not the brightest bulb on the block, but I'm not going to sit around doing this shit anymore," Szlavik remembers thinking. Rick Sincere, Szlavik's partner, says that "what finally caused us to break the relationship [with the Swazis] was that they weren't paying attention to what we were doing for them. We were giving them advice and they wouldn't follow it. They pay us for our expertise and then they ignore it." As Roberta Flack might put it, where is the love?

James Kirchick is an assistant editor of The New Republic.

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Monday, May 19, 2008 

Category: News and Politics 
1. Brazil's environment minister quits 
By Jonathan Wheatley in São Paulo

Published: May 14 2008

Brazil's environment minister has resigned after becoming increasingly isolated within the government.

Marina Silva, who rose from poverty in the Amazon state of Acre to become a global figurehead for environmental activists, resigned late on Tuesday in a manner typical of her way of operating: she wrote to President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and immediately announced her decision to the media, leaving no room for possible negotiation.

The final straw for Ms Silva appears to have been the appointment of Roberto Mangabeira Unger, the minister for strategic affairs, to take charge of a new plan for sustainable development in the Amazon.

But during five years in the job she found herself in growing conflict with ministers pressing for the approval of infrastructure projects, many of which have been held up by the long process of obtaining environmental licences.

The most visible such project concerns the River Madeira in the Amazon, where two hydroelectric generating plants are to be built against fierce resistance from indigenous people and environmental groups. Mr Lula da Silva irritated Ms Silva by commenting that Brazil's economic development was being held up "for the sake of a few fish".

Many environmentalists were dismayed by Ms Silva's departure from government, which came days after a landowner in the Amazon had a conviction for ordering the killing of a US missionary nun overturned.

Ms Silva described the ruling in the case of Dorothy Stang, apparently murdered in 2005 for her activism on behalf of landless family farmers, as "lamentable".

In a statement, Greenpeace, the international environmental group, said Ms Silva had "taken the credibility of Lula's government with her". It said: "With her exit, a faction of the government which is pressing for economic development at any cost . . . has won a major victory against those who seek to reconcile development with sustainability."

Others will be less alarmed. Ms Silva was criticised by many for seeing conservation as a "zero-sum game" and for her opposition to initiatives attempting to reconcile the interests of ranchers and farmers with conservation.

No replacement had been announced on Wednesday.

2 . Environmental cloud over Silva's exit seen to clear
By Jonathan Wheatley in São Paulo

Published: May 18 2008

Brazil will get a new environment minister this week amid a storm of controversy over the departure of his predecessor.

Marina Silva, who held the job for five years, stepped down last week after becoming increasingly isolated within government. Her resignation caused dismay among environmental activists around the globe.

It is easy to see why. Ms Silva has a powerful personality and a straight-talking determination that helped her overcome poverty, disease and illiteracy in her childhood and adolescence in the Amazon state of Acre. In rising to the ministry and, in effect, the guardianship of more than half of the world's surviving tropical rainforest, she showed a readiness to tackle the loggers and farmers who have cleared 1m sq km of land in the Amazon in recent decades.

Her departure has been seen as clearing the way for this destruction to continue unchecked. But Ms Silva's going may not precipitate the disaster many have predicted. She was remarkably unsuccessful in her job, losing one battle after another to the "developmentalists" in President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva's government and, most recently, antagonising farmers and ranchers, many of whom had begun to adopt more responsible practices.

"For the environmental movement, she was the best minister we've ever had, no doubt about it," says Paulo Moutinho, head of Ipam, an Amazon research institute in Brasília. He counts among her big achievements the formulation of a forest management programme and the fact that 11 different ministries now share responsibility for the environment.

"She changed the government's way of thinking," he says. "Five years ago it hated even talking about deforestation." Now Brazil is leading moves to get international funding to pay for environmental services provided by forest preservation.

But in terms of battles fought and lost – over genetically modified crops, Brazil's third nuclear reactor and many others – Ms Silva was a failure. Most damaging, perhaps, will be the antagonism she has sparked over what appears to be a worsening pace of deforestation on the southern rim of the Amazon, after three years of substantial improvement. Ms Silva's punitive measures especially irritated Blairo Maggi, governor of Mato Grosso state, where most of the worst-affected counties are located. Mr Maggi is one of the world's biggest producers of soya and in recent years has gone from villain almost to hero of the environmental movement for his leadership of a soya moratorium, under which traders have stopped buying the crop from recently deforested land.

