China, other developing BRICS nations seek change in global economic order

Image by Trenchfoot via Flickr
By Keith B. Richburg, Thursday, April 14, 2:20 PM

BOAO, CHINA — With the United States and Europe still reeling from the 2008 financial crisis, five disparate developing countries led by China — large, populous, with growing economies — are using their combined clout to demand a larger voice and to upend the world’s traditional councils of power.

Brazil, Russia, India, China and newcomer South Africa, collectively known by the acronym BRICS, used their third summit meeting here on this southern Chinese resort island to call for a restructuring of the World War II-era global financial system and an eventual end to the long reign of the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency.

The five run the gamut politically, from vibrant democracies to authoritarian regimes. Economically, they are as much competitors as partners. But what they share is a common sense of exclusion, and the idea that the main institutions of global governance — the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization and the U.N. Security Council — were formed in a different era when the countries were economically weak and the United States was the world’s dominant superpower.

“They were really the biggest countries kind of left out,” said Amar Bhattacharya, a former World Bank official who now runs the Washington-based Group of 24 forum of developing countries.

The Obama administration came to office trying to engage China to become a “responsible stakeholder” in the established global order. But China, now with the backing of the other BRICS countries in a forum that it dominates by virtue of its size, has argued that the existing order is unfair and needs reshaping.

“The governing structure of the international financial institutions should reflect the changes in the world economy, increasing the voice and representation of emerging economies and developing countries,” the group’s final statement said.

Of the United Nations, it said, “We reaffirm the need for a comprehensive reform of the U.N., including its Security Council, with a view to making it more effective, efficient and representative.” It added, “China and Russia reiterate the importance they attach to the status of India, Brazil and South Africa in international affairs, and understand and support their aspiration to play a greater role in the U.N.”

The countries called for “a broad-based international reserve currency system providing stability and certainty,” a slap at the U.S. dollar and Washington’s monetary policy, which they think has allowed the dollar to depreciate.

The statement, more strongly worded and specific than one expressing similar sentiments at the group’s 2009 summit, said these emerging-market countries should have more of a say in how the world’s financial system is run, including which currencies should be in the emergency “basket” of drawing rights managed by the IMF.

In one of the first concrete steps, the five leaders agreed to have their development banks provide credit to one another, denominated in their local currencies and not, as is typical, in U.S. dollars.

And in an attempt to find some political common ground for the disparate group, the five leaders said they were “deeply concerned” about the turmoil in the Middle East and North Africa and urged all parties to “resolve their differences through peaceful means and dialogue.”

Without specifically referring to the NATO-led airstrikes against the forces of Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi, they said, “The use of force should be avoided.”

South Africa, the smallest of the countries, became a newly minted BRICS member this year. Meeting at the summit are Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, Chinese President Hu Jintao, who is the host, and South African President Jacob Zuma.

In a small irony for some, the term BRIC was coined in 2001 by a British economist for Goldman Sachs, mainly as a shorthand way to refer to the four countries that were far too large and advanced to be considered in the same league as, say, Zambia but were not quite wealthy enough to qualify for rich-world status.

The BRICS economies together are worth about $12 trillion, compared with $15 trillion for the U.S. economy. By 2020, their economies should pass that of the United States, economists say.

But the real story is their growth rates. While the United States and Europe are still shaking off the effects of the economic crisis and dealing with mounting debt, China is expected to grow by 9.5 percent a year for the next five years and India is expected to grow at more than 8 percent a year. Russia and Brazil each are expected to see growth of more than 4 percent.

With these emerging economies now seen as the engine for global growth, their leaders are demanding a greater voice on the world stage — even though they are hugely divergent countries with different political and economic systems. The five countries are just as often competing as cooperating.

Brazil and India are concerned that China’s undervalued currency is hurting their exports. And while Russia, a huge commodity exporter, is benefiting from soaring prices for oil and commodities, China, a major importer, is sharply criticizing those price rises.

“The member countries have starkly different economic interests,” said Phil Levy, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, “and are unlikely to function effectively as an economic bloc.”

This is not the first time China has challenged the existing system, which it thinks is dominated by the United States. In January, in written answers to questions from The Washington Post, Hu called the world currency system a “product of the past.” China has begun moves to boost the use of its currency, the renminbi, in trade and investment. Yet the renminbi is still not a convertible currency.

The BRICS forum gives China a new international vehicle to push its agenda. “The economic size of BRICS countries accounts for about 18 percent of world GDP,” said Jin Canrong, a professor of international studies at Beijing’s Renmin University. “But these countries are not the decision makers in the international economic system. They are only the athletes. The Western countries are the rulemakers and judges. Right now, the BRICS countries want to join the judging committee, too.”

Yao Zhizhong, a researcher with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, agreed: “Times have changed. In the past, the developed economies manipulated the world economic system. But right now, they are no longer able to dominate the world economy. With the growth of their economic size, the emerging economies want to join the decision-making process and have their voices heard in the international economic governing system.”

Hu may have found an unlikely ally from outside the BRICS format: French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who holds the chairmanship of the Group of 20 wealthy and developing nations. Sarkozy has similarly called for a change to the global monetary order and an end to the dollar as the “sole” reserve currency.


richburgk@washpost.com

Researcher Zhang Jie in Beijing contributed to this report.

In Tripoli, clandestine resistance takes peaceful and violent forms

Image by Abode of Chaos via Flickr
By Simon Denyer, Thursday, April 14, 10:12 PM

TRIPOLI, Libya — A man bends over, pretending to work on his car, muttering “just keep walking.” A long wait, a brief, coded phone call — and a car stops. A door swings open.

“Get in,” the man in the front tells two reporters. “If anyone stops us, just say we are going to the fish market.”

In Moammar Gaddafi’s Tripoli, under a shroud of fear and suspicion, a clandestine opposition movement is struggling to reorganize after February’s protests were brutally suppressed. As rebels in eastern Libya continue to hold territory and fight for more, resistance to the government in the capital is taking peaceful and violent forms.

“People are ready for suicide bombings,” the man, a leader of the anti-Gaddafi insurgency, later told two reporters over coffee and a cigarette in a safe house somewhere in the city.

Gaddafi, the man said, often salutes adoring crowds standing through the open roof of his car. “We can get near him,” the insurgent said.

Almost every night, the crackle of gunfire erupts around the Libyan capital. The insurgent, middle-aged and stocky, would not give his name, and his identity could not be independently verified. But he claimed responsibility for the gunfire. “Our boys,” he said, attack checkpoints at night, killing Gaddafi’s militiamen and stealing their weapons.

