Socialism in Asia and Africa

The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves-And Why It Matters

Most books on North Korea focus on the nuclear issue, that never-ending soap opera of the international diplomacy. In the rare cases when North Korean domestic dynamics are taken into account, the authors (most of whom do not speak or read Korean) concentrate on the official pronouncements of the regime.

Brian Myers takes a fresh approach. He largely ignores what the regime tells the outside world about itself, but concentrates instead on what North Koreans themselves are supposed to believe, paying special attention to the North Korean narratives and mass culture, including movies and television shows. North of the DMZ, mass culture is not about entertainment. Rather it is a lighter version of propaganda whose task is to deliver the same message, but in more palatable form.

As in the case in the Soviet Union, Pyongyang uses works of fiction to send signals which cannot be transmitted otherwise due to current political considerations. For example, when North Korean media found a few kind words for South Korean President Kim Dae Jung who visited North Korea in 2000 with impressive amounts of giveaway cash, North Korean novels still ridiculed him as a pathetic double-dealer.

Few people have the training and expertise (and willpower) needed to peruse boring and voluminous North Korean novels, or spend days watching equally dull North Korean movies and serials. Fortunately Mr. Myers, a student of North Korea for 20 years who is fluent in Korean and a professor at a Korean university, has all these qualities.

The author challenges some established views of North Korean regime. For instance, he believes that the regime is based neither on Stalinism nor Confucianism but rather an extreme nationalism that developed under the influence of Japanese fascism of the 1930s.

North Koreans are taught to see themselves as a unique race bestowed with an unparalleled spiritual purity. This sets them apart from the evil and inherently immoral outsiders, but also makes all contact with the outside world dangerous. Being uniquely pure, spontaneous and naïve-overgrown children, essentially—Koreans have to be guided and protected by a leader.

It is sometimes assumed that the power of the Kim family is based on police brutality and surveillance alone. For those who believe this simplistic picture, it is important to absorb the evidence presented in this book. It makes clear, "the personality cult proceeds from myths about race and its history that cannot but exert strong appeal on the North Korean masses." Indeed, as I know from my own experience with the North Koreans, this worldview seems to be widely accepted and has a direct impact on North Korean politics.

In the official narrative a special role is played by the United States. The Yankees are an eternal enemy of Korea, never to be redeemed (unlike their Soviet colleagues, the North Korean propagandists never make a distinction between "good" American workers and "bad" American capitalists). It is important that Mr. Myers attracts attention to a fact which is well known to a tiny group of North Korean watchers, but remains widely misperceived outside this small community: American goodwill gestures are always presented by North Korean propaganda as tributes that terrified Yankees pay to North Korea and its mighty leader. This was the way U.S. food aid was explained in the 1990s, when America was the major provider of aid to the North. The Cleanest Race has an impressive number of quotes from the North Korean media and fiction which clearly show that actions which Americans saw as a way to show their good will and generosity are invariably interpreted by the North Korean media as yet another sights of Americans' cowardice and weakness. At all probability, North Korean people accept this explanation.

The same worldview makes it possible to deal with a new challenge: the spread of dangerous knowledge about life in South Korea. For decades, the North Koreans were told that the South was a destitute American colony, but in recent decades information about South Korean prosperity began to filter in, largely because of large illegal migration to China and also because of the spread of the South Korean DVDs, smuggled from China. The old myth of a destitute South, populated by beggars and prostitutes, became unsustainable. But the North Korean propagandists quickly cooked up another story which fits nicely into the official myth. Incidentally, Brian Myers was probably first to notice this change of the official narrative, which is not widely known even among North Korea watchers.

According to the new myth, South Korea is doing relatively well, but its people are deeply unhappy. Being true Koreans, pure and spiritual creatures, they see that their land has been polluted by the foreign dominating presence. So, they dream of being re-united with their brethren in the North who maintain the quintessential Korean spirit—thanks to the presence of the wise leader, of course. South Koreans might be eating pure rice every day, but they should not be envied, since they live in a land which, to quote a North Korean novel, "degenerated into a whore of America, covered in bruises from where it was kicked black and blue by the American soldiers boots, or decaying from where the American sewage has seeped in." According to this official narrative, only the presence of the countless U.S. soldiers, assisted by a handful of villainous collaborators, prevents South Koreans from realizing their dream of a happy and pure life under the care of the Dear Leader.

Mr. Myers is skeptical about the hope that goodwill gestures will soften the regime or change its negative view of outsiders. He also believes that the new picture of South Korea inoculates the northern populace against the temptations of South Korean consumer culture. However, he points at another potential problem which could make North Koreans restive: the growing understanding that South Koreans do not look at Kim Jong Il's regime with admiration and hope (in most cases, they cannot care less about their unlucky North Korean brethren). As many dictators have learned to their dismay, ideologies of all kinds, including nationalism, are no good substitute for economic success. However, the right propaganda mix can be helpful in postponing the inevitable.

There are few books that can give the world a peek into the Hermit Kingdom. The Cleanest Race provides a reason to care about how those in North Korea see themselves and the West. It is possibly the best addition to that small library

Andrei Lankov, author of numerous books on the North Korean history and society, is teaching history in Kookmin University, South Korea.

from the Wall Street Journal Europe, 2009-Oct-15, by Julian Morris:

Starving for Freedom
Blame famine on trade restrictions, not on climate change or a lack of Western aid.

Today is World Food Day and, once again, millions of people in East Africa are starving. Some have sought to turn this tragedy into opportunity. Ethiopia's Prime Minister Meles Zenawi blames Western-induced climate change, and demands that rich countries cut greenhouse gas emissions and provide more aid. These views are echoed by the World Bank, Oxfam, Christian Aid and that bellwether of bad ideas, Gordon Brown. But such top-down solutions are doomed to failure. If Africans are to to weather their existing and future climates, the solutions must come from the bottom up.

Birhan Weldu became the poster child for famine in Africa 25 years ago. Then 3 years old, the image of the emaciated girl from the Ethiopian highlands appeared in newspapers across the world and was shown at a "Live Aid" event, viewed by over a billion people. A grown-up Ms. Weldu appeared at the "Live 8" concert in 2005—as if demonstrating the success of the effort mounted by Sir Bob and his buddies.

Although thousands of individuals like Ms. Weldu have been saved by Western charity and taxes, millions more have suffered and died needlessly from famine in East Africa in the past quarter century. But their suffering was not caused by a lack of aid. Nor was it caused primarily by climate change (Western-induced or otherwise). Rather, it was and is the result of policies in the affected countries that inhibit freedom and incentives to trade, own land, and invest in diverse, prosperity-enhancing economic activities.

Before about 1800, famine was a common cause of death everywhere. The majority of the world's population were subsistence farmers. When conditions were good, they produced enough to eat and a little more. When conditions were bad, they consumed their savings. If the bad conditions persisted, they died.

Then, first in England and soon in many other parts of the world, people began to rise above subsistence. They specialized more narrowly than before in the production of certain goods and they traded with others who also specialized. This led to increased output, as specialists were able to produce more than generalists. Competition in the supply of goods drove innovation, which led to further increases in output. Agricultural production rose dramatically and famine declined.

Two European famines of the nineteenth century stand out as exceptions: Ireland from 1845 to 1852, and Finland from 1866 to 1868. Both were the result of oppressive governments restricting the rights of individuals to own land and trade. In both countries, subsistence farming, combined with disease and bad weather, resulted in the death of many.

Since the 1920s, global deaths from drought-related famines have fallen by 99.9%. The reason? Continued specialization and trade, which has skyrocketed the amount of food produced per capita, and has enabled people in drought-prone regions to diversify and become less vulnerable.

In places where trade is restricted, people are forced to remain subsistence farmers. So, when drought occurs, the majority suffer and many die. The Indian drought of 1965 affected 100 million people, of which 1.5 million died. India subsequently liberalized and farmers adopted new technologies, notably high-yielding varieties of wheat and rice developed by Norman Borlaug, a truly deserving recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. Although the droughts of 1987 and 2002 affected three times as many people, there were only 300 reported deaths in 1987 and none in 2002.

The 1983 to 1985 famine in Ethiopia, which Ms. Weldu survived, was a direct result of then-President Mengistu Haile Miriam's policies, which combined socialism with a violent resettlement program. Unable to trade, people engaged in subsistence agriculture. When drought struck in 1983, as it does periodically, millions were unable to obtain enough food. Aid flowed in from foreign governments and from naïve Westerners (including me, since I bought a couple of copies of "Do They Know It's Christmas?"), but much of it was requisitioned by the regime and used to oppress the very people it was supposed to help. Over a million died.

Mengistu continued to implement his socialist vision after the drought, forcing over 12 million people to live in essentially autarkic villages, promoting poverty and inhibiting adaptation. Ethiopia's economy had been growing steadily until Mengistu came to power, with real per capita GDP rising by about 50% in the 20 years before 1973 (in spite of attempts by the government at planned agro-industrialization). But by the time he was eventually forced out of office in 1990, Ethiopia's real per capita output was about 10% lower than in 1973.

Things did not change much during the 1990s, and GDP stagnated. Since coming to power in 1991, Mr. Zenawi has removed some trade restrictions and introduced a commodities exchange. As a result, the economy has grown rapidly. Yet state restrictions on ownership of land, and the government's view that certain agricultural activities are essential, have undermined investment and prohibited the rural poor from fully participating in the economy. This means the recent drought has again hit the rural poor hardest, and left around 14 million people on the verge of starvation.

The pattern repeats across the continent. In the 1970s, Idi Amin murdered and exiled Uganda's traders and nationalized many businesses. The country's economy collapsed. When Yoweri Museveni came to power, he gradually liberalized the economy and it has since prospered. But in the northeast, government forces have clashed with the Lords Resistance Army and with so-called "warrior" pastoralists in Karamoja. Over two million people have been forced into subsistence farming, and are thus at the mercy of the variable climate.

Kenya's economy has also grown rapidly for the past several years, as a result of economic liberalization. But large swathes remain subject to uncertain tenure rules, which make it more difficult to buy, sell or mortgage land, thus inhibiting agricultural improvement and diversification, and acting as barriers to trade. In such areas, tribal conflicts are more frequent, for in the absence of trade, warfare is the only way to improve one's lot. Kenya's land reforms of 2009 promise to exacerbate this situation by further undermining security of tenure.

The situation in Somalia is similar: Years of lawlessness and warfare have destroyed formal property rights and trade. As a consequence, about half of the population now faces the prospect of starvation.

Instead of carping about climate change and more aid, the World Bank, Western governments and all those charities in Africa should learn the lessons from one of this year's economics Nobel laureates. Elinor Ostrom has spent a lifetime analyzing the ways in which humans devise institutions—from formal property rights to informal "rules of the game"—that let them solve their own problems. Her work emphasizes the need for such institutions to be built from the bottom up, without interference from higher levels of government.

Unfortunately, the West still incentivizes the political elite in Africa to impose rules from the top down, by providing "aid" that lets them ignore their citizens. Let's stop "aiding" these kleptocrats with our taxes. Those leaders who genuinely want to govern will have to stop interfering, so their people can own property and trade.

Mr. Morris is executive director of International Policy Network.

from the Wall Street Journal, 2010-Feb-18, p.A18:

Why Africa Is Poor
Ghana beats up on its biggest foreign investors.

President Obama headlined his first trip to sub-Saharan Africa last July with a stop in Ghana. Speaking to the parliament in Accra, Mr. Obama praised the country's growth and its example that "development depends on good governance." Eight months later, Ghana's government is turning the nation into a cautionary tale for foreign investors.

Exhibit A is the case of Kosmos Energy, a U.S. company based in Texas, which has lately seen capricious government meddling in a deal to sell a $4 billion stake in a Ghanaian oil field to ExxonMobil Corp. Ghanaian Energy Minister Joe Oteng-Adjei suggested in a letter to Exxon reviewed by Journal reporter Will Connors that the government would "support the strategic intent and efforts of [Ghana National Petroleum] to acquire Kosmos's Ghana assets at a fair market value."

By "fair market value," Mr. Oteng-Adjei means fire-sale prices. While the government insisted later that it would not block the Exxon deal, which is still in place, the desired affect was achieved. The strategy lets the government disavow its intention to directly intervene in deals while potentially scaring away potential buyers and making it possible for the government to buy the oil fields cheaply, possibly reselling them to a third party.

That's the kind of official thuggery more frequently associated with the likes of Nigeria, where the vast oil and gas resources have driven corruption and exploitation while the people continue to live in poverty. Until Kosmos's investment uncovered the Jubilee oil field in 2007, there had been little success in exploration in Ghana.

When Kosmos began its project under the then-ruling New Patriotic Party, the business environment seemed relatively stable with adequate protections for foreign investors. Under Ghana law, consent for a deal such as the one between Kosmos and Exxon can't be unreasonably withheld, delayed or denied. Such contract protection began to dissolve in January 2009, with the election of the leftist National Democratic Congress.

Other foreign investors are also getting the Kosmos treatment. In 2008 Vodaphone, the British mobile phone company, bought a 70% stake in Ghana Telecom. At the time, the company issued a statement that it was "delighted" to be "working in partnership with the Government of Ghana." By April 2009, the deal was on the rocks, as Ghana's government set up a "review committee" to question the details. Earlier this month, Ghana Vice President John Dramani Mahama insisted that the government wasn't planning to break the deal despite "concerns."

After getting a license for offshore exploration in November 2008, the Norwegian oil company Aker was told this year that its development license was invalid, though the agreement had been unanimously approved by Ghana's parliament. Aker investment manager Maria Moraeus Hanssen said the government position had "no basis in law or fact."

Attracting foreign investment has been a pillar of Ghana's development strategy, with the government pitching itself as the "Gateway to West Africa." Spooking new investors by repudiating contracts will rapidly ruin the country's prospects for long-term development.

The Obama Administration has so far been silent on the shadows now haunting the country it heralded as a source of hope and leadership in Africa. Getting the country back on the track of moderate good governance and respect for the rule of law would be an important example to set on the poorest continent.

from the Wall Street Journal Asia, 2009-May-8, by Siddharth Varadarajan:

Indian Communist Chic
The Left Front stands to be a big electoral winner.

At first blush it may seem a paradox to some that India, the world's largest democracy, is also home to one of the world's most politically influential Communist movements outside of China. But India's coalition of Communist parties, known as the Left Front, isn't disappearing any time soon. They may very well gain influence after the results of India's national election are announced May 16.

If they do, the Left Front could reshape Indian policy abroad as well as at home. The Communists can be expected to call for policies that India's elites, who aspire to greater liberalization of the economy and closer corporate and strategic ties with the U.S., may well find unpalatable. They might seek to slow down the pace of military-to-military and nuclear cooperation between the two countries. The Left Front would also want the government to build closer economic and political ties with Russia, China and perhaps even Iran.

The Left Front has gained power not so much because of the popularity of its program but because it has positioned itself as a kingmaker between India's two largest parties, the Congress Party of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, and the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party. Although the Left Front has never held more than 12% of seats in Parliament, it has wielded more influence over the past five years than ever before. In 2004, the support of the Left Front was crucial to the ability of Mr. Singh's Congress-led coalition to form a majority government. Today, Congress is wondering whether that scenario might repeat itself this year.

Because of this dynamic, the Left Front could gain in influence in this election even if they win fewer seats in parliament than their current 64. Aware of their own strength as powerbrokers, the Communists have moved aggressively to capitalize on it. On the eve of the election, they resurrected a loose coalition of leftist and regional parties known as the Third Front to present voters with a viable national alternative to the two big players. The group is disparate in terms of leaders and ideologies, but it is expected to perform well in states like Andhra Pradesh, Orissa, Tamil Nadu and Uttar Pradesh.

If the BJP were to do extremely well in this election, the Left Front might play little or no role in government. But in a best-case scenario for the Left, if the Third Front does well it might well become a magnet for regional parties previously allied with one of the major parties. With coherent national policies and several decades of administrative experience in Bengal and Kerala, the Communists are a logical pole toward which regional players can gravitate. And if the Communists are the single largest formation within the front, they might even stake claim to lead the new government. The front-runner under such a scenario would be Buddhadeb Bhattacharya, the leader of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) who, as chief minister of West Bengal, is, paradoxically, seen as an investor-friendly administrator.

Part of the reason India's Communists have been able to remain relevant is the long-term decline in the electoral fortunes of the Congress and the BJP. Its policies too have appeal. While parties like the BJP inflame religious passions for political ends, the Left is seen as a consistent defender of minority rights and secular values. As the economy slows down in the face of worldwide recession, the Communists are also credited with saving India from a worse fate by blocking Congress efforts at banking and insurance deregulation and strongly rooting for an employment guarantee scheme for millions of poor families in the countryside.

