The Uprising Against Facism

'There is a real feeling that this is just a publicity stunt'

By Jerome Taylor
Published The Independent: 27 November 2007

For just the briefest of moments yesterday, David Irving and Nick Griffin must have thought they had got away with it – that despite the outcry, their debate at the Oxford Union was going to be a breeze. When the controversial speakers rolled up at the famous debating society's headquarters on St Michael's Street in separate black cabs shortly after 5.30pm, the media scrum outnumbered the protesters.
Maybe it had something to do with traditional student time-keeping, but the crowds of anti-fascist and minority rights campaigners simply hadn't turned up yet. But an hour in student politics is a long time and when the protesters finally did show up they nearly succeeded in doing what they had promised to do: cancelling a debate with two people that many believe stand for little more than intolerance and bigotry.
To say that the hierarchy of the Oxford Union were taken by surprise at just how controversial their event was would be a gross understatement. But no one was more caught out than the union's eloquent and now notorious president, Luke Tryl. The confident smile he had worn all afternoon as he smoked cigarettes and chatted outside the union disappeared once the protesters turned up in force. In its place, a look of flustered exasperation took over as he fought to find a way from stopping his evening from going under.
By 7pm, one and a half hours before the debate was due to take place, St Michael's Street had turned into an impassable bottleneck as protesters converged in their hundreds. Within 30 minutes, they began blockading the small wrought iron gate that was serving as the only entrance to the 100-year-old building.
As one of the protesters, a second-year chemistry student called Max Tzard, said: "I'm absolutely appalled we invited these people in the first place, no good can come of this. There is a real feeling that this is just a publicity stunt and we as members of the union are paying a price that most of us are not willing to pay."
Cheered on by the crowd, a small group of hardened anti-fascism activists pushed through the gate and over the walls to rush the main chamber where the original debate was to take place. A sit-in ensued and the building went into a lock down.
Even after the speakers were separated, just getting to the cramped, oak-panelled room with the BNP leader Nick Griffin for the start of the debate was a Herculean task, after a day of farce that would make a Charlie Chaplin day out look organised.
But by 9.45pm the academic jousting could begin and a small crowd of approximately 150 students sat on the floor to hear him speak.
Flanked by two shaven- headed heavies, Mr Griffin swept into the room wearing a well-cut suit finished off with a red tie and beige scarf. As the temperature in the room rose, one of the heavies retrieved a perfectly folded paper fan from the inside of his jacket pocket and began fanning himself – the academic heat was on.
Two university debating stalwarts were up against Mr Griffin: the 23-year-old Jess Prince and the 25-year-old James Dray. Ms Prince was the first to speak. A Canadian national who said she had been debating for 11 years, she opened by saying she relished the opportunity to debate against a man she described as "abhorrent".
Beginning a rapid fire assault on why free speech should have its limits she evoked the memory of her grandfather, who had fought against the Nazis in the Second World War. "Never did he think that his granddaughter would have to stand in the Oxford Union debating against someone like Mr Griffin," she said. "What this man stands for is disgusting and abhorrent. You ask how far is too far? This man is too far."
Mr Griffin wasted no time in reeling off his own family's war history. "My father fought in the RAF and my grandfather in World War One, so we're quits on that one," he retorted.
Never one to shy away from bold statements, the BNP leader's speech was littered with the sort of soundbites that have made him such a controversial figure – but a method to his arguing was hard to come by.
From supporting the rights of indigenous people living in the rainforest to "cut off the heads and stick on poles" those loggers and miners who would steal their natural resources, to stating that immigration was bad for the environment – "Every time someone from Africa comes over here, think of the carbon footprint" – Mr Griffin's arguments verged on the obscure.
But the one area where he could not help but win grudging agreement from his audience was on the subject he was asked to defend – the fundamental right to free speech. "The moment you have an establishment or an elite saying 'This is wrong' your heading towards a totalitarian state. Every generation has its sacred cows, its certainties, but very often they are wrong," he said.
It was an argument the audience spent little time trying to defeat. Instead they concentrated on dismantling the BNP, which Mr Griffin had a much harder job defending. Told by a self-confessed "integrated British Asian" that he would have no intention of "going home" were the BNP to win an election and try to force him to, Mr Griffin simply stuttered: "Well stay then."
Unlike most debates at the Oxford Union, however, there was no official motion and therefore no vote. The union decided to label last nights debate a Free Speech Forum and, while the discussions took all the forms of a debate, there was no way for the audience to express whether they liked what Mr Griffin had to say.
Sitting downstairs in the union library as he signed a guestbook that has the signatures of luminaries such as Mother Theresa and the Dalai Lama, it was clear that Mr Griffin felt good about how the event went. "How do I feel? I think it went pretty well," he said to the dying chants of the protesters outside. "At least it wasn't called off. Now we just have to find a taxi." Told by a union member to have a safe journey, the BNP leader looked slightly unsure of himself for the first time that evening. "I guess we'll have to see," he said.

http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/article3198966.ece

For the main news report written by Andy McSmith and I see here.

The saviours of the whale

(Photo: Angela Wylie)

As the Japanese harpooners set sail, their bitterest foes are also mobilising – and the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society will stop at nothing to protect the humpbacks

By Jerome Taylor

Published The Independent: 20 November 2007

Among the thousands of humpback whales that have begun making their way south towards the icy waters of the Antarctic's Southern Ocean this month is one of the world's most unusual and dazzling animals, a 40-tonne, bright white humpback known as Migaloo.
Believed to be the only entirely white humpback whale in the world, Migaloo, named after the Aboriginal word for "White Fella", was first spotted breaching the ocean's surface in 1991 and has since become the most recognised member of one of Mother Nature's great migrations.
But this year Migaloo's journey home is nothing short of perilous. Tracking him and his family is Japan's internationally despised whaling fleet, a mechanised armada of death that has, for the first time in 40 years, vowed to bring back 50 harpooned humpbacks on top of their annual "quota" of more than 1,000 whales.
Migaloo's family, part of six humpback communities that make their winter migration from the warm shallows of the South Pacific to the Antarctic each year, will have to dodge the Japanese harpoon guns and state-of-the-art satellite tracking techniques. The only thing standing between them and the whalers are two environmental groups comprised of hardened eco-warriors who travel to the Southern Ocean every year in their dilapidated vessels to try to act as a buffer between the whales and their would-be killers in a maritime game of cat and mouse.
But while activists on board Greenpeace's vessel the Esperanza will stick to their non-violent tactics of blockading and filming the Japanese ships, the second group will resort to much more controversial tactics.
In two weeks' time members of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, will sail from their mooring in Australia into the Antarctic waters to head off the Japanese fleet and this time round they have placed saving the humpbacks at the heart of their vigilante mission, codenamed "Operation Migaloo" . Using nothing more than a high-speed, 53-metre former Scottish fishing vessel, the Robert Hunt, Sea Shepherd activists have vowed to do whatever it takes to stop the whalers, even if it means physically disabling Japanese ships up to eight times their size. Tactics resorted to last year included ramming, throwing smoke bombs on board the ship's decks or dropping long knotted coils of polypropylene into their propellers.
Captaining this self-styled anti-whaling police force is 56-year-old Paul Watson, one of the international animal rights movement's most notorious and controversial figures – a vigilante environmentalist who, when not harrying Japanese fleets in sub- zero temperatures, can often be found ramming illegal fishing vessels off the coast of Ecuador or dropping steel " net-rippers" into the depleted fishing waters off the coast of Newfoundland.
"I did not establish the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society as a protest organisation," said Watson shortly after announcing this year's expedition. "I have not gone to sea over all these years to simply bear witness to the atrocities that whalers continue to inflict upon the most gentle and intelligent beings in the seas. We are sea cops, operating legally under the guidelines of the United Nations' World Charter for Nature. "
This year the activists' hunt for the hunters will once again centre on finding and stopping the Japanese fleet's flagship, the Nisshin Maru. To environmental campaigners, the giant 400ft-long vessel is something of a sick joke. Although it has "research" painted in large black letters on the side of its hull, it is in fact a "factory ship", the mothership of the Japanese fleet that acts as a floating butchering and refrigeration facility for the thousands of whales brought to it by the other boats in the fleet.
During last season's whale hunt, Sea Shepherd activists nearly succeeded in halting the Nisshin. On 12 February, after nearly two months of criss-crossing the Southern Ocean and failing to come across a single Japanese ship, spotters on board the Sea Shepherd's Robert Hunter sighted the Nisshin in the distant horizon. Dressed in black combat fatigues, their faces covered by ski masks, the activists headed towards the ship and threw smoke bombs and harmless foul smelling chemicals onto its decks.
A separate group of activists, meanwhile, boarded inflatable dinghies and motored up to the ship's hulls, nailing shut the scuppers through which whale blood was released into the ocean. The assault was eventually called off when one of the dinghies went missing in the day's increasingly stormy weather; two weeks later the Nisshin was forced to limp back to Japan after a fire on board disabled the ship's engine. The fire had nothing to do with the anti-whaling campaigners but the Japanese government was incensed nonetheless and branded Watson's crew "terrorists".
For many anti-whaling campaigners, Watson's coercive conservation tactics are simply a step too far and make it all too easy for whaling nations to accuse the environmental movement of being dominated by "eco-terrorists" . Watson was one of the dozen activists who helped found Greenpeace in the early 1970s; he was thrown out in 1977 for breaking the group's non-violent ethos during a protest against seal hunters and spent much of the following 30 years ostracised from the mainstream environmental movement.
"No one doubted his courage for a moment," the journalist Robert Hunter, a fellow Greenpeace founder and the man Sea Shepherd's current anti-whaling ship is named after, once wrote. "He was a great warrior-brother. Yet in terms of the Greenpeace gestalt, he seemed possessed by too powerful a drive, too unrelenting a desire to push himself front and centre, shouldering everyone else aside."
Over the past 30 years the methods employed by Watson and his followers read more like a James Bond novel than an activist's diary. According to his somewhat colourful autobiography, Watson claims he was first drawn to direct activism after his best friend, a wild beaver he called Bucky, died in an animal trap in the forests around his home in the New Brunswick Canada. At the age of nine he began dismantling and confiscating traps before moving on to the somewhat perilous task of standing in front of hunters during duck shoots.
In 1964, following the death of his mother during childbirth, he ran away from his abusive father and ended up in Vancouver, at the time a Swinging Sixties haven of free radicals, Vietnam draft dodgers and other hangers-on. Homeless and broke, he joined the local coastguard and before long his particular brand of radical maritime activism was born.
His first encounter with whaling fleets occurred in 1975 when Greenpeace vessels surrounded a Soviet harpooner off the coast of California. For much of the 1970s Greenpeace had campaigned primarily against nuclear testing but increasing alarm over the plummeting whale populations brought them into confrontation with the whalers. During the battles Watson saw a harpooned adult sperm whale die, an experience he later claimed changed his life. " In an instant, my life was transformed and a purpose for my life was reverently established," he wrote.
Following his acrimonious expulsion from Greenpeace, Watson went on to found the Sea Shepherds and spent much of the 1980s carrying out his particular shocking brand of coercive conservation. In 1981 he infiltrated Soviet Russia and documented the illegal harvesting of whale meat for animal feed. A year later he cropped up dropping light bulbs filled with paint on to the decks of Russian trawlers from an aeroplane and the following year he managed to single-handedly halt the annual seal hunt in Canada by threatening to sink his own ship at the entrance to St John's Harbour in Newfoundland where most of the Canadian seal trawlers were based.
But it is in the last four annual expeditions to the Antarctic that Watson has really found his true calling and, despite his controversial tactics, wider praise. For those who believe that the world's few remaining whaling fleets must be stopped at all costs, the Canadian campaigner and his crew of 52 volunteers are nothing short of saviours.
"I don't necessarily support everything Paul does but I do think on the whole he has helped the anti-whaling campaign greatly," says Peter Singer, the Princeton-based ethicist and one of the founding fathers of the animal rights debate. "Paul and the activists of Sea Shepherd are the kind of people who are prepared to go through the type of hardships that have to be endured to stop the whaling nations. Without their presence on the high seas there would be much less public knowledge, much less media interest and much less international focus on what is happening to these whales."
If Migaloo could speak he might say very much the same thing.

