Global News Journal

Weathering the storm: “Am I ready?”

(Charles Abbyad, 58, is the maitre d’ at Arnaud’s, a classic creole restaurant in the center of New Orleans. With his wife, Jill, he keeps a guesthouse called The Chimes in the city’s historic Garden District. While thousands of residents are packing their cars and fleeing Hurricane Gustav, Abbyad is staying behind with Reuters reporters Matt Bigg and Tim Gaynor to ride out the storm.

It’s 4 p.m. Charles has been up a stepladder most of the day, putting up shutters and preparing for the gathering storm. This is probably his last post for today.)

“In the last couple of days we didn’t have a speck of wind, but now it’s starting. It’s overcast, and the outer reaches of the storm are with us. Most people don’t realize it, but when they are dealing with a storm, they’re on edge. I want it to come and get it over with.”

“I’ve shuttered the four big windows on the front of the house, the small windows on the side and now I’m putting in some extra screws. Last time, when we came back after Katrina, my palm tree was leaning into the guest house. I’ve tied it to another tree, and this will hopefully keep it in place.

“Am I ready? Well, as an innkeeper I am ready. As a new steam helper, I’m not sure. If the Reuters news team do an excessive amount of driving, I don’t know if the 21 gallons of gasoline I bought will be enough.”

Follow Abbyad and Reuters reporters Matt Bigg and Tim Gaynor here as they weather the storm in New Orleans. 

Above: Charles Abbyad holds a plank of wood he plans to nail to the outside of his home to protect it against Hurricane Gustav. Photo by Matthew Bigg/REUTERS.

Weathering the storm

Charles Abbyad, 58, is the maitre d’ at Arnaud’s, a classic creole restaurant in the center of New Orleans. With his wife, Jill, he keeps a guesthouse called The Chimes in the city’s historic Garden District. While thousands of residents are packing their cars and fleeing Hurricane Gustav, Abbyad is staying behind with Reuters reporters Matt Bigg and Tim Gaynor to ride out the storm.

“We learned from Katrina that if the city is going to be closed up for any period of time, the food would spoil in the refrigerators at the restaurant. Last time we would have opened much sooner if we had prepared better. This time, we threw some food away on Saturday, and gave the rest to the fire department. By the time we walked out of the restaurant yesterday, it was locked up, all the computers were put away and then I came over here to get everything ready.”

“I am staying behind because my bed and breakfast is my life. Tonight the winds are supposed to come, and so we are shuttering up the windows. I made a commitment to Reuters during Katrina, that the next storm if there was one, they were going to be taken care of. So, we have enough food to feed you for a week. I also have a shotgun and a .38 so that if someone is going to loot the house, they have to get by me — If I dare to use them!”

Follow Abbyad and Reuters  reporters Matt Bigg and Tim Gaynor as they weather the storm in New Orleans.

Above: Charles Abbyad holds a plank of wood he plans to nail to the outside of his home to protect it against Hurricane Gustav. Abbyad is seen carrying the plank in the second photograph. Photos by Matthew Bigg/REUTERS.

Development aid: how can it work?

Ministers and officials from more than 100 countries, as well as representatives of multilateral development and financial agencies, are meeting in Accra, Ghana this week (Sept. 2-4) to discuss ways of making development aid more effective. 

At its best, development aid from rich countries to help the world’s most needy can really touch the poor, giving them the means and the know-how to transform their lives and future in self-sustaining projects that profitably plug their labour and activities into the globalised world.

A project I visited in Senegal is helping Senegalese peasant farmers to become international exporters of melons.

But horror stories abound in the international aid community about wasteful proliferation, confusion and overlap of aid projects — the so-called “Tower of Babel” syndrome in which aid projects sometimes go ahead without the full collaboration of host governments and may even compete with each other.

If badly conceived and applied, aid projects can squander hundreds of millions of aid dollars in costly “white elephants” that end up providing uncontrolled funds and expensive SUVs to a handful of corrupt officials, while leaving the intended recipients as poor as they were before. 

President Abdoulaye Wade of Senegal, the African country which has received one of the highest levels of aid per capita on the continent since independence, has criticised some aid NGOs as being “greedy gobblers of aid resources, absorbing the best part of this through all kinds of schemes, in administration, travel and luxury hotel costs for so-called experts — rather than spending on actions”.  He recommends innovative aid initiatives that “help people to stand up”.

Some might ask what Senegal really has to show for this aid influx over the years, when we see an exodus of many young Senegalese risking their lives every year in rickety, open boats to try to reach Europe to seek a better life.

from Africa News blog:

Time for colonial masters to pay up?

Italy settled its colonial era dispute with Libya at the weekend with $5 billion in compensation for wrongs done during colonial rule. The money will be invested in a major new highway as well as used for clearing mines and other projects. Both sides say that will allow them to make a new start.