The Communists' ideological pragmatism has also contributed to their political success. Whatever the Communists might say in Delhi about the evils of economic reform, their state-level governments have tended to be pro-business. In Bengal, for example, the Marxist-led government of Mr. Bhattacharya came under fire from human-rights activists, Maoists and leftist intellectuals for attempting compulsorily to acquire land from peasants on behalf of large corporate investors like the Tatas.

The Communists are not unstoppable, though. The problem for the Left is that the pragmatism which makes them such an important player in the superstructure of Indian politics is also eroding their traditional support among workers and peasants at the base. The Marxist party's emphasis on parliamentary politics and top-down coalition building has not helped it to expand its influence nationally. As the party and its allies vacate the space for "revolutionary" politics, Maoist insurgents have moved in to fill the void, establishing a strong presence in nearly 20% of the country's districts. In Bengal and Kerala, unpopular policies -- including those that smack of the "neoliberalism" the comrades excoriate -- are likely to produce setbacks for the Communists in the present election. In the long run, these trends might well lead to their permanent weakening as a parliamentary force.

Yet in 2004, the two biggest national parties together polled fewer than half of all votes cast, the first time this had ever happened in countrywide polling. The story this time is not likely to be very different. The Communists, therefore, are going to remain a force to be reckoned with, at least for this election cycle and in the future too.

Mr. Varadarajan is associate editor of the Hindu in New Delhi.

Commie surge, not so much, it happily turns out:

from Bloomberg, 2009-May-19, web-posted 2009-May-18, by Cherian Thomas, Kartik Goyal and Shobhana Chandra:

Indian Stock Surge Shows Investors Anticipate More Open Economy

New Delhi -- India's record stock-market surge after the election triumph of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's Congress Party is a sign of just how much investors want the next government to open Asia's third-biggest economy.

Expectations are soaring as Singh, 76, starts his second term without the need for support from the communist allies who choked his market-opening efforts from 2004. Investors are betting the Oxford-trained economist will remove the last barriers to foreign investments in financial services and re- start asset sales to help trim a widening budget deficit.

“There's a real sense of urgency in taking this event and translating it into tangible results,” said Nick Chamie, global head of emerging-markets research at RBC Capital Markets in Toronto. “If we don't see some positive signs on an improving fiscal deficit in relatively short order, we could end up again with a weaker equity market, a weaker rupee and reduced confidence in the government's ability.”

The benchmark Sensitive Index, or Sensex, jumped 17 percent yesterday, breaching the daily limit and forcing share trading to be halted for the day for the first time. The rupee climbed 3.1 percent against the dollar to 47.92 in Mumbai and the benchmark bond yield fell 12 basis points.

Among the names being speculated by the Indian media to take over the reigns of the finance ministry is Palaniappan Chidambaram, who had the job for more than four years until last November, when he was moved to the home ministry to tackle terrorism after the Mumbai attacks. Chidambaram, 63, presided over a record average growth rate of almost 9 percent since 2004.

Mukherjee, Nath

Other potential candidates for the position include acting finance minister Pranab Mukherjee, Commerce Minister Kamal Nath, 62, Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission, Montek Singh Ahluwalia, 65, and former central bank governor Chakravarthy Rangarajan, the Economic Times reported yesterday.

Congress and its allies won 261 of the 543 elected lower- house seats, with the party getting 206 lawmakers of its own, the most since 1991, when Singh as finance minister abandoned Soviet-style state planning and introduced free-market policies that have helped India's economy quadruple in size.

The immediate interest among investors is the fiscal stimulus the government can provide to revive an economy growing at its weakest pace since 2003. The finance minister may unveil this year's budget by July. Singh's government said before the elections that the economy needs stimulus of at least another 1 percent of gross domestic product.

Six-Month `Honeymoon'

“They'll have a honeymoon of six to eight months,” said John Praveen, chief investment strategist at Pramerica International Investments Advisers, a unit of Prudential Financial Inc. in Newark, New Jersey. “As long as they're delivering on some of the expectations, the markets will hold the gains. They have to make the right start.”

The Reserve Bank of India estimates the fiscal and monetary steps announced so far are worth more than $85 billion, or almost 7 percent of GDP.

The tax cuts and increased spending since December widened the federal budget deficit to 6 percent of GDP in the year ended March 31, from a target of 2.5 percent.

The prospect of an increased budget shortfall prompted Standard & Poor's to say in February that India's spending plans were “not sustainable” and the nation's credit rating may be cut to junk if finances worsen. S&P has a BBB- long term credit rating on India, the lowest investment-grade level.

Window of Opportunity

S&P and Moody's Investors Service, which places India two steps below investment grade, yesterday indicated the South Asian nation has a chance to improve its fiscal situation after the resounding election victory.

The poll result gives the government more “political space” to sell stakes in state-run companies and improve revenue, Moody's senior analyst Aninda Mitra told Bloomberg News.

S&P's director of sovereign ratings Takahira Ogawa said “there is a possibility for the government to implement various measures to reform for further expansion of the economy and for the fiscal consolidation.”

Singh had to depend on the communist parties to gain a majority in parliament in his first term. The communists were opposed to his plans to raise funds by selling stakes in National Hydroelectric Power Corp., Oil India Ltd., Bharat Heavy Electricals Ltd. and National Aluminium Co.

“Among the key reforms will be disinvestment now - the new government will focus on fiscal responsibility,” said Rajeev Malik, an economist at Macquarie Group Ltd. in Singapore. “The key issue will be for the government to balance the need for additional fiscal stimulus with a credible plan for fiscal consolidation.”

Communist Impact

Communists also stalled a bill to raise the foreign- investment ceiling for Prudential Plc and other insurers to 49 percent from 26 percent, and resisted legislation aimed at removing a 10 percent cap on the voting rights of foreign investors in non-state banks. They also blocked entry of global retailers such as Wal-Mart Stores Inc. into India.

“Now the Congress party can rule with a minimum number of coalition partners and with a mandate for reform,” said Rory Medcalf, an India specialist at the Lowy Institute for International Policy in Sydney. “This is exceptionally good news for India.”

from BBC News, 2009-May-4, by Roland Buerk:

Communism on rise in recession-hit Japan

Tokyo -- The protesters gathered in a park in the shadow of corporate headquarter skyscrapers, a short walk from Ginza, Tokyo's most upscale shopping district.

Hundreds strong, they included workers already laid off as the global downturn battered Japan's economy, and those who feared they might be next.

The demonstrators set off on a march towards Japan's Diet building - or parliament - carrying red flags.

"I support the Communist Party because it's the one that thinks about workers first," said one man.

"We're demonstrating to get better rights for the temporary workers," said another.

"The Communist Party is the only party that gets really serious about problems like this."

Fists in the air

Lined up on a set of steps near the Diet, wearing suits, red sashes and beaming smiles were officials from the Japanese Communist Party.

They joined the protesters chanting and raising their fists in the air.

The Communist Party has always had a surprisingly large role in Japan, the world's second biggest economy.

But while it had been fading towards irrelevance, now as the recession bites it is on the rise again.

The party already has more than 400,000 members and people are joining at the rate of 1,000 a month.

In comparison, the membership of the Liberal Democratic Party, the largest member of the governing coalition, is twice the size. But its numbers are declining.

"Many people are beginning to think: 'Is Japanese capitalism OK as it is?'" said Akira Kasai, a Communist member of the Diet's House of Representatives.

"Living standards are going down. The gap between rich and poor is growing."

Lost generation

Communist ideology has been spread in Japan in unusual ways.

There was a book, Kanikosen - The Crab Factory Ship, which raced back up the bestsellers' lists.

A classic tale of proletarian fishermen uniting to rise up against their bosses, it had been almost forgotten since it was written in 1929.

Publishers have also produced a manga, or comic, version of Das Kapital, Karl Marx's treatise on how capitalism would collapse under the weight of its own contradictions.

One new Communist Party member we met in a restaurant found out about Marxism on the internet.

"I got interested in Karl Marx a few years ago," she said.

"In capitalism now we are controlled by the capitalists, or capital. But I think in communism society we can think about whole of the society and decide our economic activities in democratic way."

The woman, 34, did not want to be identified for fear her employers, whom she claimed disapproved of the Communists, would find out.

But she had told her family.

"My parents were very surprised that I joined the party," she said. "They are not supporters of the Communist Party. They don't understand correctly, I think."

The woman said she was a member of a "lost generation" - people who came into the employment market during Japan's long stagnation in the 1990s and could not find proper jobs.

As the economy picked up at the start of this century, employers picked graduates untainted by years of drifting.

Job insecurity

Now Japan's economy, which relies for growth on sales abroad of cars, electronics and machinery, is struggling again.

Exports have fallen by nearly half compared to a year ago, and industrial production has dived.

The traditional Japanese dream of a job for life has been further undermined by reforms of the labour market in 2004 that allowed manufacturers to take on temporary workers. About a third of the workforce is now on short-term contracts and their jobs are the most threatened.

Communist members of parliament make much of their efforts to get workers a better deal by holding talks with company managers.

Unions are helping some to take their employers to court claiming wrongful dismissal.

Not even the Communists themselves expect to win power soon.

But they won nearly five million votes in the last election for the more powerful lower house of the Diet, and that was before the downturn.

They are hoping to do better when the Japanese next go to the polls later this year.

"Of course the final goal is a socialist, communist society in Japan, overcoming capitalism," said Akira Kasai.

"But before that we are taking a step-by-step approach. The first stage is to solve problems of labour and living standards according to people's demand."

from Reuters, 2009-Apr-6, by Jon Herskovitz, with additional reporting by Kim Junghyun:

ANALYSIS-North Korea Kim Jong-il's fortunes soar on rocket

SEOUL - North Korean leader Kim Jong-il has a stronger hand to squeeze concessions from global powers and keep his iron grip in place over the destitute state after launching a long-range rocket on Sunday, analysts said.

The launch was a high-stakes gamble for Kim, 67, whose stroke last August raised the first serious questions in years about his ability to lead and whether there was anyone waiting in the wings to replace him as the head of Asis's only communist dynasty.

Even though U.S. and South Korean officials said the launch was technically a failure because it did not send a satellite into space, as the North said it did, it still appears to be a boon for Kim, who has been lauded in his state's media.

"Pride among North Koreans stemming from what they believe to be a successful launch would help keep his regime intact ... creating a better atmosphere for Kim to hand over the power to his successor," said Koh Yu-hwan, a Dongguk University professor of North Korea studies and an expert on the state's ideology.

The North's power elite has been in a state of flux over the past few months, with sweeping changes to the cabinet and powerful military. A new parliament was elected last month to sit for five years, which ushered in a new pecking order in its ruling communist Workers' Party of Korea.

Analysts said the new government line-up may have been considering a post-Kim era, especially after recent pictures showed him looking frail. But it may now be looking to cement his legacy ahead of major celebrations planned for 2012.

Kim, who has been mostly absent from state functions since his illness, is supposed to re-emerge on Thursday for the annual meeting of the rubber stamp Supreme People's Assembly, basking in patriotic glory from the missile launch.

"The timing of the launch was designed to coincide with the start of Kim's new mandate and to herald what the North's propaganda calls 'a great prosperous powerful nation' the country aims to build by 2012," Koh said.

The year 2012 marks the 100th anniversary of the birthday of state founder and Kim's father, Kim Il-sung. The country will use it to showcase its communist system, which experts said is designed to keep the Kim family in power.

"With the launch, Kim Jong-il has more time to ponder succession while remaining in full control," said Paik Hak-soon, director at the Center for North Korean studies at the Sejong Institute, near Seoul.

INTERNATIONAL LEVERAGE

Kim has given no indication as to which of his three known sons, all educated overseas and mostly unknown to the average North Korean, might succeed him.

Even if he does not anoint an heir, his system will likely endure after his death in the form of collective leadership, perhaps aligned around one of his sons or powerful cadres such as his brother-in-law Jang Song-taek, analysts said.

While basking in praise at home, Kim has drawn global scorn from the United States, South Korea and Japan, which say he used the satellite launch as a cover for a long-range missile test, violating U.N. resolutions.

Despite the prospect of rebuke and punishment, analysts said the launch helps the North's tested strategy of using military threat to wring concessions by adding a new missile card to play.

"The more importance we attach to this test, the more negotiating leverage the North Koreans will create for themselves," said William Tobey, at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University.

The launch may have also changed the dynamics of six-way talks on ending Pyongyang's atomic ambitions, experts said, which could lead it to try to water down its existing obligations and resist calls from the five dialogue partners to agree to a nuclear inspection system.

The North's broken down economy produces few goods wanted by the outside world, except weapons. Despite sanctions, North Korea has been able to generate large sums of hard cash through missile sales, with reports saying Iran is a major customer.

It is too early to say if a launch that appeared to be a partial success will entice foreign buyers, who South Korean media said were on hand to watch the launch.

But Peter Beck, an expert on Korean affairs at American University in Washington, said ahead of the launch: (A success) is the best possible advertisement they could make to let the rogues of the world know that they have a missile that they might want to buy."

from the Times of London, 2009-Apr-24:

US journalists to stand trial in North Korea

Two U.S journalists detained in North Korea are to go on trial for unspecified criminal charges.

Laura Ling and Euna Lee, who work for Current TV, were arrested in MArch near North Korea's border with China, while reporting on Koran refugees living in China.

Pyongyang's official Korean Central News Agency said the reporters would stand trial 'on the basis of the confirmed crimes.'

It did not say exactly what charges they face or when the trial would take place.

State-run media had said late last month that they were being investigated for illegal entry and 'hostile acts.'

Under North Korea's criminal code, conviction for illegal entry could mean up to three years in a labor camp.

It was unclear what charges would be applied for 'hostile acts,' said South Korean legal expert Moon Dae-hong. But conviction on espionage or 'hostility toward North Koreans' carries a sentence of five to 10 years in prison.

In Seoul, Unification Ministry spokesman Kim Ho-nyeon urged the North to abide by legal procedures during the trial.

The Americans' prolonged detention comes amid increasing tensions in the area over North Korea's nuclear ambitions. Intelligence experts are acknowledge that North Korea is now a fully fledged nuclear power with the potential to kill millions in Japan and South Korea.

Observers believ the move to put the two women on trial is intended to pressurise Washington into talks with the North.

Paik Hak-Soon, of the Sejong Institute think-tank, said North Korea would probably bring spying charges against the pair.

"This means that Pyongyang will actively use them as playing cards to put pressure on Washington to engage in direct negotiations with the North," he said.

Pyongyang's initial hopes for policy change under the Barack Obama administration were giving way to disappointment and anger following US and UN condemnation of its April 5 rocket launch, said Mr Paik..

The North reacted angrily to the rebuke, announcing last week that it has abandoned six-party disarmament talks and would restart its nuclear weapons programmes.

Pyongyang says the rocket put a satellite into orbit, but the United States and its allies believe it was a disguised long-range missile test.

from CNN.com, 2008-Jul-19:

Zimbabwe introduces $100 billion banknotes

HARARE, Zimbabwe -- Zimbabwe's troubled central bank introduced $100 billion banknotes Saturday in a desperate bid to ease the recurrent cash shortages plaguing the inflation-ravaged economy.

The bills officially come into circulation Monday, although they were on the foreign currency dealers market Saturday.

As high as they are, though, the bills still aren't enough to buy a loaf of bread. They can buy only four oranges.

The new note is equal to just one U.S. dollar.

Once-prosperous Zimbabwe has seen an unprecedented economic meltdown since it gained independence in 1980, with the official inflation rate now at 2.2 million percent.

Gideon Gono, governor of the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe, said the new notes are for "the convenience of the banking public and corporate sector" in light of price hikes.

"The RBZ has noted with concern the unjustifiable and incessant general increases in prices of goods and services. It is therefore appealing to the business community to follow ethical business practices as well as take an interest in the plight of the general public," Gono said in a statement dated Friday.

Zimbabwe started issuing large bank notes in December, starting with denominations of $250,000.

In January, the government issued bills in denominations of $1 million, $5 million, and $10 million -- and in May, it issued bills from $25 million and $50 million up to $25 billion and $50 billion.

The new bills are actually bearer checks and have an expiration date of December 31. Zimbabwe has not had formal currency since the introduction of bearer checks as a temporary measure in 2003.

"The RBZ is fighting a losing battle," economist John Robertson said in Harare. "As long as the inflation remains high, cash shortages will persist. There is need to address the inflation by increasing production so that too goods do not [cost] a lot of money."

from the Times of London, 2008-Jul-11, by James Bone:

China and Russia veto UN Zimbabwe sanctions

New York — China and Russia tonight vetoed a US draft resolution in the UN Security Council that would have slapped sanctions on Robert Mugabe's regime.