Ms Silva opposed moves to help farmers and ranchers conform with the law, insisting they should be punished. Yet many producers say they are forced into criminality by legal inconsistencies and that her tough line will undermine initiatives encouraging them to replant sensitive areas. Ms Silva's successor is Carlos Minc, formerly environment secretary in the state of Rio de Janeiro, where he earned a reputation for cutting red tape holding up environmental licences for infrastructure projects. He has promised less bureaucracy but greater rigour in the licensing process and has also pledged to continue Ms Silva's policies unchanged. His biggest challenge will be to deliver results as successfully as Ms Silva raised awareness of environmental issues.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008

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By Ivo Perelman
Release date: 2002-09-18
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Thursday, May 01, 2008 

Category: Life
I've been writing to my great friend Eric from Paris and we found out that we share the same interest in Nouvelle Vague movies. 
Then he sent me this fantastic text about something that became reality in our country.
 
ALPHAVILLE EXISTS IN BRASIL
ALPHAVILLE EXISTS
In these dystopian times, Jean-Luc Godard's remarkable work is more relevant than ever
By Chris Darke
Click Here to view PDF version of the article PDF format
'Jeremiah has never had much success in pretending he doesn't thoroughly enjoy his job.'
- Kingsley Amis, New Maps of Hell

Seven and a half miles from the heart of São Paulo there is a gated community which houses 30,000 of the city's richest and most security conscious residents, many of whom travel by helicopter to work among the 17 million other inhabitants of the world's third largest city. According to the Washington Post, 'at night, on "TV Alphaville", residents can view their maids going home for the evening, when all exiting employees are patted down and searched in front of a live video feed.' In his account of 'a walled city where the privileged live behind electrified fences patrolled by a private army of 1,100', the Post's correspondent failed to discover which keen ironist had named the development after the film by Jean-Luc Godard. Nor, I suppose, would it have been much appreciated had the reporter, as he flew low over the teeming favelas, the prisons and choked highways, casually asked his host, a CEO and Alphaville resident, 'You do realise you're living in a movie, don't you?'

Neon, night signage in the non-place of Alphaville
Neon, night signage in the non-place of Alphaville

Developed by the Alphaville Urbanismo Corporation in the 1970s, Alphaville São Paolo 'resembles its fictional namesake in elaborate and all-encompassing surveillance techniques' writes an American professor of urban studies, 'including high walls, hidden cameras and alarm systems … The Alphaville gym specializes in selfdefence and is called CIA.' The facts about the development get better, or still worse, depending on whether one prefers dystopia to remain firmly in the realms of fiction or to come fully fledged to life:

"To advertise Alphaville, the company sponsored some episodes of a popular prime-time Brazilian soap opera whose leading male character is an architect. The architect and his mistress visit Alphaville where, according to Brazil's Gazeta Mercantil, the characters exalt the safety, freedom and planning of the place, comparing it to the neighbourhoods shown in US films." -

And so … Godard's film about a city of the future, shot on location in the Paris of the mid-1960s, has endowed not just one but thirty gated communities in Brazil with its name. And reality, having provided fiction with the raw material for its most dystopian scenarios, returns the compliment by materialising them. The back-and-forth between image and reality is dizzying: from CCTV to soap opera, from European art cinema to aspirational Hollywood and back again. Where does the utopian projection end and dystopian reality begin? We might call it, with a certain queasiness, the 'Alphaville effect'. But surely this is only an accident of naming, a sick joke? Are the 'Alphas' paying to inhabit their top-security luxury lock-up only so-called compared to the favela-dwelling 'Epsilons'? How long before Alphaville becomes a suburb of Los Angeles, a satellite of Mumbai? As the oracular tones of the supercomputer Alpha 60 remind us at the beginning of Godard's film, there are indeed times when 'reality becomes too complex for oral transmission. But legend gives it a form by which it pervades the whole world.'

Dystopia Discovered & Described The first question to be asked about Alphaville's dystopia is, how seriously should we take it? Wasn't Godard's vision of technological servitude, a talking computer-god and a surveillance-ridden city-state already a little derivative, if not old-hat, back in the sixties? And isn't the dystopian element in the film just that, an element, one among many of which the master-collagist avails himself? The answers I propose to these questions are, in reverse order: 'yes', 'yes' and 'very seriously'. Before considering Godard's depiction of dystopia, it's worth recalling how the word has come down to us. As an invented word for an imaginary place, 'dystopia' designates the worst of all possible worlds but if we consider how familiar the adjective 'dystopian' has become, a shorthand blessing for knee-jerk JEREMIAHS everywhere, we have to ask at what point in the long history of 'no places' did the bad begin to edge out the good? The strict meaning of dystopia's antonym 'utopia' is nowhere or no place but has often been taken as meaning good place, as in the title of Sir Thomas More's classic proposal of an ideal society published in 1516. John Carey describes this as being because of 'confusion of its first syllable with the Greek eu as in euphemism or eulogy. As a result of this mix-up another word dystopia has been invented, to mean bad place.' Sensibly deciding that dystopia nevertheless remains a 'useful word', Carey makes a useful distinction:
"Strictly speaking, imaginary good places and imaginary bad places are all utopias, or nowheres …To count as a utopia, an imaginary place must be an expression of desire. To count as a dystopia, it must be an expression of fear." -