Relations between Libya and Italy had been especially difficult and this was a very specific dispute, but Italian colonialism did not last all that long in Africa - even if there were episodes of particular nastiness while it did.

What about the far more important colonial players in Africa: Britain, France and Portugal? Not only was their presence far longer lasting, but they were more heavily involved in the Atlantic Slave Trade, which sapped the strength of west and central Africa for centuries and forced millions of its people into death or slavery. Calls for reparations from some quarters have never died down.

The colonial powers later carved up the map of Africa for their own administrative convenience and with little regard for those living there. Independence movements were often suppressed with heavy force -- including in Algeria, the former Portuguese colonies and Kenya.

Since independence, the former colonial powers have given billions of dollars in development aid and other assistance. They generally have far better relationships with former colonies than Italy had with Libya.

But is it time for other former colonial powers to apologise and pay up for misdeeds on the continent? Or should the past be left for the history books?

“August Syndrome” strikes new Kremlin chief

     “April is the cruellest month”  wrote T.S. Eliot, but had “The Waste Land” been written by a modern Russian poet, August would have won the title hands down.

    Over the past two decades, coups, wars, floods, economic collapse and air disasters have blighted the eighth month of the year, when government and business largely shut down for the long school summer holidays, fixing the “August Syndrome” in the popular psyche.

    Like his predecessor Vladimir Putin, the syndrome has bitten President Dmitry Medvedev in his first year in office with the war over Georgia’s breakaway region of South Ossetia.

    He sent in Russian tanks and troops this month to crush Georgia’s attempt to retake the province and recognised the pro-Moscow region and another secessionist province as independent states on Tuesday, sparking a major crisis in relations with the West.

    But the syndrome itself dates back to August 1991, when Communist hardliners tried to depose Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev in a botched putsch which set the pattern for much of the ensuing post-Soviet period.

    In August 1993 Gorbachev’s successor in the Kremlin, Boris Yeltsin, locked horns with the Soviet-era parliament, a showdown that saw him dissolve the legislature the following month and eventually shell deputies into submission with tanks.

    In August of 1996, separatists in Chechnya took the capital Grozny by storm from Russian troops, a humiliation which resulted in a truce that gave the rebel province de facto independence.

from Africa News blog:

Ivory Coast’s election dilemma

The authorities in Ivory Coast have now embarked on what is supposed to be the last step of issuing identity papers to its citizens. Those who lost their papers during the war or never had any in the first place and missed out on previous hearings across the country are getting another chance .

This, in theory, will then allow those old enough to register to vote in elections, which are due to take place on November 30. These are the elections meant to end a crisis that was sparked by a short war in 2002-2003 and left the country, the world's top cocoa producer and home to one of the region's most stable and flourishing economies, divided between a rebel-held north and a government-controlled south.

The two sides have struck numerous deals and, though there was little fighting after the first few months of the war, election deadlines have come and gone. The 2007 deal between President Laurent Gbagbo and rebel leader Guillaume Soro, who has since become prime minister, seems to be Ivory Coast's best shot at peace yet.

But a glance at the newspapers on the day the new identification drive was launched revealed other concerns. Fraternite Matin, a respected daily, devoted its front page to a headline that read "It is not possible!" above a collection of reasons why the presidential election cannot be held on Nov. 30. Many other papers had columns analysing rumours and the subsequent denials that the army chief had been arrested.

Abidjan is no stranger to rumours but this is a less-than ideal run up to elections. The disarmament of rebels and militia has not taken place on the scale it is meant to have done. Over the last two months, dissident rebels have protested over issues such as money from demobilisation, at times fighting their former colleagues. Hardly any of the equipment needed to register voters has actually been deployed, just days before the electoral lists are meant to be published. Despite this, the official word is still that the polls should take place as planned.

Ivory Coast seems to face a choice between elections on time but in less than perfect conditions or yet another delay. What would the consequences be of putting off the polls, yet again? Given the importance of identity and nationality in Ivory Coast, should elections be held when there are still questions over who is eligible to vote and who is not? What about organising elections when there are still various groups who are still armed and could use them to challenge the results?

from Pakistan: Now or Never?:

Kashmir’s lost generation

One of the more troublesome aspects of the latest protests in Kashmir, among the biggest since a separatist revolt erupted in 1989, is the impact on the younger generation.

In an op-ed in the New York Times, Indian writer Pankaj Mishra writes that India's attempt to crush the revolt in 1989 and 1990 ended up provoking many young Kashmiris to take to arms and embrace radical Islam. 

"A new generation of politicized Kashmiris has now risen; the world is again likely to ignore them - until some of them turn into terrorists with Qaeda links," he writes.  Calling on India to take some first steps to ease the situation by cutting the number of troops in the Kashmir Valley and allowing Kashmiris to trade freely across the Line of Control -- the military demarcation line which divides the former kingdom of Jammu and Kashmir between India and Pakistan -- he says the past record does not inspire much hope.