“There are not so many checkpoints now, because their boys got scared and they don’t want to do it anymore,” the insurgent said.

The strikes aren’t limited to checkpoints. Anti-government forces attacked bus stations in the capital this week, he said, and gas stations are next. The goal, he said, is “to make chaos in the country.” Innocent bystanders will just have to get out of the way.

Although information is difficult to corroborate in Tripoli, given stringent restrictions on reporting by foreign journalists, similar claims have been made to other reporters.

Reuters quoted Tripoli residents as saying there have been several attacks on army checkpoints and a police station in the past week.

But Gaddafi’s forces are also claiming victories: The insurgent said that many of his men had been arrested.

The opposition says 20,000 people have gone missing since protests erupted, and informants continue to try to infiltrate the opposition’s ranks.

“We have to get rid of them because they are no good,” he said. “If we don’t kill them, they are going to kill us.”

‘These are our streets’

Elsewhere in the city, a group of men is trying to keep the flame of peaceful protest alive. Last week, a dozen friends assembled in the early-morning hours in a side street in the city’s Ben Ashur district and read a defiant statement of opposition to Gaddafi.

“These are our streets, and these are our alleys,” the protest leader read. “For we vow to you, shameful and disgraceful Gaddafi, not you nor your battalions, nor your snipers, nor your mercenaries, however many they are, will terrify us anymore, and we will not back down on our revolution and uprising, no matter how great the sacrifice.”

The video, circulated by e-mail and since shown on at least two foreign TV news channels, shows a few young men, scarves wrapped around their faces, nervously looking at the camera and holding up placards.

“Friday’s protest was a start, but it isn’t the benchmark of what’s to come,” the organizer later told The Washington Post via Skype. “It was more a statement of intent, a symbol. That we are on the streets, in the open, that we are here.”

With the Internet cut and phones tapped, the protest organizer is one of a handful of dissidents with a satellite connection, something he says is probably a “hangable offense.”

Dissatisfaction with Gaddafi’s rule had been brewing for a long time, he said. But what really angered people in Tripoli was the way the protests in the east were violently suppressed in mid-February. Now, there is no going back.

“Too much blood has been shed,” the organizer said. “There have been too many inflammatory speeches. Too many people were called ‘rats’ and ‘al-Qaeda drunks.’ Too many peoples’ freedoms were suppressed, and too many had their dignity violated.”

“Believe me, if we go back to how it was, then he will kill us all. There will be silent vengeance the likes of which has never been seen.”

Denials of wrongdoing

The organizer promised more protests, in greater numbers, but the challenges are growing. Most people lack access to news reports, and the government is filling the vacuum with fear and misinformation.

Last week, undercover agents took to the streets of the restive Fashloom neighborhood, residents and activists said, waving opposition flags and chanting slogans. Anyone who joined was arrested.

Tripoli buzzed with rumors of protests again this week, but even the organizer of last week’s protest was suspicious. “I don’t know where the rumors came from,” he said. “It could be a trap.”

Government spokesman Moussa Ibrahim denied there had been any shooting between rebels and the government in Tripoli.

“We have heard of these reports. They are false,” he said. “Tripoli has been peaceful. There is no organized rebellion.”

He also denied that government agents were posing as protestors to entrap dissenters.

Despite the obstacles, the protest organizer and the insurgent have one thing in common: their hope that the Gaddafi government will crumble under the weight of its own fear and repression.

“We are just waiting for one more army commander,” the insurgent said. “If one of them turns against him, we’ll get him.”

In the meantime, he said, the time for peaceful protest has passed. “It is a waste of life anyway,” he said. “They don’t think twice. They just kill and ask questions later.”


denyers@washpost.com

US service personnel play key part in Libya campaign even as US withdraws from front-line role

Image via Wikipedia
By Associated Press, Friday, April 15

ABOARD THE CHARLES DE GAULLE — U.S. Navy Lt. Patrick Salmon is getting ready for another day at work, strapping himself into the cockpit of his strike jet and roaring off this French aircraft carrier for his daily attack mission against Moammar Gadhafi’s ground forces.

He’ll be launched into action by Kyle A. Caldwell, another U.S. Navy lieutenant who operates the flattop’s catapult systems. When Salmon is ready to set his plane back on deck, yet a third U.S. Navy lieutenant, Philip Hoblet, will be standing by in a French rescue helicopter, hovering just off the ship’s bow in case any of the returning pilots are forced to ditch into the sea.

The United States, which originally led the Libya campaign, has been steadily reducing its role over the past two weeks. On March 31, it handed over command and control of the international campaign to NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and shortly after that it ceased all attack missions over Libya — setting of a search by NATO for more planes capable of carrying out precision strikes against Gadhafi’s forces.

NATO said Friday that the U.S. still flies one-third of the Libya operation’s missions. But that refers to surveillance and refueling missions, not to attack flights over Libyan territory.

But even though the U.S. has withdrawn its forces from the front lines of the NATO campaign, a handful of Americans serving on this French navy carrier remain at the forefront of the action.

They are members of a little-known French-American naval exchange program in which U.S. officers spend time in the French navy — known as the “Marine Nationale” — and French officers spend time in the U.S. navy.

“Because French carrier pilots are trained in the United States, this helps a lot with standardization of procedures,” said Cmdr. Matthew Hogan, 44, Grass Valley, California. “We’re very comfortable operating with each other.”

Hogan, who is nine months into a two-year posting at the naval base of Toulon in the south of France, serves on the flattop as a staff officer for Rear Adm. Philippe Coindreau, commander of the French fleet conducting the airstrikes against Libya.

The carrier, known in the navy by its nickname “Le Grand Charles,” began reconnaissance flights over Libya on March 22. Attack missions followed almost immediately, and the ship has acted as the tip of the spear for NATO s aerial campaign ever since.

France currently has only a single carrier in its inventory, while the U.S. operates 11 of the floating air bases. The French therefore long ago decided it wasn’t cost-effective to organize a training program of their own for their pilots, but rely instead on U.S. Navy training.

French naval aviators and some support personnel regularly head to U.S. Navy bases in Mississippi and Florida to learn carrier operations.

The four American officers serving aboard live in or near the base in Toulon, but only Hoblet has his family with him. The others say they spend too much time at sea to make it worthwhile for their wives and children to relocate to a foreign country.

The Americans received their basic language training at a Defense Languages Institute in Monterey, California. Although they achieved fluency in French, mastering the intricacies of colloquialisms and idioms remains a challenge.

Caldwell, 38, of Colombia, SC, remembers his confusion when his workmate told him: “Ne faut pas pousser la grand mere dans les orties” — literally “don’t push your grandmother into the nettles.”