'Natacha Von Braun (Anna Karina) and Lemmy Caution (Eddie Constantine) face up to the Capital of Pain'
'Natacha Von Braun (Anna Karina) and Lemmy Caution (Eddie Constantine) face up to the Capital of Pain'
The journeys taken through these imaginary places have become a staple of the modern imagination and Carey is right to describe 'desire' and 'fear' as their impetus. Across the twentieth century, these journeys have departed from the desire to control the future and to imagine the techniques by which this might be achieved only to culminate in the fear of having lost control of those same techniques. The British novelist Kingsley Amis came to a similar conclusion in his 1960 study of science-fiction literature, New Maps of Hell: Whereas 20 years ago, the average yawn-enforcer would locate its authoritarian society on Venus or in the thirtieth century, it would nowadays, I think, set its sights at Earth within the next hundred years or so. The machinery of oppression, then, is wielded not by decadent quasi-aristocrats in ceremonial dress – these are far more common in fantasy – but by business-like managerial types well equipped with the latest technological and psychological techniques for the prevention or detection of heresy."

he un-policed imagination is the sovereign enemy so, in Dystopia, no one will let you dream.

'Dystopia' really came into its own around the middle of the 20th century, encouraged by a brace of nightmarish fictional speculations that included Yevgeny Zamyatin's We (1924), Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932) and Orwell's Nineteen Eighty Four (1949). Its contemporary coinage was the work of Glen Negley and J. Max Patrick, a pair of American scholars who, in 1952, published The Quest for Utopia. Duly coined, the word passed rapidly into common currency.

'Natacha Von Braun (Anna Karina) and Lemmy Caution (Eddie Constantine) face up to the Capital of Pain'
'Natacha Von Braun (Anna Karina) and Lemmy Caution (Eddie Constantine) face up to the Capital of Pain'

Dystopias extrapolate from the present those signs of modernity whose promise is at best ambiguous and at worse downright frightening and, in so doing, they hold the idea of 'progress' at an ironic, allegorical distance the better to question it. The dystopian scenario need not be the exclusive preserve of science fiction but, with the genre's propensity for speculation, allegory and straightforward prophecy, it appeared as its natural home. During the 1950s and 1960s a tendency emerges in literature and cinema dramatising a host of fears about the emerging modern landscape and 'dystopian' becomes its accepted description. As Amis observed, with science fiction's focus shifting away from depicting other worlds in outer space towards the otherness of life on Earth it was well placed to accommodate the fears that were coalescing at the same moment: fears of automation and atomic destruction, of consumerism and standardisation. Each is a typically modern fear stemming from the suspicion that beyond modernity's gleaming carapace, behind the windows of skyscraper and department store alike, forces were at work whose purpose was to control and subjugate humanity. If, by the 1960s, certain conventions were sufficiently well established to be recognised as describing a 'dystopian' vision then Godard, in Alphaville, turns them inside-out, inverting them to make them resonate anew.

One can happily travel through Alphaville ticking off dystopian tropes – 'Tyranny of the Machine', 'Crime of Love', 'Visitor from Another Time', 'City of the Future' – which probably explains why, in 1967, Robin Wood claimed, 'In terms of intellectually worked out prophecy, Alphaville offers little that is new, most of its ideas about the future of society being traceable to Nineteen Eighty Four, Brave New World and other works.' Which is fair, up to a point. Yes, Godard's Alpha-ville may well be indebted to Huxley's genetically-engineered hierarchy which runs from Alpha to Epsilon, just as the all-seeing Alpha 60 can be taken as a surrogate for Orwell's 'Big Brother', but the film also owes something to Zamyatin's depiction of a technocratic autocracy enclosed within a glass city. But as a low-budget take on Metropolis presided over by a high-tech version of Dr. Mabuse, Alphaville owes equally to Fritz Lang. Wood's criticism neglects Godard's bravura creation of the city itself, not from sets but through filming some of the most modern structures Paris had to offer in 1965 and from the careful selection of surface detail. This undeniably qualifies as much as an 'idea' as a production decision; beyond simply making the most of a limited budget it also observes the 'presence of the future' that was materialising in the metropolitan fabric of Paris. The British novelist J.G. Ballard summed it up well: 'For the first time in science fiction film, Godard makes the point that in the media landscape of the present day the fantasies of science fiction are as 'real' as an office block, an airport or a presidential campaign.'

The avowed purpose of Alphaville's city-state is, bowdlerising Diderot, to strangle the last lover with the entrails of the last poet.

