Global News Journal

from FaithWorld:

Leaked Danneels tapes with Catholic sex abuse victim make for sad reading

"Why do you feel so sorry for him and not for me?" -- Victim of sexual abuse by a Belgian bishop to Cardinal Godfried Danneels.

The transcripts of two meetings between Belgian Cardinal Godfried Danneels and a man sexually abused by the disgraced former bishop of Bruges make for sad reading indeed. Two Flemish-language newspapers, De Standaard and Het Nieuwsblad, published the texts on Saturday after the victim provided them with his secret recordings of the sessions.  My analysis of the case is here.

Apart from the exchanges they reveal, the transcripts are sobering because of the context of the meeting. It took place on April 8, at a time when the series of clerical sexual abuse revelations that began in Ireland the previous year was tearing through Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Austria like a tornado. Pope Benedict had issued an unprecedented apology to the Irish for the scandals only shortly before. Church leaders all over were vowing to end the Church's culture of secrecy and put the victims' welfare above the defence of the clergy. If there was any time to simply say, "OK, he has to go. We have to report this," this was it.

It's a sad end for the career of a leading Catholic cardinal, a grandfatherly man who spent 30 years as primate of the Belgian Church and stepped down last January amid wide popular support (except from conservatives who denounced him as too liberal).

There's also an almost comic side to this story. When Belgian police swooped down on Church offices and Danneels's apartment in late June to seize files and computers for abuse records, they also searched two tombs of deceased archbishops in the Mechelen cathedral crypt because someone suggested the cardinal had hidden some  incriminating documents down there. They found nothing but the previous primates' remains. Little did they know a real bombshell was elsewhere, on the tape the bishop's victim had made.

In the published transcripts of that meeting,  the unnamed victim, now 42, told Danneels he could no longer keep quiet about how his uncle, Bishop Roger Vangheluwe, sexually abused him between the ages of 5 and 18. He says Vangheluwe could not remain in office and the case must be reported to the Church hierarchy, but he doesn't know how to do this.

from Africa News blog:

Hopes of a nation hinge on a document

On July 7, 1990, fear spread around Kenya. It stretched from the capital, where the opposition had called demonstrations to press for a multi-party system and constitutional changes, right into rural areas.

When a lorry carrying packed milk, under a now long-discarded school-feeding scheme, approached a rural schoolyard during a break, schoolchildren ran into their classrooms because the black stacked crates looked suspiciously like the helmets of armed police.

Some schoolchildren were picked up by their parents from school, too anxious about their safety to let them stay in school.

Opposition leaders and their supporters were beaten up and arrested on the streets by police, forcing some to flee into foreign embassies and into exile in the ensuing crackdown by security forces.

Two decades later,  a new constitution is being enacted. It could guarantee the survival of the country by protecting it from intermittent ethnic conflict, a political establishment susceptible to abuse, corruption and the skewed distribution of resources such as land.

The road to this point, for many people, was peppered with heartbreak, because several times the promise of a new constitution and the much-needed new start turned out to be false dawn.

For instance, in 2002, euphoria swept the country with the election of President Mwai Kibaki who, among other promises, ran on a platform of delivering a new constitution within a 100 days of election.

Acronym soup swamps Malaysia reform drive

Malaysia’s Prime Minister Najib Razak says he has embarked on a series of radical economic reforms. In reality it feels as if he has unleashed a barrage of incomprehensible acronyms on the unsuspecting public of this Southeast Asian nation.

The charge for economic reform is being led by the snappily named PEMANDU. As well as being the Malay word for “driver” it stands for the government’s Performance Management and Delivery Unit.

PEMANDU is in charge of formulating and implementing NKRAs (National Key Result Areas), MKRAs (Ministerial Key Result Areas) and getting “Big Results Fast”, according to its website, although it singularly failed to win political backing for a radical revamp of Malaysia’s costly subsidy regime.