The two veto-holding powers joined South Africa, Libya and Vietnam in opposing the draft which sought to impose an assets freeze and a travel ban on Mr Mugabe and 13 of his cronies, as well as an arms embargo on Zimbabwe.

Western officials had argued that the sanctions would help pressure Mr Mugabe's ruling Zanu-PF into a political settlement with the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, led by Morgan Tsvangirai, who won the first round of the presidential poll on March 29.

But Zimbabwe called the sanctions “escalatory and tragic”. In a statement circulated at UN headquarters, Zimbabwe said the UN Security Council was being used “as a force multiplier in support of Britain's colonial crusade against Zimbabwe".

“The situation in Zimbabwe does not warrant the attention that it is getting. Zimbabwe's quarrel with Britain is purely bilateral and has no place on the UN Security Council agenda,” it said.

The resolution targeted Mr Mugabe and his inner circle, including Constantine Chiwenga, the commander of the Zimbabwean Army; Augustine Chihuri, the police chief; Perence Shiri, the head of the air force; and Happyton Bonyongwe, the chief of the Central Intelligence Organisation.

The US proposal met strong resistance from South Africa, which argued that its mediation efforts required more time.

Russia was also strident in voicing objections, even though President Medvedev signed up to the idea of new financial sanctions at the G8 summit in Japan earlier this week.

Russia argued that the UN Security Council had no place in certifying an election of a member state.

China has a policy of non-interference in countries' internal affair but had been expected to abstain to avoid a fresh wave of protests ahead of the Olympics in Beijing.

from the Telegraph of London, 2006-Oct-21, by Damien McElroy:

North Korea locks up disabled in 'subhuman' gulags, says UN

North Korea operates a rigorous system of eugenics that locks up those deemed subnormal, ranging from the disabled to dwarves, according to a UN report released yesterday.

A system of gulags is designed to ensure that those who do not conform to the state's designation of normal do not pass on their genes by having children.

"Those with disabilities are sent away from the capital city and particularly those with mental disability are detained in areas or camps known as 'Ward 49' with harsh and subhuman conditions," wrote Vitit Muntarbhorn, a Thai lawyer who is special rapporteur for human rights in North Korea. Evidence was gathered from defectors to South Korea.

The report said that dwarves are not allowed to reproduce and that they are rounded up and relocated. Marriages at the camps are permitted but having children is not.

Shut away for life, the afflicted are subjected to harsh and sub-human conditions. Food is scarce and of poor quality and beatings are commonplace. There are extensive reports of other forms of torture, including chemical weapons tests and germ agent experiments. Those not used as laboratory guinea pigs are ordered to carry out back breaking work.

North Korea is not the only totalitarian state to retain a fascination with a goal of breeding a better population by eliminating those with "weak" genes.

Since the fall of the Soviet bloc, it is one of the last states to implement the practice. Pyongyang is also dedicated to the principle of racial purity. Women who have sexual relations with the small Chinese community in North Korea are often purged.

The report said: "If they carry a child of non-Korean ethnicity, they may be subjected to discrimination and/or violence, with a dire impact on the babies."

The report was delivered to the UN General Assembly which has been asked to censure the Stalinist dictatorship.

from Time Magazine, 1978-Feb-20:

Thorns Appear in Lotus Land
The Pathet Lao builds a harsh new world

For centuries Laos was a sleepy country of rice fields, water buffaloes and a notably pacific people who seemed to find little to fault in their fertile lotus land.

But two decades of civil war and three years of Communist rule have taken the bloom off. Under the Puritan discipline of the Pathet Lao, who seized control in 1975, the gentle life of the Laotians has undergone a harsh transformation.

Nowhere is this more evident than in Phong Saly province, a remote region that juts into southern China. There, the Pathet Lao have set up prison camps for "enemies of the state" that seem like something out of Solzhenitsyn: their heavy log walls are covered with barbed wire and bordered with sharp bamboo stakes; beyond, there is nothing but dense jungle and forbidding mountains. "You can try to escape," the guards taunt their charges, "but we'll have you back here within seven days."

This jungle Siberia is the maximum-security wing of a detention system that may give Laos the sad distinction of having more political prisoners per capita than any other country.

By the regime's own reckoning 40,000 Laotians (out of a population of 3.4 million) have been herded off to "reeducation camps."

Most of them are former army officers and "rightist" officials linked with the old pro-U.S. government, and, at least in theory, they can look forward to release after they have learned their lessons.

But the regime's figures do not include 12,000 unfortunates who have been packed off to Phong Saly. There, no pretense at re-education is made. As one high Pathet Lao official told Australian Journalist John Everingham, who himself spent eight days in a Lao prison last year, "No one ever returns."

Those who wind up in Phong Saly are accused of specific crimes, although the charges may be as vague as being a "spy" or a "reactionary." Since Pathet Lao soldiers have been given blanket permission to charge just about anyone and no trials are necessary, many Laotians have been banished to Phong Saly for little reason.

Among others sent to the camps: Khong Khetsakhorn, a machinery operator whose crime was to have worked on USAID construction projects, and Ut Philaphan-deth, a scion of an important Laotian business family, who was accused of harboring "a nest of spies."

The only prisoners known to have walked away from Phong Saly are five of a group of 15 Thai nationals released from Laotian jails last month as a gesture of reconciliation. They tell a grim tale of forced labor, undernourishment and disease. Said one: "We were so thin, so hungry that we even tried to roast toads. We pleaded for medicine, but the doctor wouldn't give us any. We thought we would die." Others told of three prisoners thrown into tiger cages for having killed and eaten a guard's dog; one Thai claimed that disease had killed at least 10% of the 600 or so inmates at his camp.

The Pathet Lao's plans for Phong Saly appear to be patterned on what the Vietnamese Communists euphemistically call a "new economic zone," a remote area where primitive agriculture can absorb a large population of political exiles who are there to stay. Inmates in other parts of the Lao gulag may also be sinking some unwanted permanent roots. Many who were shipped off to re-education centers two years ago are still there, and some prisoners' wives have been warned to pack up and join their husbands if they ever want to see them again. The Pathet Lao's reluctance to let its captives go is understandable: of 16 prisoners released from the Vieng Sai re-education camps in 1976, more than half eventually fled across the Mekong River into Thailand.

from the Orange County Register via the Dart Center, 2001-Apr-29, by Anh Do and Hieu Tran Phan:

Millions of lives changed forever with Saigon's fall

"I'm sorry, so sorry," he says. "Soldiers don't cry."

But his shoulders contort, his body racks with sobs. His hands try to wipe away the tears.

"Please forgive me," murmurs the former lieutenant colonel, shaken by memories of nearly 13 years in a prison camp. "This is what re-education does to you."

Hung Huy Nguyen, 71, along with an estimated 1 million South Vietnamese, is a man who came to know death and torture in the years following a war that tore apart families, countries, generations.

His was a world where friends died suddenly. Violently. Where others slowly wasted away from malnutrition and disease. Where stealing a grain of rice led to lashes on the back, down bony legs. Where men and women silently endured, night after night, grasping at hope that someday they might see their children again.

There are no official figures on how many prisoners were executed or how many died from poor treatment. There are no known government records of who was sent to the "re-education" camps, or for how long. There are no archives on the jails, or of what went on. Such are the ways of war, and the treatment of those on the losing side.

A four-month review by the Register of these camps, however, shows a widespread pattern of neglect, persecution and death for tens of thousands of Vietnamese who fought side by side with American soldiers.

To corroborate the experiences of refugees now living in Orange County, the Register interviewed dozens of former inmates and their families, both in the United States and Vietnam; analyzed hundreds of pages of documents, including testimony from more than 800 individuals sent to jail; and interviewed Southeast Asian scholars. The review found:

• An estimated 1 million people were imprisoned without formal charges or trials.

• 165,000 people died in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam's re-education camps, according to published academic studies in the United States and Europe.

• Thousands were abused or tortured: their hands and legs shackled in painful positions for months, their skin slashed by bamboo canes studded with thorns, their veins injected with poisonous chemicals, their spirits broken with stories about relatives being killed.

• Prisoners were incarcerated for as long as 17 years, according to the U.S. Department of State, with most terms ranging from three to 10 years.

• At least 150 re-education prisons were built after Saigon fell 26 years ago.

• One in three South Vietnamese families had a relative in a re-education camp.

Vietnamese government officials declined to be questioned but agreed to release a statement about the camps:

"After the southern part of Vietnam was liberated, those people who had worked for and cooperated with the former government presented themselves to the new government. Thanks to the policy of humanity, clemency and national reconciliation of the State of Vietnam, these people were not punished.

"Some of them were admitted to re-education facilities in order to enable them to repent their mistakes and reintegrate themselves into the community."

Officially, 34,641 former prisoners and 128,068 of their relatives fled to America, according to the State Department. At least 2,000 former inmates live in Orange County.

And the legacy of the prisons continues today.

Authors, artists, journalists and monks are routinely arrested and jailed across Vietnam, human-rights activists say.

In Orange County, many former inmates wake up in the dark, shaking from nightmares. Others find themselves sleepwalking, aimlessly wandering. Some live in fear, trusting only family.

Dozens of former prisoners declined to be interviewed by The Orange County Register, saying they worry about reprisals against relatives who remain in their homeland. Most asked not to be named.

Some agreed to tell their tales, then hid when they heard knocks on the door. Still others shared their stories only to regret it later, the searing memories too much to bear.

In refugee enclaves throughout the United States, anger and hatred toward the Hanoi government are common. There are ongoing boycotts of Vietnamese goods, especially in Orange County, where more than 250,000 immigrants settled, forming the nation's largest Vietnamese population.

Some survivors, however, are beginning to speak out, to give testimony to their treatment and to those who died.

To offer a full and authoritative picture about what re-education meant, this project tells the story of life in one prison – Camp Z30-D – jail to thousands of the highest- ranking officers in the South Vietnamese army.

[This story is the introduction to a ten part series, readable here at the Dart Center. -AMPP Ed.]

from the Wall Street Journal via OpinionJournal.com, 2006-Dec-19, by Melanie Kirkpatrick:

Pastor Buck Is a Rescuer . . .
Helping North Korea's refugees is the key to regime change.

This being The Wall Street Journal, we went straight to the bottom line. How much, we asked our visitor at a recent editorial board meeting, does it cost to free one North Korean refugee hiding in China?

The Rev. Phillip Buck pauses a moment before replying, apparently making the yuan-to-dollar conversions on the abacus in his mind. "If I do it myself," he says, "the cost is $800 per person. If I hire a broker to do it, it's $1,500."

Pastor Buck is a rescuer. It's a job title that applies to a courageous few--mostly Americans and South Koreans and predominantly Christians--who operate the underground railroad that ferries North Korean refugees out of China to South Korea, and now, thanks to 2004 legislation, to the U.S. Mr. Buck, an American from Seattle, says he has rescued more than 100 refugees and helped support another 1,000 who are still on the run. For this "crime"--China's policy is to hunt down and repatriate North Koreans--he spent 15 months in a Chinese prison. He was released in August.

The plight of the tens of thousands of North Korean refugees in China is a humanitarian crisis that has received scant world attention. It won't be on the agenda of the six-party talks, which are scheduled to restart today in Beijing. But the experience of Pastor Buck and other rescuers is worth noting as negotiators sit down with Kim Jong Il's emissaries. North Korea won't change, they believe, so long as Kim remains in power. Follow that logic, and regime change is the proper goal.

The refugees, Pastor Buck argues, are the key to regime change in North Korea and, by inference, the key to halting the North's nuclear and missile programs. Help one man or woman escape, he says, and that person will get word to his family back home about the freedom that awaits them on the outside. Others will follow, and the regime will implode. This is what happened in 1989, when Hungary refused to turn back East Germans fleeing to the West, thereby hastening the collapse of the Berlin Wall.

---

Pastor Buck was born in North Korea in 1941 and fled with his brothers to the South during the Korean War. He emigrated to the U.S. in the '80s, becoming a citizen in 1992. When famine hit North Korea in the late '90s, and millions died, he raised relief funds in Korean churches in the U.S. "I helped send 150 tons of flour and rice to the North," he says, "and 70 tons of fertilizer . . . This was a time when government rations had stopped and people were living off grass."

But on visits to the North, he soon realized that the government was stealing the food intended for starving citizens. "I changed my mind" about the efficacy of aid, he says, and in 1998 he joined the effort to help people escape. "If you see someone who is drowning in the river, wouldn't you reach out and help that person?" he asks. "That's what was in my heart."

Pastor Buck is nothing if not determined. In 2002, while in a Southeast Asian country with a group of refugees he had guided there, his apartment in Yanji city, in northeast China, was raided. Nineteen refugees were captured and a copy of his passport was confiscated. With his identity now compromised, Mr. Buck returned to the U.S. and underwent legal proceedings to change his name. John Yoon, the name he was born with, was dead; Phillip Buck was born.

The new Pastor Buck returned to China, where, on May 25, 2005, he was arrested and eventually convicted of the crime of helping illegal immigrants. Thanks to the intervention of the U.S. government, he was deported before he could be sentenced.

Another American, Steve Kim, was not so lucky. Mr. Kim, a furniture importer from Huntington, N.Y., has been in prison in China since September 2003, sentenced to five years for smuggling aliens. Mr. Kim, who, like Mr. Buck, is of Korean ancestry and is a Christian, became aware of the plight of the refugees during business trips to China. He funded two safe houses and paid for refugees' passage on the underground railroad. Beijing refuses to grant him parole, saying foreigners are not eligible. His wife and three children will pass their fourth Christmas without him.

Mr. Buck, meanwhile, will celebrate Christmas at home in Seattle, along with four refugees, now settled in South Korea, whom he has invited to spend the holiday with him and his family. These refugees--two men and two women--have harrowing personal tales of starvation, death and repression in the North and desperate lives on the run in China.

---

One young man, who asks that his name not be used for fear of retribution on family members still at home, spent time in the North Korean gulag, after being captured in China and repatriated. He was tortured, he says--rolling up his trousers at a recent press conference in Washington, D.C. to display the scars on his legs.

One morning at roll call, he recounts, one of his cellmates, a man who had been badly beaten during the night, was too sick to get out of bed. The guards ordered the prisoners to carry the injured man into the woods and bury him. "I keep thinking, maybe he would still be alive if we hadn't buried him," the escapee says. The name of the dead man was Kim Young Jin. The name of the prison is Chong Jin. Says the man who escaped: "I am very glad to be here, and tell the people in America how life in North Korea really is."

Pastor Buck spent last Christmas in jail. "My cellmates were criminals," he says, "12 in all, murderers and rapists." His diary entry for Dec. 24, 2005, notes that he distributed the chocolates his children had sent him as Christmas gifts to his cellmates. And this year? "I am so excited that I can celebrate this Christmas with lots of joy," his diary entry for last Thursday reads.

His final words are for the refugees. "I pray, let the Christmas spirit be with those North Korean refugees still in China. Let them be safe too."

from the Associated Press via the International Herald Tribune, 2006-Dec-21:

Turkmenistan's authoritarian president dies at 66

ASHGABAT, Turkmenistan: President Saparmurat Niyazov — who created a vast cult of personality during two decades of iron-fisted rule over arid, energy-rich Turkmenistan — has died, officials said Thursday. He was 66.

A terse report from state television said Niyazov died early Thursday of heart failure and showed a black-framed portrait of the man who had ordered citizens to refer to him as "Turkmenbashi" — the Father of All Turkmen.

Niyazov underwent major heart surgery in Germany in 1997 and last month publicly acknowledged for the first time that he had heart disease. But he did not seem seriously ill; two weeks ago he appeared in public to formally open an amusement park named after him outside the capital.

Niyazov had led Turkmenistan since 1985, when it was still a Soviet republic. After the 1991 Soviet collapse, he retained control and began creating an elaborate personality cult and turning Turkmenistan into one of the most oppressive of the ex-Soviet states.

He ordered the months and days of the week named after himself and his family, and statues of him were erected throughout the nation. He is listed as author of the "Rukhnama" (Book of the Soul) that was required reading in schools. Children pledged allegiance to him every morning.

He crushed all opposition and drew condemnation from human rights groups and Western governments.

A 2002 alleged assassination attempt against Niyazov sparked a severe crackdown, leading to dozens of arrests that were criticized by international human rights groups and the U.S. government. A former foreign minister, Boris Shikhmuradov, was named as the mastermind of the plot and sentenced to life in prison after a Stalinist-style show trial broadcast on TV that included a taped confession where he said he was a drug addict and hired mercenaries for the attack while living in Russia.