http://environment.independent.co.uk/nature/article3177018.ece

Off with their subsidies!

EU threatens to slash huge annual payments to Britain's wealthiest landowners

By Jerome Taylor: Published The Independent, 9th November 2007

Some of Britain's wealthiest landowners, including the Queen, the Prince of Wales and the Duke of Westminster, would see their farm subsidies drastically reduced under plans by Brussels to impose, for the first time, a cap on the amount of money that individual farmers can claim.
The proposal, being drawn up by the European Commission, is the first attempt in years to tackle the scandal of giant agri-businesses and millionaire barley barons – as opposed to smallholders and family farmers – being the chief beneficiaries of the Common Agricultural Policy. The plans, due to be submitted for consultation with EU member states on 20 November, will suggest that some of the largest payments to super-rich landowners and industrial farms could be reduced by as much as 45 per cent.
Disclosures over the past two years have shown that Britain's elite landowners harvest the lion's share of farming subsidies – a consistent source of embarrassment for the EU's farm policy which is supposed to provide a reasonable standard of living for poor farmers struggling to compete in the global market, not redistribute taxpayers' money into the hands of a few millionaires.
Estimates published earlier this year showed that the Queen, one of the wealthiest women in the world, receives approximately £404,000 a year in European subsidies for her Sandringham estate and at least £140,000 for Windsor Castle. Some of the richest British aristocrats, such as the Duke of Westminster, the Duke of Marlborough and the Earl of Leicester, are also known to receive hundreds of thousands of pounds each year.
Under the new proposals annual payments over €100,000 (£70,000) could be reduced by 10 per cent, those above €200,000 by 25 per cent and those above €300,000 by as much as 45 per cent. That could mean the Queen receiving £181,400 less per year for Sandringham and the Duke of Westminster losing up to £178,000 in subsidies for his farms in Cheshire, Lancashire and Scotland.
"This is a largely symbolic proposal but it will hit the pockets of major landowners and that includes people like the Queen," said Jack Thurston, co-founder of farmsubsidy.org which campaigns for greater transparency over payments. " We've known for a while now that roughly 80 per cent of the CAP goes to the richest 20 per cent of farmers. Those who benefit from subsidies the most have never been the poor struggling farmer."
The plans being proposed by the Commission are less ambitious than previous attempts at reform but they do mark the first attempt to cap farm subsidies since 2003 when a much more sweeping cap was blocked by Germany and Britain.
"This is an attempt to bring in a cap on subsidies in a more subtle way, " said Michael Mann, spokesman for the EU's agriculture commission. "In 2003 we proposed a similar idea that was less nuanced, capping all subsidies at £300,000, but it never got any further than a proposal. You have to live in the real world and come up with proposals that will be realistically taken up by the member states."
Although the British Government officially supports CAP reform it is particularly wary of any proposals that target large holdings because the vast majority of farm subsidies in the UK go to big businesses and wealthy landowners.
According to Mr Thurston's calculations, Germany's collectivised farms would be hit hardest by the proposals, cutting €270m off their annual subsidies while about 6,100 British farms would receive €78.5m less.
Opponents of the Common Agricultural Policy have long argued that the system unfairly benefits Britain's elite by redistributing taxpayers' money towards the wealthiest landowners. The Queen and Prince Charles, who are thought to have received more than £1m over the past two years, are eligiblefor subsidies because of their large land holdings farmed by tenants in the duchies of Lancaster and Cornwall.
A report released by Oxfam in 2004 condemned the way so-called subsidy magnates are able to reap hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of handouts despite being among the richest men and women in England. Its report highlighted in particular the Duke of Westminster, at the time the wealthiest man in Britain, who received a daily equivalent of a £1,000 handout thanks to the EU's lavish farm subsidy regime. Oxfam has called for a blanket £50,000 cap on farm subsidies and that all payments above £20,000 should be disclosed to the public.
Oxfam welcomed the European Commission's suggestions but said far more needed to be done to redress the inequalities within the Common Agricultural Policy. "It's a start and it would be churlish to be completely critical of the proposal," said Claire Godfrey, Oxfam's EU policy adviser. "But what it still doesn't do is actually address the inequalities in the distribution of subsidies."
Analysts also warned that the Commission's proposals could be significantly watered down by the time member states actually come to vote on the issue some time next year and that Britain and Germany were most likely to be the main countries behind any such move. The plans are part of a series of incremental reforms being suggested that will in principle come into force in January 2009 and run until 2013 when the next EU budget will be decided upon.

Who stands to lose what...

The Queen
£544,000 slashed to £299,000
One of the richest women in the world and a landowner whose farms bring in more than £0.5m a year in subsidies. The Queen's Sandringham estatein Norfolk nets her £404,000 a year in subsidies; Windsor Castle brings in a further £140,000.