It is also helping to formulate the 10th Malaysia Plan, 10MP for those in the know, a communist-era sounding 5-year plan that aims to help lift this middle income country to developed nation status by 2020.

PEMANDU is part of the GTP, the Government Transformation Programme, which also involves the SITF (Special Implementation Task Force). Throw in the NKEAs (National Key Economic Areas), another thinktank known as the EPU (Economic Planning Unit) and you haven’t reached the end of the alphabet spaghetti dreamed up by Malaysia’s civil servants…. There’s still the ETP. the NEP (sometimes good, sometimes bad) and the NEM (New Economic Model).  

To be fair to Malaysia, it is not the only country in the world that is wallowing in economic acronyms, the U.S. gave the world TARP, a $700 billion bank bailout programme, and the even more mind-numbing ABCP MMMFLF   (don’t ask), but it is fair to ask what Malaysians have got from all of this.

from Pakistan: Now or Never?:

Pakistan-India; a $5 million downpayment on a peace initiative

Historical parallels can be misleading, so I am a little bit wary of reading too much into a comparison between the devastating cyclone which hit then East Pakistan in 1970 and the current floods in Pakistan. But on the surface the similarities are there.

In 1970, the Pakistani government was criticised for not doing enough to help the victims of the Bhola cyclone, exacerbating tensions between the western and eastern wings of the country ahead of a civil war in which East Pakistan broke away to become Bangladesh. In 2010, the Pakistani government has been criticised for not doing enough to help the victims of the floods; potentially exacerbating tensions between the ruling elite and the poor -- usually the first to suffer in a natural disaster. At the same time the country is fighting what is effectively a civil war against Islamist militants, for whom poverty and alienation provide a fertile breeding ground.

At the very least, you can say that big natural disasters have unpredictable consequences. For that reason I'm reluctant to start speculating about the long term consequences of the floods, although the Indian blog, The Acorn, has made a pretty good stab at it here. And you can also say that the response of India will be crucial.

 In 1971, India backed the Bengali separatists, inflicting a humiliating military defeat on Pakistan, forcing its army to surrender at Dhaka and taking 90,000 Pakistani prisoners-of-war. Whatever the rights and wrongs of that war - and there are many - Pakistan's narrative memory of India exploiting its weakness in a civil war to split the country in two continues to inform its thinking about its much bigger neighbour to this day. So what happens in 2010?

The question -- at least as posed to me from a Pakistani perspective - is this. Will India show its sincerity towards peace by helping Pakistan recover from the biggest natural disaster in its history? Or will India take advantage of Pakistan's current vulnerability to impose its will on Kashmir? It is a question which is at once haunted by the ghosts of 1971, and infused with an optimism that history does not have to repeat itself.

So far the signs are reasonably promising. Pakistan has accepted an offer of $5 million flood aid from India (think America taking aid from Iran or vice versa to understand the significance of this).  India is also pledging to do more to help rebuild Pakistan. India and Pakistan, said Indian ambassador to the United Nations  Hardeep Singh Puri, shared the same history, topography, land mass and river systems.  The South Asian region was prone to natural disasters and, throughout it, the vagaries of nature continued to take a heavy tool of human lives and material losses. “We share the pain and agony and fully understand the trauma and suffering that our Pakistani brethren are living through,” he said.

At the same time, two of the big issues (Kashmir and water) which India and Pakistan traditionally blame on each other have been shown to be caused - at least partially - by problems within.  In Kashmir, a fresh wave of protests led by Kashmiri youths throwing stones has displaced the standard Indian view of the Kashmir revolt as one fuelled almost entirely by Pakistan-backed gunmen and bombers.  For the first time in years, the talk is of a need for a settlement on Kashmir which acknowledges that Kashmiri separatism has indigenous roots. In Pakistan, its problems with water management have been shown to go far beyond the much talked about threat of India manipulating the rivers which flow from its side of the border.  Both countries have had their assumptions challenged; both therefore have the potential for a change in mindset which might make talks easier.

from Afghan Journal:

India, Pakistan can’t break the ice, even in hour of tragedy

Pakistan's catastrophic flood continues to boggle the mind, both in terms of the human tragedy and the damage it has inflicted on a fragile, unstable country.  One official has likened the disaster to the cyclone that devastated what was once East Pakistan, setting off a chain of events that eventually led to its secession and the birth of Bangladesh.