It was unclear who may be in line to replace Niyazov or how the succession process would be conducted. The funeral is to be held on Sunday.

Turkmenistan — a majority Muslim country dominated by the vast Kara Kum desert — has the world's fifth-largest natural gas reserves, but Niyazov failed to convert that wealth into prosperity for his country's 5 million people.

Earlier this year, the eccentric leader announced he would provide citizens with natural gas and power free of charge through 2030. But he has also tapped the country's vast energy wealth for outlandish projects — a huge, man-made lake in the Kara Kum desert, a vast cypress forest to change the desert climate, an ice palace outside the capital, a ski resort and a 130-foot pyramid.

Niyazov was born Feb. 19, 1940. His father died in World War II and the rest of his family was killed in an earthquake that leveled Ashgabat in 1948. He was raised in an orphanage and later in the home of distant relatives.

Niyazov attended Leningrad Polytechnic Institute in Russia to study power engineering and worked at the Bezmeinskaya Power Station near Ashgabat after his graduation in 1966.

Named head of the Communist Party in Turkmenistan in 1985, Niyazov was named president of the Turkmen Soviet Socialist Republic in October 1990 and led his nation through its Oct. 27, 1991 independence. He was elected president of the new independent Turkmenistan in 1992 with a reported 99.5 percent of the vote. In 1994, an alleged 99.9 percent of voters supported a referendum allowing him to remain in office for a second five-year term without having to face new elections.

In 1999, he was effectively made president for life after parliament removed all term limits, but an August 2002 gathering of the country's People's Council — a hand-picked assembly of Niyazov loyalists — nonetheless went further and endorsed him as president for life.

Under Niyazov's rule, Turkmenistan adopted a strict policy of neutrality and spurned joining regional security or economic organizations that sprung up in the wake of the Soviet collapse.

But Niyazov supported the U.S.-led anti-terror campaign in neighboring Afghanistan, allowing coalition airplanes to use Turkmen airspace and humanitarian agencies to pass through to deliver aid.

Niyazov also pursued strong nationalistic policies to encourage the use of the Turkmen language over Russian and banned access to Russian-language media, leading to an increased exodus of some of the country's most educated citizens and decimating its school system. Secondary education has been reduced in Turkmenistan to a required nine years, causing human rights groups to complain of a deliberate attempt to dumb down the population and prevent dissent.

from People's Weekly World, 2006-May-18, by M.K.N Moorthy:

Left posts gains in regional Indian elections

Buddhadeb Bhattatcharjee, CP of India (Marxist) leader and chief minister of the Weest Bengal State. AP photo by Kaushik Sengupta TRIVANDRUM, Kerala, India — Communist-led electoral coalitions registered substantial gains in two Indian states and several other regions this month in a development that observers say will have national repercussions.

In Kerala, at India's southern tip, the Left Democratic Front, led by the Communist Party of India (Marxist), wrested power back from the United Democratic Front (UDF), the centrist Congress Party-led coalition. The LDF won roughly two-thirds of the seats, 98 out of 140, in the provincial parliament.

In West Bengal, in the country's northeast region, the Left Front, a similar coalition, was returned to office for an unprecedented seventh term, winning three-fourths of the seats, 235 out of 293. The CPI(M) won over half of the seats by itself.

“We had the people's complete trust and we knew we would win by a huge margin,” Biman Bose, the West Bengal secretary of the CPI(M), told Reuters.

The Left Front has won substantial support as a result of its improvements in the state's water supply, literacy, health care and other social services. Its latest campaign platform emphasized the need to further reduce poverty.

The struggles of common people, especially workers, helped the LDF win back power in Kerala. Voters were fed up with the misrule of the UDF government, whose neoliberal policies created adverse effects in several sectors of the economy.

As a result of the UDF's “liberalization” policies, growers of agricultural products like coffee, tea, cocoa and coconut are facing extreme hardship. Prices for these products have fallen to an all-time low, even as the UDF has allowed multinational companies to enter the agricultural sector. These policies have spelled ruin for many small farmers, and hundreds committed suicide in one small district in Kerala alone.

During its five years in office, the UDF government in Kerala also undermined the public education system, shifting more and more schools into to a private, profit-oriented set-up charging tuition and fees. As a result, higher education became a dream for poor people.

The effect of all these measures was to further undermine the hard-won social gains won by the people of Kerala over the course of many years of struggle. Communist parties and socialist groups led those struggles, and the election of the LDF candidates is widely seen as a vote of confidence in their ability to reverse the UDF's course.

V.S. Achuthanandan, a longtime leader of the CPI(M), will serve as the new chief minister of Kerala.

The victory of the CPI(M)-led Left Front in West Bengal is remarkable for several reasons. No other political force in the nation has received the people's mandate seven times in a row. The government's bold moves to rein in privatization and liberalization, and its empowerment of the cooperative sector, have won it widespread support among the state's working people.

While there are many private multinationals operating in West Bengal, they are doing so under the strict and watchful eye of the government, which seeks to protect the public interest.

Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee will continue as the chief minister of West Bengal.

In Kerala and West Bengal the right-wing, Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) lost almost all of its races. The erosion of its support signals a growing rejection of narrow, communalist-oriented politics.

“Overall these results have strengthened the role of the left in national politics,” said Prakash Karat, leader of the CPI(M), at a post-election news conference.

M.K.N. Moorthy is the publisher of a progressive Malayalam language publication in Kerala, India.

from the Wall Street Journal via OpinionJournal.com, 2006-Feb-19, by Claudia Rosett:

Food for Nukes?
In North Korea, it's Western chumps to the rescue.

It's bad enough that North Korea's Kim Jong Il is starving his people while building nuclear bombs. But why are we helping him?

In theory, we're not. But the U.S. has been by far the largest donor to the aid appeal under which the U.N. World Food Program has shipped $1.7 billion worth of rice, corn, wheat and sugar into North Korea over a decade. Last summer the regime declared itself self-sufficient in food, ordering the WFP to wind down operations by the end of the year. But North Korea also let the WFP know that it would be happy to start receiving aid for state-run development projects. Obediently, the WFP has come up with a plan, awaiting approval from its executive board this week, to "work with the Government to support its strategy of moving towards development and away from humanitarian assistance." The "Protracted Relief and Recovery Operation" has a $102 million budget to deliver food and "transitional assistance" for Pyongyang's "strategy for recovery."

What Kim hopes to recover is his grip on a population that, despite North Korea's secret police, gulag and public executions for "crimes" such as trying to flee the country, has been slipping ever so slightly out of his control. Last fall, Pyongyang shut down the private grain exchanges that over the past three years had offered some crude semblance of market activity in the world's most rigidly ruled society. Now Pyongyang is trying to put back together its old state-run public distribution system. The WFP, which never actually closed its office in Pyongyang, is there to help.

---

But is North Korea's idea of "development" friendly to the interests of the free world or its own people? For the past 20 years, the regime has played a canny game of hinting that it is about to reform--only to extort whatever it can, and clamp down again, pursuing its ballistic missile and nuclear bomb projects along the way. Optimists point to China's market reforms, and such North Korean exploits as Kim's semi-secret train trip last month to China. They forget that in China reform began only after Mao's death in 1976 allowed a change in leadership.

Since North Korea's inception as a totalitarian state in 1948, Pyongyang has had only two rulers--Kim Il Sung (installed by Stalin) and his son, Kim Jong Il, who took charge after his father's death in 1994. The junior Kim's record over the past dozen years is not one of reform, but of brutality, duplicity and blackmail.

What brought significant Western aid to North Korea in the first place was a nuclear-freeze deal proposed in 1994 by Jimmy Carter. Kim cheated on the deal, pursuing nukes while starving to death an estimated two million North Koreans--using the state distribution system to decide most expeditiously who would die. Foreign aid workers found themselves up against the policy of songun, meaning the army gets top priority. Some left: Médecins Sans Frontières pulled out in 1998, having concluded that "its assistance was not reaching the most vulnerable people, and was, on the contrary, helping to feed the regime oppressing them." MSF instead devoted its efforts to helping North Koreans who fled the country.

The WFP plowed ahead, trying to outmaneuver the regime on its own turf. North Korea siphoned off aid to the military and the party elite, refused to allow snap inspections, and prohibited the WFP from bringing in native Korean speakers--leaving them dependent on the regime's translators. In response, the WFP expanded its international staff in North Korea from two to 46, eventually setting up five field offices outside Pyongyang, running a number of food factories and food-for-work programs while bringing in grains less favored than rice in the hope that this would cut down on state diversion of supplies. By mid-2004, the WFP was boasting that it had "gained greater and greater access to the country." To try to stop the regime from diverting aid, the WFP refused to send food to areas where the government barred access.

Since Kim turned up his nose last year, the WFP has been concocting a menu more to his liking. The new WFP proposal states that in compliance with North Korea's wishes, "monitoring will be significantly reduced." There will be no more field offices. Inspection visits will be allowed only four times a year. The government will handle all internal storage, transportation and distribution. The WFP will pay Kim's regime for the favor of storing the free goods, reimburse it for fuel used in transport, and on top of everything else, provide a tip in the form of $3 million for travel, office rent, communications, vehicle maintenance and North Korean "consultants."

If the WFP's new plan goes forward, Kim will be in the pleasant position of receiving free goods, enjoying plenty of control over who gets what, and taking credit for the handouts. Part of the WFP plan, for example, is to provide supplies for food-processing factories where the government will hire the workers, operate the plants, and in some cases--how many is not clear--"transport the product to the beneficiary institutions."

---

There is no question that many people are hungry, and, as the head of the WFP office in Pyongyang, Richard Ragan, described it in a recent interview, "living on the edge." In the field of good works, one of the worst dilemmas is what to do when a tyrant holds hostage his own population--trading on their deprivation to lever out of well-meaning donors whatever it is he really wants. But in North Korea, the WFP--America's main conduit for aid into the country--is losing whatever leverage it ever had. Big brother China and eager-to-appease South Korea are shipping substantial aid with few strings attached. Meanwhile, the U.S. is trying to corral Kim over matters as mortally important as nuclear bombs. This new program whipped up by the WFP to suit Kim's palate sends just one message: Yes indeed, we are chumps.

Ms. Rosett is a journalist-in-residence with the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.

from the Associated Press, 2005-Feb-10, by Sang-Hun Choe:

North Korea admits having nuclear weapons

SEOUL, South Korea -- North Korea publicly acknowledged Thursday for the first time that it has nuclear weapons and said it won't return to six-nation talks aimed at getting it to abandon its nuclear ambitions.

The statement from the reclusive, Stalinist state dramatically raised the stakes in the two-year-old nuclear confrontation and posed a grave challenge to President Bush, who started his second term with a vow to end North Korea's nuclear weapons programs through multilateral talks.

"We ... have manufactured nukes for self-defense to cope with the Bush administration's ever more undisguised policy to isolate and stifle the (North)," the North Korean Foreign Ministry said in a statement carried by the state-run Korean Central News Agency.

North Korea had reportedly told American negotiators during private talks that it possessed nuclear weapons and might test one of them. North Korea's U.N. envoy told The Associated Press last year the country had "weaponized" plutonium extracted from its pool of 8,000 nuclear spent fuel rods.

But Thursday's statement marked North Korea's first public admission that it has nuclear weapons through its usual means of making official declarations -- statements carried on KCNA, its main news outlet to world.

North Korea's "nuclear weapons will remain (a) nuclear deterrent for self-defense under any circumstances," the ministry said. "The present reality proves that only powerful strength can protect justice and truth."

Since 2003, the United States, the two Koreas, China, Japan and Russia have held three rounds of talks in Beijing aimed at persuading the North to abandon nuclear weapons development in return for economic and diplomatic rewards. But no significant progress has been made.

A fourth round scheduled for September was canceled when North Korea refused to attend, citing what it called a "hostile" U.S. policy.

In the past weeks, hopes had risen that North Korea might return to six-nation talks, especially after Bush started his second term last month by refraining from direct criticism of North Korea.

On Thursday, North Korea said it had no intention to rejoin such talks any time soon.

"We have wanted the six-party talks but we are compelled to suspend our participation in the talks for an indefinite period till we have recognized that there is justification for us to attend the talks," the North said Thursday.

North Korea said it came to its decision because "the U.S. disclosed its attempt to topple the political system in (North Korea) at any cost, threatening it with a nuclear stick."

Still, North Korea said it retained its "principled stand to solve the issue through dialogue and negotiations and its ultimate goal to denuclearize the Korean Peninsula remain unchanged."

Such a comment has widely been interpreted as North Korea's negotiating tactic to get more economic and diplomatic concession from the United States before joining any crucial talks.

In Bush's State of the Union address last week, he only mentioned North Korea in a single sentence, saying Washington was "working closely with governments in Asia to convince North Korea to abandon its nuclear ambitions." That was in stark contrast to Bush's speech three years ago, when he branded North Korea part of an "axis of evil" with Iran and Iraq.

The softened rhetoric had raised hopes for a positive response from North Korea, with analysts saying that the North would wait to hear Bush's speech before deciding to rejoin nuclear talks.

The nuclear crisis erupted in October 2002 when U.S. officials accused North Korea of running a secrete uranium-enrichment program in violation of international treaties, and it and its allies cut off free fuel oil shipments for the impoverished country.

North Korea retaliated by quitting the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty in early 2003 and restarting its plutonium-based nuclear weapons program. Its plutonium facilities had been frozen in return for oil shipments and other benefits under a 1994 deal with Washington.

The North had also claimed that it completed reprocessing 8,000 spent fuel rods previously unloaded from its 5-megawatt reactor and kept under U.N. seals under the 1994 deal. The reprocessing could yield enough plutonium for several nuclear bombs.

The North has also reloaded the 5-megawatt reactor, which can generate more spent fuel laden with plutonium.

from the Boston Globe, 2004-Feb-8, by Jeff Jacoby:

An Auschwitz in Korea

TWO WORDS -- "never again" -- sum up the most important lesson that civilized men and women were supposed to have learned from the 20th century. It is forbidden to keep silent, forbidden to look the other way, when tyrants embark on genocide and slaughter -- if Auschwitz and Kolyma and the Cambodian killing fields taught us nothing else, they taught us that.

Or so, at any rate, we like to tell ourselves. As Samantha Power discovered upon returning to the United States after two years as a war correspondent in Bosnia, the lesson of "never again" is invoked far more often than it is applied.

"Everywhere I went," Power recalled in a speech at Swarthmore College in 2002, "I heard `never again.' Steven Spielberg's `Schindler's List' had been a smash hit. The Holocaust Museum had opened on the Mall in Washington. College seminars were taught on the `lessons' of the singular crime of the 20th century. But why, I wondered, had nobody applied those lessons to the atrocities of the 1990s: the systematic murder of 200,000 Bosnian civilians in Europe between 1992 and 1995 and the extermination of some 800,000 Rwandan Tutsi in 1994.

"Did `never again' simply mean `never again will Germans kill Jews in Europe between 1939 and 1945?' "

Power went on to write "A Problem From Hell," her Pulitzer Prize-winning account of America's failure to intervene in the genocides of the 20th century. The book was hugely and deservedly praised. It made clear, as no book had before, how much Americans knew about some of the most horrific massacres of the last century even as they were happening, and how little we did to stop them -- or even, in most cases, condemn them.

Which brings us to North Korea.

It is not exactly news that the communist regime of Kim Jong Il has sent millions of North Koreans to early graves. Estimates back in 1998 were that as many as 800,000 people were dying in North Korea each year from starvation and malnutrition caused by Kim's ruthless and irrational policies. World Vision, a Christian relief organization, calculated that 1 million to 2 million North Koreans had been killed by "a full-scale famine" largely of Pyongyang's creation.

Nor is it breaking news that North Korea operates a vicious prison gulag -- "not unlike the worst labor camps built by Mao and Stalin in the last century," as NBC News reported more than a year ago. Some 200,000 men, women, and children are held in these slave-labor camps; hundreds of thousands of others have perished in them over the years. Some of the camps are so hellish that 20 percent or more of their prisoners die from torture and abuse each year. The dead can be of any age: North Korea's longstanding policy is to imprison not only those accused of such "crimes" as practicing Christianity or complaining about North Korean life, but their entire families, including grandparents and grandchildren.

And, of course, it is widely known that Kim is openly pursuing nuclear weapons, has fired missiles capable of reaching Japan, and controls one of the largest military forces on earth.

All of this is hideous enough, and more than sufficient reason for making Kim's ouster -- and his prosecution for crimes against humanity -- an explicit goal of the United States. But now comes something new.

