Sunday, Sept. 14, 2008, The Japan Times online.

Regarding The Trips to Libya - “Oily Moves to Compensate” by Gwynne Dyer from London.

Libya was the diplomatic crossroads of the planet last weekend: Condoleezza Rice made the first visit by a U.S. secretary of State in 55 years (to discuss a murky deal involving payments to American victims of terrorist attacks allegedly sponsored by Libya); radical Bolivian President Evo Morales showed up (to beg for money or cheap oil); and Italy’s Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi arrived to promise Libya $5 billion in compensation for the brutalities of Italian colonial rule.

The U.S. Congress was not impressed. Last Monday the Senate Foreign Relations Committee postponed hearings on the confirmation of Gene Cretz as the first U.S. ambassador to Libya since 1972.
What bothered the senators was Libya’s delay in paying a promised $1.8 billion in compensation to the families of 180 Americans who died when Pan Am Flight 103 was brought down by a terrorist bomb over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988, and of the American soldiers targeted in a 1986 attack on the West Berlin nightclub La Belle (one killed, scores injured).
Western intelligence services blamed both those attacks on Libya’s leader, Colonel Moammar Gadhafi. U.S. aircraft bombed Libya after the 1986 attack, killing some 30 Libyans including Gadhafi’s adopted daughter. Yet the evidence for Libyan involvement is distinctly shaky, and Libya never officially admitted its responsibility. Instead, Libya finally signed a “humanitarian” deal that gives the American families $1.8 billion, but also includes an unstated amount for the Libyan victims of the American air attacks. How very curious.

Details of the deal have been left vague, and nobody will say where the money for the Libyan victims of U.S. airstrikes is coming from. If it is coming from the U.S. government, that would be an interesting precedent. But everybody knows what is really at play here.

The United States worries about the security of its oil supplies and Libya produces oil, so Washington has been seeking a way to end its quarrel with Colonel Gadhafi for a long time. Gadhafi wanted that too, because the U.N. sanctions imposed at Washington’s request were hurting his regime. But since neither government ever apologizes, it took a while.

Gadhafi’s key move was to dismantle his fantasy “nuclear weapons program” — he never really had more than bits and pieces — in 2003. This let President George W. Bush claim that his “war on terror” was scaring the bad guys into behaving better, so the mood music improved immediately. Even before that, Libya sent a couple of low-level intelligence agents to face an international court over the Lockerbie bombing (one was acquitted, one was convicted, and the Libyan regime was scarcely mentioned).

The final compensation deal was signed last month. Condoleezza Rice was in Libya this month partly to show that Gadhafi was no longer in the doghouse — and partly to ask where the money was. That is bothering the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, too, but they shouldn’t worry. Libyan banks take more than a month to transfer even thousands of dollars abroad, let alone billions.

The history behind Silvio Berlusconi’s deal with Gadhafi is much clearer, and so are the motives behind it. Italy conquered Libya, formerly part of the Ottoman Empire, in 1911, and ruled it until 1943. Tens of thousands of Libyans who resisted were killed, many more had their land confiscated and given to Italian settlers, and the country was run for Italy’s benefit, not that of its own people. Italy owes — but why is it paying now, half a century later?

The answer is partly oil — a quarter of Italy’s oil and a third of its gas come from Libya — but also illegal immigrants. Italy is the destination for a growing stream of economic migrants from Africa who use Libya as a jumping-off place for their trip across the Mediterranean, and Berlusconi needs Gadhafi’s cooperation to stem the flow. So Libya gets $5 billion of Italian money to compensate for all the wrongs of the colonial era (and Italy’s compensation will come later, in apparently unrelated deals).

“It is my duty . . . to express to you in the name of the Italian people our regret and apologies for the deep wounds that we have caused you,” Berlusconi said in Benghazi, bowing symbolically before the son of the hero of the Libyan resistance, Omar Mukhtar.