It is not only the conventional sci-fi image of the futuristic metropolis that Godard invokes in an inverted form. The character of Lemmy Caution, for example, is a comical inversion of the 'Visitor from another Time', as Godard admitted: 'I didn't imagine society in twenty years from now, as [H.G.] Wells did. On the contrary, I'm telling the story of a man from twenty years ago who discovers the world today and can't believe it.' And it is this man from the past who must confront the 'Tyranny of the Machine' with the only weapons he has: low cunning, a loaded gun and lyric poetry. Similarly, Lemmy and Natasha join the ranks of characters such as Winston Smith and Julia in Nineteen Eighty Four and D-503 and 330 in We – each guilty of the 'Crime of Love'. In Alphaville, love is not the carnal transgression it is for those other outlaw lovers but a chaste and lyrical romanticism. Love remains a crime, though, because it represents the royal road to the imagination, which allows the lovers to entertain the idea that another world is possible. In the name of 'Silence, Logic and Security' the avowed purpose of Alphaville's city-state is, bowdlerising Diderot, to strangle the last lover with the entrails of the last poet. One might say that in the eutopian mode all the imagination goes into the worldmaking, whereas in the dystopian it goes into escaping that world. And, from Zamyatin's We – ' … you are sick. And the name of your sickness is FANTASY!' – via Brave New World's bliss-inducing drug Soma to the crowdpleasing pablum of Prolecult as imagined in Nineteen Eighty-Four, the inhabitants of dystopia are everywhere encouraged in their 'eager denial of mind'. The un-policed imagination is the sovereign enemy so, in Dystopia, no one will let you dream. There is another dimension to the idea of the no-place worth mentioning. Godard once claimed that the principal achievement of the new wave was to have established a new country on the map of the world and the name of that country was 'cinema'. What could be more utopian than that?

Science-fiction films tell us as much about the time in which they were made as the future they project and between the two moments – the one specific, the other nominal (1984, 2001, etc) – a sense develops of their qualities of prescience and allegorical vision. The enterprise of proposing a world-to-be is always a hostage to the future's fortune. The law of diminishing returns that applies as regards special effects bears this out. How soon before Matrix-era 'bullet time' looks as dated as Douglas Trumbull's 'star gate' pyrotechnics in 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)? Which may explain why Alphaville hasn't aged as badly as other examples of the genre; it finds its 'special effect' in the specifically cinematic resource of light.

But this light, let's remind ourselves, is the light of the past brought to bear on the presence of the future now. Would it be going too far to suggest that, in adding the dimensions of past and future to the present of 1965, Godard was able to set the controls of his particular time machine to withstand the very test of time? There's no shortage of films that seek to travel in time following Alphaville, from Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982) and Mauvais sang (Leos Carax, 1986) to Gattaca (Andrew Niccol, 1997) and Dark City (Alex Proyas, 1998). There is also the developing genre of what critic Jonathan Romney has named 'steel and glass cinema' which he describes 'as cinema set in the recognisably contemporary urban world but framed and shot in such a way that it becomes detached, not unreal so much as irreal, bordering on science fiction', examples of which include Elle est des nôtres (She's a Jolly Good Fellow, Seigrid Alnoy, 2002), Demonlover (Olivier Assayas, 2002), Cypher (Vincenzo Natali, 2002) and Code 46 (Michael Winterbottom, 2003). Romney claims Alphaville to be 'the mother' of such cinema and with good reason. In the forty or so years separating Alphaville from Demonlover it has become evident that the no-place of Godard's dystopia, with its labyrinth of corridors and lobbies, was already one big non-place in waiting. The presence of the future that Godard was keen to capture back in 1965 has since taken shape as a global nonplace crossing continents and time-zones. 'It may be that we have already dreamed our dream of the future', J.G. Ballard has mused, 'and have woken with a start into a world of motorways, shopping malls and airport concourses which lie around us like a first instalment of a future that has forgotten to materialize.' Or, to put it another way, Alphaville exists. Everywhere.

This is an edited extract from Chris Darke's monograph on J-L Godard's Alphaville to be published by I.B.Tauris in 2005. Chris Darke is a writer, critic and lecturer on the moving image. His book of selected writings, Light Readings, is published by Wallflower Press. He is also represented, with his film study Chris on Chris, on the DVD of La Jetée and Sans Soleil.

ALPHAVILLE EXISTS FROM VERTIGO MAGAZINE  - UK

http://www.vertigomagazine.co.uk/showarticle.php?sel=bac&siz=0&id=203

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Friday, May 04, 2007 

Brazil is big, democratic, stable and rich in resources, says Brooke Unger.

So why is it not doing a lot better?