The English equivalent of the phrase is “don’t try so hard.”

“So when we’re not working, we’re mostly studying French,” he said. Working in another language on board a carrier involves the additional complication of communicating in intensely noisy conditions. Jet engines roar, cables clang across the deck, catapults thump as they heave planes aloft and lifts whine has they move planes from the hangars to the flight deck.

But the four have received high praise from French officers for their language abilities, their performance and their camaraderie.

Caldwell, who has worked on several U.S. carriers, said the similarities between the two navies outweigh the differences, and said the major distinction was the number of sorties he handles a day.

“On U.S. carriers we trap about 160 aircraft a day at sea, but here it’s just 35-40 a day,” he said. “Also, on U.S. carriers we’re able to launch and trap aircraft at the same time, but because of the shorter size here we need to close the carrier deck for each operation.”

At NATO summit, U.S. resists calls for greater engagement in Libya

Image via Wikipedia
By William Wan and Leila Fadel, Thursday, April 14, 8:30 PM

BERLIN — At a summit of NATO nations that opened here Thursday, U.S. officials played down emerging rifts among allies and rebuffed calls from within NATO for its members to commit more forces to the military operation in Libya.

Since the United States turned over command of the airstrikes in Libya to NATO at the end of March, there has been growing criticism from some in the coalition — particularly France and Britain — that other allies need to do more to help Libya’s rebel opposition battle Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi.

French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe said he asked Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton in a closed-door meeting Thursday whether the United States could contribute additional fighter planes to the effort but did not receive an encouraging response.

“I got the sense that the Americans will stick to their same line,” Juppe said. “That is, to maintain their current policy of intervening with forces as they are needed, depending on the situation and where the assets they have are particularly useful.”

U.S. officials have pushed back against such demands, saying that NATO has not yet asked the United States directly for additional assets and pointing out that they are already supplying many support-type planes. They also say they believe other countries will eventually come forward.

U.S. officials had hoped to use the two-day NATO summit to bridge such emerging differences in the coalition.

“Gaddafi is testing our determination,” Clinton told other foreign ministers during the summit. “As our mission continues, maintaining our resolve and unity only grows more important.”

At a Thursday morning news briefing ahead of the summit, U.S. officials insisted that NATO commanders in charge of the operation have everything they need.

“If the commanders feel they need more capability, the commanders will ask for more capability. That’s not what they are doing so far,” said a senior U.S. administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

During the Berlin meeting, however, NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said commanders had indeed sought more military assets, specifically requesting equipment capable of precision attacks on ground forces.

According to Rasmussen, NATO’s supreme allied commander for Europe, Adm. James Stavridis, told foreign ministers that while NATO has the overall assets required for the mission, its military needs have changed with recent shifts in Gaddafi’s strategy.

“We had great initial success bombing his tanks, but we’re encountering problems now that Gaddafi’s moving his heavy armor closer to civilian populations,” said a Western diplomat involved in the discussions. According to that official, NATO now needs about eight more planes capable of precision bombing, such as the U.S. F-15 or F-16 or similarly equipped aircraft from other countries.

Spain and Italy have planes helping to enforce the no-fly zone, but both countries said Thursday they did not plan to step up their role to include ground strikes.

Rasmussen declined to single out the United States as the country he and NATO commanders hoped would provide the additional assets now needed, and said, “I’m confident that nations will step up to the plate.”

In Libya, meanwhile, Gaddafi chose the same day and, according to some reports, the very hour NATO ministers were meeting to ride around Tripoli in an open-top sport-utility vehicle, pumping his fist defiantly, in an act broadcast on Libyan state TV.

And 130 miles to the east, the besieged city of Misurata came under heavy rocket and artillery fire Thursday morning, according to residents and doctors there. Explosions rocked the city — the only opposition foothold left in western Libya — as Gaddafi loyalists intensified their attacks and the city’s port was closed amid the violence, port authority officials in the rebel stronghold of Benghazi said.

Misurata has been under siege for seven weeks as Gaddafi’s forces have tried to regain complete control of the remote city, but residents have held out despite sniper attacks and artillery shelling that have killed hundreds.

Benghazi port authority officials said aid organizations’ boats that had been shuttling medicine and supplies from Benghazi to Misurata, as well as evacuating the wounded, were unable to dock Thursday because of shelling.

At the port in Benghazi, ships were also being loaded with rockets and guns to resupply rebels even as news spread of Misurata’s port closing. One boat destined for Misurata was being loaded with bulletproof vests, helmets and ammunition in crates labeled in English as having come from Qatar.

Misurata’s hospitals were overflowing Thursday, with at least 13 people dead and 50 wounded in the latest attacks, said Shaymaa Najil, an Iraqi doctor volunteering with the Red Cross there.

“We don’t have enough medicine, doctors, beds or tools,” she said. “Every day is the same now. We wake up to bombing and go to sleep to bombing.”

In her speech in Berlin, Clinton spelled out the actions she deemed essential for the Libya mission, including improving coordination between NATO commanders and rebel forces — some of whom have been killed by friendly fire from NATO planes — and intensifying financial and diplomatic international pressure on Gaddafi. Planning for a post-Gaddafi Libya must also begin, she said.

U.S. officials said Clinton also met with Turkish officials on Thursday and talked about creating “an exit path” for Gaddafi to step down and leave Libya.

Turkey maintains a unique position as the only country in NATO that still has a functioning embassy in Tripoli, as well as a consulate in Benghazi.

A senior Turkish official said his government hoped to use the Berlin meeting to come up with a diplomatic solution, which would include establishing direct communication with Gaddafi, making arrangements for his exit and ensuring that the opposition council sets up a new government that represents all tribes and groups.

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has maintained telephone contact with Gaddafi and his sons since before the start of the military operations, Ibrahim Kalin, Erdogan’s senior adviser, said in an interview late Wednesday. On each occasion, Erdogan “urged Gaddafi to leave peacefully,” Kalin said.

“If the Berlin meeting produces results,” Kalin said, a cease-fire could be declared within days. Although he acknowledged the difficulty of dealing directly with Gaddafi, he said the international community needs to “open a line of communication” with the Libyan leader, through Arab interlocutors or Turkey itself, to assure him he has a viable exit and convince him that he has no other option.


wanw@washpost.com

Fadel reported from Benghazi, Libya. Correspondent Simon Denyer in Tripoli and staff writer Karen DeYoung in Washington contributed to this report.

Brazilian company JBS dominates world beef industry from farm to fork

Image via Wikipedia
By Juan Forero, Thursday, April 14, 4:37 PM

LINS, BRAZIL — In many ways, JBS, the company that owns the big slaughterhouse here on the edge of town, is still run like a family business.