It’s a generous apology, too: $200 million a year on infrastructure projects for 25 years, and if Berlusconi’s cronies in the Italian construction business get the contracts, what’s the harm in that? But we will probably not see him making a similar apology in Mogadishu or Addis Ababa anytime soon.

Libya got off lightly. Ethiopia, Somalia and Eritrea, Italy’s other African colonies, suffered far more from its rule, and are owed far more in compensation. But they have no oil, they are not close to Italy, and they are not going to get it.

If you calculate the amount owed by other former colonial powers at the same per capita rate as Italy did for Libya — around $1,000 per head of the ex-colony’s current population — then France owes Algeria $30 billion, the U.S. owes the Philippines $75 billion, and Britain owes India $1.1 trillion.

But the victims’ heirs shouldn’t spend their money until they actually have it in their hands, and they shouldn’t hold their breaths while waiting.

EYE ON THE UN: For Immediate Release - May 26, 2008 - The US Memorial Day.

Contact: Anne Bayefsky
(917) 488-1558
 anne at hudsonny.org

UN Racism Conference to be held in Geneva April 20-24, 2009 - Ironically over Holocaust Remembrance Day.

May 26, 2008

The next UN racism conference - known as Durban II or the Durban Review Conference - will be held on UN premises in Geneva from April 20-24, 2009, a UN preparatory committee decided today.

Anne Bayefsky, editor of EYEontheUN.org, said “holding the meeting at a UN venue on European soil will essentially guarantee funding from the UN regular budget for the conference, and that the European Union will fully participate and not follow boycott plans of Canada, the United States and Israel.”

The European Union had been insisting on a shorter session in New York, but the African Group refused to agree on the New York venue and wanted a 5-day conference. The idea floated by some states of again holding the conference in Durban, South Africa fell through when South Africa withdrew its offer to host the event. Throughout negotiations the African group was tightly controlled by the Organization of the Islamic Conference, with Egypt acting as their spokesperson.

Bayefsky noted “Ironically, the Durban Review Conference will take place over Holocaust Remembrance Day, Yom HaShoah on April 21, 2009.

Jews all over the world will be remembering the 6 million murdered in the worst instance of racism and xenophobia in human history.

At the same time, the United Nations will be discussing whether the Jewish state, created in the wake of the Holocaust and standing as a bulwark to ensure it is never repeated, should be demonized as the worst practitioner of racism and xenophobia among nations today.”

Durban II is intended to promote the implementation of the 2001 Durban Declaration, which singled out only Israel and labeled Palestinians as victims of Israeli racism.

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For once South Africa showed the courage to stand up and be counted among the Nations - the rest of Africa - we must note - is nothing but a rug at the feet of the Islamic world - Sudan, Somalia, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Djibuti, Kenya, Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso, Chad, Mauritania, Marocco … all countries were black Africans suffer from the Egyptian led OIC intrusions on their continent. The UN is just a conduit for making the world pay the bill.

CHAD, CENTRAL AFRICAN REPUBLIC, DARFUR MUST BE TACKLED TOGETHER – BAN KI-MOON SAYS.

The Observation Seems Right - but it just does not cover the UN nakedness.

The flare-up of civil strife, cross-border tension and displacement involving Chad, the Central African Republic (CAR) and Sudan should be addressed in a unified manner that is outside the mandate of the mission currently being deployed by the United Nations, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon says in a report released today.

In his report on the Mission in CAR and Chad, known as MINURCAT, Mr. Ban writes: “The internal crisis in Chad, the situation facing refugees and internally displaced persons [IDPs] in eastern Chad and the Central African Republic, the tensions between Chad and the Sudan and the situation in Darfur should be addressed simultaneously.”

This should be done, he adds, in a coordinated effort that takes into account the root causes of the internal conflicts and the regional dimensions of those problems.

“To date, however, neither MINURCAT nor EUFOR is ideally mandated to address these issues,” he says, with the latter acronym referring to the European support force.