Prince Charles
£225,000 slashed to £121,000
The heir to the throne received approximately £168,000 in subsidies for his organic Home Farm at Highgrove in Gloucester between 2003 and 2004, while farms in the Duchy of Cornwall – the 141,000-acre estate which provides most of the Prince's income – brought in more than £135,000.
Duke of Marlborough
£370,000 slashed to £203,500
The 81-year-old Duke,head of the Churchill family, received subsidies worth more than £510,000 over a two-year period between 2003 and 2004. His 1,600-acre Oxfordshire estate, which includes Blenheim Palace and largely farms cereals, brings in just under £370,000 a year. Duke of Westminster
£325,000 slashed to £178,750
A regular in the top five richest men in Britain, the duke receives a healthy remuneration from the EU thanks to his farmlands in Cheshire, Lancashire and Scotland. A report by Oxfam in 2004 claimed his subsidies were the equivalent of £1,000 a day from the taxpayer, compared to the £7 a day in tax credits that a single mother received at the time.
Duke of Bedford
£380,000 slashed to £209,000
The Duke's 5,400-hectare Woburn Abbey is widely known for its safari park, but at least half the land is arable, and has been known to bring in more than £700,000 in subsidies over a two-year period.
Earl of Leicester
£250,000 slashed to £137,500
Holkham Hall, the earl's 18th-century Norfolk seat, is surrounded by 25,000 acres of land, much of which is set aside to grow cereals. The estate's 405 hectares of wheat and 486 hectares of barley make him eligible for annual support of around £254,280, the equivalent of £686 a day.

http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/this_britain/article3143253.ece

'Asian Cilla Black' brings arranged marriages to TV

By Jerome Taylor
Published: The Independent 30 October 2007

Ask someone in a happy arranged marriage why they let their parents pick their spouse and they often repeat the saying: "In the West, you marry the one you love. In the East, we love the one we marry". You learn to love the person you marry, they argue, because the people who selected them chose so well. Parents and close relatives are the people who know you better than anyone else, so why not let them choose something as important as a life partner?
Now the BBC hopes to bring this philosophy into our homes and hearts with a new primetime matchmaking show to help lonesome singles find the partner of their dreams using the principles of a modern Asian arranged marriage.
Arrange Me A Marriage which airs next month on BBC2 is hosted by Aneela Rahman, a thirty-something British Pakistani who is being heralded as the "Asian Cilla Black".
With such high divorce rates in the UK, Ms Rahman believes the key to successfully finding a life partner is through the principles of a modern arranged marriage in which compatibility is crucial. Only by matching up class, education, family background, life goals and earnings will it ultimately succeed.
She argues her 15 years of marriage to her husband Maqsood, with whom she has two children, is living proof that arranged marriages work and, in a society where more and more people live alone unhappily, a dose of traditional Asian marital medicine may be exactly what we need.
She said: "Most Asians are introduced to potential partners by the people who know them best – their family and friends – and the suitors are selected in a very matter-of-fact way based on who might be most compatible."
"My approach to arranging marriages is pragmatic, focusing on compatibility – looking at shared goals, background, values, education, earning potential but love and attraction is also very important. I don't advocate suitors getting together if they aren't attracted to each other. But I believe that there is a strong chance of making a successful marriage if as many of these key factors as possible are taken into account."
A pilot of the programme aired earlier this year. It received such positive reviews that BBC executives were persuaded to commission a five-part series. The first episode features Lexi Proud, a 33-year-old who moved, aged 16, from the North-east to London and has a string of broken relationships. Aneela believes that Lexi's pattern of failed relationships is down to dating people outside of her class – something with which Lexi strongly disagrees – and so Aneela sets about finding her someone more compatible, using her family as chief advisers.
Geeta Vastavasrivastava, the UK head of the global matrimonial website Shaadi.com, said: "Because an arranged marriage is supported by a family from the start, when you go through a bad patch, you still have the support of the two families that brought that marriage about in the first place. It's something very specific to the Asian culture."
She believes that many people in Britain have trouble with the idea of an arranged marriage because they confuse it with a forced marriage. Geeta said: "The vast majority of arranged marriages are not forced in any way. You can often spend a few months with someone the family has chosen and at the end of it just say no. Ninety per cent of the people I know have decided on their own whether they like the person enough to marry them."
But many young Asians increasingly believe that the concept of an arranged marriage is incompatible with living in the modern world and point to increasing divorce rates among Asian couples.
Aninditha Basu, a 33-year-old lawyer currently fighting off suitors put forward by her family, believes that arranged marriages are simply too artificial for modern times.
She said: "In an arranged marriage both prospective partners only show their best side so you don't get to know the real person. In a love match, you already know everything there is to know about your partner before you take the plunge. For me it's not good enough to hope that love comes once the marriage has taken place. That's too big a risk to take."

http://news.independent.co.uk/media/article3109882.ece

INTERVIEW: Ebullient Sharif sets up three-way struggle for leadership of Pakistan

By Jerome Taylor
Published The Independent: 01 September 2007

Nawaz Sharif, declaring that he is determined to remove General Pervez Musharraf, has brushed aside fears that he faces jail if he returns to Pakistan. He has also set up a three-way struggle for leadership of the country that looks likely to reach a conclusion this month.
The former prime minister, who was deposed, briefly jailed and exiled by General Musharraf in a bloodless coup in 1999, said he was unafraid of the regime's threats to arrest him on corruption charges if he returns from exile.
"Musharraf's threats can't stop me from responding to my call of duty," he said in an interview with The Independent. "He must know the tide has turned against him and that he is fighting a losing battle.
"He's already put me in jail before. For 14 months I was kept in solitary confinement. I was kept in a little dungeon in a 16th-century fort and I was treated even worse than a prisoner of war. That is how he treated the country's democratically elected prime minister."
Mr Sharif was overthrown by the army in 1999 and later exiled to Saudi Arabia under a deal that was supposed to keep him out of Pakistani politics for at least 10 years. But last week Mr Musharraf's struggling regime was dealt a severe blow after the country's Supreme Court ruled that the former prime minister could return home. His faction of the Muslim League now leads a coalition that wants to remove the President from office and bring back democracy.
On Thursday, Mr Sharif raised the stakes by announcing he would return to Pakistan on 10 September to challenge the general's rule, which is already mired in a crisis with the country's judiciary. The announcement came against a backdrop of frantic talks between General Musharraf and Benazir Bhutto, another former prime minister-in-exile, who is trying to negotiate her own return by arranging a power-sharing agreement with the regime.
Yesterday, Ms Bhutto met leaders of her PPP opposition party in London to decide whether to continue talks with Mr Musharraf, and whether they should set a date for her return, after failing to receive a public commitment from the general that he would relinquish his army role.
Also speaking in London, Mr Sharif attacked Ms Bhutto for negotiating with the general and accused her of reneging on previous commitments not to strike a deal with the military regime. "There can be no deals with dictators because we are struggling for the restoration of undiluted democracy in Pakistan," he said. "But [Bhutto] decided on another course and has entered into negotiations with Musharraf. The democratic forces in the country must not be trying to rescue the sinking ship of dictatorship. This is not the time to shake hands with dictatorship."
The prospect of two of Pakistan's most prominent opposition politicians returning from exile at a similar time will send shivers down the spine of Mr Musharraf, whose once seemingly unassailable rule is looking increasingly frail. Both Mr Sharif and Mrs Bhutto command popular followings back home, particularly in Sindh and Punjab, the two most populous states. Mr Musharraf's dispute with the judiciary, meanwhile, coupled with a rise in violence following the Red Mosque siege in Islamabad and criticism from the White House over his inability to stop al-Qa'ida sheltering in tribal areas, has left his government increasingly isolated.
Unlike Mrs Bhutto, Mr Sharif has consistently ruled out any negotiations with the President, an approach that has made him particularly appealing to Pakistan's Islamist parties but unpopular with Western governments and particularly the US. While Ms Bhutto has been cautious to avoid overly criticising US policy, Mr Sharif is often highly critical of the Bush government's support of General Musharraf.
Yesterday, Mr Sharif accused the Bush government of double standards in the way it selectively promotes democracy. "Bush preaches democracy in Iraq, he preaches democracy in Afghanistan but why is he supporting a uniformed President in Pakistan?" he asked. "Bush must not equate Musharraf with Pakistan."
Critics of Mr Sharif say that, despite his party's supposedly secular politics, his faction of the Muslim League is too close to religious parties, many of which espouse a Taliban-style implementation of sharia law in a country where most Muslims follow the relatively relaxed Hanafi tradition.
But, unlike Mr Musharraf and Ms Bhutto, Mr Sharif's relationship with the religious parties may in fact make him a leader who could stem the rise of extremism inside Pakistan if he is allowed to return.
"Sharif has always had an extremely ambiguous relationship with the religious right in Pakistan," says Farzana Shaikh, an expert on Pakistan at the think-tank Chatham House. "But it could be in the interest of the US, and probably the wider world, to have the Islamist vote channelled through the relatively moderate Sharif faction of the Muslim League rather than the more extreme Islamist parties."

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/asia/article2917332.ece

FULL TRANSCRIPT OF THE INTERVIEW:

President Pervez Musharraf’s is threatening to arrest you on corruption charges if you return on the 10th. Are you willing to risk going to jail?

I am going back to Pakistan to make my own contribution to the struggle of our people to establish the rule of law, to ensure the supremacy of the constitution, the restoration of genuine democracy.
I’m not scared of the President’s threats. He’s already put me in jail before. For fourteen months I was kept in solitary confinement, I was kept in a little dungeon in a sixteenth century fort and I was treated even worse than a prisoner of war. That is how he treated the country’s democratically elected prime minister who and the largest mandate in the history of Pakistan’s democracy.
There are no corruption cases against me, none whatsoever. Despite his best efforts in the eight years of Musharraf’s tyranny he’s not been able to find out anything against me – no allegations of corruption, kick backs or commissions.
Musharraf’s threats can’t stop me from the call of duty and my commitment and he must know that the tide has turned against him, that he is fighting a loosing battle. The civil society – lawyers, activists and the media – are on one side and on the other side are the forces who want to push history backwards. There is a new Pakistan emerging from the people’s sacrifices and struggle for democracy that has been launched over the last several months. Pakistanis will not accept any patchwork of dictatorship and democracy. The solution to all problems lies in restoring the constitution and undiluted democracy.

What will you and your supporters do if you are arrested as soon as you step off the plane?