"I witnessed a whole family being tested on suffocating gas and dying in the gas chamber. The parents, a son, and a daughter." The speaker is Kwon Hyuk, a former North Korean intelligence agent and a one-time administrator at Camp 22, the country's largest concentration camp. His testimony was heard on a television documentary that aired last week on the BBC. "The parents were vomiting and dying, but till the very last moment they tried to save the kids by doing mouth-to-mouth breathing."

Like other communist officials, Kwon was not bothered by what he saw. "I felt that they throroughly deserved such a death. Because all of us were led to believe that all the bad things that were happening to North Korea were their fault. . . . Under the society and the regime I was in at the time, I only felt that they were the enemies. So I felt no sympathy or pity for them at all."

Soon Ok-lee, who spent seven years in another North Korean camp, described the use of prisoners as guinea pigs for biochemical weapons.

"An officer ordered me to select 50 healthy female prisoners," she testified. "One of the guards handed me a basket full of soaked cabbage, told me not to eat it, but to give it to the 50 women. I gave them out and heard a scream. . . . They were all screaming and vomiting blood. All who ate the cabbage leaves started violently vomiting blood and screaming with pain. It was hell. In less than 20 minutes, they were dead."

Gas chambers. Poisoned food. Torture. The murder of whole families. Massive death tolls. How much more do we need to know about North Korea's crimes before we act to stop them? How many more victims will be fed into the gas chambers before we cry out "never again!" -- and mean it?

from the Times of London, 2007-Jul-1, by Christina Lamb:

Zimbabwe's top cleric urges Britain to invade

Bulawayo -- ZIMBABWE'S leading cleric has called on Britain to invade the country and topple President Robert Mugabe. Pius Ncube, the Archbishop of Bulawayo, warned that millions were facing death from famine, unable to survive amid inflation believed to have soared to 15,000%.

Mugabe, 83, had proved intransigent despite the “massive risk to life”, said Ncube, the head of Zimbabwe's 1m Catholics. “I think it is justified for Britain to raid Zimbabwe and remove Mugabe,” he said. “We should do it ourselves but there's too much fear. I'm ready to lead the people, guns blazing, but the people are not ready.”

Some parts of Zimbabwe have seen 95% of crops fail, leaving families with only two or three weeks' food supply to last a year. Prices in the shops are more than doubling every week and Christopher Dell, the American ambassador, predicts that by the end of the year inflation could hit 1.5m%.

Ncube said that far from helping those struggling on less than £1 a week, Mugabe had just spent £1m on surveillance equipment to monitor phone calls and e-mails. “How can you expect people to rise up when even our church services are attended by state intelligence people?

“People in our mission hospitals are dying of malnutrition. We had the best education in Africa and now our schools are closing. Most people are earning less than their bus fares. There's no water or power. Is the world just going to let everything collapse in on us?”

from the Times of London, 2007-Jun-1, by Christina Lamb:

Teachers sell sex to buy food as Mugabe cronies get richer
While the government prospers, most of the Zimbabwe survives on less than £1 per week and will do anything to survive

STELLA SITHOLE is a high school teacher with neatly braided hair and a husband who works in a bank, yet in the twisted world of President Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe she has to turn tricks to feed her children.

Battling to survive the world's highest inflation, estimated by local bankers to have reached 15,000%, the salary of Z$2.1m she has just received is six times what she got last month. But it is not even enough to cover her bus fares to school and back. In fact, it is equivalent to less than £3.50 a month.

So for several days of the week, instead of standing in front of her class in Kwekwe teaching history and geography, Sithole takes the bus 146 miles north to Harare. There, she sits at the bar in clubs such as Chez Ntemba, Chez Mambo and the Stars Studio at Rainbow Towers hotel, waiting for a proposition.

At 32, Sithole is pretty and refined, though there is a far-away sadness in her eyes and clients complain that there is not enough of her bottom (“What do you expect on one meal a day?” she asks).

On a pulsating Friday night at the Stars Studio, there is no shortage of takers. “Ministers,” she whispers, “or Zanu big men.”

While the vast majority of Zimbabweans are struggling, like Sithole, to survive on less than £1 a week - “We're not even have-nots,” she says, “we're have-nothings” - these paunchy men in striped suits knocking back shots of malt whisky are finding that things have never been so good.

Not only government ministers and officials from the ruling Zanu-PF party, but also top police and army officers and High Court judges have been cleverly woven into Mugabe's patronage system, benefiting hugely from his despotic rule.

Many have been allotted property that was violently seized from white farmers. But their real wealth comes from access to foreign exchange at less than 1,000th of the rate on the streets.

This enables them to buy expensive vehicles such as the Hummers, S-class Mercedes and Toyota Prados that fill the hotel car park – one of which will whisk Sithole to a lodge on the edge of town.

When I first meet her through a friend, the primly dressed mother of two is ashamed to tell me what she does, referring instead to “colleagues that have become sex workers”. But it is clear she knows too much and in the end she admits her tawdry double life.

“I studied three years at college to become a teacher and was so proud when I graduated,” she says, sadly. “Now look at me. I'm very ashamed and always regret afterwards but otherwise we would starve.”

Her clients pay in “cash and kind”. Pointing at the long black leather boots she is wearing, she explains: “The most I got was Z$600,000 and this pair of boots as well as a mobile phone my husband sold.”

She can earn more depending on what she refers to as “the what”. This means whether she is prepared to have sex with no condom - an enormous risk in a country where at least one in five adults is HIV-positive.

“These dirty things make me scared because most of these guys are infected but I'm desperate,” she shrugs.

To show the impossibility of surviving on a teacher's wage, we take her entire Z$2.1m salary to a local supermarket. All she manages to buy with the two large bricks of notes is one bottle of cooking oil, one packet of salt, one laundry soap, one pack of powdered soup, some milk powder and a pack of sugar.

In fact, just her bus fares to travel the 15 miles to school are Z$60,000 each way, totalling Z$2.4m a month if she goes every day. “So I'm already on minus,” she says. “I'm actually having to borrow money to go to work.”

On top of that, her bills last month were Z$315,000 for electricity, Z$130,000 for water and Z$800,000 for rent, not to mention food and bus fares for her 11-year-old daughter and nursery fees for her five-year-old son. Her husband earns just Z$1.4m. “We're the poorest millionaires on earth,” she laughs.

For two years she supplemented her salary by working in a field or cleaning after school. She would use the money to go into Harare and buy cheap clothing. She would exchange this in rural areas for ground nuts and peanuts that she could then sell in town.

Colleagues cross the border to Botswana or South Africa, where they can buy goods for a quarter of the price, and come back and sell them. But Sithole has never amassed enough money to buy the foreign exchange she would need to do this.

This year, as inflation spiralled, she has found herself borrowing more than her salary each month. “I don't have any family abroad to send me money and we weren't even having one meal a day,” she says.

One of her colleagues suggested accompanying her to Harare for the night. She earned more in a few hours than for a month's teaching. When I ask if many of the other teachers at her school are doing the same, she laughs. “Three-quarters,” she replies.

Others have simply left the country, part of a massive exodus of 4m people. At the start of term in May more than 5,000 teachers in Zimbabwe did not return to their posts, among them Sithole's headmaster.

The children they have left behind are just told to sit and read. “Zimbabweans sacrifice bread for books to get their children to school, then there's no teaching,” said James Elder of the United Nations Children's Fund (Unicef) in Harare.

He pointed out that the pass rate had dropped sharply - just 37% passed grade 7, which means almost two-thirds are failing.

“It hurts me that we teachers are abandoning the children to service these beasts with their fine cars,” says Sithole. “But we don't have an option.”

Her clients' children attend private schools or study in the UK, America or Australia. They can easily afford this because of the beneficial exchange rate available to those close to power.

Although the Reserve Bank knocked three zeroes off the currency last November, the Zimbabwe dollar has continued to lose value at an astonishing rate. At the start of the year it was 3,000 to the US dollar. Last month it fell from 100,000 to 300,000 in a week on the streets where most people exchange. Yet the official rate is 250.

“Imagine the money you can make,” a merchant bank director explained. “Say you buy US$100 at the official rate – that costs you Z$25,000. Then you sell that US$100 on the streets and get Z$30m. With that Z$30m, at the official rate you can buy more than US$100,000 – all for your initial outlay of about eight cents.

“And that's not to mention fuel vouchers,” he added. A litre of fuel for the privileged costs just Z$400 while everyone else must pay Z$185,000. “If you're one of Mugabe's cronies, you can live in fantastic wealth.”

That wealth is visible not only from the number of new luxury cars on the streets of the capital but from a spin round Borrowdale Brooke, a private housing estate with its own golf course in northern Harare.

Many government ministers have elaborate mansions. On the hill is a three-storey glass monstrosity with its own lift, owned by the army chief, and beyond a heavily guarded entrance is the shining blue pagoda-style roof of Mugabe's multi-million-pound new home.

The local Spar sells Mozambican prawns, lobster and Laphroaig malt whisky at Z$9m a bottle but if residents prefer to eat out, they can head down the road to Amanzi, where dinner for five costs more than Z$26m.

“At the same time most people are barely surviving, those with access to power are literally bleeding the country and becoming richer daily,” said Roy Ben-nett, a leading member of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) who had to flee to South Africa after 10 months in jail.

“It's not just Mugabe. There's an elite of around 5,000 scoring from the situation and there are enough of them in high places to maintain the status quo.

“They realise their only way to survive is to keep Mugabe there, because once he goes it's a bun-fight between them.”

It is not only those holding the reins of power who are benefiting. Zimbabwe's stock market is booming. At a cafe in Harare I met Robert, a flashily dressed 26-year-old who was showing off a Ford Triton for which he had just paid Z$14 billion. He and his friend had five mobile phones on the table that kept ringing.

“More deals to make,” he explained, describing himself as a commodity broker, which in today's Zimbabwe seems to mean black market profiteer. “It's chaos but we've never had it so good,” he said as he drove off in his new car.

“We have this ridiculous dichotomy where this is the cheapest country in the world if you're earning US dollars and the most expensive in the world if you're earning Zim dollars,” said an importer of luxury perfumes and cosmetics. “You can pretty much afford anything you want if you have access to foreign exchange.”

But he added that after a couple of boom years, his sales were now falling. “The numbers are becoming less and less and noticeably so,” he said.

With inflation so high that the Reserve Bank needs to double the amount of money in circulation every month, it is struggling to print enough of the country's Monopoly-style notes and recently had to bribe printers to work overtime with a Z$5m bonus.

It was the Reserve Bank that pushed up the exchange rate so precipitously last month, buying up foreign exchange on the black market to pay Eskom in South Africa for electricity and to repay money owed by Air Zimbabwe so it could keep flying. It also paid for US$2m worth of surveillance equipment, following the introduction of a law that permits the monitoring of phone calls and e-mails.

The biggest payment, however, was US$39m owed to the US Export-Import Bank to avoid legal action from the US Treasury. Gideon Gono, the governor of the Reserve Bank, wrote a furious letter to the US attorney-general, complaining that the repayment had forced the government to “divert funds which were meant for importation of . . . medical drugs for our hospitals, antidrought food imports, fuel, electricity, seeds as well as agricultural equipment”.

He added: “The people of Zimbabwe have paid an invaluable sacrificial welfare price to meet your abrupt harsh turn of spirit.”

Short of foreign exchange and having run out of farms to hand out to supporters - all but 200 of the 4,500 white farms have been confiscated - the government last week announced legislation to seize 51% of foreign companies.

Although the government has stopped issuing inflation figures since it hit 3,700% in March, prices are doubling weekly. A loaf of bread that cost Z$8,000 in May is now Z$50,000.

In supermarkets such as the Bellevue Spar in Bulawayo, staff struggle to keep up with the increases. Every aisle has someone busy with a pricing gun and some items have six or seven price labels, one on top of another. The baked beans on sale for Z$66,000 five days ago have just been repriced at Z$125,000. Hardly anyone in the shop seems to be buying anything. People stare at prices and window shop as if they were ata luxury department store.

“We're going round from place to place to see if any shop has items it hasn't yet marked up,” says Charles, a young man with dreadlocks who is foreman of a local factory.

He has just discovered hair gel for Z$30,000 that is going for Z$130,000 elsewhere, so he buys up six to sell on the street.

Others, such as a white-haired pensioner, walk out with nothing. His monthly pension is not even enough to buy a toilet roll, he tells me.

The desperate situation has led to some appalling acts. In the state-owned Herald newspaper last week was the story of a Rushinga man who murdered his 10-year-old son with an axe for eating four mice that were meant for the family dinner.

Power cuts are so common that at night the centre of Harare is as dark as remote countryside. The government recently announced 20-hour power cuts, but some areas of the capital often go without for three days at a time. People sell bundles of firewood in the city centre. Many areas of Bulawayo and some parts of Harare have no water.

The state-owned media blame it all on a plot by British and American governments. Last week the Chronicle wrote: “We can reveal that British and US governments, after failing to incite a public revolt against the government of Zimbabwe, are now working overtime to destroy the economy, mutilate the Zimbabwe dollar, foment civil unrest . . .”

Few are taken in. For the first time in years of going to Zimbabwe, I found people speaking out openly, suggesting that anger is overtaking fear in a police state where one person in three is now thought to be an informer.

“The rule of economics is the one law Mugabe cannot break,” said Christopher Dell, the US ambassador, who predicts that inflation will reach 1.5m% by the end of the year. “Historically, no regime has ever survived six or seven-digit inflation.”

Dell's criticism of the regime has outraged Mugabe and in his office is a framed front page of the Herald with the headline, “Dell can go to hell”.

“They're printing money at madcap rates to pay for fuel, maize and electricity imports,” he said. “It's all self-inflicted.

“It's like when you pull out the plug on a bathtub. First the water goes slowly but then as it gets near the plughole, it starts swirling faster and faster. I think we're in the final swirl.”

Dell admits it could get even worse after Mugabe. “I think we could see a period of instability with maybe three or four presidents in a row,” he said. “The most dangerous thing will be if the military gets involved.” At the moment the least threat to Mugabe seems to come from the opposition. The MDC has been crippled, first by internal splits, then by the regime's silent campaign of torture and intimidation.

“Of course we've gone quiet - we've been battling to stay alive,” said Bennett in exile in South Africa.

“In the last month I've had an influx of more than 30 members of the senior leadership running away from the police and seeking asylum.”

Following the beatings of the party's president, Morgan Tsvangirai, and other senior members, which drew international condemnation in March, Mugabe's thugs set about destroying the MDC's entire network.

“They raided our headquarters and seized all our computers and accessed documents so they could see who's who in all our structures,” Bennett said. “Then they systematically went about arresting all our members so it's impossible for us to organise.”

Although many have criticised Tsvangirai's lack of leadership, the opposition is not helped by the make-do culture of most Zimbabweans. “No one is ever going to rise up,” said a restaurant owner in Harare. “If there's no power, we light a candle. If there are no candles, we light a fire.”

Mugabe's exhausted population has no time or energy for protests. Every morning a flood of people can be seen walking into Harare and Bulawayo - the so-called “human train” of people walking for up to four hours to get to work because they cannot afford the fare.

Many are surviving on remittances sent from the estimated 4m Zimbabweans who have left the country - almost a third of the population. Just £10 a month sent back would triple the salary of a teacher such as Sithole.

Shops and factories across the country have been closing, unable to afford imported raw materials. Bakeries in the southern town of Masvingo on Friday suspended the production of bread following a government order to reduce prices by 50%.

“We no longer have an industry to talk about,” said Callisto Jokonya, the head of the Confederation of Zimbabwe Industries. “We have deindustrialised ourselves.”

At one clothing factory in Harare, the owner said he had lost 10% of his workforce in the past two weeks. “Frankly I don't know why workers still come,” he shrugged. “It can only be hope.”

Hope is all they have in many rural areas such as Matabeleland in the south of the country. A severe drought has resulted in a 95% crop failure in the south and in villages around Plumtree, one family after another showed their recent maize harvest was enough for only two or three weeks. Nationwide, the country's harvest of maize, its staple crop, is thought to have been between 500,000-800,000 tons, compared to annual needs of 1.4m tons.

Yet this works in Mugabe's favour because he will again be able to use food as a political tool in the run-up to elections next March.

If the situation seems grave in rural areas, things are even worse in parts of Bulawayo.

A whole community of people whose homes were demolished by the government two years ago now live on the Richmond rubbish dump, surviving by foraging for glass bottles and plastic.

Remedio Moyo, 26, shows the black plastic shelter he lives under with his wife and children aged three and five. Small black flies cover everything.

“This is not a proper life,” he said. “I went to school and all I wanted from life was a job anda small house, not to be a big man. There is only one person to blame for this situation and I would like that man to die any minute.”