The founder, who began by slaughtering one or two head a day in 1953, raises calves far in the countryside. Six of his children are in JBS’s management. And ranchers such as Edson Crochiquia, who is 69 but rounds up cattle on horseback near here, spare no detail to provide the company with healthy, 1,000-pound animals.

Even a decade ago, JBS was still mainly focused on selling in Brazil. But by acquiring American giants such as Swift and Pilgrim’s Pride, JBS grew from a $1 billion private company into a $40 billion behemoth that slaughters 90,000 head of cattle a day, employs 125,000 workers and exports to 150 countries.

JBS is now the world’s biggest provider of meat, its footprint felt by feedlots, packing plants and chicken processors from Argentina to Italy to the American Midwest.

In Brazil, it is not uncommon to find banks, steel mills and other companies that evolved from family businesses into global giants. But JBS stands out, using an alliance with Brazil’s development bank and an aggressive acquisition strategy to become a vital pillar of the country’s efforts to project its economic power abroad.

To Wesley Batista, JBS’s 40-year-old chief executive and the founder’s fourth child, the company is still run “a simple way,” using a management model without “a lot of layers, not a lot of fancy things, not a lot of time spent on PowerPoint presentations.”

And although family patriarch Jose Batista Sobrinho, 77, can still be found at JBS headquarters in Sao Paulo whispering advice to his sons, the company he built is anything but folksy.

High-tech plants in Australia supply the Asian market, and its 39 slaughterhouses in Brazil help feed this booming country as well as Europe. In the United States alone, it employs 75,000 workers and is projecting revenues of $28 billion this year.

“In terms of slaughtering capacity, we have 10 percent of the total worldwide capacity,” Wesley Batista said. “And in terms of the beef trade, 25 percent of the worldwide trade in beef comes from JBS.”

Brazil’s rise

No meat company in decades has come so close to dominating all facets of beef production — from feedlots and grazing lands to packing plants to distribution points.

“Today, 50 percent of the meat commercialized worldwide is transported by companies with Brazilian capital,” said Dante Sica, a Buenos Aires economist who tracks Brazilian foreign investments. “Brazil is advancing strongly.”

That has rankled some in cattle country, as far away as Montana. “We believe it is a very aggressive company that truly is attempting to dominate the protein market globally,” said Bill Bullard, chief executive of R-CALF USA in Billings, Mont., which represents 6,500 cattle producers.

In 2009, JBS dropped its purchase of Kansas City, Mo.-based National Beef after the Justice Department and several state attorneys general opened an investigation to determine whether a takeover would hurt competition. By then, JBS had already bought Swift for $1.4 billion, to be followed by cattle feedlots and a chicken processor.

Since 1980, Bullard said, the number of cattle-raising operations in the United States has fallen by 42 percent as companies such as JBS, Tyson and Cargill have expanded. “A major factor contributing to this contraction is the unbridled concentration of our meatpacking sector,” Bullard said.

JBS officials say that their arrival in the United States brings efficiency, which ultimately benefits consumers, and that the company’s purchase of companies such as the chicken processor Pilgrim’s Pride, which was in bankruptcy when it was acquired, saved jobs.

Feeding the middle class

JBS’s buying spree took place at a time when cattle operations in the United States and elsewhere were struggling. The cost of the grain cattle consume soared in recent years, while meat prices remained relatively low.

JBS secured the financial heft for its expansion by going public in Brazil in 2007, which raised $5 billion, Wesley Batista said. The company is also banking on the future; the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization projects that meat consumption will rise 20 percent in the developing world by 2018.

Batista said that an expanding middle class in Russia, China, Brazil and the Middle East, places vital to JBS’s long-term plans, will use its new purchasing power to improve its diet. “They put this money — first thing — in food,” he said.

And that means more meat — beef that begins its circuitous journey from farm to fork on ranches such as Santa Izabel.

Here, 6,500 heads of humpbacked Cebu cattle graze three days in one field before Crochiquia’s cowboys herd them to the next plot, a process designed to keep fields lush.

In less than a year and a half, he said, they are shipped to feedlots for a final few weeks of fattening. Then it is on to the processing facility in Lins, not JBS’s biggest but still so sizable that it has its own plants to generate electricity and biofuels.

The end comes on a narrow concrete corral leading to the slaughter room. In their final minutes of life, the steers must be kept from panicking, which releases adrenaline and makes meat acidic tasting, said Bassem Akl Akl, the plant manager.

Once inside, the animal is rendered unconscious by a captive bolt pistol. It is hoisted up by its hind legs. A worker then slices the carotid artery and jugular vein, and the steer bleeds to death in seconds. A processing line of workers, all in hard hats and white aprons, then skin, debone, slice, can and package the meat.

“You have to have people very well trained,” said Akl Akl, yelling to be heard above the din of conveyer belts, “because this is a very specific task. You have to cut exactly on the anatomical division.”

It all happens fast.

By the end of a typical day, at least 900 animals will have been slaughtered. The final product: rump roasts or tenderloins, corned beef or beef jerky, to be exported as far away as London.


foreroj@washpost.com

Bahrain backs off on plans to close Shiite opposition parties after international criticism

Image via Wikipedia
By Associated Press, Thursday, April 14, 10:56 AM

MANAMA, Bahrain — Bahrain’s government appears to be pulling back from plans to dismantle main Shiite opposition parties after criticism from Washington and other allies.

The state-run Bahrain News Agency said on Friday that authorities are holding off any action until the outcome of investigations into the main Shiite political group, Wefaq, and a smaller Shiite bloc.

Bahrain’s Sunni rulers had earlier said the groups would be shut down for alleged links to the Shiite-led uprising in the strategic Gulf kingdom that hosts the U.S. Navy’s 5th Fleet. The U.S. State Department quickly raised concern about Bahrain’s plans to block the groups.

Wefaq has withdrawn its lawmakers from Bahrain’s parliament to protest the government’s crackdown on dissent, including a declaration of martial law.

As Bahrain stifles protest movement, U.S.’s muted objections draw criticism

Image via Wikipedia
By Joby Warrickand Michael Birnbaum, Friday, April 15, 4:35 AM

Two months after the eruption of mass protests in Bahrain, the kingdom has largely silenced the opposition, jailing hundreds of activists in a crackdown that has left the Obama administration vulnerable to charges that it is upholding democratic values in the Middle East selectively.