We’ll resist that. I’m with the 160m people of Pakistan and they are with me. I’m sure that they do not tolerate Mr Musharraf’s atrocities and brutalities any more and that is why they are struggling against his dictatorship. Mr Musharraf doesn’t believe in the rule of law. He believes in might is right and the law of the jungle. He should know that there is a constitution and a law of the land that he must respect.I think the people of Pakistan are more powerful than Mr Musharraf who is simply wearing the uniform of a commando. He acts like a commando, he only knows how to settle things through the barrel of a gun. This is the 21st century, Pakistan is a civilised country and he can’t turn us into an uncivilised nation. We will resist that.

Some of your critics, particularly those wary of Pakistan’s slide towards extremism, believe that you have been playing to the Islamic gallery quite a lot recently. Are their fears correct?

We are a moderate party, progressive and forward looking. That is what our track record is. I’ve been elected two times the prime minister of the country, we have had the biggest mandate in the history of Pakistan. We’ve always fought elections single handedly so we will have no electoral alliance with any other party?

Does that mean you would rule out any type of alliance with Islamist politicians such as Maulana Fazlur Rahman [head of Pakistan‘s Jamiat Ulema-I-Islam]?

Maulana Rahman came into the parliament because Mr Musharraf marginalized the liberal forces in the 2002 elections. The extremists never found their way into the parliament when the country was a democracy. For the first time, Mr Musharraf’s dictatorship paved the way for the extremist forces to take a bigger share in the parliament. Extremism and terrorism only thrives under a dictatorship. They never thrive under a democracy. Take the Lal Masjid incident for instance. Why did Mr Musharraf allow in the first instance for extremists to build an arms cache in the capital? We have been fighting terrorism, our track record shows that under Clinton. But the war against terrorism cannot be fought single handedly by one man. If we have to win this battle then we need the support of the all 160million Pakistanis.

Whoever wins the upcoming power struggle will have to deal with Pakistan’s problem with terrorism, both internal and external. How will you tackle terrorism?

We have to fight terror in a manner that allows us to win the battle. We are against and condemn terrorism of all forms anywhere in the world. But you see we have to devise a wise policy to eliminate terrorism. It’s only through democracy that we can fight these menaces, not through dictatorship.The country is in a deep mess and it is making Pakistan ungovernable. Mr Musharraf has taken Pakistan to a level that I’m honestly not sure what one will have to do to redress the present situation.

How will you deal with the United States, which seems, if anything, to be hedging its bets with your rival Bhutto rather than yourself?

Well I don’t know whether the US is backing Bhutto or not but what is most important is that Bush must not equate Musharraf with Pakistan. This is not a correct policy. It is not Musharraf who represents the 160m people of Pakistan. Dictatorship is dictatorship, democracy is democracy and we can’t mix up the two.
Bush is preaching democracy in Iraq, he preaches democracy in Afghanistan but why is he supporting a uniformed president in Pakistan?
Mr Bush should not support a man who is guilty of subverting the constitution of Pakistan. He should not support a man who is guilty of throwing the chief justice out of the window and he should not support a man who does not believe in decency, morality, or the rule of law.
Mr Bush is supporting one man against the wishes and aspirations of 160m people and Pakistanis feel let down by this.

What is your relationship like now with Bhutto? Earlier this year there were all sorts of rumours that you would come up with a joint opposition strategy together, that you might join forces?

Bhutto and I both signed our Charter of Democracy and she has violated that document. We are both signatories to that document, which clearly says there can be no deals with dictators, especially military dictators. We understood that we are struggling for the restoration of undiluted democracy in Pakistan. There should be no question of any deals and I thought we were both committed to that.
But Bhutto has decided to take another course and enter into negotiations with Musharraf. I don’t know why she’s done this because now is supposed to be the time for all the political forces in the country to unite on a common platform and bring back democracy.

So why do you believe Bhutto would not be good for Pakistan?

I’ve never said that Bhutto wouldn’t be good for Pakistan, I only say that the democratic forces must not be trying to rescue the sinking ship of dictatorship. The sinking ship is now breathing its last and this is not the time to shake hands with dictatorship.

Do you think the army will support you?

The army must be fed up of Mr Musharraf’s misrule. He has done nothing but use the army to perpetuate his illegal rule. The army knows that he is increasingly becoming a liability for the institution itself. I think the army is very unhappy with what happened in Karachi when Mr Musharraf encouraged MQM to defy the chief justice’s rally there.

You are committed nonetheless to seeing the army exit the political stage?

I think it is the time now for the Pakistani military to go back to its barracks. The military has no role in politics any more, that is very clearly laid down in the constitution and they should never meddle in politics again


Given the highly fragile state of Pakistani politics at the moment doesn’t your return risk making the situation worse - particularly if there is violence?

It is not me, it is Mr Musharraf’s actions that are destabilising the country - it is his nefarious designs. It is dictatorship that is ruining the country, not the democratic forces. We are trying to encourage stability by providing Pakistanis with the right to elect and reject a government.

If you want to serve as prime minister the constitution will need to be changed. Is it your desire to once more run the country as prime minister?

If the people decide to give me the honour of serving them I would be prepared to do that but I’m not looking for office at this point. My personal safety doesn’t matter, we all come and go but the country is more important. My number one objective is to put our country back on the rails, back on its democratic path. My primary objective is to restore the rule of law, ensure the supremacy of parliament, to ensure the independence judiciary and the freedom of the press.

If you are allowed to land and you are not arrested what are you going to spend the first few weeks doing when you return?

I will travel all over the country to meet the people of Pakistan. I will caution the people that a man is trying to perpetuate his misrule once again and I will fight for their rights. We have to fight this law of the jungle, the idea that might is right. Martial law has been a disaster for Pakistan and it’s my duty to tell the people that.

Heathrow protest reaches its climax as peaceful protest turns to clashes with riot police

By Jerome Taylor
Published, The Independent: 20 August 2007

Geoff Lamb had to shout to be heard over the ever-present drone of the police helicopter yesterday afternoon. The 63-year-old former petro-physicist had worked for more than 40 years in the oil industry, but yesterday he was marching next to a banner that read: "It's your great-grandchildren's planet too - stop wrecking it for them"
"I've spent a lifetime on the wrong side of the fence,'' he said. "We need to radically alter the way we live our lives. Our environment is being utterly ruined and yet it's business as usual.''
Flanked by a phalanx of police officers, Geoff's group of Aberdeenshire protesters were on the move. They, like hundreds of others from all over the country, had come to take part in the climax of the Climate Camp, 24 hours of direct action at Heathrow. After a week of occupying a barren stretch of scrubland bordering the northern edge of Britain's busiest airport, a motley collection of environmentalists, veteran campaigners, local residents and part-time activists had gathered to make their point more forcefully than ever before.
Their mission: to highlight the link between global warming and aviation emissions - and to do it with posters, banners and a healthy dose of purposeful rebellion.
As promised, yesterday's protest involved more than just marching and shouting. The organisers of the camp had always said they expected those gathered between the villages of Harlington, Sipson and Harmondsworth to take part in direct action. They are, after all, the three places that would be wiped off the map if Heathrow's owners, BAA, go ahead with plans to build a third runway.
Just talking about climate change, the camp's inhabitants argued, was not going to make people or the Government listen, and if they had to break the law in order to make the world take the issue seriously enough, they would. Simple as that.
The protest plan was straightforward. At midday, a column of marchers made up predominantly of local residents would head through the village of Sipson and symbolically mark out the route that a third runway would take were it one day to carve through their homes.
Those wishing to take part in direct action, meanwhile, were encouraged to walk to the headquarters of BAA, a nondescript block of offices that lies to the north of Heathrow's perimeter fence, and blockade it. The residents' protest would then join them there and stop anyone going in or out of the offices for the next 24 hours. But the police were taking no chances. Waiting for the protesters at BAA were about 1,500 officers.
Phil Sutton, a resident of Harlington for more than 40 years, was one of those on the first march to highlight where the third runway would go. If BAA gets the go-ahead to build that runway, he and his disabled wife will have to move. "A lot of people say we shouldn't complain, that if you don't want to be moved you shouldn't live next to an airport. But not everyone had a choice. I've lived here since 1963 and my wife has lived here all her life," he said.
But would he be willing to break the law to highlight his case? "Why not? We've been taken for a ride long enough. We've protested peacefully for years against the expansion of Heathrow and it's made no difference. We've been forced to resort to direct action. I just hope no one gets hurt.''
For the early part of the afternoon, the atmosphere in the residents' protest was cordial and at times even jovial. Although one 21-year-old man was arrested for an assault on a police officer, according to the Metropolitan Police, the march was markedly non-confrontational. Police said there had been just three arrests in total - one other for carrying Class A drugs and another for going equipped to cause criminal damage.
Protesters laughed and joked with their police escorts even as they were penned in on Sipson Road for more than an hour. Children dressed in carefully constructed, brightly-coloured costumes marched alongside their parents, who walked next to heavily pierced hippies. Sipson had probably never seen such a varied crowd. Even Daniel Hooper, aka the legendary environmental campaigner Swampy, was reported to be in attendance.
But by two o'clock a very different crowd had emerged from the camp's tent. Heading south towards the BAA offices and Heathrow Airport itself a second column of between 200 to 300 activists left the camp and began walking across a field. Here were the protesters that organisers had promised would blockade BAA at all costs and it was not long before the police helicopter returned and circled overhead.
For much of the next two hours, protesters fought pitched battles with riot and mounted police in waist-high brushland as they tried to make their way towards their target. Communicating by text message and radio, the protesters tried to find a way through the police lines. Many were forced back by police batons and at least one woman could be seen nursing a bleeding head wound.
Yvonne Deeney, a 20-year-old protester who claimed she had been beaten by police, said: "We were standing peacefully next to the fence and then suddenly the police came on to the field to push us back. We were trying to talk to them but they were having none of it.''
Police officers on site said they were unable to let anyone leave the field as protesters doing so would be trespassing on private property.
Although the majority of activists were successfully beaten back, small splinter groups were able to make it through the police cordon and by late afternoon there were reports that a sizeable number had made it to the BAA car park.
Organisers of the march claimed the day had been a resounding success, despite critics' assertions that the turnout - thought to be about 1,400 - had proved a disappointment. Gary Dyer, one of the camp's spokesmen, said: "We're a medium-sized industrial economy. We could be a great test case.. Most campaigns are about more. The suffragettes wanted more of a voice, the civil rights movement was asking for more equality. Climate change is a slightly strange cause because we are asking for less and that's a real psychological challenge.''
To the relief of holiday-makers, fears that flights would be delayed proved unfounded. The protest at Heathrow is planned to continue until noon today.