"But a brutal suppression of the nonviolent protests will continue to radicalize a new generation of Muslims and engender a fresh cycle of violence, rendering Kashmir even more dangerous - and not just to South Asia this time," he says.

It would be wrong to overstate the role of radical Islam in the revolt -- the Kashmir Valley is primarily Sufi and the hardline brand of Wahhabi/Deobandi Islam followed by al Qaeda and the Taliban has never really managed to take root there.

And nor would it be correct to hold India alone responsible -- many Pakistanis will admit privately that Pakistan played its own role in encouraging the separatist revolt, in part to use as a pawn against its much bigger neighbour.

But no amount of finger-pointing or bitter wrangling over history can take away from the fact that children who were born after the revolt erupted and grew up in violence, are now turning into teenagers as the troubles flare anew. What hope for them?

Georgia’s day of prayer: who can save country now?

At the security checkpoint on the way in to Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili’s chancellery building, two small posters are displayed.    

“Stop Russia,” says the first. The second is a quotation from British World War Two leader Winston Churchill: “Never, never, never give up.”

Together, they sum up a national mood of grim defiance in Georgia after a short, disastrous war with Russia, followed by the loss of two provinces that have been outside Tbilisi’s control since the early 1990s but have now cemented their split by getting Moscow to recognise them as independent states under its protection.

Sitting in front of a row of Georgian and European Union  flags,  Saakashvili projects remarkable energy for a man under intense strain, three weeks into a national crisis. ”The first couple of days he didn’t sleep, we were all worried about him,” says a staffer in the presidential building. 

For several nights this week he held late-night sessions with Western reporters, sometimes finishing as late as 3 a.m., as he sought to gain the upper hand in the media war that has run parallel to the conflict on the ground with Russia.

“Russia clearly intended this as a blatant challenge to world order. It’s now up to all of us to roll Russian aggression back,” he told Reuters in an interview that started at 20 minutes after midnight.

Saakashvili has lost weight, says a Western observer who knows him well, but his face shows barely a trace of the sleepless nights.  

Fears of conflict as tensions rise around the Black Sea

Tension is mounting around the Black Sea following Russia’s recognition of two Georgian regions, South Ossetia and Abkhazia, as independent states.  

Russia said its navy was monitoring ”the build-up of NATO forces in the Black Sea area” as the U.S. Navy shipped humanitarian supplies to Georgia on Wednesday.

In a move that could further aggravate Russia, Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko said he wanted to discuss charging Russia more for the lease of a naval base in the Crimean port of Sevastopol, which is part of Ukraine.   

Ukrainian leaders say they fear they might be next on Russia’s hit list, a concern echoed by French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner. He told France’s Europe 1 radio: ”I repeat that it is very dangerous, and there are other objectives that one can suppose are objectives for Russia, in particular the Crimea, Ukraine and Moldova.”

Analysts say the Crimea region, in southern Ukraine, could be used by Russia to destabilise Ukraine. Not only does it host Russia’s Black Sea fleet, but the majority of people living there are ethnic Russians.                                                            

It would not be the first time Crimea has been at the heart of a war. The territory has been conquered many times and has been controlled by people including Goths, Huns, Bulgars and Greeks. 

The Russian Empire lost the Crimean War of 1854-1856 against an alliance of France, Britain, the Kingdom of Sardinia and the Ottoman Empire but the war is regarded by many Russians as a glorious defeat.

What’s next in the Russia-West crisis over Georgia?

The people of South Ossetia and Abkhazia were celebrating on Tuesday after Russian President Dmitry Medvedev signed a decree recognising the independence of the two regions. 

Western leaders responded with harsh words. U.S. President George W. Bush said it increased world tensions and Britain called for “the widest possible coalition against Russian aggression in Georgia,” where the two regions lie. 

But what can the West do to punish Russia or discourage it from any similar acts in the future? 

Military action has never been a realistic option since Russia sent tanks and troops to halt Georgia’s assault on South Ossetia. United Nations sanctions are also out of the question because Russia ihas the right of veto on the U.N. Security Council.

Major powers are also reluctant to do anything that might encourage Moscow to withdraw its help with U.N. sanctions against Iran over its nuclear programme and transit support for NATO forces in Afghanistan. 

Retaliation could involve Russian membership of the big international clubs: excluding Russia from the Group of Eight (G8) top industrial democracies or blocking its bid to join the World Trade Organization (WTO). 

But any action will be carried out with the nagging thought at the back of Western leaders’ minds – Moscow is no longer the economic basket-case of Soviet times and, riding a tide of petrodollars from soaring oil prices, western Europe depends on Russian oil and gas.