Pius Ncube, the outspoken Catholic Archbishop of Bulawayo, said things were now so desperate that he was calling on the West to invade and oust Mugabe's regime.

“Anyone who is ready to starve his people to death for the sake of power is a murderer,” Ncube said. “What more does he have to do?”

Names have been changed to protect identities.

from the Wall Street Journal via OpinionJournal.com, 2006-Nov-5, by Arnold Tsunga:

'Yes, You Will Be Thoroughly Beaten'
Robert Mugabe turns Zimbabwe from a success story to a human-rights catastrophe.

A tsunami has rolled through Zimbabwe, different from the tidal waves that hit Asia in 2004. Ours came last year, in the form of bulldozers and soldiers. Vibrant towns were reduced to flat and desolate grounds. More than 700,000 people lost their homes and livelihood. Why?

President Robert Mugabe thought that the poor people who lived in these urban areas represented a political threat. He feared that the citizens might mobilize against him. So he launched a pre-emptive strike against those already suffering under his policies. He called it "Operation Murambatsvina," literally "Operation Clear the Filth"--the "filth" being hundreds of thousands of Zimbabwean men, women and children who were internally displaced, many of whom continue to live without access to humanitarian assistance today.

Zimbabwe was once a success story in Africa, but over his long rule Mr. Mugabe has dragged us all down. Under the pretext of pan-Africanism, he has created a system of terror for the majority and patronage for the elite few. Our inflation is estimated to be the highest rate in the world. According to the World Health Organization, Zimbabweans have the shortest life expectancy world-wide--the average life span has halved to only 35 years old today from 69 in 2000.

In the past six years, the government of Zimbabwe has increasingly turned to repressive and often violent means to suppress criticism from the opposition and civil society. Opposition political parties have been stifled. Police and other state-sponsored agents routinely intimidate, attack and torture government critics, including members of civil-society organizations, human-rights lawyers, journalists and trade unionists. At the same time, the police use repressive laws to silence critical voices in the remnants of civil society. Americans may take for granted the essential freedoms of speech and assembly. But in Zimbabwe, printing presses have been bombed and newspapers have been closed for criticizing Mr. Mugabe.

In reaction to recent waves of protests against deteriorating social and economic conditions, the Zimbabwean government this autumn intensified its campaign to suppress those of us who are peacefully dissenting. On Sept. 25, the government violently ended a peaceful march by some 500 activists from the National Constitutional Assembly in Harare. Riot police armed with batons blocked the march, ordered the activists to sit down, and proceeded to beat them one at a time with batons. During the beatings, people panicked, leading to a stampede that injured several dozen.

Mr. Mugabe has thrown himself into this campaign to stifle critics. Responding to the arrest and torture of 15 trade-union activists in September, he said "some are crying that they were beaten. Yes, you will be thoroughly beaten."

---

Today, Zimbabwe's man-made human-rights catastrophe is bleeding across the region, as Zimbabweans continue to stream into South Africa to escape the deteriorating political and economic conditions at home. An estimated 1.2 to 3 million Zimbabweans refugees now live in South Africa, and the stability of the Southern African region is increasingly at stake.

The effort to fight HIV/AIDS has also suffered serious setbacks. According to a report by Human Rights Watch, Mr. Mugabe's forced evictions have disrupted access to treatment and health care for thousands of Zimbabweans living with HIV. Today, more than a year after the evictions, many still live in appalling conditions, without shelter or in overcrowded houses. As a result they are left not only more prone to opportunistic infections such as pneumonia and tuberculosis, but also exposed to a more resistant strain of HIV with potentially catastrophic consequences for the whole region.

After working for many years as a commercial lawyer in Mutare, I was abducted, tortured and threatened for simply defending individuals who stood in the way of Mr. Mugabe. My co-workers and I have been arrested and dragged to the courts for trying to document and create an official record of government abuses. Some people ask me why I bother using the legal system when the deck is so stacked against us. I answer that there is still a semblance of a court system and some brave judges who will uphold the law. But they are operating in straitjackets and desperately need support to continue doing the right thing.

We in Zimbabwe will continue our long fight to restore civil society, the rule of law and basic human rights. But we need the support of the international community.

Human-rights defenders in Zimbabwe face enormous risks as they fight for reparations and resettlement of the hundreds of thousands made homeless by Mr. Mugabe's evictions. The U.S. can support these activists through the provision of technical assistance and other forms of targeted support. Greater humanitarian assistance is also required for the victims of the evictions who today remain in desperate need of housing, food and other forms of assistance.

The crisis in Zimbabwe does not just affect Zimbabwe. It destabilizes the entire region. It also tests the interests of Western society. For example, in the absence of concerted U.S. assistance and support, Beijing has seen a strategic opportunity to fill a vacuum: China is moving in to fill the gap in Zimbabwe and other developing countries--without any concern for human rights or democracy.

Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights stands for a Zimbabwe that adheres to constitutionalism, the independence of the judiciary and respect for basic human rights. Just as Mr. Mugabe has used law with tsunami-like force for his own political ends, our vision is to use it to rebuild a just, stable and democratic society that adheres to the rule of law.

Mr. Tsunga is the executive director of Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights. Last week he was awarded Human Rights Watch's top honor at the organization's Voices for Justice dinner.

from the Wall Street Journal's OpinionJournal.com, 2002-Jul-25, by Claudia Rosett:

Dearth of a Nation
Creating a famine is hard work, but Robert Mugabe is indefatigable.

NEW YORK--Zimbabwe's mission to the United Nations occupies a low, gold-paneled building in midtown Manhattan. On a recent hot morning, I pressed the doorbell and was admitted to a cool, neat waiting room--in which no one else was waiting. Posters on the walls advertised Zimbabwe's natural wonders, including wild elephants and the splendid Victoria Falls, with the caption "Africa's Paradise."

Yet in today's Zimbabwe what looms large is not paradise but famine. "The situation is deteriorating fairly rapidly," says Kevin Farrell, country director for the U.N.'s World Food Program, reached by phone in the Zimbabwean capital of Harare. He says that in any village right now, "you will see people clearly hungry." The U.N. is appealing for $611 million worth of emergency aid for sub-Saharan Africa. Almost half of that is for Zimbabwe, the region's former breadbasket, where aid workers now predict that without massive help, hundreds of thousands may soon starve to death.

One seasoned relief expert who recently visited Zimbabwe, the Rev. Jack Finucane of American based Concern Worldwide, doubts that even drastic international action will be enough. "I don't think you can avoid large numbers of people dying of starvation this year in Zimbabwe, Father Finucane told me in a phone interview. "There's a problem about getting food into the country."

There is nothing natural about this.

True, Zimbabwe has had a drought. But it's a nation that inherited from colonial days some of the best infrastructure in Africa. There's nothing wrong with the roads, on which Father Finucane traveled hundreds of miles to gather the evidence on which he based his grim findings. In our modern world, with its swift transport, global markets and cheap technology--supplemented in a crisis by a vast network of eager aid agencies--there is no way that famine can be chalked up simply to natural disaster.

Given any reasonable degree of freedom, people faced with dwindling supplies of food will make mighty use of their basic human ingenuity to find ways to survive. It takes a lot of work, by determined tyrants, to starve human beings to death. Stalin engineered a terrible famine in the 1930s to subdue rebellious farmers in Ukraine. Mao in the 1950s and '60s starved some 30 million Chinese to death in the process of consolidating his grip on power. Ethiopians suffered famine in the 1980s under the Marxist rule of Col. Mengistu Haile Mariam, who was finally ousted in 1991 (and retired to luxury digs in Zimbabwe, where he still resides). North Korea's totalitarian Kim Jong Il has forced the starvation of more than one million North Koreans since the mid-1990s, rather than let them grow their own crops, trade in free markets and quite probably save their own lives.

---

At Zimbabwe's U.N. mission, above the reception desk, near the promos for paradise, hangs a portrait of the ruler who has chosen to enroll this once-fruitful country in the axis of famine: "His Excellency the President of the Republic of Zimbabwe"--Robert Gabriel Mugabe.

Mr. Mugabe peers out from behind big dark-rimmed spectacles, looking younger in this official portrait than his 78 years. He has ruled Zimbabwe since independence from Britain in 1980, tightening his grip over time. As some countries in Africa have begun to liberalize, Zimbabweans have been looking more urgently for change, turning to such opposition figures as Morgan Tsvangirai, a popular trade union leader. Mr. Mugabe has responded with increasingly destructive tactics for keeping power--imposing price controls, nationalizing enterprises and turning loose gangs known as "war veterans" to brutalize opponents.

In March, Mr. Mugabe "won" re-election, defeating Mr. Tsvangirai in a rigged vote. The U.S. State Department described the election as "marred by disenfranchisement of urban voters, violent intimidation against opposition supporters, intimidation of the independent press and the judiciary and other irregularities." Despite all that, Mr. Tsvangirai still won about 40% of the vote.

Over the past two years, Mr. Mugabe's bid to boost his waning support has included a "land reform" in which his government ordered white commercial farmers to quit farming and surrender their land to be parceled out to blacks. This was done in the name of redressing racial injustice left over from colonial times. In an independence day speech on April 18, Mr. Mugabe announced triumphantly that the land "has finally come to its rightful owners."

But these huge farms, run with large economies of scale, were the most productive source of the country's food. Their confiscation, carried out in many cases by violent mobs, has brought farming to a near halt. With famine imminent, Mr. Mugabe's regime has ordered almost 3,000 white farmers still on their land to halt all production and leave their property within the next three weeks.

According to sources such as the U.S. Agency for International Development, the parceling out to date has been neither equitable nor productive. London's Daily Telegraph reported in May that vast tracts of land had been "handed out to President Mugabe's closest allies, including 10 cabinet ministers, seven MP's [members of Parliament] and his brother-in-law."Concern Worldwide estimates that yields have plunged 90% from what was once normal. And though the drought ended months ago and many of the reservoirs are now full, Mr. Mugabe's ruinous land "reform" means there is now almost no effective irrigation or new planting. Whatever hardship all this means for the white farmers, by far the worst hit by these ruinous tactics are millions of blacks.

Nor can people simply buy supplies on the open market. The government runs a Grain Marketing Board that has monopoly rights to import and deal in commodities such as corn--the staple food in Zimbabwe. Roadblocks restrict unauthorized shipments into the country. Farmers are forced to sell exclusively to the state marketing board, at well below world price, which further reduces incentives for large-scale planting. The marketing board rations its stocks, funneling food toward Mr. Mugabe's supporters and stinting the opposition, according to USAID head Andrew Natsios. Mr. Natsios describes Mr. Mugabe as "predatory and tyrannical" and says the Mugabe government "has politicized the distribution of food."

Making matters worse, government policy has also brought soaring inflation, now in the triple digits, which has been fast eroding the buying power of ordinary Zimbabweans. The official exchange rate is now about 1/16th the black-market rate for hard currency, meaning that even if Zimbabweans resort to the black market, the price of imported food is increasingly out of reach.

---

In a country that was once among the most prosperous and promising in Africa, Mr. Mugabe's government is "causing the mass destruction of the middle class," says USAID's Mr. Natsios. This is causing deep alarm in neighboring South Africa. In a June 19 cover letter to an extensive report compiled by dissident civic groups in Zimbabwe, documenting abuses committed by the Mugabe government, South Africa's Archbishop Desmond Tutu wrote that "Zimbabweans are now suffering the brunt of policies that could soon spill over into the entire region." Describing the March presidential election as "not fair," Archbishop Tutu added: "It is now clear that the resolution to the Zimbabwe crisis can only be found in recapturing the legitimacy of government and returning the country to a fair and just rule of law."

Aid donors are now trying to maneuver emergency rations through Mr. Mugabe's horrific political maze--which has included objections by Harare officials to the importation of genetically modified grain. This precludes some kinds of corn that Americans routinely eat.

This week the U.N. issued a frantic call for swifter relief to avert catastrophic starvation. Assorted nongovernmental organizations have been urgently petitioning finicky officials in Harare for permission to ship in enough food to feed Zimbabweans deprived of the freedom to feed themselves. Mr. Mugabe, however, hasn't been bothering himself much with all the fuss about famine. He was off in Cuba last week, lauding what he calls his "fast track" land policy and hobnobbing with his old pal Fidel Castro--another septuagenarian believer in the power of rationing.

---

Back in New York, my visit to Zimbabwe's mission to the U.N. led to an interview the next day with the ambassador to the U.N., Tichaona Jokonya. An elderly, well-spoken man, Mr. Jokonya offered an intriguing window on the history of Zimbabwe, including an account of his own role in fighting colonial rule along with Mr. Mugabe some three decades back, a part for which Mr. Jokonya says he was trained in China during the late 1960s by the forces of Mao Tse-tung, one of his heroes. Mr. Jokonya agreed that not all is well is Zimbabwe today, saying that "half the population will be affected" by hunger, and noting that the grain marketing board has its shortcomings. He added that Zimbabwe is a "young" nation and needs time and understanding.

But time is running out. And what most needs understanding is the kind of information I learned from a relief worker in Zimbabwe who has just put in a long stint going village to village. This relief worker described people in the countryside who still look healthy but are now running through their last resources--selling off the cow or the goats, boiling roots for food, and waiting in mile-long queues at local offices of the state's Grain Marketing Board--when anything is actually available there.

The relief worker described an old Zimbabwean woman who came with hundreds of others to a foreign aid center set up near a village school. She said that almost everyone she knows is getting desperate: "We beg, we borrow, we look for food." In hunger, if nothing else, she added, "we are all equal now."

Ms. Rosett is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board. Her column appears Wednesdays here and in The Wall Street Journal Europe.

from Reuters South Africa, 2006-Apr-7, by Stella Mapenzauswa:

Gloom for Zimbabwe economy as inflation surges

HARARE - Zimbabwe's annual inflation rate reached a record 913.6 percent in March, dashing hopes of revival for an economy mired in escalating poverty after eight years of recession.

The previous record of 782 percent was set in February, the Central Statistics Office said on Friday. The rise in inflation piles yet more pressure on President Robert Mugabe's government, ruling over a restive population grappling with soaring costs of everything from basic food staples to transport costs and school fees.

Zimbabwe's inflation is the highest in the world, according to the International Monetary Fund.

Analysts said the March increase dashed central bank forecasts that inflation would peak at between 700 and 800 percent during March before falling to between 220 and 230 percent by the end of the year in response to a tighter monetary policy.

"We are in a mess and in a normal situation one would expect that someone at the ministry of finance or the Reserve Bank would get fired for failing to do their job," said Tony Hawkins, a business studies professor at the University of Zimbabwe.

The March increase was driven partly by sharp annual increases in house rentals following the government's controversial clean-up operation last year, which demolished homes and lefts hundreds of thousands without shelter.

Price pressures were also stoked by sharp rises in the costs of postal services and beauty products -- hair and cosmetics.

"It's not surprising. We had expected the inflation rate to be 1,000 percent this month," said Yvonne Mhango, an economist at Standard Bank in Johannesburg.

Mugabe's government is blamed by critics for an economic meltdown that has made itself felt through recurring shortages of fuel, foreign currency and food along with soaring uemployment.

It has recently reinstated price controls on basic commodities and services in a bid to control inflation.

But analysts maintain that superficial price controls without a rise in production across the economy's key agriculture, mining and manufacturing sectors will do little to reverse the country's fortunes.

"This latest inflation increase is likely to strengthen the government's resolve to keep a grip on prices because at this stage I don't see what else these guys can do," said Hawkins.

"We are in a random walk situation now and it is impossible to guess what will happen next."

Analysts say the government is constantly haunted by the spectre of public unrest among urban Zimbabweans hardest hit by the impact of an estimated 40 percent contraction in the country's economy over the past seven years.

Most of Zimbabwe's private-run schools have doubled fees for the term beginning in May to keep up with rising prices of text books, stationery and other maintenance costs. They have also warned struggling parents of a further upward review on the basis of the March inflation figure.

President Mugabe blames the once prosperous nation's woes on sabotage by the West, led by former colonial power Britain in retaliation for his controversial seizures of land from white commercial farmers.

But critics say Mugabe has failed to deal decisively with corruption, including among government and ruling ZANU-PF party officials, which the veteran leader concedes has contributed towards the country's economic woes.

from Reuters via the Washington Post, 2006-Sep-20:

Zimbabwe internet slows to crawl as debts unpaid

HARARE - Internet traffic in Zimbabwe has come close to a standstill after an international satellite firm slashed its bandwidth because the cash-starved government failed to pay the bill.

Government-owned TelOne, which owns the country's main satellite Internet link, said satellite firm Intelsat had cut its international bandwidth because it failed to pay the $700,000 fee.