http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/transport/article2878784.ece

Hip-hop showdown: Is the battle between Kanye West and 50 Cent just a publicity stunt?

(Photo: vibe.com)

Kanye West and 50 Cent are both best-selling rap artists - but the similarities end there. One is from the suburbs, the other from the streets. And, as they prepare to release their new albums on the same day next month, the mutual antagonism is growing. But is it all a publicity stunt?

By Jerome Taylor
Published, The Independent: 14 August 2007

50 Cent has never been a one to mince his words. Even before he was a multiplatinum-selling rap star, complete with the obligatory footwear line, sprawling mansion and autobiographical movie, the Queens-bred rapper was renowned on the underground New York scene as a man who had perfected the so-called Art of Beef.
Otherwise known as trashing a fellow artist (be it their ability to rap, wear the correct industry approved clothes or score with the opposite sex) "beefing" is practically a hip-hop rite of passage and, from the start, 50 Cent was a gifted, and somewhat foolhardy, natural.
In early 2000, while still a young rapper virtually unknown outside his small circle of local fans, 50 Cent stormed on to the New York scene with the underground track "How to Rob", a tongue-in-cheek instruction manual detailing how best to mug some of the industry's most successful stars, including Jay-Z, the Wu-Tang Clan and Nas. They responded in kind by attacking the cheeky upstart in their own tracks and the rest, as they say, is history.
As a recipe for generating publicity and notoriety beefing has worked every time for hip-hop artists, and none more so than for 50 Cent - a man with almost as many aliases as someone on the FBI's most-wanted list (Fitty and Five-0 being just two). But now the rap star has taken beefing to a whole new level by opening up a new and unusual feud with Kanye West, the only hip-hop artist who could steal his thunder, when they simultaneously release new albums on 11 September.
Hip-hop fans were stunned over the weekend when 50 Cent made the unusual announcement that he would quit rapping if West's Graduation sells more copies than his own upcoming album, Curtis. In an interview with the hip-hop website Sohh.com on Friday, 50 Cent attacked supporters of West, who is himself a highly acclaimed platinum-selling artist, but generally regarded as likely to sell fewer records next month.
"They would like to see Kanye West give me a problem because I've worked myself into a space where I've become the favourite," he said "Everybody roots against the underdog when he goes against the favourite. Put it like this, let's raise the stakes. If Kanye West sells more records than 50 Cent on September 11, I'll no longer write music. I'll write music and work with my other artists, but I won't put out any more solo albums."
Hip-hop's biggest showdown for years will pit two characters from distinctly different backgrounds and many are billing it as the music world's latest class war, the 21st-century equivalent to the Beatles v the Rolling Stones, or Blur against Oasis.
On one side is 50 Cent, a multi-platinum artist who survived on the streets of New York by dealing crack cocaine at the age of 12 and whose music praises the thuggish urban gang culture into which he was born. On the other is West, the critically acclaimed, born-again Christian from middle-class Chicago suburbia who fought off the macho gang culture surrounding hip-hop to revolutionise the way people listen to rap.
Since the announcement, websites and blogs across cyberspace have been packed with fans debating which of the two mega-stars will outsell the other, and whether 50 Cent would actually stick to his promise to quit rapping if West wins.
The simultaneous release of new albums from two of the rap world's best-selling and most talented artists was already being hailed as the mother of all contemporary music battles. But the New Yorker's vow to turn his back on what he does best has raised the stakes to a whole new level.
When 50 Cent and Kanye West released their debut albums in 2003 and 2004 respectively, both critics and fans lauded what was then a much-needed fresh input of raw talent into the increasingly staid US hip-hop scene.
The former's album, Get Rich or Die Tryin', became the fastest selling solo album in US history, shifting 872,000 copies in the first four days of its release. Alongside his second offering, The Massacre, he has since gone on to become one of the world's best selling hip-hop artists, shifting nearly 20 million records worldwide.
West's triple-platinum 2004 debut, The College Dropout, meanwhile, stunned critics and fans for its sheer originality, topping all the major critics' polls and earning 10 Grammy nominations. His second release, Late Registration, sold 600,000 copies in the first week alone and picked up a further three Grammys.
The perception that West is the critically acclaimed rap revolutionary while his rival simply sells lots of records appears to have been the major impetus behind 50 Cent's latest attack. "The people who give out trophies, pick [Kanye] because he's safe," he said. "But my projects have been making a way bigger impression ... by actually selling. That's an indication of the public's interest.
"How many people are interested enough to go spend $16 (£8) on a CD? I sold 1.1. million records in four days and I didn't get one trophy for The Massacre, for the entire album, then release Get Rich Or Die Tryin' as a soundtrack, sell 3 million records of the soundtrack and soundtracks are harder to sell than solo albums ... and then, no trophies for the soundtracks. I don't get trophies, I get cheques, he gets the trophies. But how you gon' give him a trophy now when he comes out the same time I come out? And I'm just all over his ass. You gon' clearly see the favouritism. He's gonna still get the trophies."
But is 50 Cent's animosity for real, or was his announcement a cleverly crafted media stunt to garner as much publicity in time for the release of his new album? After all, both artists were very much spotted and supported by the same people who helped launch both their careers.
"There's a lot of clever PR going on here," says Hatie Collins, the editor of NWD magazine, one of the UK's best-selling hip-hop publications. "It's a tradition in hip-hop that if you want to sell a new album then you come out and take a pop at another artist. Kanye and Fitty are friends, I think Kanye's even got a track coming out on 50's upcoming album."
Apart from their single-parent backgrounds and long struggle to get into the industry, 50 Cent and West have very little in common. The early life of Curtis James Jackson III, the man who would later be known as 50 Cent, was virtually a blueprint for the endemic violence that has plagued America's inner-city poor for decades.
Forced on to the streets after his drug dealer mother was murdered when he was aged just eight, 50 Cent quickly learnt that the only way to get out of the urban poverty he had been born into was to make money, fast. (His stage name, 50 Cent, is a reference to the way the star survived the streets of New York through providing for himself "by any means"). The quickest way to make cash in the drug-infested inner suburbs of 1980s New York was to sell crack cocaine. At the age of 12 he became a dealer.
While 50 Cent was dodging rival dealers and police officers as a teenager, Kanye Omari West was attending the Polaris High School in Oak Lawn, Illinois. His mother, a teacher, had moved there after divorcing the singer's father, a former Black Panther, and the young singer enjoyed the type of American suburban idyll that his rival could perhaps have only dreamed of.
After dropping out of art college, West looked to a career in hip-hop and soon found himself producing tracks for top artists such as Jay-Z, The Game and Alicia Keys. But while Kanye's middle-class background allowed him to jump into the hip-hop scene as a producer, many felt he would be hard pressed to gain the legitimacy needed to be a rapper on stage in an industry that lionised gang culture and violence.
Both 50 Cent and West, for instance, cite near-death experiences as events that forced them to turn their lives around, but whereas Kanye's was a near- fatal car crash, the way 50 Cent cheated death was by miraculously surviving being shot nine times at point-blank range. In the world of hip-hop, being shot is simply sexier than crashing a car.
"We all grew up street guys who had to do whatever we had to do to get by," said Jay-Z in an interview with Time magazine in 2005. "Then there's Kanye, who to my knowledge has never hustled a day in his life."
But then fans of West's music and style would say that the rap star had never been about hustling in the first place. In contrast to most of his contemporaries, West has resolutely distanced himself from the violence, misogyny and homophobia that is often endemic in modern popular hip-hop. Where 50 Cent's lyrics largely revolve around the hip-hop mainstays of guns, sex and drugs, West brought criticism and scepticism to his own industry and culture.
"Kanye never really tried to be a gangster," says Hattie Collins. "He always questioned why anyone would want to be part of that ethos. When he came on to the scene you knew it was hip-hop, but with lyrics that were different and original."
On the upcoming showdown between their two albums, West has remained noticeably non-combative. His only comment so far has been deliberately conciliatory, simply stating: "When my album drops and 50's drops, you're gonna get a lot of good music at the same time."
But in an industry where feuds have often spilled out into open warfare between rival rap stars, is it not a little dangerous to start a rivalry between two of the hottest properties on the hip-hop scene at the moment? "Feuds are simply a great way to generate publicity," says Collins. "I admit they can get a little sinister when it comes to hip-hop, but with 50 and Kanye its pretty much a clever PR stunt dreamed up by the record labels."
But whether the rivalry is real or not, bosses at both the artists' record labels will undoubtedly be licking their lips at the prospect of a showdown between the two people that have arguably done more to revolutionise hip-hop music and widen its appeal in the past five years than any of their other contemporaries. And suggestions that the feud is class based will only help grease the already well-oiled publicity machine.