Not even that spectre, raised by Pakistan's ambassador to Britain, can however dent the steadfast hostility between India and Pakistan.   For a full three weeks as the floods  worked their way  through the spine of Pakistan from the turbulent northwest to Sindh in the south, Islamabad made frantic appeals to the international community not  to ignore the slow-moving disaster,  and instead help it with emergency aid, funds. But next-door India, best-placed to mount  a relief effort probably more because of the geography than any special skill at emergency relief, was kept at arm's length. An Indian aid offer of $5 million, which itself came after some hesitation and is at best modest,was lying on the table for days before Pakistan accepted it.   "There are a lot of sensitivities between India and Pakistan ... but we are considering it very seriously," a Pakistani embassy spokesman told our reporter in New Delhi earlier this week.  Things appeared to have moved faster only after Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh called his Pakistani counterpart Yusuf Raza Gilani expressing sympathy and reminding him of the offer of aid. Millions of Pakistans meanwhile continued to struggle for food.

To some extent, Pakistan's hesitation in accepting aid from India is understandable. India is the traditional enemy. It is also the bigger country of the two. And over the last two decades it has become easily the more prosperous entity, courted by the world’s industrialists while Pakistan is "haunted by the world’s terrorists", as columnist Vir Sanghvi writes in the Hindustan Times.   A Pew poll that we wrote about a few weeks ago showed how deep-seated these Pakistani fears are:  a majority of those polled said they considered India to be the bigger threat than al Qaeda or the Taliban, despite the violence they have suffered at the hands of the militant groups over the past few years.

As Sanghvi writes:

But, to be fair to the Pakistanis, let us accept the position that decades of hostility between our two countries have led to a situation where the Pakistanis simply do not trust us. Let us also accept that they are so resentful of India that even in their hour of greatest crisis when thousands of people have died and millions are homeless, they will still spurn India’s hand of friendship. And let us grant them their claim that given our history, they are justified in being suspicious of India.

from Pakistan: Now or Never?:

Helping Pakistan; not if, but how

Outside President Asif Ali Zardari's political rally in Birmingham last weekend, I chatted to a middle-aged woman passing by about the floods in Pakistan. "I have every sympathy for Pakistan and the Pakistanis, but he is not helping them much, is he?" she said. Another woman asked me to explain why it was that the  protesters were not focused on the floods but demonstrating "about all sorts".  Inside the rally, a young British Pakistani who had recently returned from a visit to his family home in Kashmir complained about negative stereotyping in the media of Pakistan that had reduced a country of some 170 million people to "a terrorist threat".

If there is a common thread to the relatively slow western response to one of the worst catastrophes in Pakistan's history, it is a sense of confusion, not about whether to help, but how to help. That, and the dehumanising impact of stereotypes - corrupt politicians, angry bearded protesters, suicide bombers to name but a few -- that obscure the impact of the floods on the very real people - 14 million of them - affected by the disaster.

In the short term, the weak civilian government has been slammed for failing to come up with a clear plan to address the immediate needs of those hit by the floods. Nor has it provided the leadership that might rally all institutions and people behind it. The result has been that the Pakistan Army, long the country's most efficient and effective national institution, has stepped in to fill the void, leading efforts to rescue flood victims.  Meanwhile, as Pakistani politicians squabbled amongst themselves and flew into disaster-hit areas with an eye for photo-ops, and as Zardari travelled abroad to France and Britain, the banned Jamaat-ud-Dawa - the humanitarian wing of the Lashkar-e-Taiba militant group - quietly moved in to help, as it did in the 2005 earthquake in Kashmir. 