Bahrain’s monarchy, since calling in Saudi troops last month to help crush the protest movement, has been quietly dismantling the country’s Shiite-led opposition. On Friday, the Sunni government announced an investigation into the activities of Bahrain’s largest political party, the Shiite-dominated al-Wefaq, which could lead to its ban.

The Obama administration has repeatedly appealed to the Bahraini government for restraint, and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton this week called for a political process that “advances the rights and aspirations of all the citizens of Bahrain.” But the administration has neither recalled its ambassador to Manama nor threatened the kinds of sanctions it imposed on Libya — a striking disparity that is fueling ­anti-U.S. sentiment among Bahraini opposition groups.

“Even though the American administration’s words are all about freedom and democracy and change, in Bahrain, the reality is that they’re basically a protection for the dictatorship,” said Zainab al-Khawaja, a prominent human-rights activist who began a hunger strike after her father, husband and brother-in-law were arrested at her apartment over the weekend.

U.S. officials privately acknowledge that the administration has been understated in its criticism of Bahrain, in part to avoid further strain in relations with Saudi Arabia, a vital U.S. ally and neighbor to the tiny island kingdom. The Saudis, fearing the rise of a pro-Iranian Shiite state on its eastern frontier, urged Bahrain to deal firmly with the throng of protesters that occupied a central square and blocked access to Manama’s main business district.

A month later, however, with Bahrain’s iron first tightening further, the White House is facing awkward questions from political allies as well as foes. A perceived U.S. double standard on Middle East democracy — a problem since the Arab spring movement began three months ago — could become more acute if Washington is seen to ignore widespread abuses, according to current and former diplomats and regional experts.

“We need to worry about the human-rights situation deteriorating there,” said Joel Rubin, a former Middle East specialist for the State Department and deputy director of the National Security Network, a Democratic-leaning foreign policy think tank. “It has a real impact on perceptions of American policy in the region.”

U.S. officials defend the administration’s ad hoc approach to Middle East democracy movements as prudent, saying each country requires a unique balancing of democratic ideals and compelling security interests.

“We don’t make decisions about questions like intervention based on consistency or precedent,” Denis R. McDonough, Obama’s deputy national security adviser, said recently in explaining why U.S. policy on Libya differs from that on Bahrain. “We make them based on how we can best advance our interests in the region.”

In the case of Bahrain, the United States has key military interests. The kingdom is home to the U.S. Navy’s 5th Fleet; it is also seen as a strategically important bulwark against Iranian power in the region. But even more vital is the U.S. relationship with Saudi Arabia, a critical ally in the Middle East for half a century.

Saudi Arabia and the United States have fundamentally different views of what is happening in Bahrain, why it is happening and who is responsible for it. Saudi officials deny that Bahrain has cracked down on legitimate demonstrators, insisting that action has been taken only against radicals seeking to provoke the government. A senior U.S. official held the opposite view, saying: “The crackdown is a fact.”

Administration officials accept that Bahrain is the Saudi “back yard,” a point emphasized by a member of the Saudi legislative council, Majlis al-Shura, during a visit to Washington last week. “Bahrain is our Cuba,” said the official, who spoke at a forum organized by the New America Foundation.

“We don’t believe the uprising is real,” said another shura member. Most of Bahrain’s Shiites “are happy; a small minority is causing the problem,” he said. “Maybe some are oppressed, but 1 percent is causing the trouble.”

Whatever the makeup of the protest movement, the intensity of the crackdown stunned Bahraini opposition leaders as well as many Middle East experts, who are dismayed by the dismantling of reforms that had cemented the island’s reputation as progressive and Western-friendly. Until the crackdown on March 14, many of the thousands of protesters who jammed the capital’s Pearl Square were confident that the movement sweeping the region would bring new political freedoms and economic equality for the country’s majority Shiite population.

“Only a month ago, we had a feeling of change and respect for democracy and human rights. Now we feel as though we are all in a big prison,” said Mohammed al-Maskati, president of the Bahrain Youth Society for Human Rights. “They want to attack everyone who was involved in the protests.”

In addition to jailing activists and banning Shiite-led opposition parties, Bahraini authorities fired civil servants and even professional athletes who participated in demonstrations.

The country’s only independent newspaper was taken over last week and its editor forced to resign. And on Monday, the New York-based Human Rights Watch alleged that at least three opposition figures had died in Bahraini prisons under suspicious circumstances. While Bahraini authorities attributed the deaths to natural causes, Human Rights Watch said in a report that one of the victims’ bodies bore “signs of horrific abuse.”

Some government opponents accuse the United States of failing to put enough pressure on Bahrain and the neighboring Persian Gulf kingdoms that supported the crackdown. One prominent human rights activist described Bahraini protesters as “very, very disappointed” by the mild American response.

Clinton defended the U.S. role in a speech this week at a meeting of the U.S.-Islamic World Forum, insisting that the United States’ “core interests and values have not changed, including our commitment to promote human rights.” But Clinton cited other goals, including the defeat of terrorism and the containment of Iran, as “mutual interests.”

“We know that a one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t make sense in such a diverse region at such a fluid time,” she said.

Clinton mentioned Bahrain only briefly, hailing what she called a “decades-long friendship with Bahrain that we expect to continue long into the future.” But, referring to the recent crackdown, she added that “violence is not and cannot be the answer.”

“We have raised our concerns about the current measures directly with Bahraini officials and will continue to do so,” Clinton said.


warrickj@washpost.com


birnbaumm@washpost.com

Birnbaum reported from Berlin. Staff writer Karen DeYoung in Washington contributed to this report.

The fight for Sarawak

Kazakh president holds fast as Arab revolutions topple others

By Kathy Lally, Wednesday, April 13, 11:25 PM

ASTANA, Kazakhstan — The tempests that have whirled through other authoritarian states dissipated well before reaching this Muslim country, where last week citizens effusively thanked their president for his 20 years in power by awarding him five more.

In January, when Tunisians forced their president of 23 years to flee, Kazakhs considered extending President Nursultan Nazarbayev’s term to 2020. Instead, they settled on having the presidential election more than a year early and last week gave the 70-year-old leader 95.5 percent of their vote.

“I think the president is going to run the country for 10 years more,” said Yermukhamet Yertysbayev, the president’s pugnacious political adviser, “and if someone in the West doesn’t like it, they’ll have to get used to it.”

Although the West criticizes human rights violations — international observers found fault with the election, and last week an annual State Department human rights report noted a long list of problems — Kazakhstan’s relative serenity in strategic Central Asia is appreciated. U.S. oil companies have invested billions here, and the U.S. government desires friendship, unwilling to cede influence to Russia and China, which loom large and near.