ON THE right bank of the wide channel that constitutes the port of Santos, Brazil's biggest, the Orange Wave awaits a charge of orange juice for delivery to New Jersey. The North King, of Panamanian registry, is taking on soya grown somewhere between Brazil's temperate south and the savannahs of the centre-west. Further on gleaming ranks of cars await their vessel. Portside terminals, once owned by the state, now display corporate heraldry: the logos of COSAN, a sugar and ethanol producer; Bunge, a global food trader; and America's Dow Chemical. Last year Santos broke its 1909 record for exporting coffee, the commodity that midwifed the port in the 19th century.

The Victorian majesty of berthed ships gives no hint of the difficulties the cargo must overcome on its way to and from Santos, which handles 27% of Brazil's international trade. For soya these can start in the field, where scarce storage sometimes forces growers to dispatch it to port regardless of price. Then it faces a bumpy journey on potholed roads (80% of the cargo arrives in Santos by lorry rather than by rail). Privatisation of the terminals and better traffic management have boosted the port's efficiency, but ships must still await high tide to clear the channel, which is 2m (over six feet) shallower than it should be. The state environment regulator is withholding permission to deepen it. Transport costs consume nearly 13% of Brazil's GDP, five percentage points more than in the United States, according to Paulo Fleury of COPPEAD, a business school in Rio de Janeiro. And that is only a small part of the burden that businessmen refer to despairingly as custo Brasil (the cost of Brazil).

Fecundity and frustration sum up the state of Brazil these days. It is bursting with the commodities coveted by the rising economies of Asia, from soya to iron ore. No other country is better placed to cash in on the global craze for biofuels. Yet Brazil refuses to grow in line with the expectations of its 188m people. Since the end of the "miracle years" of the 1960s and 70s, when it was the world's second-fastest-growing large economy, Brazil has lagged (see chart 1). In the past four years, whereas developing countries as a whole have grown at an average of 7.3%, Brazil has loped along at 3.3%.

In 2003 Goldman Sachs, an investment bank, selected Brazil, along with Russia, India and China, as one of the four "BRICs"—the developing countries that would share dominance of the world economy by 2050. It has been the slowest-growing by far, leading some Brazilians to wonder whether the "B" would be dropped. South Korea's income per person overtook Brazil's in the 1980s; it may not be so long before China's and India's do the same.

Brazilians have non-economic grounds to fret, too. In its first crack at national power the Workers' Party (PT) of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva—which used to crusade against corruption—orchestrated a baroque scheme involving bribes to Congressmen in exchange for votes, known as the mensalão (monthly allowance). The Congress that ended its four-year mandate in December is widely reviled as "the worst in history". Within the past year Brazil's two biggest cities, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, have been terrorised by gangs operating from inside the prison system. Education, perhaps Brazil's biggest failing, seems to be getting worse rather than better. Air travel has been crippled following the mid-air collision last year between a passenger plane and an executive jet. Brazil is "falling to pieces", lamented Lya Luft, a columnist for Veja, the biggest news magazine, last year.

What's the problem?

If so, many Brazilians appear not to have noticed. President Lula resoundingly won re-election last October, largely on the strength of support from the poor. Their living standards have been soaring, thanks in part to handouts from the federal government. Income inequality, from which Brazil suffers more than most other countries, has at last begun to shrink.

The same is true of inflation and its lingering symptom, high real interest rates. The introduction of the real as Brazil's currency in 1994 ended decades of high inflation. Many observers feared that Lula would rekindle it when he was first elected president in 2002. His PT had opposed the Real Plan. The risk premium on Brazil's bonds soared. But Lula realised that inflation hit the poor most. Defying his companheiros, he has entrenched stability, faithfully sticking to the policy "tripod" put in place by his predecessor and political foe, Fernando Henrique Cardoso: a primary surplus (ie, before interest payments) high enough to reduce debt as a share of GDP, a floating exchange rate and inflation targets.

Helped by global enthusiasm for Brazil's goods and financial securities, the Cardoso-Lula tandem has wrought an economic miracle of a different sort. Inflation last year was only 3%, below the target of 4.5% set by the central bank. The markets expect it to remain below target this year. Real interest rates are at their lowest level since 2001. The risk of a panic abroad triggering a crisis at home, which often happened during the 1990s, has diminished. Exports and the trade surplus have soared (see chart 2), pushing foreign-exchange reserves above $100 billion. When Brazil became independent in 1822 Britain insisted that it assume the debts of the Portuguese crown. Now Brazil's government is an international creditor. An investment-grade credit rating is probably only a matter of time. When Lula finishes his second term in 2010 Brazil will have enjoyed "16 years of stability and predictability", says Mailson da Nóbrega, a former finance minister who now heads Tendências, a consultancy. That is an important and sometimes underrated discount on custo Brasil.

In some ways Brazil is the steadiest of the BRICs. Unlike China and Russia it is a full-blooded democracy; unlike India it has no serious disputes with its neighbours. It is the only BRIC without a nuclear bomb. The Heritage Foundation's "Economic Freedom Index", which measures such factors as protection of property rights and free trade, ranks Brazil ("moderately free") above the other BRICs ("mostly unfree"). One of the main reasons why Brazil's growth has been slower than China's and India's is that Brazil is richer and more urbanised.