The United States, along with other countries, has been ratcheting up its aid efforts, offering financial assistance totallling $76 million and sending military helicopters for relief and rescue operations. However, I can't help but feel a bit uneasy when this is presented in terms of vying for influence with Islamist charities like the Jamaat ud-Dawa. This may be partially true, but it is also part of the same dehumanising process, as though the flood victims are no more than "hearts and minds" to be won over, rather than people facing death from hunger and disease.  International and Pakistani NGOs are doing what they can - although for those who want to help, it can be hard for outsiders to work out which charity best deserves donations (inside Pakistan, the Edhi Foundation is widely respected.)

But if understanding how to alleviate the short-term crisis is hard enough, the question of how to help Pakistan in the long term is even more perplexing.  The damage to its fragile economy is likely to be felt not just this year - the World Bank says $1 billion in crops have been lost - but in grain sowings for food supplies in the future.  The impact on society in a country already struggling to find its feet in a battle against Islamist militancy is yet to be fully understood, although popular anger against the government over its response to the floods does not bode well. Add to that  the disorientating impact of climate change -- and scientists are still arguing about how much the floods in Pakistan and drought in Russia are due to global warming -- and the need to bolster Pakistan's defences in the future against water crises (both shortage and excess) and you have a reconstruction challenge which would defy even the strongest of governments.

At a crude level, Pakistan needs better water management, better irrigation and a reversal of the deforestation which has been widely blamed for exacerbating the flooding.  Deforestation has a double impact. Firstly there is nothing to slow flood waters and mudslides. Secondly,  it contributes to soil erosion, silting up river waters so that dams and levees downstream are even less able to contain the impact of unusually heavy monsoon rains. Pakistan's forests have been ravaged by an illegal timber mafia, often working in league with corrupt local politicians. Reversing that process is both an obvious need and - as with so many obvious needs in Pakistan - a political nightmare.

The economy itself might actually tick up slightly. Natural disasters are often followed by a reconstruction boom. But reconstruction which does not take account of the need for sustainable development would leave Pakistan exposed to more natural disasters in the future, particularly if uneven monsoons combine with faster melting of the Himalayan glaciers which feed its rivers. Reconstruction which exacerbates income disparities and feeds corruption will tug even harder at the country's fragile social fabric.

from FaithWorld:

Did Bloomberg inspire Obama’s speech about NYC Muslim cultural centre?

There was an interesting echo at the White House when President Barack Obama came out in favour of the proposed Cordoba House Muslim cultural centre near the site of the September 11, 2001 attacks in New York (see our news report here).  Controversy about the project, which opponents call the "Ground Zero mosque," has been swirling in New York for weeks and went national recently when Republicans Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich joined the critics' campaign. But until the annual Iftar dinner he hosted on Friday evening, the president had kept out of what his spokesman called "a matter for New York City and the local community to decide.”

Reading his comments, it looks like Obama not only let NYC authorities decide the issue -- favourably for the project, as it turned out, as both the local community board and the landmarks commission voted overwhelmingly to let it go ahead. He may also have taken pointers for his speech from New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who has stood solidly behind the project despite all the emotion it has stirred up.

After the Landmarks Preservation Commission cleared the last administrative hurdle to the plan -- rejecting the opponents' bid to protect the 1857 building standing on the proposed Cordoba House site from being torn down -- Bloomberg delivered a forceful speech on August 3 defending two long-standing American traditions.

The first and most obvious one was freedom of religion: “Of all our precious freedoms, the most important may be the freedom to worship as we wish... I believe that this is an important test of the separation of church and state as we may see in our lifetime – as important a test – and it is critically important that we get it right."