“Nazarbayev won’t leave until he dies,” said Serikbai Alibaev, a leader of a democratic opposition group that is not permitted to operate legally.

Nazarbayev has ruled since 1989, when Kazakhstan was part of the Soviet Union and he was its party secretary. He is the country’s only directly elected official. His domination has been so complete that no serious political competition has emerged and so adroit that much of the population reveres him.

“He’s more than the leader of our country,” said Erlan Karin, secretary of Nazarbayev’s Nur Otan party. “People see him as a symbol of Kazakhstan’s development, independence and success.”

Local officials, all appointed by Nazarbayev, compete to get out the vote and get it right. “Here, 99 percent voted for the president,” said a triumphant Turkbenuli Musabayev, mayor of the small, depressed southwestern town of Aralsk. “He has visited us, and people know he cares.”

Kazakhstan’s 16 million people live on a landscape the size of Western Europe. Corruption is high, but oil and gas reserves have helped Nazarbayev bring the per-capita gross domestic product from $700 in 1994 to $9,000 now. The country has five billionaires, according to Forbes, including a Nazarbayev daughter and son-in-law.

Reminiscent of Peter the Great in Russia, Nazarbayev built his own capital in Astana and ordered the government to move here from Almaty at the end of 1997. He presides from a marble, blue-domed presidential palace over a city of glass towers rising from the wind-swept steppe, where horses and camels graze. A large shopping mall, designed to evoke a nomad’s tent, has tier upon tier of stores and restaurants, with a swimming pool on top set off by sandy beaches, thatched umbrellas and tropical-shirt-clad servers. Visitors ascend the 340-foot Bayterek Tower in the center of the city to place their right hand on a gilded impression of Nazarbayev’s own hand.

“The regime is unchallenged,” said Grigory Golosov, a St. Petersburg political scientist. “Almost everything is closely controlled, so controlled that most people can’t even think of an alternative to Nazarbayev.”

A desire for stability

In the days before the election, Nazarbayev’s presence hovered over city avenues and small-town lanes, his billboards emblazoned with the message “We vote for the leader,” his face rising out of a gently curving blue horizon.

“This is the image of a person who solves the problems of the universe,” said Alexei Vlasov, a Moscow political scientist. “And that’s how people treat Nazarbayev.”

Vlasov, who is director of the Information and Analytical Center for Post-Soviet Studies, calls Nazarbayev a powerful, pragmatic and tactical politician. “He knows when to make decisions,” he said, and he has benefited from the Kazakh desire for stability.

Rather than envy the revolutions of the Arab world, people are grateful that they have avoided the turmoil besetting neighboring countries. Tajikistan endured a costly civil war, and Uzbekistan, where the president is as long-serving but far more ruthless, has suffered civil strife.

“Russia, the U.S. and China are interested in a stable Kazakhstan,” Vlasov said. “That is why during the last 10 to 15 years they have never played against Nazarbayev, and they have always recognized him as a legitimate leader despite the lack of freedom of the press and speech and suppression of the opposition.”

This does not sit so well with the opposition, which is largely excluded from the political process.

“Kazakhstan keeps promising to hold free and fair elections,” said Alibaev, head of the Astana branch of the unregistered National Social Democratic Party, “but it doesn’t happen. Why do the United States and Europe believe this propaganda? It seems Kazakhstan’s wealth makes the world ignore what they don’t want to see.”

Nazarbayev and his Nur Otan party deftly change the constitution to suit their needs. One amendment last year made him “Leader of the Nation,” giving him and his relatives lifelong immunity from prosecution and allowing him to make government decisions even after retirement.

“The constitution has been changed seven times,” Alibaev said, “the last time Feb. 2, when they changed it in a few minutes so they could move up the elections.”

Printers can’t keep up — an exasperated Alibaev has taken to updating his copy of the constitution by pasting in newspaper notices of the changes.

Golosov, project director at the Center for Democracy and Human Rights Helix in St. Petersburg, said Kazakhstan has adopted the Russian system of what he calls electoral authoritarianism.

Elections give the impression of democracy, he said, even as the authorities make it difficult for candidates to run and parties to organize. Parties must win at least 7 percent of the vote to enter parliament, and Nur Otan holds every single seat. Western leaders and investors, however, find the trappings of democracy comforting, he said.

“Nobody wants to have any dealings with a dictator,” Golosov wrote recently, “but an imperfect democrat is quite a different matter.”

Yertysbayev, the political adviser, is contemptuous of the opposition that the president has made so weak, saying its members are forever calling, asking for ministry or embassy jobs. “Politics is a fight for power,” he said. “In Georgia, they brought people to the square and grabbed it. Here, they ask for favors.”

Squabble they may, but Nazarbayev holds steady, balancing the political forces around him.

“During these 20 years they have recognized Nazarbayev as the moderator of political dialogue,” Vlasov said, “and those who did not want to accept that now live in London.”



lallyk@washpost.com

Global stillbirths: 2.6 million a year, overlooked and often preventable

Image via Wikipedia
By David Brown, Wednesday, April 13, 10:41 PM

About 2.6 million babies are born dead each year, a largely ignored and silently grieved loss of life, about half of which could be prevented.

That’s the conclusion of a huge project unveiled Wednesday to enumerate stillbirths country by country and propose ways to reduce them.

Today, there are more stillbirths each year than deaths from AIDS or malaria combined. The stillbirth rate in sub-Saharan Africa is 10 times that of the industrialized world and equivalent to what existed in the United States in 1900. In many places, stillbirths aren’t reported to health authorities or counted as deaths.

“Stillbirth is a big problem, and it hasn’t been on the global agenda before. We hear a lot about ‘overlooked problems,’ but this is genuinely one,” said Joy E. Lawn, a physician who works in Cape Town, South Africa, and helped lead the effort that produced eight papers published online by the Lancet, a European medical journal.

Historically, the medical community has viewed stillbirth deaths as both less tragic and less preventable than deaths of mothers or children.

“I think what we’ve ignored in that argument is what the families think. The families don’t discount those losses,” she said.

About 98 percent of stillbirths — most commonly defined as death in the final trimester of gestation — occur in the developing world. Ten countries account for two-thirds of them, and two-thirds occur in rural families.

The global rate is 19 deaths per 1,000 births. Finland and Singapore have the lowest stillbirth rates, two per 1,000. Pakistan and Nigeria have the highest, at 46 and 42 per 1,000. The United States ranks 17th out of 193 countries, with three per 1,000.

The list of problems that cause babies to die before taking their first breath is long. The most weighty are problems during delivery; infections in the womb; illnesses in the mother, such as hypertension and diabetes; inadequate growth of the fetus (usually because of problems with the placenta, which provides oxygen and nutrients); and genetic abnormalities.

