One of the more bizarre takes on Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez’s death comes from Associated Press business reporter Pamela Sampson (3/5/13):
Chavez invested Venezuela’s oil wealth into social programs including state-run food markets, cash benefits for poor families, free health clinics and education programs. But those gains were meager compared with the spectacular construction projects that oil riches spurred in glittering Middle Eastern cities, including the world’s tallest building in Dubai and plans for branches of the Louvre and Guggenheim museums in Abu Dhabi.
That’s right: Chavez squandered his nation’s oil money on healthcare, education and nutrition when he could have been building the world’s tallest building or his own branch of the Louvre. What kind of monster has priorities like that?
Souce: NACLA’s Keane Bhatt
In case you’re curious about what kind of results this kooky agenda had, here’s a chart (NACLA, 10/8/12) based on World Bank poverty stats–showing the proportion of Venezuelans living on less than $2 a day falling from 35 percent to 13 percent over three years. (For comparison purposes, there’s a similar stat for Brazil, which made substantial but less dramatic progress against poverty over the same time period.)
Of course, during this time, the number of Venezuelans living in the world’s tallest building went from 0 percent to 0 percent, while the number of copies of the Mona Lisa remained flat, at none. So you have to say that Chavez’s presidency was overall pretty disappointing–at least by AP‘s standards.
Dette er helt klart en fejl, som Helle Thorning-Schmidt og Margrethe Vestager aldrig ville have begået.
Du ser splinten i de andres øjne, men ikke pinden i dit eget.
NB: Linket er en kildehenvisning, ikke en anbefaling. Fare for forhøjet blodtryk, kaffepletter på upraktiske steder og hjernemasse på væggen. Klik på eget ansvar.
Jeg støtter ikke nogen form for sanktioner, FN-resolutioner eller militær aktion mod Syrien, så længe præcis de samme lande, regeringer og politiske partier i Folketinget, som nu udtrykker så megen omsorg for befolkningen i Syrien ikke er villige til at bruge præcis de samme midler til at støtte det demokratiske oprør i Bahrain.
Jeg ønsker befolkningen i Syrien det bedste, men der er intet, der tyder på, at Villy Søvndal og de øvrige hyklere i “Syriens Venner” tænker på andet end deres egne interesser. Så længe der ikke kommer en tilsvarende FN-resolution om Bahrain inklusive en fuld konfrontation med Saudi-Arabien om spørgsmålet, er den internationale forargelse over Ruslands og Kinas veto intet værd.
Nicholas Kristof, som jeg omtalte i mit sidste indlæg om anholdelsen af Zainab Alkhawaja, opsummerer situationen i Bahrain de seneste uger med to små billeder – det ene netop af Alkhawaja:
[Obama] should also understand the systematic, violent repression here, the kind that apparently killed a 14-year-old boy, Ali al-Sheikh, and continues to torment his family.Ali grew up here in Sitra, a collection of poor villages far from the gleaming bank towers of Bahrain’s skyline. Almost every day pro-democracy protests still bubble up in Sitra, and even when they are completely peaceful they are crushed with a barrage of American-made tear gas.
People here admire much about America and welcomed me into their homes, but there is also anger that the tear gas shells that they sweep off the streets each morning are made by a Pennsylvania company, NonLethal Technologies. It is a private company that declined to comment, but the American government grants it a license for these exports — and every shell fired undermines our image.
In August, Ali joined one of the protests. A policeman fired a shell at Ali from less than 15 feet away, according to the account of the family and human-rights groups. The shell apparently hit the boy in the back of the neck, and he died almost immediately, a couple of minutes’ walk from his home.
The government claims that the bruise was “inconsistent” with a blow from a tear gas grenade. Frankly, I’ve seen the Bahrain authorities lie so much that I don’t credit their denial. (….)
The police have continued to persecute Ali’s family. For starters, riot policemen fired tear gas at the boy’s funeral, villagers say.The police summoned Jawad for interrogation, most recently this month. He fears he will be fired from his job in the Ministry of Electricity.