This survey will argue that disgruntlement persists because Brazil is a battleground between progress and inertia. Since independence was proclaimed by the son of the Portuguese king, Brazil has been adding layer upon layer of change rather than sweeping away the old and starting afresh. The 1988 constitution, which restored democracy after 20 years of military dictatorship, did not abolish the culture of cordialidade, which in politics means the primacy of personal bonds over rules. Liberties and electoral rights are entrenched, says the former president, Mr Cardoso, "but there's a lack of citizenship, of respect for the law. Democracy means that, too."

Too much, too soon

The constitution too readily created rights—of bureaucrats to job protection, of sub-national governments to tax revenues, of ordinary citizens to government transfers—that Brazil can ill afford. They help explain why real interest rates remain among the highest in the world, why public investment in roads, ports and other infrastructure is stunted and why the tax burden befits a rich European welfare state rather than a young developing economy.

Brazil is thus in the midst of a slow metamorphosis in its economy, society and polity. "Contemporary Brazil is a hybrid between two moralities: one unequal and hierarchical, the other universal and egalitarian," argues Jacqueline Muniz, an anthropologist in Rio de Janeiro. Rigid legalism sits alongside rampant illegality, and a vibrant private sector coexists with a sclerotic state. President Lula, who presented himself as the scourge of old-style oligarchs, now governs with their help. Few modernisers are untainted by the past.

Although progress is slow, Brazil's institutions are now strong enough to make it reasonably sure. Goldman Sachs recently reaffirmed the country's BRIC status. Economic growth may top 4% this year. When GDP figures were revised in March, Brazil discovered that it was richer and less indebted than it had thought. It could do better still. But that would require another insight from Lula, as important as his conversion to low inflation: that the main obstacle to progress is the state itself.

Apr 12th 2007
From The Economist

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By Mike Watt
Release date: 07 October, 1997
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Monday, April 23, 2007 

Dear Santa Claus!

Is everything alright with you? I know our relationship has not been that close, but I'll go do my best to improve it. These years I didn't write to you because many things have happened… I'd like to take advantage of this moment to ask you to forgive me.
 
I'm noticing that the people are so silly: as they grow old, they stop to believe in what they like more. When I was only a child, I loved you. But now I do not know if you remember this... I used to spend hours and hours at the Christmas night, waiting you to arrive, but sleep always arrived before you. But okay, I knew that you had to visit many houses, and mine always had to be one of the last to be visited. 
 
The only gift that really I want now is a GIBSON LES PAUL StANDARD guitar. We will take a frozen beer and will eat roll-mops and peanuts, and we will talk about ideas to change the world. Then as well as the children, who are pure and believe what really the heart touches them, the adults (silly) also will believe you again.
 
Ps.: My house's chimney is obstructed, so I advise you to come in to the door or window this time!
 
Merry Christmas for you all ...hohohohohoho....!
 
DO YOU BELIEVE?
SANTA K.  JEFF BECK,  BARRY & MARGOT GAVE ME A FENDER STRATO SURF GREEN! HOHOHOHOHO
 
HAPPY 2008 FOR ALL OVER THE UNIVERSE!!!!
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Thursday, April 12, 2007 
all rights reserved © 1997-2007 Le Monde diplomatique.

Africa, continent of organised pillage
Sudan: genocide in Darfur

The Darfur conflict, which has already left 400,000 dead, has destabilised Sudan, Chad and the Central African Republic. At a summit in Cannes last month, all three countries agreed to respect each other's territorial integrity, but the diplomatic activity conceals an international political deadlock over potential oil wealth.

By Gérard Prunier

Two million people have fled Darfur in northwest Sudan since 2003, 250,000 of them since last August (1), and the resources of neighbouring Chad are suffering from the strain of 250,000 refugees. The conflict has left 400,000 dead in four years. Aid workers from the United Nations and NGOs have had to move camps 31 times to escape attacks, although this did not prevent the arrest of several aid workers on 19 January in Nyala; they were beaten with rifle butts by the Sudanese police. Twelve aid workers were killed during massacres and five others have disappeared.

The Islamic government in Khartoum justifies frequent air raids by claiming their victims are rebels who refused to sign the Abuja "peace" treaty in Nigeria on 5 May 2006 (2). In reality, the Sudanese government is trying to prevent the fighters from holding a congress that would unify their movement and enable them to start negotiations with the support of the international community (3).