In the last few years, maternal- and child-health issues have returned to global health’s center stage, dominated for the past decade by AIDS. The Obama administration’s six-year, $63 billion Global Health Initiative will spend about 15 percent of its money on efforts to save mothers and newborns, and for reproductive and family planning services — all of which will also help prevent stillbirths.

The stillbirth rate in the last 15 years, however, has fallen only about half as much as maternal and child death rates, suggesting to many experts it needs to be specifically targeted.

Simple efforts would prevent some stillbirths. Screening pregnant women for syphilis and treating them — recommended almost everywhere, but overlooked in many places — would prevent 136,000 stillbirths. Folic acid supplements before conception would prevent 27,000. Providing insecticide-treated mosquito nets to women in malaria-endemic areas would prevent 35,000.

What’s most needed, however, is a way to assure that a pregnant woman can get a Caesarean section if she needs one. Worldwide, about 45 percent of stillbirths occur during delivery.

The World Health Organization estimates that for optimal protection of mother and baby, about 15 percent of all deliveries should be by Caesarean. As the Caesarean rate falls below 10 percent, the stillbirth rate rises steadily. Malawi and Mozambique are addressing the need for more Caesareans by allowing some highly trained non-physicians, called surgical technicians, to do them.

“This has actually been successful, and other countries are looking at it as a possibility,” said Elizabeth Mason, director of maternal, newborn, child and adolescent health at the agency, based in Geneva.

The WHO estimates that 1.1 million stillbirths and 1.6 million deaths of women and newborns could be prevented if 10 steps to prevent stillbirths were added to five previously proposed ones. The latter include giving antibiotics after premature rupture of membranes and steroids to women in early labor to speed development of the fetal lungs. According to WHO calculations, that would add $2.32 to the cost of a pregnant woman’s care in the 68 countries where nearly all those deaths occur.

“If we put better quality in this time period, we get a triple benefit,” Mason said.

In the United States, the stillbirth rate is twice as high for black women as white women and is also higher in households with less income and education. Lowering the rate depends in large part on reducing risk factors in the mother, such as obesity, smoking and high blood pressure, said Wes Duke, an epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who helped write one of the Lancet papers.


browndm@washpost.com

‘Spillionaires’ are the new rich after BP oil spill payouts

Image by drp via Flickr
By Kim Barker | ProPublica, Wednesday, April 13, 6:29 PM

The oil spill that was once expected to bring economic ruin to the Gulf Coast appears to have delivered something entirely different: a gusher of money.

So many people cashed in that they earned nicknames: “spillionaires” or “BP rich.” Others hurt by the spill wound up getting comparatively little. Many people who got money deserved it. But in the end, BP’s attempt to make things right — spending more than $16 billion so far, mostly on damage claims and cleanup — created new divisions and even new wrongs.

Some of the inequities arose from the chaos that followed the April 20 spill. But in at least one corner of Louisiana, the dramatic differences can be traced in part to local powerbrokers.

To show how the money flowed, ProPublica interviewed people who worked on the spill and examined records for St. Bernard Parish, a coastal community about five miles southeast of downtown New Orleans.

Those documents show that companies with ties to parish insiders got lucrative contracts and then charged BP for every possible expense. The prime cleanup company submitted bills with little or no documentation. A subcontractor billed BP $15,400 per month to rent a generator that usually cost $1,500 a month. Another company charged BP more than a $1 million a month for land it had been renting for less than $1,700 a month. Assignments for individual fishermen also fell under the control of political leaders.

“This parish raped BP,” said Wayne Landry, chairman of the St. Bernard Parish Council, referring to the conduct of its political leadership. “At the end of the day, it really just frustrates me. I’m an elected official. I have guilt by association.”

The economic benefits rippled throughout the gulf. In the six months after the spill, sales tax receipts, a key measure of economic activity, rose significantly in eight of the 24 most affected communities from Louisiana to Florida. In only one community, in Mississippi, did receipts dip significantly.

Sales tax collections from Louisiana’s Plaquemines Parish rose more than 71 percent. And St. Bernard had a bigger jump than anywhere. That parish collected almost $26.8 million in sales and lodging tax receipts in the six months after the spill, almost twice as much as over the same period in 2009. Flush with cash from cleanup and claims, many fishermen bought new boats and trucks. Sales at the nearest Chevrolet dealer rose 41 percent.

Parish president’s powers

Just days into the crisis, St. Bernard’s parish president, Craig Taffaro Jr., invoked a Louisiana law to declare a 30-day emergency and handle the crisis without most normal government checks and balances. He chose the prime contractor that supervised the cleanup. He and people close to him decided which fishermen would be hired to put out booms and search for oil.

In some ways, parish residents seemed to view the disaster and BP’s culpability as an opportunity to recover from earlier blows. St. Bernard bore the brunt of Hurricane Katrina, which flooded almost every home in August 2005. Population dropped almost in half, from about 67,000 in 2000 to 36,000 in 2010, largely because people didn’t go back after Katrina and the hurricanes that followed. Before the spill, the parish slashed its budget by 11 percent, cutting garbage collection, the fire department and mosquito control. There was just no money.

The spill changed that. Fishermen were paid to lay out protective booms to try to corral the oil. Contractors were hired to manage the cleanup and provide security. Claims money began flowing to people who said their lives had been upended by the crisis.

The St. Bernard government was among the first to benefit, snagging a $1 million check for oil-spill expenses. Parish employees went shopping for cameras, printers, a file cabinet, staplers and 712 shirts emblazoned with the parish name. Taffaro and other officials said the parish shouldn’t have had to spend its own resources to respond to the spill. The shirts were necessary to identify employees at the cleanup site, they said.

Some of the money also went to overtime pay for more than 40 parish employees, including three who claimed overtime for picking up dog food for the animal shelter. St. Bernard’s homeland security director, David Dysart, a salaried employee, got almost $23,000 for working 497 hours of overtime in less than seven weeks, a fact first reported by the New Orleans Times-Picayune. Dysart did not respond to a query about his overtime.

As the money flowed, complaints spread. Subcontractors said those at the top of the cleanup creamed off money, while those at the bottom earned much less for doing the actual work.

BP provided only limited information to ProPublica. The federal government ceded control of cleanup spending to BP, and the U.S. Coast Guard, the federal agency most involved with overseeing BP’s response, said BP was spending whatever was required to clean up the spill.

Taffaro and other St. Bernard officials refused to respond to public-records requests ProPublica began filing in November. When asked again last week why the parish hadn’t provided any records, Dysart said that he would be happy to help but that filling the request would take time and cost a lot of money.