http://arts.independent.co.uk/music/news/article2861743.ece

The miracle of Rwanda: How one refugee's remarkable story is being told on the Edinburgh stage

Immaculée Ilibagiza is a latter-day Anne Frank. The daughter of two devout Catholic Tutsis, she was a prime target for the Hutu death squads who brought their genocidal terror to the African country in 1994. She survived, hidden for three months in the sweltering heat of a tiny bathroom. Now her remarkable story is being told on the Edinburgh stage.

By Jerome Taylor
Published,The Independent: 11 August 2007

The man who came closest to killing Immaculée Ilibagiza never knew how near he had got to his prey. He was a machete-wielding member of the Interahamwe, the Hutu death squads that prowled the length and breadth of Rwanda during the country's brutal genocide looking for what they called "cockroaches", those members of the Tutsi tribe they had sworn to destroy.
Ms Ilibagiza was in hiding. For 91 days she and seven other Tutsi women were crammed into a stiflingly hot bathroom as the orgy of looting, rape and murder that swept through the country in 1994 raged outside. Ms Ilibagiza, the daughter of two prominent Catholic Tutsi teachers, was a prized target. As they teetered on the edge of destruction the only thing stopping their would-be killers from finding the women was a single wardrobe that had been placed over the door to the toilet.
"I heard a guy saying he'd already killed 499 Tutsis and that he was determined to make me the 500th," says Ms Ilibagiza, now 37. She has since moved to New York and has two of her own children. "He was standing just behind the door when he said it. These people were our neighbours, people who just weeks earlier used to be our friends. "
Her story, simultaneously harrowing and uplifting, is the Rwandan equivalent of The Diary of Anne Frank - a remarkable account of how, against all odds, people can survive in the most inhumane conditions as the violence of man crashes down around them and how, through forgiveness, even the most horrendous experiences can lead to redemption.
But unlike the young German-Jewish author, who was eventually found by the Nazis and died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp just weeks before its liberation, Ms Ilibagiza lived to tell her tale. Her book, Left to Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust, has gone on to sell more than 250,000 copies around the world and she is feted by world leaders, church groups and charities as a highly inspirational speaker. But what makes Ms Ilibagiza's experience truly stand out, as terrifying and anguished as it is, is the way she has learnt to forgive the people that destroyed her family and country.
Now the story of her agonising three months in hiding has been turned into a one-woman play and this week it is showing at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival as part of a world tour.
For 100 deadly days in the spring of 1994, Rwanda experienced a genocide of near unimaginable savagery. Anyone who knew the country at the time said the outbreak of violence was predictable - Hutus and Tutsis had had a long history of enmity and warring - but very few were prepared for the sheer level of barbarity reached.
On 6 April 1994, three days after Immaculée and her family had celebrated Easter together in their ancestral village of Mataba, an aeroplane carrying Rwanda's Hutu President, Juvénal Habyarimana, was shot down. Habyarimana had incensed Hutu extremists by ending a long civil war with the Tutsis and his death gave them a pretext for starting a highly organised, systematic campaign to rid their country's minority Tutsis.
"Within 10 minutes [of Habyarimana's death] the whole country changed," recalls Ms Ilibagiza. "Everyone hid in their houses just listening to the radio."
The violence began almost immediately. The international community looked away as the 10 Belgian peacekeepers that had been assigned to watch over Rwanda were shot dead and then turned its back as more than one million Tutsis and pro-Tutsi Hutus were exterminated. Men were usually hacked to death with a machete. For women, the method was most often gang rape and then the machete.
A more brutal realisation of the evil that men do could hardly be imagined but, as with many of humanity's darkest chapters, the Rwandan genocide also produced extraordinary tales of individual heroism and survival.
It was not long before Mataba, an ethnically mixed village in the western district of Kiyube, found itself caught up in the maelstrom. Fearing that his daughter would be raped if caught by Hutu militiamen, Ms Ilibagiza's father sent her to hide in a nearby house owned by the Rev Simeon Nzabahimana who, despite being a Hutu, risked his life to hide her and seven other women.
So secret was the women's hiding place that the priest's family were not even told about it in case they were threatened or tempted into revealing its whereabouts.
"It was a room measuring three feet by four feet, a small bathroom really," says Ms Ilibagiza. "It didn't even have a sink, just a toilet sunk into the ground. There was a door on to the next room and at night we could sometimes go there to lie down. But only at night." For the next three months the women sat in terror as the Interahamwe went from house to house butchering Mataba's Tutsi population. They could hear the screams of their relatives as the men were cut down and the women raped before being butchered.
Ms Ilibagiza's father had already survived two civil wars and believed he could try and reason with the Interahamwe. Witnesses say he was shot dead by a man called Felicien before he could even open his mouth. The same man then went on to slaughter her mother, Rose, and her elder brother, Damascene. A second brother was also cut down sometime later. The only immediate relative of Ms Ilibagiza to survive the genocide other than herself was her third brother, Aimable, who fortunate enough to be studying in Senegal at the time of the genocide. He has chosen to remain in his country of birth and works as a vet.
Convinced they would never see their families again, waiting for the death squads to storm into the filthy white tiled room at any moment, the women sat for days on end in total silence, only daring to communicate by sign language. At 5ft 9in Ms Ilibagiza was one of the tallest and within days her body was covered in sores from being unable to move properly.
Privacy and cleanliness were forgotten. The toilet could only be flushed when the neighbour next door did so and there was rarely enough paper for the women's menstrual periods. After a week lice were crawling in their clothes and hair.
Despite the crippling pain of being largely unable to move, Ms Ilibagiza says the women stoically accepted their lot. "When you realise that someone is next door waiting to kill you, you can do anything," she remembers. "You can put up with any hardship. We never complained."
Initially, as the violence raged around her, so to did Ms Ilibagiza's heart. She admits that in the first few weeks of her captivity it was difficult to feel anything but hate for the people who had killed her family and destroyed her life. As desperation set in she turned to her rosary, the last thing her father had given her before she went into hiding, and prayed to God. Inside her prison, surrounded by squalor, misery and mourning, Ms Ilibagiza decided to forgive the people who had murdered her family.
"The day I truly understood what forgiveness meant was while I was hiding in that room," she says. "It was like a light turning on in my mind and I made a choice. If I gave up on humanity I would die inside. I'd no longer be able to trust anybody.
"I kept thinking of Christ on the cross and his words, 'Forgive them father they know not what they do'. I knew there was no way my family's killers could understand the magnitude of what they were doing."
By the time the women left their hiding place and made it to a refugee camp that was run by French peacekeepers, Ms Ilibagiza's weight had plummeted from 8 stone 3 pounds to just 4 stone 9 pounds. Mr Nzabahimana, the man who had hidden them, was killed during the dying days of the genocide for sheltering Tutsis.
By late summer the killing had finally died down and Ms Ilibagiza decided to test how far her forgiveness could go. She found her father's killer in a nearby prison. The tables had been turned. Now he was imprisoned, filthy and terrified but the first words he heard from the woman who had come to see him were: "I forgive you."
"He couldn't look at me, he looked down and was so ashamed," said Ms Ilibagiza. "Something changed in his heart. I hope it's made him realise the gravity of what he's done. Like me he had a beautiful family and home but one day he decided to go out and kill."
This ability to forgive such atrocities was what inspired Leslie Lewis Sword, an American actress who came to know Ms Ilibagiza after attending one of her lectures, to dramatise her life. "Her message is forgiveness," Sword said earlier this week. "She has found a way to move on after these unbearable hardships. It gives hope for Darfur, for Zimbabwe too. People are taking a look at these things too and asking what is happening there."
The play itself, Miracle in Rwanda, in which Sword plays all the parts including Ms Ilibagiza, her family and an Interahamwe leader, has received lavish praise in the US press and is currently making a world tour. Her performances at Edinburgh have sold out each night.
Ms Ilibagiza, meanwhile, hopes her fellow Rwandans will follow her approach and look towards reconciling their differences rather than look for retribution. "The happiness you get from being able to forgive someone is beyond any apology," she says. "I think Rwanda will recover. It could take hundreds of years but it will recover."