The innovative, multi-dimensional MINURCAT was set up by the Security Council last September to help protect civilians and facilitate humanitarian aid to thousands of people uprooted due to insecurity in the northeast of the CAR and eastern Chad and in the neighbouring Darfur region of Sudan.

It was mandated to comprise 300 police and 50 military liaison officers, as well as civilian staff, focusing on the areas of civil affairs, human rights and the rule of law. The strength as of 1 April stood at 163 national and 64 national staff.

Deployment was delayed when Chadian rebels advanced from the area of the border with Sudan in a bid to take Chad’s capital, N’Djamena in early February. Though the rebels were eventually driven out of the city, street fighting left many dead and UN staff were evacuated.

Also in early February, about 10,000 people from West Darfur sought refuge in eastern Chad following a series of deadly air and land attacks by the Sudanese Government and its allied militia.

In addition, the Prime Minister of the CAR resigned in January and in the subsequent period many thousands fled their villages due to raids by armed groups, with many making their way to Chad.

These problems are complex and all require comprehensive solutions worked out between the many parties involved, Mr. Ban notes in the report.

Based on an article on JPost.com , Jan 3, 2008 20:37      Israel gets seats on United Nations agency panels, the original by Herb Keinon of The Jerusalem Post.

While Israel won a four-decade battle in 2000 to get accepted into one of the UN’s regional groupings critical for full incorporation into the world body, only now, sixty years since the UN helped legitimize the State  of new Israel, its full integration into the UN system is slowly taking place as Israel is finally participating in regular deliberations of UN agencies dealing with the environment and human settlement.

In May 2000, after a long struggle, Israel was accepted into one of the five regional groupings that make up the UN: WEOG, or the Western European and Others Group. Until this time, Israel was the only country at the UN that was outside a regional grouping, and as a result was barred from membership on such UN organizations as the Security Council, UNICEF, UNESCO and numerous other UN bodies and agencies. Why WEOG and not Asia, where it belongs - that please ask the Arabs at the UN, and the UN managers that had no backbone when it came to mention the UN Charter.

The reason was simple: membership in those bodies was allocated according to regional groupings, and Israel was not a member of any such group. Asia, Israel’s geographic home, would not accept it.

But finally gaining entrance into WEOG was not the end of the battle, because this meant that Israel could be voted onto the governing bodies of organizations, but it did not give it the right to take part in their consultations. Another selection process inside WEOG was necessary to send Israel to those meetings.

In this selection process, certain WEOG countries objected to Israel taking part because they did not think Israel should be involved in discussions in which issues related to Israel and the Palestinians were raised. Since being chosen for those bodies needed a consensus of all WEOG state, it was always enough for one country to object to block Israel’s acceptance.

Since 2000, Israel - according to Roni Leshno Yaar, the director-general of the Foreign Ministry’s UN and International Organizations Division - has been trying to get into these consultations.

Last month Israel was voted by WEOG to represent the grouping in consultations for two UN agencies: HABITAT, the UN Human Settlement Program, and UNEP, the UN Environment Program. Both these agencies are based in Nairobi.

Calling the move a “significant breakthrough,” Leshno Yaar said, “This is an important step for Israeli diplomacy in the direction of normalizing Israel’s status in the UN, and recognizing Israel’s ability to contribute professionally to the regional UN bodies.

Now, to us at www.SustainabiliTank.info these news have a very special meaning. Also please remember that a year ago Israel was elected for a two year’s period on the UN Commission on Sustainable Development - UN CSD. The above three UN bodies, as well as UNDP, UNIDO, WMO, UNESCO, FAO are  the UN bodies most important to the area of our interest - in Sustainable Development with its implications to the development of alternate sources of energy (mainly renewable energy), global warming/climate change, water resources, agriculture and forestry with use to biomass for energy, the sustainable development of arid and semiarid land….and other very practical issues of keeping earth a livable planet.