Less highlighted but equally important was respect for private property: "The simple fact is this building is private property, and the owners have a right to use the building as a house of worship. The government has no right whatsoever to deny that right... lost in the heat of the debate has been a basic question – should government attempt to deny private citizens the right to build a house of worship on private property based on their particular religion? That may happen in other countries, but we should never allow it to happen here."

Obama hit all these themes in the key passage of his speech: "As a citizen, and as President, I believe that Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as everyone else in this country. And that includes the right to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in Lower Manhattan, in accordance with local laws and ordinances. This is America. And our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakeable."

This is not to say that Obama would not have backed this project if Bloomberg had not spoken out so eloquently. His support is consistent with his views on constitutional rights, religious freedom, diversity and outreach to Muslims. It also made sense to save this speech for the Iftar dinner, when his stand could play more prominently than it might if it were simply proclaimed in a statement on the White House website.

Can export bans be challenged at the WTO?

Russia’s ban on grain exports as a heat wave parches crops in the world’s third biggest wheat exporter has raised questions whether such export curbs break World Trade Organization rules. Russia is not a member of the WTO, and it remains to be seen how its new grain policy will affect its 17-year-old bid to join. But other grain exporters, such as Ukraine, which is also considering export curbs, are part of the global trade referee.

WTO rules are quite clear that members cannot interfere with imports and exports in a way that disrupts trade or discriminates against other members. But in practice most WTO rules aim to stop countries blocking imports – shutting out competitor’s goods to give their own domestic producers an unfair advantage.

from Afghan Journal:

Resurgent Taliban target women and children

Civilian casualties in the worsening war in Afghanistan are up just over 30 percent in the current year,  the United Nations said in a mid-year report this week, holding the Taliban responsible for three-quarters of the deaths or injuries.

More worrying, women and children seem to be taking the brunt of the violence directed by a resurgent Taliban, which will only stoke more concern about the wisdom of seeking reconciliation with the hardline Islamist group.

Indeed the Taliban have been blamed for a series of horrific assaults on women in recent weeks,  which must be distasteful to even those pushing for a deal with them as a way to end the nine-year conflict.

A 48-year-old widow was given dozens of lashes in public and then executed for alleged adultery by the insurgents in the northwestern Badghis province on Sunday, according to a Reuters report, citing a provincial police officer.  This came hard on the heels of a Time magazine cover picture of an 18-year-old woman allegedly disfigured by the Taliban for trying to flee abuse by her husband.

The UN report, documenting attacks on women and children, makes for equally grim reading. It said that in the first six months of this year, 55 percent more children were killed or wounded by the Taliban and other anti-government groups than in the same period in 2009. The number of women killed or wounded by the Taliban and other insurgents increased by six percent. Here is a PDF of the report.

It's not just accidental deaths that we are talking of here, or people getting caught in the middle of crossfire between soldiers and insurgents.  These were targeted killings, especially in the case of children, often suspected of  spying for the government. Here are three cases listed in the report :

Irony the clear leader in Australian election campaign

Australia’s election campaign has been mostly dull and stage-managed, leaving a lot of us bored and cynical, but it has at least served up one delicious irony.

In a land of immigrants, the two main candidates are promising to crack down on immigration if elected — even though both were themselves born overseas.

Prime Minister Julia Gillard is a fully fledged immigrant, having been born a British citizen, while opposition leader Tony Abbott also has a foreign flavour, having been born in London to Australian parents living abroad.

Gillard is actually one of this country’s original “boat people”, having arrived in the 1960s from Wales on a ship full of “10-pound poms”, Britons who paid a 10-pound one-way fare in the post-war decades for a better life Down Under.

That pony-tailed red-head, who stepped ashore at the age of four, is now promising to stop the boats.

She used one recent media scrum to send a very clear message to people thinking of paying people-smugglers and making a hazardous journey by boat to seek asylum in Australia:

“Do not risk your life only to arrive in Australian waters and find that you are far, far more likely than anything else to be quickly sent home by plane,” she said.