"The link is slow because they reduced the megabits on our satellite link until the payment is made," TelOne spokesman Phill Chingwaru told Reuters on Wednesday.

"We have approached the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe for foreign currency and they are working on that, but meanwhile there would be delays in browsing because of the partial cut-off."

President Robert Mugabe's government is grappling with an eight-year recession, the world's highest inflation rate of 1,200 percent, shortages of foreign currency, food, fuel, and unemployment above 70 percent.

Zimbabwe's foreign currency shortages have worsened after a fall-out with international donors over policy differences, such as Harare's seizure of white-owned farms for blacks.

"It is a nightmare because of the congestion and we are getting calls from desperate clients, some of them who can't even access the Internet," said an official from a private ISP, which uses TelOne's satellite link.

The Zimbabwe Internet Service Providers Association (ZISPA) said on its website TelOne's connection had been severed, causing an "almost collapse" of the Internet in the country. It said ZISPA would lobby the government to help it pay the debt.

Chingwaru said TelOne had asked the government for permission to charge big firms in foreign currency to avoid being cut off in the future.

He said TelOne had meanwhile ventured into farming by contracting tobacco and cotton farmers to produce crops for export, in a bid to generate foreign currency. Chingwaru said TelOne would get $12 million from the recent tobacco selling season.

Mugabe accuses former colonial power Britain of leading a Western campaign of economic sabotage.

from Reuters via sabcnews.com, 2006-Apr-7:

Zimbabwe threatens to grab private firms' farms

Zimbabwe's government, battling an economic crisis which critics partly blame on its seizures of white-owned farms, is now targeting firms with multiple or huge land holdings, an official newspaper reported today.

But analysts say the new drive - which could affect timber and sugar plantations - would further damage Zimbabwe's investment climate and international image. Zimbabwe, once a net exporter of grain to southern Africa, has suffered food shortages over the last five years as its farming sector has been hit by drought and disruptions linked to President Robert Mugabe's controversial land reforms.

The Herald newspaper said Didymus Mutasa, the national state security minister, told a government media briefing that while many farms had been redistributed to landless blacks since 2000, "quite a lot" still remained in the hands of private firms. "Government is investigating shareholding in the private companies that own huge farms, with the view of redistributing the land to needy people," it said.

More threats to property rights

The daily quoted Mutasa, who is also in charge of the government's lands, land reform and resettlement department, as saying: "Quite a lot of land is still being held in the hands of companies and we would want to look into that thoroughly." Mutasa was not immediately available for comment. But John Robertson, a leading economic consultant, said the government drive would further undermine property rights in a country which has largely been shunned by foreign investors since the start of its land seizures.

Analysts say only about 600 of Zimbabwe's 4 500 white farmers have kept their land after the government launched a sometimes violent campaign six years ago to redistribute farms. Critics have blamed the land seizures for a sharp drop in Zimbabwe's agricultural production, part of a wider economic crisis that has led to shortages of food, fuel and foreign exchange, rocketing unemployment and triple digit inflation.

The government says the agricultural crisis is due in large part to drought, and accuses its Western critics of applying policies aimed at undermining its rule over the former British colony.

from Reuters, 2006-Mar-31, by Cris Chinaka:

Zimbabwe's Mugabe threatens rival over protests

HARARE - Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe on Friday warned opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai not to organise street protests to overthrow him, saying such a campaign would be dicing with death.

Tsvangirai, leader of the main faction of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), said earlier this month he would soon lead a wave of "mass action" demonstrations against Mugabe, Zimbabwe's ruler since 1980.

Tsvangirai charges that Mugabe and his ZANU-PF party have rigged three main elections since 2000 to remain in power.

In that time Zimbabwe has descended into economic crisis, and critics blame Mugabe's policies for food, fuel and foreign currency shortages, huge inflation and unemployment. Mugabe says his opponents have sabotaged the economy to undermine him.

Addressing thousands of his supporters in Harare at the burial of a senior security aide, Mugabe said he would crush any attempts by the MDC to force him out of office.

Speaking in Zimbabwe's main vernacular Shona language, Mugabe mocked Tsvangirai as a coward who deserted the country's independence war in the 1970s, but was now posing as a patriot in a country struggling with a severe economic crisis.

"Who do you think you are threatening? Who do you think will be moved by your threats?" Mugabe said, adding that ZANU-PF was a battled hardened liberation party.

"These threats, that if we won't leave office you are going to remove us through violence -- Aaah, this man! Does he know our history, does he know our record?"

Tsvangirai said on March 18 sustained protests were the only way to overcome government brutality, and that he was ready to lead peaceful demonstrations.

"Don't dice with death in that manner," Mugabe warned. "It will never happen. We won't allow it," he added, saying Tsvangirai should concentrate on the ballot box.

The MDC was formed in 1999 and has for years been seen as the greatest threat to Mugabe's hold on power. But analysts say a recent split in its ranks over how to tackle Mugabe has weakened its potency.

At a recent congress of his main MDC faction, Tsvangirai said his group was still a resilient force capable of launching a strong political campaign.

Mugabe, Zimbabwe's ruler since independence from Britain in 1980, has kept the opposition in check mainly through tough policing, including routine deployment of security forces to crush all street protests.

from NBC News via MSNBC.com, 2003-Jan-15, by Robert Windrem with Lisa Myers, Rich Gardella and Judy Augsberger of NBC News and Michael Moran of MSNBC.com:

Death, terror in N. Korea gulag

In the far north of North Korea, in remote locations not far from the borders with China and Russia, a gulag not unlike the worst labor camps built by Mao and Stalin in the last century holds some 200,000 men, women and children accused of political crimes. A month-long investigation by NBC News, including interviews with former prisoners, guards and U.S. and South Korean officials, revealed the horrifying conditions these people must endure -- conditions that shock even those North Koreans accustomed to the near-famine conditions of Kim Jong Il's realm.

“IT'S ONE of the worst, if not the worst situation -- human rights abuse situation -- in the world today,” said Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., who held hearings on the camps last year. “There are very few places that could compete with the level of depravity, the harshness of this regime in North Korea toward its own people.”

Satellite photos provided by DigitalGlobe confirm the existence of the camps, and interviews with those who have been there and with U.S. officials who study the North suggest Brownback's assessment may be conservative.

Among NBC News' findings:

• At one camp, Camp 22 in Haengyong, some 50,000 prisoners toil each day in conditions that U.S. officials and former inmates say results in the death of 20 percent to 25 percent of the prison population every year.
• Products made by prison laborers may wind up on U.S. store shelves, having been “washed” first through Chinese companies that serve as intermediaries.
• Entire families, including grandchildren, are incarcerated for even the most bland political statements.
• Forced abortions are carried out on pregnant women so that another generation of political dissidents will be “eradicated.”
• Inmates are used as human guinea pigs for testing biological and chemical agents, according to both former inmates and U.S. officials.

Efforts by MSNBC.com to reach North Korean officials were unsuccessful. Messages left at the office of North Korea's permanent representative to the United Nations went unanswered.

Eung Soo Han, a press officer at South Korea's U.N. consulate, said: “It is a very unfortunate situation, and our hearts go out to those who suffer. We hope North Korea will open up its country, and become more actively involved with the international community in order for the North Korean people to be lifted out of their difficult situation.”

LABOR, DEATH, ABUSE

NBC's investigation revealed that North Korea's State Security Agency maintains a dozen political prisons and about 30 forced labor and labor education camps, mainly in remote areas. The worst are in the country's far Northeast. Some of them are gargantuan: At least two of the camps, Haengyong and Huaong, are larger in area than the District of Columbia, with Huaong being three times the size of the U.S. capital district.

Satellite photos provided by DigitalGlobe show several of the camps, including the notorious Haengyong, for the first time outside official circles. Plainly visible are acres upon acres of barracks, laid out in regimented military style. Surrounding each of them is 10-foot-high barbed-wire fencing along with land mines and man traps. There is even a battery of anti-aircraft guns to prevent a liberation by airborne troops.

Ahn Myong Chol, a guard at the camp (which is sometimes known as Hoeryong) from 1987 through 1994, examined the satellite photos of Camp 22 for NBC News. They were taken in April, eight years after he left. But he says little has changed. He was able to pick out the family quarters for prisoners, the work areas, the propaganda buildings.

Looking at the imagery, Ahn noted what happened in each building:

“This is the detention center,” he said. “If someone goes inside this building, in three months he will be dead or disabled for life. In this corner they decided about the executions, who to execute and whether to make it public.

“This is the Kim Il Sung institute, a movie house for officers. Here is watchdog training. And guard training ground.”

Pointing to another spot, he said: “This is the garbage pond where the two kids were killed when guard kicked them in pond.”

Another satellite photo shows a coal mine at the Chungbong camp where prisoners are worked to exhaustion in a giant pit.

“All of North Korea is a gulag,” said one senior U.S. official, noting that as many as 2 million people have died of starvation while Kim has amassed the world's largest collection of Daffy Duck cartoons. “It's just that these people [in the camps] are treated the worst. No one knows for sure how many people are in the camps, but 200,000 is consistent with our best guess.

“We don't have a breakdown, but there are large numbers of both women and children.”

BEYOND THE PALE

It is the widespread jailing of political prisoners' families that makes North Korea unique, according to human rights advocates.

Under a directive issued by Kim's father, North Korea's founder, Kim Il Sung, three generations of a dissident's family can be jailed simply on the basis of a denunciation.

NBC News interviewed two former prisoners and a former guard about conditions in the camps. The three spent their time at different camps. Their litany of camp brutalities is unmatched anywhere in the world, say human rights activists.

“Listening to their stories, it's horrific,” said David Hawk, a veteran human rights campaigner and a consultant for the U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea. Hawk has interviewed many former prisoners in Seoul.

“It's hard to do more than one or two a day because they're just so painful to hear: horrific mistreatment - all sorts of suffering, beatings to death, executions.”

Kang Chol-Hwan is now a journalist with Chosun Ilbo, South Korea's most important newspaper. His recent book, “The Aquariums of Pyongyang,” is the first memoir of a North Korean political prisoner. For nearly a decade, he was imprisoned because his grandfather had made complimentary statements about Japanese capitalism. He was a 9-year-old when he arrived at the Yodok camp. His grandfather was never seen again, and prison conditions killed his father.

“When I was 10 years old,” Kang recalled, “We were put to work digging clay and constructing a building. And there were dozens of kids, and while digging the ground, it collapsed. And they died. And the bodies were crushed flat. And they buried the kids secretly, without showing their parents, even though the parents came.”

The system appears to draw no distinction between those accused of the crime and their family members.

Soon Ok Lee, imprisoned for seven years at a camp near Kaechon in Pyungbuk province, described how the female relatives of male prisoners were treated.

“I was in prison from 1987 till January 1993,” she told NBC News in Seoul, where she now lives. “[The women] were forced to abort their children. They put salty water into the pregnant women's womb with a large syringe, in order to kill the baby even when the woman was 8 months or 9 months pregnant.

“And then, from time to time there a living infant is delivered. And then if someone delivers a live infant, then the guards kick the bloody baby and kill it. And I saw an infant who was crying with pain. I have to express this in words, that I witnessed such an inhumane hell.”

TESTING ON HUMANS

Soon also spoke about the use of prisoners as guinea pigs, which a senior U.S. official describes as “very plausible. We have heard similar reports.”

“I saw so many poor victims,” she said. “Hundreds of people became victims of biochemical testing. I was imprisoned in 1987 and during the years of 1988 through '93, when I was released, I saw the research supervisors -- they were enjoying the effect of biochemical weapons, effective beyond their expectations -- they were saying they were successful.”

She tearfully described how in one instance about 50 inmates were taken to an auditorium and given a piece of boiled cabbage to eat. Within a half hour, they began vomiting blood and quickly died.

“I saw that in 20 or 30 minutes they died like this in that place. Looking at that scene, I lost my mind. Was this reality or a nightmare? And then I screamed and was sent out of the auditorium.”

Prison guard Ahn's memories are, like the others', nothing short of gruesome. Every day, he said there were beatings and deaths.

“I heard many times that eyeballs were taken out by beating,” he recalled. “And I saw that by beating the person the muscle was damaged and the bone was exposed, outside, and they put salt on the wounded part. At the beginning I was frightened when I witnessed it, but it was repeated again and again, so my feelings were paralyzed.”

Moreover, said Ahn, beating and killing prisoners was not only tolerated, it was encouraged and even rewarded.

“They trained me not to treat the prisoners as human beings. If someone is against socialism, if someone tries to escape from prison, then kill him,” Ahn said. “If there's a record of killing any escapee then the guard will be entitled to study in the college. Because of that some guards kill innocent people.”

President Bush told author and Washington Post Assistant Managing Editor Bob Woodward last year that he was well aware of the camps and the atrocities. That, officials say, partly explains why Bush insisted on North Korea's inclusion in the “axis of evil” in his 2002 State of the Union address.

“I loathe Kim Jong Il,” Bush told Woodward during an interview for the author's book “Bush at War.” “I've got a visceral reaction to this guy because he is starving his people. And I have seen intelligence of these prison camps -- they're huge -- that he uses to break up families and to torture people.”

Brownback, a senator with a reputation as a human rights advocate, thinks that the prison camps and abuses have for too long taken a back seat to nuclear arms and other Korean issues.

“It seems that what happened is that there got to be a complex set of issues, and people said, `Well OK, it's about our relationship with China, it's about the Korean Peninsula, it's about this militaristic regime in North Korea that we don't want to press too much because they may march across the border into South Korea.”

Brownback says the North's nuclear program, its missile tests and generally unpredictable behavior has blurred a critical issue:

“I think people just got paralyzed to really put a focus on the human face of this suffering,” he said.

from the Telegraph, 2003-Jun-8, by Mark Nicol:

Famine-struck N Koreans 'eating children'

Cannibalism is increasing in North Korea following another poor harvest and a big cut in international food aid, according to refugees who have fled the stricken country.

Aid agencies are alarmed by refugees' reports that children have been killed and corpses cut up by people desperate for food. Requests by the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) to be allowed access to "farmers' markets", where human meat is said to be traded, have been turned down by Pyongyang, citing "security reasons".

Anyone caught selling human meat faces execution, but in a report compiled by the North Korean Refugees Assistance Fund (NKRAF), one refugee said: "Pieces of 'special' meat are displayed on straw mats for sale. People know where they came from, but they don't talk about it."

The NKRAF, an aid body set up in China five years ago which helps to smuggle food and medicines into parts of North Korea off-limits to WFP officials, interviewed 200 refugees for the report.

"If a funeral takes place during the day and the burial is performed that evening, the grave may be dug open and the body stolen before morning," said one refugee.

Another witness, named only as Lee, 54, said he feared that his missing grandsons, aged eight and 11, had been killed for food. As he searched widely for them, they boys' friends said they had vanished near a market.

Mr Lee said police who raided a nearby restaurant found body parts. The business's owners were shot.

Gerald Bourke, the WFP's representative in Beijing, said it was difficult for his organisation to substantiate the reports of cannibalism as they were unable to get to the markets. "As in any desperately poor country, it is something we might stumble on," he said. "It's not just a problem for us, but also our donors." Because of the food shortages, many people were having to survive on nine ounces of rations a day - less than half the recommended minimum daily intake.

North Korea's ability to feed itself has been hit by floods, deforestation and lack of farm fertilisers and equipment.

The WFP says Japan provided 500,000 tons of food aid in 2001, making it the biggest donor, but sent nothing last year. Food aid from America has been cut from 340,000 tons in 2001 to 40,000 tons so far this year. Washington has pledged to send a further 60,000 tons if Pyongyang lifts restrictions on the operations of agencies such as the WFP.

from the London Times, 1999-Feb-19, by Jennifer Veale in Seoul, from http://www.the-times.co.uk/news/pages/tim/99/02/19/timfgnfar01001.html?1124027:

Famine cuts North Korea population 'by two million'

BETWEEN two and three million North Koreans have died of starvation or fled to neighbouring China and Russia since 1995 when chronic food shortages began, according to a secret survey said to have been conducted in the Communist country.

South Korea's intelligence agency said that a classified report by Pyongyang's Public Security Ministry showed that the North's population had plunged more than 500,000 a year over the past four years - due mainly to starvation and disease, but also to defection.

The National Intelligence Service did not reveal how it came by the information.

While the death toll is unknown, South Korean officials believe that the Stalinist nation's population has plunged to 22 million from 24 million in 1994.

Last year a visiting delegation from the United States Congress reported that about two million North Koreans were believed to have died from malnutrition and disease since 1995.

"The North's population is expected to continue to decrease unless it eases its severe food shortages,” an intelligence official was quoted as saying. The Public Security Ministry reportedly conducted the census ahead of the polls to elect candidates to the tenth Supreme People's Assembly - North Korea's parliament.