And you know what, Israel’s own existence as a small country carved out from a climatically inhospitable land-mass next to the deserts of Egypt, Arabia, and Syria, could have been the catalyst for the development of the whole region inhabited by its Arab foes. Israel has helped in many countries of the world - in effect it does business with the Arab countries of the region, by far more business then with Jordan and Egypt, the only 2, out of 22 Member States of the Arab League, and many more members of the Organization of Islamic States - but this is under-the-table business through intermediary countries thanks to the propensity of Arab leaders to shoot at their own countries’ feet.

Anyway, the intent of this article is to celebrate the official entrance of Israel to two more UN bodies that deal with environmental issues that include subjects of pollution from the use of fossil fuels. As oil is the main weapon of the Arab States that are unfriendly to Israel, it is Israel’s self interest to help the world to develop alternatives to the use of oil - be these better material that allow conservation of energy, systems that allow less energy wasting life-styles, and technologies for renewable sources of energy. For years we advocate that Israel could do well for itself by giving away know-how, even for free, when it comes to ways how to be less dependent on oil. These methods include high-tech and communication technologies Israel has excelled in - we just posted two days ago an article about UCI lauding Israel’s achievements in those areas. So, will the Israeli Government take up now the challenge of this new opportunity and do the right things for the world - this thanks to its own clear self interest? Did the Europeans in WEOG, place Israel on the three UN bodies they participate in now officially because they had all this potential in mind - thinking also on the “Road From Bali to Copenhagen” that clearly will also path through Nairobi, the seat of UNEP and Habitat?

 http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/eo20071222a1.html
Saturday, Dec. 22, 2007, WRONG APPROACH TO AFRICA, by David Howell, former UK Minister and Now Member Of The House of Lords, for The Japan Times.

LONDON — An acrimonious summit meeting between EU leaders and the leaders of African countries ended last week in Lisbon. The EU was trying to offer the Africans a new trade deal, but many of the African representatives argued that the deal would make them worse off, not better off. They denounced European efforts as a continuation of colonialism that would “amputate” African state budgets and ruin African industries.

The atmosphere was further soured by the presence of Robert Mugabe, who has brought his own nation of Zimbabwe to its knees in a frenzy of repression — a living symbol of human rights abuse who ought never to have been invited to the gathering. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown stayed away from the event in protest.

It was not meant to be like this. The declared intention of the European Union policymakers in Brussels was to wash away postcolonial guilt, forge a new strategic partnership and open a new development chapter for the peoples of 76 former European colonies, 40 of them former British colonies and the others mostly part of the Francophone group.

This stuck in African throats. They did not see the concept as one of partnership, and 10 of them refused point-blank to sign up, including major participants South Africa, Nigeria, Zambia and Senegal. For them it was tantamount to exposing their infant industries to fierce European competition and, in the words of one leader, “slamming the door on development.”

Poorer countries of Africa, they insisted, with their weak and fledgling economies, need more protection, not less. They also claimed that the EPAs would damage African trade with Pacific countries.

Behind the European approach was a deeper fear — namely that Europe is losing its influence on the African continent to the Chinese. The Chinese are indeed everywhere in Africa these days with ready cash and no strings attached, “sweet” and easy agreements to provide infrastructure, as well as weapons and military support. Their products are also highly competitive with European goods.

As one delegate put it “For the price of one European car, you can buy two Chinese cars.”

Why was the European approach so clumsy? At root are two major flaws in EU policy. The first is to push the theory of absolutely free trade too far and too fast and to ignore the practical realities of development in very impoverished economies. A belief lingers in official minds in Europe that protection in all circumstances is bad and must be swept aside. Inequalities in trade relations, they appear to believe, can be compensated for with large aid packages.

This completely overlooks the fact that much of Europe’s own industry grew under cover of protective tariffs and that without a certain amount of well-focused tariff protection, the infant industries in Africa’s struggling economies will just never take off. It also overlooks the glaring fact that most of Europe’s agriculture is still protected by high tariffs, subsidies and quotas.