Mourners regularly leave flowers and photos of Ali on his grave, which is in a vacant lot near the home. Perhaps because some messages call him a martyr, the riot police come regularly and smash the pictures and throw away the flowers. The family has not purchased a headstone yet, for fear that the police will destroy it.
The repression is ubiquitous. Consider Zainab al-Khawaja, 28, whose husband and father are both in prison and have been tortured for pro-democracy activities, according to human rights reports. Police officers have threatened to cut off Khawaja’s tongue, she told me, and they broke her father’s heart by falsely telling him that she had been shipped to Saudi Arabia to be raped and tortured. She braved the risks by talking to me about this last week — before she was arrested too.
Khawaja earned her college degree in Wisconsin. She was sitting peacefully protesting in a traffic circle when the police attacked her. First they fired tear gas grenades next to her, and then handcuffed her and dragged her away — sometimes slapping and hitting her as video cameras rolled. The Bahrain Center for Human Rights says that she was beaten more at the police station.
Khawaja is tough as nails, and when we walked alongside demonstrations together, she seemed unbothered by tear gas that left me blinded and coughing. But she worried about her 2-year-old daughter, Jude. And one time as we were driving back from visiting a family whose baby had just died, possibly because so much tear gas had been fired in the neighborhood, Khawaja began crying. “I think I’m losing it,” she said. “It all just gets to me.”
Mine fremhævelser. Mahmood Al-Yousif har et længere blogindlæg, hvor han gør opmærksom på, at myndighederne i Bahrain fortsat torterer og myrder ganske ustraffet, som Kristofs historie om Ali desværrre siger alt om:
Maybe if you have a few atoms of humanity left in you, it might help you remove that veil off your conscience and see things for what they are:
This incident – amongst hundreds of others currently being meted out to the majority of villages in this country – should be independently investigated and the officers implicated and their masters who are doing nothing to stop this must be made to account for their actions and be punished. The government who oversees this situation should be summarily dismissed of course and with haste. Nothing else would do if that illusive “new page” is to become a reality.
Hvorfor greb man ind med bombning af Libyen for at standse overgrebene, mens for eksempel den amerikanske regering ikke lægger det mindste pres på Bahrain? Vel, en af forskellene er, at undertrykkelsen i Bahrain set i forhold til landets indbyggertal er værre end i Libyen. En anden er, at vestmagterne i stedet valgte at sætte kiggerten for det blinde øjne, da Bahrains kongefamilie diskret indkaldte forstærkninger i form af nogle tusinde soldater fra Saudi-Arabien, der kunne bistå i opgøret med de fredelige demonstranter. Money talks.
Dansk ulands-hjælp er i hvert fald generøs over for det danske erhvervsliv, som støttekronerne ofte er bundet til at blive investeret i. Og så er den også ganske venlig overfor dansk økonomi – som cand.scient.-soc. Brian Espensen skriver i en kommentar i Information:
I en ikke særlig fjern fortid var Danmark en af verdens største bidragydere i kampen mod global nød og fattigdom. Vi var en nøgleaktør, som blev fremhævet, når man skulle have andre til at yde en indsats. Det er kun 10 år siden, men det er også allerede historie. […]
Senest er det blevet aktuelt, fordi Sudan, som har en kæmpe gæld til Danmark, bliver delt i to nye nationer i dag, 9. juli. For at give de to nye stater en ‘god start’, som det hedder fra dansk side, har man generøst tilbudt at eftergive nogle af de milliarder, vi har til gode.
Det lyder jo næsten helt ædelt, hvis man altså ikke stiller flere spørgsmål hertil. Pointen, som flere udviklingsorganisationer også har påpeget de seneste dage, er nemlig, at der er tale om lidt for kreativ tænkning i ministerierne. I tilfældet Sudan stammer gælden fra nogle erhvervsfremstød i 1970’erne, som man fra dansk side opgav. Først og fremmest er der tale om private selskaber, som den danske stat sikrede betaling, når de handlede med Sudan. Regninger kunne de ikke altid betale i Sudan, og landet endte med en gæld på 500 millioner kroner.