The North's food shortages began in 1994, when massive floods swept the country, destroying crops and huge tracts of arable land.

Drought in successive years and obsolete farming techniques compounded the famine. International relief agencies have responded over the past five years with more than £625 million in food aid. But many North Koreans have fled to China and Russia looking for food and a trade in North Korean refugees has sprung up along the country's border with China.

The North is pressing for more food aid from the United States in return for access to an underground site which Washington suspects is a nuclear facility in breach of a 1994 anti-nuclear pact.

Under the deal, North Korea froze its nuclear programme in return for modern light-water reactors and economic aid from the United States and its allies. A Seoul newspaper reported yesterday that agreement between Pyongyang and Washington was expected by early next month on a deal to swap food aid and an easing of sanctions for access to the disputed site. The newspaper said the deal would also cover Pyongyang's contentious missile programme.

Another report said that Seoul was considering providing the North with 30,000 tonnes of fertiliser next month before the spring planting season.

South Korea recently gave the go-ahead for private citizens to make aid donations to the North rather than go through the Red Cross.

from The Australian, 2001-Jan-2, by Stephen Lunn in Tokyo:

Human flesh on sale in North Korea

STARVING North Koreans are reverting to cannibalism to survive, while farmers have been ordered to grow opium for state-endorsed overseas sale, a maker of television documentaries has claimed.

Carla Garapedian, producer of Children of the Secret State, a BBC-Channel 4 co-production, said film smuggled out of North Korea, and interviews with refugees escaping the communist state, revealed "acts of unspeakable barbarism not seen since Pol Pot's Cambodia".

"(The) footage is shocking. Starving children abandoned by the state. Orphans thrown into state asylums and left to die," Garapedian wrote in an opinion article run this week in Japan's Daily Yomiuri newspaper.

Worse, she said, were the drawings of 15-year-old Jang Gil-su, who with his family fled North Korea into China and has, while still in hiding, been recording his experiences of everyday life in his former country, where millions of people are understood to have starved to death.

The pictures, given to Garapedian by a refugee support group in Seoul, depict families eating pine bark, rats, snakes and anything else to stay alive. One shows a man at a market stall, with Jang captioning it "Man selling human flesh (saram hoki) at a farmers' market in Hoeroung city".

"All of the North Koreans we interviewed knew about it. Jang's picture of a dismembered child in a cooking pot says more than any of the numbing statistics," Garapedian wrote.

Independent verification of the practice is difficult because Hoeroung city is impossible to visit or contact in the secretive country.

"You eat it without knowing it is human flesh. You're so hungry you just eat it," she quotes one orphan as saying, claiming more than 200,000 orphans are starving in North Korea, despite the country receiving the second-most food aid in the world.

North Korean leader Kim Jong-il, desperate to garner more international aid with a freezing winter in full swing, is trying to open up his mysterious country to the outside world.

Australia was one of the first nations to reintroduce diplomatic relations with North Korea early last year. Since then, many nations have taken steps to follow suit, including Italy, Germany and Britain.

Garapedian said she had spoken to farmers who claimed to have been barred from growing food and instead ordered to grow opium. "The opium would then be processed by the state into heroin and then sold abroad. The proceeds would go to arm the military," she wrote.

North Korean officials could not be contacted for comment yesterday.

from TPDL 1999-Sep-18, from the New York Post:

MEET WILLIAM JEFFERSON CHAMBERLAIN

Regarding North Korea, the world's most frightening nation, Bill Clinton has made bribery the cornerstone of his failed foreign policy once again.

The administration yesterday announced the easing of trade, banking and travel restrictions in place against the Stalinist state since the Korean armistice in 1953.

The loosening of sanctions came after Pyongyang apparently - we use the word advisedly - backed off on a promise to fire a long- range ballistic missile over Japan, as it did just over a year ago. The Japanese viewed the initial missile "test" as a grave provocation - and made it clear that any repetition would have consequences.

There was potential for a real crisis here. North Korea is a destitute, demented nation run by people who feed soldiers while millions of children starve. But Japan and - increasingly - the People's Republic of China have made it clear that their patience with Pyongyang is wearing thin.

Enter Bill Clinton, doing what he does best regarding North Korea - bribery.

The deal appears to be this: North Korea agrees not to do what it shouldn't be doing in the first place - threatening its neighbors - and in return Washington will open its bag of goodies.

It's a pattern that began in October 1994, when North Korea agreed to abandon a nuclear-weapons program - in return for two modern nuclear-power plants and 500,000 tons of heavy heating oil a year, all for free.

Less than three years later, Pyongyang announced that it was pulling out of talks with the U.S., China and South Korea - unless it got 100,000 tons of high-quality foodstuffs from Washington.

Clinton ponied up.

Then North Korea demanded - and got - hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash in exchange for allowing America to look for the remains of U.S. servicemen listed as missing in the Korean war.

It also successfully extorted millions from Seoul to permit the reunification of Korean families separated by the post-war demilitarized zone. Then Pyongyang demanded - and got - more than $1 billion from the south to allow religious pilgrims to travel north of the DMZ.

Most recently, North Korea successfully extorted hundreds of thousands of tons of food aid from the United States to permit neutral inspectors to view a suspected nuclear weapons plant - but only after stalling for months after evidence that bombs were being built first surfaced.

And so it goes. The North Koreans take actions that threaten peace - or offend human decency - and then agree to stop only when the price becomes right. And, even then, it's not clear that they've complied with their own promises.

"We are once again entering the cycle of extortion with North Korea," said House International Relations Committee Chairman Benjamin Gilman yesterday. "Ultimately, we have no assurances that North Korea has halted missile development, or its program for weapons of mass destruction."

The containment of North Korea may be the most important foreign-policy challenge of our time. It's very disheartening to think that, with such a challenge facing this country and the world, the president of the United States is doing a Neville Chamberlain imitation.

from US Newswire, 1999-Mar-5:

Text of Presidential Determination on U.S. Contribution to KEDO (North Korea)

To: National Desk

Contact: White House Press Office, 202-456-2100

WASHINGTON, March 5 /U.S. Newswire/ -- Following is the text of a Presidential determination/memo on the U.S. contribution to KEDO, released today by the White House: March 4, 1999

Presidential Determination

No. 99-16

MEMORANDUM FOR THE SECRETARY OF STATE

SUBJECT: U.S. Contribution to KEDO: Certification Under Section 582(b) of the Foreign Operations, Export Financing, and Related Programs Appropriations Act, 1999, as contained in Public Law 105-277

Pursuant to section 582(b) of the Foreign Operations, Export Financing, and Related Programs Appropriations Act, 1999, as contained in Public Law 105-277, I hereby certify that:

(1)(A) the parties to the Agreed Framework have taken and continue to take demonstrable steps to assure that progress is made on the implementation of the January 1, 1992, Joint Declaration on the Denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula in which the Government of North Korea, has committed not to test, manufacture, produce, receive, possess, store, deploy, or use nuclear weapons;

(B) the parties to the Agreed Framework have taken and continue to take demonstrable steps to assure that progress is made on the implementation of the North-South dialogue; and

(C) North Korea is complying with all provisions of the Agreed Framework and with the Confidential Minute between North Korea and the United States.

(2) North Korea is cooperating fully in the canning and safe storage of all spent fuel from its graphite-moderated nuclear reactors;

(3) North Korea has not significantly diverted assistance provided by the United States for purposes for which it was not intended; and

(4) the United States is fully engaged in efforts to impede North Korea's development and export of ballistic missiles.

You are authorized and directed to report this certification to the Congress and to arrange for its publication in the Federal Register.

WILLIAM J. CLINTON

-0-

/U.S. Newswire 202-347-2770/

from the Associated Press, 1999-Mar-5:

Report: N. Korea Deploys Missiles

TOKYO (AP) -- North Korea has deployed medium-range missiles at a launch site near its border with China, a newspaper said today, quoting U.S. and Japenese military sources.

The report -- which Japanese officials refused to confirm or deny to The Associated Press -- came about seven months after North Korea fired a missile over Japan that landed in the Pacific Ocean.

That was believed to be a Taepodong missile capable of striking any part of the Japanese archipelago. Its firing prompted the United States, Japan and South Korea to review their defense systems amid deep concerns over the North's missile program.

Japan's Sankei newspaper quoted unidentified U.S. and Japanese sources saying North Korea has deployed Rodong missiles, with a range of up to 620 miles, near the border with China.

The paper said a major North Korean missile factory is located near the Rodong missile site in Yongodong, an area north of Pyongyang near the Chinese border. A total of about 30 Rodong missiles have been deployed in several unidentified sites in North Korea, the report said.

Japan's Self-Defense Agency refused to comment on the report.

In January, Japanese media reported that North Korea was building at least five underground launch sites for long-range Taepodong missiles near its borders with China and South Korea.

North Korea has said the rocket it fired in August launched a satellite, but Japan has dismissed that claim. Recently, Pyongyang said that it is preparing to launch another satellite.

The Rodong was last test-launched in 1993. The single-stage, liquid-fuel missile can carry a 450-pound warhead. North Korea also is reportedly developing an upgraded Rodong with a range of up to 940 miles.

Currently, American and North Korean officials are meeting in New York to discuss U.S. concerns about an underground construction site in North Korea that the Clinton administration believes may involve nuclear weapons development.

William Perry, the U.S. government policy coordinator on North Korea, arrived in Beijing today at the start of an Asian visit that will allow him to discuss the reclusive Communist country with Chinese, South Korean and Japanese officials.

from the Washington Times, 1999-Mar-11, by Bill Gertz:

Pyongyang working to make fuel for nukes

North Korea is working on uranium enrichment techniques and will be able to produce fuel for nuclear weapons in six years or less, according to a U.S. intelligence report.

The program involves a North Korean trading company that recently sought to buy enrichment technology from a Japanese manufacturer, and connections between North Korea and Pakistan, according to a Department of Energy intelligence report made available to The Washington Times.

According to the report, the technology sought by Pyongyang is a clear sign that North Korea, known as the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), "is in the early stages of a uranium enrichment capability."

"On the basis of Pakistan's progress with a similar technology, we estimate that the DPRK is at least six years from the production of [highly enriched uranium], even if it has a viable centrifuge design," the report said. "On the other hand, with significant technical support from other countries, such as Pakistan, the time frame would be decreased by several years."

The report is a further sign the communist regime in Pyongyang has abandoned the freeze imposed on its nuclear weapons program by a 1994 agreement with the United States.

Underground construction spotted by U.S. intelligence agencies last year at Kumchangni, North Korea, is believed to be a new facility for nuclear weapons production in violation of the agreement.

The secret intelligence assessment sent recently to senior officials throughout the U.S. government said North Korea's plan to set up a uranium enrichment capability for nuclear weapons is being helped by Pakistan, which has close ties to North Korea's missile program.

Pakistan purchased uranium enrichment technology from China in 1996 when it bought 5,000 special ring magnets used as bearings in gas centrifuges. The sale violated China's international commitment not to sell weapons technology to non-nuclear weapons states. It was dismissed by the Clinton administration after an investigation determined senior Chinese leaders were unaware of the technology transfer.

The intelligence report said the close ties between Pakistan and North Korea on missile development make it likely Pakistan is assisting the North Korean uranium enrichment program, said Pentagon officials familiar with it.

According to the report, North Korea's Daesong Yushin Trading Co. recently ordered two centrifuge-related items called "frequency converters" from a Japanese company. The trading company has been linked by U.S. intelligence to North Korea's covert weapons of mass destruction program, officials said.

One official said U.S. intelligence agencies are convinced the converters will be used in a "gas centrifuge cascade to enrich uranium."

A centrifuge cascade is a series of machines linked to increase the amount of highly enriched uranium produced by the high-speed spinning machines. Enriched uranium is a key element of fuel used to fire a first-generation nuclear weapon.

The report said the North Koreans, with only two of the converters, are probably setting up a small-scale uranium enrichment process. A larger program would then be set up.

Daesong is trying to buy the equipment in violation of Japanese government export controls. The converters provide special electrical current to the centrifuges.

Pentagon officials said the Japanese company is still considering the sale of the converters and an effort is underway within the U.S. government to block it quietly.

"Daesong is a known entity seeking weapons technology," said a Pentagon official. "This shows the utter failure of this administration's policy [toward North Korea]."

A senior administration official said: "In cases like these, our normal practice is to raise these matters with other governments and try to block shipments of this type. And normally we are successful."

The Clinton administration is close to announcing a new policy toward North Korea that is being drawn up by former Defense Secretary William Perry. Mr. Perry was in Japan yesterday, where tensions remain high after North Korea's Aug. 31 test firing of the new Taepodong missile. The missile passed over Japanese territory.

Pakistan is believed to have purchased missile know-how from North Korea for its medium-range Ghauri missile, which was test fired for the first time last year. The Ghauri has been described as closely resembling the North Korean Nodong missile and may have purchased from Pyongyang.

Gary Milhollin, director of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control, said North Korea's interest in enrichment technology would mark a shift in past efforts by Pyongyang to develop nuclear weapons.

"It shows they are considering the enrichment route, whereas their present capability is based exclusively on plutonium from reactors," Mr. Milhollin said.

A Pakistani link to the North Korean nuclear program also would be very troubling and mark a "sea change" in Pakistan's stance on nuclear weapons proliferation, Mr. Milhollin said.

Discovery of the covert nuclear technology acquisition effort is another setback for the Clinton administration's nonproliferation policy.

Under the 1994 Agreed Framework with the United States, North Korea agreed to halt all work on its nuclear weapons program, which was being built around plutonium-producing reactors at Yongbyon. Mr. Clinton has said the diplomatic effort successfully "froze" Pyongyang's nuclear weapons program.

Discovery last year of the new underground complex being built at Kumchangni was the first sign that North Korea appeared to be breaking out of the nuclear pact. National Security Adviser Samuel R. Berger has said the United States is trying to determine if North Korea plans to build nuclear production facilities at the site.

The North Korean weapons technology effort has continued despite the 1994 agreement, according to the Pentagon official.

Defense officials warned senior Clinton administration policy-makers as long as five years ago that North Korea was continuing to obtain foreign weapons technology, and the effort was increasing.

"We saw a sudden rise in purchases of technology for nuclear and missile programs," the official said.

The Pentagon official said North Korean trading companies are designated by the Pyongyang government to find certain elements needed for North Korea's weapons programs.

"You can pretty much tell by the company involved what the North Koreans are trying to do," he said.

from TPD 1999-Oct-21, from Investors Business Daily:

Misplaced Praise

When Tanzania's former President Julius Nyerere died last week at age 77 in a London hospital, accolades and tributes poured in from everywhere. It's not surprising. Nyerere had been routinely praised as a great leader for nearly four decades. But is the tribute earned?

Secretary of State Madeleine Albright will no doubt join in the praise as she attends his funeral today. She's already called him ”a giant on the world stage” and ”an eloquent spokesman for the developing world.”

Others have joined in the chorus as well. Unfortunately, they all have the wrong sheet music. British Prime Minister Tony Blair praised Nyerere as a ”leading African statesman of his time” who ”will be missed by his country, his continent and the international community.”

Said World Bank President James D. Wofensohn: ”He was one of the few leaders whose high ideals, moral integrity and personal modesty inspired people right around the globe.”

Yet Nyerere was in fact dictator of a one-party state and principal architect of one of the poorest, most dysfunctional economies in the world. The instinct to speak well of the late Nyerere, who left office in 1985 after 23 years of misrule, is commendable.

But the truth is more compelling. Nyerere was a flawed leader, a tireless advocate of unworkable socialist doctrines. He took over Tanzania as soon as it achieved independence and immediately got to work grinding its primitive economic structure deeper into the dirt.

He nationalized all the private banks and many of the nation's fledgling industries. Against their will, he swept villagers into that graveyard of agriculture - collective farms. Citizens who were too critical ended up jailed, often without a trial. And because he was in fact seen as a teacher, his misguided policies were emulated in Africa and elsewhere, with uniformly poor results.

There are some who argue that at the end of his term he recognized the failure of his policies and tried to pave the way toward economic liberalization and a market economy. But the fact is Nyerere left his nation's economy in shambles and never apologized for it.

Nyerere did, however, unite more than 100 tribes speaking various dialects and gave them a sense of Tanzanian nationhood. Also, in 1979, weary of Idi Amin's butchery, Nyerere sent troops into neighboring Uganda and chased one of the world's most horrific tyrants from power.

For those things he deserves credit. But for what he did to his own people, for his blind faith in the failed tenets of socialism, he is a sad object lesson. One that the rest of Africa should take to heart.