The second and much deeper fallacy is that Africa is a bloc or that Europe is a bloc, and that by putting the two together, face to face, trade and development solutions can be found.

Not only is the geographical continent of Africa a conglomeration of vastly diverse societies and cultures, each with its own unique problems that require understanding and solutions. But on the European side interests vary and a real unity of approach is lacking.

The proposition that if the EU countries all stick together they will always carry greater weight in trade negotiations — with America, China, Japan or anybody else — sounds superficially true.

In practice, and in the modern global context, it could well be that bilateral negotiations and bargains — say between Britain and Nigeria, or France and Senegal, or Germany and South Africa — could create more business opportunities and generate more growth than mighty deals between the whole of Europe and the whole of Africa — which anyway are proving impossible to achieve except in general, watered-down terms that have little impact on Africa’s starving millions.

And that is a tragedy both for Africa and for Europe.

David Howell is a former British Cabinet minister and former chairman of the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee. He is now a member of the House of Lords  www.lordhowell.com).

America’s militarized foreign policy is a failure.
By Jeffrey D. Sachs, Commentary, Tuesday, December 4, 2007, The Daily Star of Beirut.

 http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?…

Many of today’s war zones - including Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, and Sudan - share basic problems that lie at the root of their conflicts. They are all poor, buffeted by natural disasters - especially floods, droughts, and earthquakes - and have rapidly growing populations that are pressing on the capacity of the land to feed them. And the proportion of youth is very high, with a bulging population of young men of military age (15-24 years).

All of these problems can be solved only through long-term sustainable economic development. Yet the United States persists in responding to symptoms rather than to underlying conditions by trying to address every conflict by military means. It backs the Ethiopian Army in Somalia. It occupies Iraq and Afghanistan. It threatens to bomb Iran. It supports the military dictatorship in Pakistan.

None of these military actions addresses the problems that led to conflict in the first place. On the contrary, American policies typically inflame the situation rather than solve it.

Time and again, this military approach comes back to haunt the United States. The US embraced the shah of Iran by sending massive armaments, which fell into the hands of Iran’s revolutionary government after 1979. The US then backed Saddam Hussein in his attack on Iran, until the US ended up attacking Saddam himself. The United States backed Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union, until the US ended up fighting bin Laden. Since 2001 the US has supported Pervez Musharraf in Pakistan with more than $10 billion in aid, and now faces an unstable regime that barely survives.

US foreign policy is so ineffective because it has been taken over by the military. Even postwar reconstruction in Iraq under the US-led occupation was run by the Pentagon rather than by civilian agencies. The US military budget dominates everything about foreign policy. Adding up the budgets of the Pentagon, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the Department of Homeland Security, nuclear-weapons programs, and the State Department’s military assistance operations, the US will spend around $800 billion this year on security, compared with less than $20 billion for economic development.

In a stunning article on aid to Pakistan during the Bush administration, Craig Cohen and Derek Chollet demonstrated the disastrous nature of this militarized approach - even before the tottering Musharraf regime’s latest crackdown. They show that even though Pakistan faces huge problems of poverty, population, and environment, 75 percent of the $10 billion in US aid has gone to the Pakistani military, ostensibly to reimburse Pakistan for its contribution to the “war on terror,” and to help it buy F-16s and other weapons systems.

Another 16 percent went straight to the Pakistani budget, no questions asked. That left less than 10 percent for development and humanitarian assistance. Annual US aid for education in Pakistan has amounted to just $64 million, or $1.16 per school-aged child.

The authors note that “the strategic direction for Pakistan was set early by a narrow circle at the top of the Bush administration and has been largely focused on the war effort rather than on Pakistan’s internal situation.” They also emphasize that “US engagement with Pakistan is highly militarized and centralized, with very little reaching the vast majority of Pakistanis.” They quote President George W. Bush as saying, “When [Musharraf] looks me in the eye and says … there won’t be a Taliban and won’t be Al-Qaeda, I believe him, you know?”