http://arts.independent.co.uk/theatre/features/article2853824.ece

Mining giant faces tribal protest

By Jerome Taylor

Published, The Independent: 06 August 2007

Until he came to London Kumti Majhi had never worn shoes before - he had never needed to. A member of the Dongria Kondh, one of India's most traditional tribes from the forested hills in the state of Orissa, he had never had any need to put any protection on his feet.
But the tribal leader knew shoes would be needed if he was to try to halt the construction of a £400m bauxite mine on the Niyamgiri Mountain, the Dongria Kondh's homeland and a hill they worship as their god.
Since building of the mine and its adjacent alumina refinery first began in 2004 by the UK-based mining giant Vedanta Resources, a battle has raged between the FTSE-100 company on one side and environmentalists and tribal members on the other who say the mine has already caused untold misery and is an ecological disaster waiting to happen.
Last week Kumti Majhi travelled from his village to the annual general meeting of Vedanta Resources to inform shareholders of the fate of his people. Although reporters were banned from attending the AGM, The Independent spoke to Mr Majhi outside the Mayfair conference centre.
"Niyamgiri Mountain is a living god for us," said the father of four who until now had never left the state of Orissa. "It has provided us with food, water and our livelihoods for generations. Even if we have to die protecting our god we will not hesitate, we will not let it go."
On Thursday critics of the mine will finally find out whether their three-year campaign has been successful when the Indian Supreme Court sits to rule on the construction's legality. Three petitioners have brought cases against Vedanta in what could be a landmark ruling .
A Supreme Court committee has already accused Vedanta of "blatant violation" of planning and environmental guidelines. A separate report from the Wildlife Institute of India also criticised the project citing its "irreversible" impact on the environment.
Activists say the project is a threat to the environment and to the distinct culture and practices of the three Kondh tribes that for centuries have had a symbiotic relationship with their sacred mountain, foraging and hunting in some areas and eschewing other areas out of respect.
Vedanta rejected accusations that the rehabilitation of families was unsuitable and strongly defended its environmental record saying the company had abided by all environmental regulations.

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/asia/article2838655.ece

Shambo's Last Stand

By Jerome Taylor

Published: The Independent, 27 July 2007

To members of his Hindu community, he is touched by the divine. To Defra, he is a health threat - and last night, he was heading for the slaughterhouse.

The veterinary inspector first came for Shambo at 8.50am yesterday, 50 minutes late. After three months of legal wrangling and contradictory court rulings that seemed to swing between saving the six-year-old Friesian bull's life and condemning it to death, the Government had finally arrived take to the animal to the slaughterhouse.
As promised, the monks and nuns of Skanda Vale, a small predominantly Hindu community nestled deep in the heart of rural Carmarthenshire where Shambo has lived since his birth, were waiting for them.
When the veterinary inspector, Wyn Buick, acting on behalf of the Welsh Assembly, asked the monks to hand over the beloved bull they had sworn to protect, they refused. The inspector and entourage retreated. But late yesterday afternoon they returned, armed with a fresh warrant and backed up by more than 30 officers.
Shambo's temple was surrounded by those who had gathered to worship, but any earlier hesitation that the police might have shown disappeared as they began removing the pilgrims one by one as carefully and as sensitively as possible. True to their Gandhian principles, the devotees put up no resistance and let themselves be removed.
After the cage had been sliced through, Shambo was brought out at 7.30pm and taken away in a silver trailer. There was no confirmation from the Welsh Assembly when he would be slaughtered.
Ever since Shambo first tested positive for exposure to bovine tuberculosis on 27 April, a battle has raged between the Welsh Assembly-whose policy it is to slaughter cattle that test positive for TB - and the temple community who believe Shambo to be an embodiment of the divine. The bull, say the monks, should only have met his end when God, and not a vet, decided so.
For the authorities and police, simply getting close to Shambo was always going to be problematic. The 20 monks and five nuns who preside over the temple cer-emonies, known as poojas, vowed to do everything they could to stop the authorities getting near Sham-bo, who had been isolated from the rest of the herd in the entrance to the main temple since his test.
When the community heard of the government's intention to slaughter the bull after their last appeal was rejected by the High Court on Monday, they called on Hindus and fellow supporters to come to Skanda Vale and vowed non-violently to obstruct the authorities from getting their hands on the bull. The method they had chosen was to hold a sacred vigil directly outside Shambo's enclosure, which they said would continue for as long as it took. Any attempt to seize the bull, they said, would desecrate a holy ceremony.
By Tuesday night, a small but dedicated group of pilgrims had already found its way to the isolated 115-acre farm where the temple is built.
As dawn broke yesterday over the thickly forested vale many more devotees, supporters and curious visitors had arrived. By 5am the first of the day's devotional sanskrit chants were echoing through the heavily incensed air. Brother Michael, a slim bespectacled monk who leads the temple, stood up to address the congregation for one final morale-rousing speech.
"We have fought for many months to save Shambo's life,'' he said. "Our lives are about worshipping and serving God, not about killing. We cannot allow the Government to desecrate this temple and take a sacred life."
After finishing the first pooja of the day inside the main temple building, more than 100 devotees moved their ceremonies outside to Shambo's cage. Shambo stood munching on bales of hay, oblivious to his impending fate and the furore surrounding his existence. Supporters said yesterday that the timing of the operation to slaughter Shambo was particularly insensitive because it coincided with the temple's largest annual festival, a two-week devotion to the main presiding deity, Subramanium.
Also more commonly known as Lord Muragan and the Son of Shiva, Hindus believe he is the destroyer of negativity, a weapon against the forces of violence and destruction which the devotees have come to refer to as the Welsh Assembly.
Brother Francis, 38, who became a monk 15 years ago, said: "It's bad enough that they've come to take Shambo but to come during the middle of our most important festival is horrendously insensitive. Despite what the Government says, when it comes to Shambo there was simply no other way that we could have acted. The sanctity of life is absolute.''
Those who wanted to protect Shambo from the abattoir yesterday rejected any criticism that the temple authorities were unreasonable in their dealing with the assembly's concerns over public health.
Brother Michael said: "We tried to explore every avenue to resolve the Government's concern and instead we came up against bureaucratic intransigence at its worst. The test they use to identify TB is not conclusive. It doesn't show whether Shambo has actually been infected, it just shows he's been exposed to the TB bacteria. We suggested further blood tests - we even offered to pay the £30 it costs - but they simply kept saying, 'It's not our policy'."
Throughout its dispute with the temple, the assembly had argued that Shambo could infect other animals if he continued to live. The temple, meanwhile, insisted that since the young bull was isolated and had only tested positive to exposure to TB bacteria he posed no risk.
Even though Skanda Vale finally lost its legal battle in court, the judge nonetheless ordered the Welsh Assembly to pay the temple's legal costs. The final bill-including the costs of killing Shambo-which ultimately will be footed by the taxpayer, looks set to run into the hundreds of thousands of pounds.
Sister Carol, one of five women to have taken the Franciscan vows of celibacy, poverty and obedience that makes a Skanda Vale devotee a monk or nun, was critical of the money she believed had been wasted by the government fighting over Shambo. "They never wanted to negotiate from the beginning,'' she said. "But what exactly have they managed to achieve? Ultimately it's cost them almost a quarter of a million pounds to kill a bull.''
The loss of Shambo is the second significant blow to the Skanda Vale community this year. Earlier this month, as the fight over Shambo first went to court, the temple's founder, a man known to his followers as Guru Sri Subramanium, died. He had been ill for some time and had been staying in the hospice the temple provides for followers and locals. Brother Francis said: "To lose our guru at such a key time was a big blow. But we still feel his presence.''
Born in 1920 to a wealthy Sri Lankan family, Guru Subramanium moved to Europe shortly after the Second World War. His followers say he was so horrified by the violence unleashed in the name of religion and ideology he decided to create a temple somewhere in Europe that would unify the Western world's faiths with those further east.
Ten years of doing menial jobs in London including - according to his "official'' biography - stints as a flower seller, nightclub singer and a job on the shop floor of Selfridges, Guru Subramanium had finally collected enough cash to found his first temple, which he did so in London. It was free to everyone and open to all faiths.
In 1973 his group bought a small, rundown farmhouse in Carmarthenshire with 115 acres and began building the Skanda Vale temple. For more than 30 years, deep in the heart of Western Wales, a small but dedicated group of largely Western-born men and women have chosen to forego their societies' material-ism in favour of a life of poverty, chastity and worship. Despite Skanda Vale's isolated location-it lies four miles up a potholed track and mobile phone reception is non-existent-more than 60,000 pilgrims make their way to the temple each year.
Although the gods worshipped there and the form that worship takes is noticeably Hindu, like the first temple in London Skanda Vale is non-denominational.
It is one of the few places in the world where the priests administering pooja are predominantly white. Yesterday's crowd were a typically eclectic collection of believers. Swiss Hindu converts sat next to Asian Hindus from London, who sat singing next to local Christians.
Delyth Howells, who described herself as a Christian but one that had "learned more about Christ in Skanda Vale than from anything taught in church", said she had been visiting the temple for more than 20 years. "The Government have handled this with total disregard for the way things are done here,'' she said. "I know what's right and wrong and this is wrong. A life is a life.''
Linda Salzmann, a Swiss national who arrived two days ago with her husband and five-year-old daughter Celina, was one of the few devotees to express any sympathy for the authorities.
"I can understand the Government's position," she said. "They can't go back. But it must be a difficult decision for them."
Shortly before the police arrived, Brother Michael read out an email from a cow sanctuary in Maharashtra: "A number of cow sanctuaries in India have said they were willing to take Shambo and shipping had been arranged,'' he said. "But the Welsh Assembly refused the plan."
Although Skanda Vale has received some messages of support from the rural community - many of whom have watched their cattle be slaughtered because of TB - farmers unions have been critical of the way the temple refused to let Shambo be slaughtered. If the policy was that their cows were slaughtered because of TB, they argued, Shambo should be no different.
As night fell on Skanda Vale a few diehards were still chanting Vedic mantras but most hung outside the empty cage. Many were in tears. "It really saddens me that animal life is so worthless here," said one Buddhist devotee who did not want to be named. "But sometimes having faith and conviction can be hard. God moves in mysterious ways.'' Three other members of the temple's herd of cattle are showing signs of exposure to the TB bacteria. Whether the Welsh Assembly will have the stomach for another fight like yesterday's remains to be seen.