Det beløb er siden vokset med over 1.000 procent ved at lægge absurd høje renter, renters renter og til sidst strafrenter på. Så nu er gælden på mere end fem milliarder kroner. Allerede her kunne man kritisere Danmark. Men nu kommer den gode rigtig gode idé: Man vil nu eftergive disse milliarder, men bogføre dem som udviklingshjælp. Vupti. Noget der faktisk er et tab på 500 mio. inden for en hel anden sektor, forvandles ved et trylleslag til ulandsbistand på over fem mia. kroner.
I praksis tages disse milliarder så fra den kasse, der skulle have været brugt på udviklingshjælp og overføres i stedet til finansministeriet.
Meget kreativt – også kendt som “at give uden at give”. Men glorien og den gode samvittighed kan vi da stadig pudse.
EUs toprådgiver for Mellemøsten udtaler nu, at det er OK at skyde demonstranter ned med skarpt, hvis det er det, der skal til for at genoprette ro og orden i LibyenSyrien Bahrain.
But Robert Cooper, one of the EU’s highest-ranking diplomats and councillor to Ashton on the Middle East and the Balkans, told MEPs: “I’m not sure if the police have had to deal with these public order questions before. It’s not easy dealing with large demonstrations in which there may be violence. It’s a difficult task for policemen. It’s not something that we always get right in the best western countries and accidents happen.”
Briefing MEPs after a fact-finding mission to the Gulf, Cooper stressed that two of those killed were police. He said that Bahrain, home to the US fifth fleet, is “a rather pleasant, peaceful place”.
While still calling for dialogue between protesters and the government, he said: “One should understand the authorities were right to restore calm and order and that’s what they’ve done.”
Breaking news: Bombetogterne over Libyen afblæses. “One should understand that Gaddafi was right to restore calm and order and that’s what he’s done”, udtaler EUs udsending for området. Eller Assad. Eller Ahamadinejad. Hvorfor er det lige præcis, det ikke fungerer lige sådan med hensyn til krav om frihed og demokrati i lande, vi ikke er allieret med?
Eller Yemen, for den sags skyld. Hykleriet har spist dem: Yemen har ingen olie, og det er vores allierede Saudi-Arabien der har invaderet Bahrain. Og Bahrain har heller ikke selv noget olie. Så det taler vi ikke om, som Tom Scocca skriver i Slate:
The helpful thing, if you’re overwhelmed by so much news going on at once, is that Bahrain is roughly the same story as Libya—only instead of pro-democracy protesters being murdered by a terrorist-sponsoring monster of a dictator who has been on America’s enemies list for ages, the pro-democracy protesters are being murdered by a government that is America’s very own dear ally. And where Qaddafi brought in foreign mercenaries for support, King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa of Bahrain brought in troops from our even more vital ally, Saudi Arabia.
So basically, take all those proud feelings about the United States standing up for freedom and human rights in Libya and turn them inside out, and vomit into them. That’s Bahrain.
Bahrain and Saudi Arabia are the same rotten royalist dictatorships they’ve always been. And they’ve been on our side. The helicopters over the square were reportedly American-made Cobras, because the Royal Bahraini Air Force flies what we sell them; the rifles on the ground are American M16s. Freedom and democracy are what we talk about. Values are what we do.
Så, som Scocca skriver – tag al snakken om demokrati og menneskerettigheder og bræk dig på dem; så ved du, hvad alle de gode ord om demokrati og menneskerettigheder og beskyttelse af civilbefolkningen i Lbyen er værd.
Som vi læser i The Guardian. Men selvfølgelig skal vi intervenere i olie, jeg mener Libyen. Demokrati er en god ting, især i lande, vi ikke er allieret med.
Souce: NACLA’s Keane Bhatt