This militarized approach is leading the world into a downward spiral of violence and conflict. Each new US weapons system “sold” or given to the region increases the chances of expanded war and further military coups, and to the chance that the arms will be turned on the US itself. None of it helps to address the underlying problems of poverty, child mortality, water scarcity, and lack of livelihoods in places like Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier Province, Sudan’s Darfur region, or Somalia. These places are bulging with people facing a tightening squeeze of insufficient rainfall and degraded pasturelands. Naturally, many join radical causes.

The Bush administration fails to recognize these fundamental demographic and environmental challenges, that $800 billion of security spending won’t bring irrigation to Afghanistan, Pakistan, Sudan, and Somalia, and therefore won’t bring peace. Instead of seeing real people in crisis, they see caricatures, a terrorist around every corner.

A more peaceful world will be possible only when Americans and others begin to see things through the eyes of their supposed enemies, and realize that today’s conflicts, having resulted from desperation and despair, can be solved through economic development rather than war. We will have peace when we heed the words of President John F. Kennedy, who said, a few months before his death, “For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.”

Jeffrey Sachs is a professor of economics and director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. THE DAILY STAR publishes this commentary in collaboration with Project Syndicate (c)  www.project-syndicate.org).

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Professor Sachs, being the scientist he is, will not utter words like global warming induced droughts, floods, and most probably also earthquakes. He does not want to be in a corner where folks like Bjorn Lomborg or Fred Sachs will say that he has not enough proof.

He will also not say that the American interest in Middle East oil is behind the American militarism in the Islamic world - he will not want to be accused of editorializing when he provides what some may say are political views. In short - he has all the material there we speak about on our web but does yet not put his finger right into the eye of the storm.

We at www.SustainabiliTank.info have less restraints - and we would like thus to suggest a different end to his article - the simple recommendation to the US people of demanding from their government to move towards an economy that is not based on the exclusive use of oil, and while in transition does start by withdrawing from oil imports from the Middle East first. In parallel - the US shall start helping developing countries that were the first victims of human induced climate change that was caused by our past transgressions in matters of use of fossil and nuclear energy materials.

We hope someday to discuss above suggestions with Professor Sachs.

Japan eyes global warming as pillar of aid to Africa.

Kyodo News, The Japan Times on line, November 13, 2007.
Japan plans to make support of Africa’s fight against global warming one of the pillars of a declaration to be made at next year’s international African aid conference in Yokohama, Foreign Ministry officials said Monday.

The “Yokohama Declaration,” to be adopted at the fourth Tokyo International Conference on African Development, or TICAD, in May, will also call for measures to help accelerate economic growth, promote peace and prevent environmental degradation in the region.

By adopting the declaration, Japan apparently aims to differentiate its policy toward Africa from resource-hungry China’s efforts to cement ties with the region.

At a ministerial preparatory meeting in August for the Yokohama conference, Japan criticized China for violating international rules by offering loans to African and Southeast Asian nations in a bid to secure natural resources in those regions.

Japan has hosted the African aid conference once every five years since 1993, jointly with international agencies, including the United Nations and the World Bank. Next year’s event will be the first held outside Tokyo.

Japan will call for promotion of clean energy sources, including hydraulic and solar power, and combating desertification in many parts of Africa, the officials said.

It will also seek to work for peace in the region by helping African nations institute democratic processes and hold elections mainly through financial assistance, they said.

Countries around the world are vying to step up their engagement with Africa. The European Union, for example, will hold its first joint summit with the African Union in seven years in December in Lisbon.

Minister of Economy, Trade and Industry Akira Amari is going to South Africa and Botswana this week as part of its bid to strengthen relations.

Japan is lagging far behind China in assistance to Africa.

Chinese President Hu Jintao has visited 11 African countries over the past two years, while few high-ranking Japanese government officials have visited the region since mid-2006, when Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi went there.

Beijing also maintains the presence of more than 1,000 peacekeeping troops in Africa, but no Self-Defense Forces personnel are on any such mission there.