news.independent.co.uk/health/article2809195.ece

Unveiled: The Pakistani tribe that dares to defy the fundamentalists

(PHOTO: Jerome Taylor)

Published, The Independent: 18 July 2007

In the North West Frontier Province, the mullahs' word is law and the veil is worn. But one ancient tribe refuses to cover up. Jerome Taylor reports from the Rumbur Valley

In Pakistan's deeply conservative North West Frontier Province, the veil is simply a way of life. Whether in the bazaars of the capital Peshawar or high up in the myriad of Himalayan villages bordering Afghanistan, women wishing to leave their houses do so under the cover of a niqab or a billowing burqa. So important is the Islamic concept of purdah that the fort-like houses in the tribal areas usually contain separate living quarters for women and men.
Give or take the occasional advertising hoarding or glitzy film from Lahore, most men are unlikely to see an adult female face outside of their immediate family until they marry.
But in the remote Chitral region nestled high in the Hindu Kush mountain range are the last remnants of a tribe where the women walk unveiled in bright red and black dresses. Lavishly decorated with orange bead necklaces and colourful hats made from cowrie shells, they dance in public and are often free to marry and take lovers. They are the Kalasha, one of Pakistan's only remaining indigenous non-Muslim communities and a remarkable living throwback to a pre-Islamic era.
Yet according to the Kalasha themselves, their unique way of life is under attack like never before. Thanks to rising extremism among a small minority of Pakistanis and the growing appeal of populist orthodox mullahs who espouse sharia law and Taliban-like austerity, the Kalasha are increasingly in the firing line.
"We've always been called kafirs (infidels) but most people simply left us alone," says Azam Kalash, one of the few members of his 3,500-strong community who managed to go to university and now campaigns for his tribe's welfare. "Now we are deemed enemy number one. Particularly after September 11 and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the missionaries and mullahs are determined to see us wiped out."
Isolated from the outside world by the remoteness of their valleys and the heavy Himalayan snows that block the mountain passes in winter, the Kalash somehow managed to survive successive waves of Muslim invaders and missionaries that pushed back the pre-Islamic Hindu, Buddhist and pagan tribes who once filled the fertile plains of the Indus valley.
Until last century, very few outsiders had ever made it as far as the three valleys of Rumbur, Bumboret and Birir where the Kalasha now live. Even today the valleys are only accessible by 4x4 along a tortuous road perilously carved into the shifting mountain side. But 20 years ago, following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the rise of the religious mujahedin, things began to change.
"For a long time the Kalasha lived in total isolation," says Cecil Chaudhury, General Secretary of the All Pakistan Minorities Alliance. "I remember going there in the 1950s with a mountaineering expedition and they were blissfully happy living in their own distinct social system. But with the mujahedin came the missionaries and the Kalasha were always going to be an easy group to target. Now the extremists are back."
Although the fighters have largely disappeared from the Chitral region, the Kalasha are now outnumbered in their own villages by converts and outsiders. During the Soviet war in Afghanistan, the notoriously brutal Afghan warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar used the valley as his hideout and many believe he has returned to the region to continue his fight against Nato forces and the Afghan government.
After a 10-year lull, the missionaries are returning and many fear that if orthodox preachers, such as those who, until recently, ran Islamabad's Red Mosque, continue to increase their appeal, the country's last non-Muslim tribe may sink into oblivion.
No Kalasha would mean no Zonor Bibi. The mother of five sits on the front porch of her mud-walled house perched high above the swollen glacial river that roars through the heart of her village. It is harvest time and apricots lie drying in the summer sun eyed by her eight-year-old daughter Walena.
Zonor's husband has just set off on the daily three-hour walk to the grazing meadows that lie high above the village but that does not stop Zonor from welcoming outsiders with open arms, an act that would be unthinkable to her Muslim neighbours.
Deeply proud of her culture, she bursts into laughter when asked how long it takes to make the iconic cowrie shell hats that all Kalasha women wear.
"They take us months," she says. "It is important to continue our traditions so not to anger our spirits and god."
Kalasha believe that failure to practice their ancient traditions has profound religious implications and can bring disaster on the village which may explain why their dress and distinct practices have managed to survive against such odds.
The role of women in Kalash society is perhaps the most obvious aspect that separates their culture from their Muslim neighbours. Where Muslim women in the region generally remain indoors or hidden from public view, their Kalash counterparts are conspicuous in the fields working alongside their men. During the festivals that celebrate the various summer harvests and preparations for winter, it is not unusual to find Kalasha women drinking apricot wine and dancing in public with males that are neither their husband nor family. Although some marriages are arranged by families, it is perfectly acceptable for Kalasha women to choose their husbands. If they are treated unkindly during the marriage the women are expected to leave the house and take a lover.
Such comparative sexual and social freedom has led to the false but commonly held perception among many lowland Pakistanis that the tribe's women are sexually promiscuous. But while Kalasha men do seem to extend a greater level of physical and social freedom to their other halves, the lives of their women-folk are still strictly regimented.
To the Kalash the world is divided into two states, onjesta (pure, sacred) and pragata (impure, profane). Women are considered pragata, particularly during menstruation and childbirth where they are exiled to special huts away from the village. Only once they have purified themselves can they return to the tribe. Certain fields and shrines considered pure and sacred to the community are also out of bounds for the tribe's women.
Such peculiarly distinct customs have fascinated anthropologists, linguists and travellers alike for centuries, not just because the survival of the Kalasha in a sea of Islam is so unusual but because no one is sure exactly where they came from.
Their tongue, like many of the dialects spoken in the Hindu Kush range, is closest to the Dardic branch of the Indo-European languages of Central Asia. But Kalash oral history tells a different story, that they are descended from Shalak Shah, one of Alexander the Great's generals whose armies conquered as far as the Indus river before turning back towards Europe. Although blond hair and blue eyes are common amongst the Kalash, recent genetic testing has suggested that they may be an aboriginal group that are, in fact, indigenous to the area.
But how did the Kalasha manage to cling on to their distinct polytheistic pagan traditions in an area renowned for its particularly orthodox brand of Islam?
"I think they were just lucky," says Siraj Ul Mulk, a direct descendant of the Sunni Muslim royal family that once ruled the Chitral region until they ceded to Pakistan in the 1960s.
"Despite their orthodox appearance, Chitralis have always been very relaxed about the Kalasha and other minorities. The missionaries always tend to come from outside." Walking through the dusty fort that his father, the Mehtar of Chitral, once used as his summer palace, Mr Ul Mulk also offers another explanation for why the Kalasha of Pakistan remained unharmed: India's partition. "Under British partition we were lucky enough to be placed on the Pakistani side," he says. "If we'd ended up in Afghanistan I doubt the Kalasha would have survived."
Two hundred years ago Afghanistan was also home to numerous Kalasha tribes, known locally as the Red Kafirs, but they were annihilated at the end of the 19th century. After receiving a bloody nose in two disastrous conflicts with the Afghans, the British simply stood by as the founding father of modern Afghanistan, Abdur Rahman Khan, systematically forced the non-Muslim tribes in the east of the country to convert at the point of a sword. A small number of Afghan Kalasha managed to flee towards Chitral and can still be seen in the upper valleys wearing their distinctive red dresses but all Kalasha are fully aware of the threat that extremist beliefs pose to their very survival.
That the Kalash are frightened of the current climate in Pakistan is testament to how seriously they take the current threats. They survived the marauding armies of Tamerlaine, the religious zeal of Abdur Rahman and even the anti-Soviet mujahedin. But now, like many of Pakistan's religious and ethnic minorities, they once again feel unprotected and vulnerable.
"We've survived so much over the years and we're not about to give up now," says Azam Kalash. "For centuries we have lived happily alongside our Muslim neighbours but thanks to extremism our numbers are dwindling. Whether we'll survive this century I simply don't know."

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/asia/article2779426.ece