The UN and the African Union (AU) have been powerless in the face of this disaster, producing only symbolic measures and stalling tactics. For the past two years the African Union Mission in Sudan (AMIS), an inter-African military force of 7,500 men, has been deployed in Darfur. A dozen African countries contribute contingents but most come from Rwanda and Nigeria. The force is totally ineffectual. At least 30,000 men would be needed for an area the size of Darfur, 500,000 sq km.

AMIS is under-equipped and has a ludicrously restrictive mandate: soldiers may not carry out offensive patrols and may only negotiate. They are there to count the dead. The international force requires political determination to end the massacres that both the AU and the UN refuse to qualify as genocide. The powerless African soldiers admit in private: "We're no use here at all".

AMIS is almost entirely financed by the European Union; the US makes a nominal contribution. On 31 August 2006 the UN conceded a lack of results and adopted resolution 1706 to deploy a UN intervention force. But the resolution has not been implemented because the Sudanese government has yet to approve the deployment. Diplomats have flown to Khartoum to persuade President Bashir to change his mind.

His objections are astonishing. He accuses the UN of wanting to re-colonise the Sudan, and claims that the force is merely a cover for the West to enable it to get hold of Sudanese oil (4). He also says the international forces have "peddled Aids" (5) and he has threatened to use special Iraq-type suicide units against the peace troops.

The ghost of Milosevic

These justifications are fanciful. Jan Pronk, the former UN special representative in Sudan who was expelled from the country last November for having criticised the Sudanese army, explains in his blog: "On more than one occasion high political officials in Sudan have told me that they had weighed the risk of non-compliance with Security Council resolutions against the risk of compliance. Non-compliance might bring them in conflict with the council and its members: sanctions and threats against the regime.

"Compliance would entail a different risk: domestic opposition and efforts to change the regime from within. They had compared and weighed those risks meticulously, they told me, and they had come to a rational conclusion: the risk of compliance would be much greater than the risk of non-compliance. They have been proven right."

The Sudanese government fears that the UN forces may act as the secular arm of the International Criminal Court, which for the past two years has held a UN-compiled list of war criminals. The list has never been made public but it is likely that several important members of the Sudanese government are on it, possibly even Bashir. It would be a great boost to the opposition if these were to be prosecuted: the ghost of Slobodan Milosevic hovers over the Islamists in Khartoum.

Although the Sudanese government will not permit the deployment of UN troops, it encourages the international community to continue financing AMIS, precisely because it serves no purpose. This arrangement is hypocrisy. The Europeans and the Americans turn a blind eye to the inefficiency of the African forces because it makes them appear to be doing something. On 23 January the British government said it would provide another $28.8m to AMIS, although British diplomats have confirmed in private that they do not believe these forces will be able to protect civilians in Darfur from the Janjaweed.

Faced with a deadlock, the UN has come up with a new concept: hybridisation. Since the Sudanese government will accept an African force but not a UN one, why not have an Afro-UN force? This would mean the UN sending 103 police officers and 20 administrative staff. Serious discussions are being held in the UN and the AU about the exact proportions of this hybrid force. The Sudanese government accepted this proposal on 28 December, knowing full well that it is just another futile gesture. They intend to keep it that way.

Why is the international response so weak? The US position is ambiguous. Beneath the firm entreaties is a mixture of tricks, double talk and impotence. Since 11 September 2001 Washington has considered that Khartoum has earned a good behaviour ticket in the fight against terrorism. The Sudanese secret services have a good cop, bad cop routine in which Nafi Ali Nafi, former interior minister and adviser to Bashir, plays the bad cop, while his deputy, Salah Abdallah "Gosh", plays the good guy. Ali Nafi is denounced as an extremist while Gosh (one of the main authors of repression in Darfur) is invited to discussions with the CIA and considered an ally in the war against terror.

Compromising collaboration

The practical results of this compromising collaboration have yet to be seen. Washington's official declarations remain firm but are not followed up by concrete measures even when encouraged by President George Bush's own political allies. California's Republican governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, passed a law obliging California public bodies to sell any shares in US or foreign companies working in Sudan. This disinvestment policy, which enabled human rights activists to force the Canadian oil company Talisman Energy to withdraw from Sudan in 2003, was not supported by the White House. The first victim of US double-dealing was Bush's own special envoy, Andrew Natsios, former director of the US Agency for International Development. When he ran out of resources he threatened Bush with a mysterious plan B if plan A, which was UN deployment, failed. When pressed by journalists, Natsios was unable to provide any details about plan B.

China is an unknown, though important, factor in Sudanese geopolitics, and a reason for international inertia about Darfur. Sudan is China's second-largest trading partner in Africa and bilateral trade was $2.9bn in 2006. China buys 65% of Sudan's oil and is the leading supplier of arms to Bashir's regime, the guns that are killing people in Darfur.

When Chinese president Hu Jintao went to Sudan in February he spoke only about business and visited the new hydroelectric plant in Meroe, financed by the Chinese to the cost of $1.8bn. Although he recommended the deployment of UN forces to Bashir, his lack of conviction was such that Bashir was able to say he felt under no pressure. In the UN, China demands that Sudan's national sovereignty be respected, despite resolution 1706.

France is working behind the scenes to help its own proteges under threat from Sudan. Although it has long defended Sudan against the hostility of Anglo-Saxons, it has not received any benefits in exchange. Total's oil permits in southern Sudan are blocked by legal squabbles and the regime's militia uses Darfur, whenever possible, to destabilise France's allies: Chad's president, Idriss Deby, and Central African Republic (CAR) President François Bozizé.

Indeed, despite Deby's protests to the contrary, he supports the guerrillas in Darfur. These include many fighters from his own ethnic group, the Zaghawa (see "The factions"). French forces provide logistical support to the Chad army fighting Sudan-backed rebels, and in December 2006 they were involved in bombing and ground skirmishes in the north of the Central African Republic, to chase out other rebels, also supported by Sudan. But beyond these frontier skirmishes, the oil stakes are real. The relationship between Chad and the US oil companies working there is tense and they have been threatened with expulsion. In April 2006 rebels who got as far as the streets of the capital N'Djamena were carrying Chinese weapons. One might wonder if China is trying to topple some of the central African regimes (6).

Ethnic cleansing, not 'genocide'

The UN has raised the issue of ethnic cleansing in Darfur but, like the EU, will not use the term genocide. Among the arguments it uses to justify this is the myth of tribal warfare as a result of the desertification of the Sahel, with nomadic Arab herdsmen contending for pastureland with sedentary African peasants. Like all clichés, this one contains a modicum of truth, but no more than that.

Nomadic shepherds are unlikely to conduct aerial bombardments. The Janjaweed are armed, fed and equipped by the regular army, which often fights alongside them. Since December the main Arab ethnic group in Darfur, the Baggara Rizaygat, has set up its own militia, claiming that it was needed because of its poverty and the government's negligence (even though it is an Arab government) (7).

There is another reason. The regular attacks by the militia on black African tribes do not resemble attacks by armed groups of nomadic Arab shepherds. The militia include criminals of various ethnic origins who have been freed from prison on condition they join, as well as deserters from the government forces stationed in the south of the country who have had nothing to do since the 2005 Nairobi agreement (8). There are also members of the small tribes of camel herdsmen from the far north of Darfur, such as the Jalloul, who are the real victims of climate change, and even members of small African groups, such as the Gimr, who hope that by allying themselves to this genocidal cause they may be co-opted into the larger Arab family and benefit from its social standing and economic advantages.

Why does the Sudanese government want to exterminate, or at least subjugate, the African population in its western province? The reason cannot be religious since everyone in Darfur, killer and victim alike, is a Sunni Muslim. The true reasons are racial and cultural. Arabs are a minority in Sudan. The Islamists are the latest historical incarnation of Arab dominance in the region.

Peace between north and south is disintegrating. On 9 January, the second anniversary of the Nairobi agreement, Salva Kiir Mayardit, deputy leader of the Sudan People's Liberation Movement in the south, warned Bashir that if the situation did not improve, secession would be inevitable within four years.

'Adjust' the border

The Khartoum government needs to act urgently. It has to adjust the north-south frontier to place most of the oil in the south (this is under way). It has to buy arms in preparation for renewed hostilities and forge solid international alliances (China is a given, Iran is being negotiated). The government also has to maintain its territorial dominance by setting up an ethnic cordon sanitaire that would extend from the Nouba mountains to Kordofan and include Darfur (9). The Nouba tribes were crushed in fighting between 1992 and 2002, but Darfur represents far more of a threat. The Arab leaders in Khartoum will do anything to avoid a breach through which African tribes from the west could ally themselves with an independent, oil-rich, black Africa in the south.

It has become a strategic necessity to subdue revolt in Darfur by any means. The regular army, which includes representatives from many of the region's African ethnic groups in its ranks, cannot be relied on for this task. Hence the recruitment of the Arab Janjaweed militias, largely made up of minority groups or social misfits. They must prevent the real Arabs in Darfur from revolution — meaning the Baggara tribes that make up 22%-30% of the population in the region. They, as much as their black African fellow-citizens, are the victims of discrimination in the region. The only reason the Baggara support the murdering elite in Khartoum is for reasons of misplaced Arabism, which is more imagined than real.

The protection of oil revenues comes at a deadly price, currently being paid. Unlike Rwanda, where 800,000 people were killed in 100 days, ethnic cleansing in Darfur has gone on for four years. Those who still dare to say never again are either totally ignorant or hypocritical. Once again the dead are being valued according to the colour of their skins.

English language editorial director: Wendy Kristianasen - all rights reserved © 1997-2007 Le Monde diplomatique.
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