“I’m in the process of really, truly trying to assist you,” said Dysart, who is also the parish’s interim chief administrative officer.

In response to questions submitted by ProPublica last month, Taffaro said through his spokeswoman that he can approve overtime for salaried employees in extenuating circumstances and that Dysart eventually decided to stop taking overtime. Taffaro said that paying overtime for picking up dog food was necessary because the spill had caused fishermen to abandon their dogs.

Politically connected firms

Many companies and people earning big money in St. Bernard Parish had connections to parish powerbrokers, according to court documents, parish records and interviews done by ProPublica.

BP based its cleanup operation in the parish on land leased by Amigo Enterprises, which had been paying less than $1,700 a month to the Arlene and Joseph Meraux Charitable Foundation, according to the nonprofit’s most recent tax returns. But Amigo billed BP more than $1.1 million a month, BP spokesman Joe Ellis said. One of Amigo’s owners was St. Bernard’s sheriff of 26 years, Jack Stephens, who was also on the Meraux Foundation board.

Anthony Fernandez Jr., Stephens’s cousin and manager of Amigo Enterprises, said BP’s figure of $1.1 million was too high, but he refused to provide the actual amount. Stephens didn’t return calls for comment.

BP had no comment on the allegations that it was overcharged.

The company that benefited most from BP’s checkbook was Loupe Construction, a small, family-owned business. On May 5, Taffaro chose Loupe to manage the cleanup in St. Bernard, a contract that would eventually be worth as much as $125 million. Until then, its main job in St. Bernard had been helping to rebuild levees.

Taffaro said he selected Loupe after asking for proposals from several companies. The decision didn’t sit well with everyone.

“That company had no particular expertise in oil mitigation — none,” said Landry, the parish council chairman. “But we’ve been kept in the dark on the entire operation. Pardon the pun, but we’ve been left out of the loop.”

Company owner Paul Loupe referred questions to his attorneys. One, Karl Dix, said the company was chosen because of its levee projects and heavy construction work and because it was available. “There was this urgent need to start work immediately to protect the coastline,” Dix said.

After Taffaro named Loupe as the lead contractor, there was a feeding frenzy to get hired by the company. People with little connection to commercial fishing used old boats or bought new ones and signed up to work. Companies from Washington State, Nevada and Mississippi came to town. Everyone wanted a piece, just as after Hurricane Katrina. Only this time, the federal government wasn’t footing the bill. A reviled corporation was, and the prices reflected that.

BP sent a letter to the company in late August stating that all of Loupe’s invoices lacked the proper documentation.

“There was a lot of gouging,” said David Northcutt, who worked for a Loupe subcontractor and has since sued for unpaid wages. “It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for a lot of people.”

As the cleanup dragged on, Loupe faced a cash-flow problem. For help, Loupe turned to Park Investments, a local company that primarily develops shopping malls. Park Investments and its related companies had done business with plenty of parish officials, including Stephens, the sheriff.

Although a search of court records showed that Park Investments rarely made such loans, the company agreed to loan Loupe an unspecified amount of money, with BP payments as collateral.

Park Investments and companies run by its two top executives donate frequently to Taffaro and other politicians, both statewide and nationally.

Confusing claims process

By fall, the small amount of oil that had hit parish waters was mostly gone, and the fishermen were getting the bulk of their BP money through the claims process, not the cleanup. The $20 billion compensation fund that BP and the federal government set up in August would run for three years, pay people who could prove damages from the spill and in theory avoid costly court battles.

Kenneth Feinberg, who administers the fund, said his team was initially overwhelmed by the number of claims it received.

The system didn’t differentiate between fishermen who got cleanup jobs with BP and those who didn’t. The amount people received for their initial six-month emergency claims was based on the paperwork they submitted, not their actual losses.

One man who earned $67,000 in 2009, fishing crabs and hunting a swamp rat called nutria, got $100,000 for his six-month claim. That was on top of $90,000 for working on the cleanup and $20,000 he received in initial BP claims. In the eight months after the spill, he made $210,000, more than three times his 2009 income.

But Thomas Gonzales, who said he filed $90,000 in taxable income in 2009, received only $22,000 in his six-month payment. “They’re giving the money to the young generation,” said Gonzales, who is 73. “They figure I got one foot over the hole.”

Many fishermen fretted that businesses that had been hurt by the recession, not the spill, were getting BP money: hairdressers, waiters, restaurant owners.

Felesia Carter, a manager at St. Bernard’s only off-track betting parlor, said customers were gambling away claims money. Her business was so good, she said, that employees worked overtime.

“I don’t understand how BP is just giving its money out like this,” Carter said. “Give it to the people who deserve it.”

Kim Barker is a writer for ProPublica, an independent, nonprofit news organization that produces investigative journalism in the public interest. A longer version of this article appears on the organization’s Web site. ProPublica’s research director, Lisa Schwartz, and researchers Kitty Bennett, Sasha Chavkin and Liz Day contributed to this report. To see a ProPublica story and video about a gulf fisherman, go to propublica.org/delacroix.


health-science@washpost.com

Egypt ex-president Mubarak detained for investigation over killings of protesters, corruption

Image via Wikipedia

Cheney and Mubarak in 2007

By Associated Press, Wednesday, April 13, 8:50 AM

CAIRO — Ousted President Hosni Mubarak and his two sons were detained Wednesday for investigation of corruption, abuse of power and killings of protesters, bringing cheers of victory from activists who hoped it marked a turning point in Egypt’s turbulent transition to democracy.

The 82-year-old Mubarak was under detention in a hospital, a step prosecutors depicted as a precaution to monitor his health while under questioning.

His sons Gamal, once seen as Mubarak’s successor, and Alaa, a wealthy businessman, were jailed in Cairo’s Torah prison, where a string of former top regime figures — including Mubarak’s prime minister, ruling party chief and chief of staff — are already languishing, facing similar corruption investigations.

The detention of the man who ruled Egypt unquestioned for 29 years set a new landmark in the already unprecedented wave of upheaval shaking the Middle East. It was arguably the first time an authoritarian leader in the Arab world has been brought to justice by his own people, given that Saddam Hussein was toppled and later captured by American troops, who handed him over for trial and execution by Iraq’s new Shiite rulers.

Corruption had been rife under Mubarak’s regime. In a country where 40 percent of the population lives on $2 a day or less, many resented the business tycoon-politicians elevated to power by Gamal Mubarak and accused of looting the nation’s coffers to enrich themselves.

As Mubarak’s sons were driven away after being taken into custody in the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, where the family has been living since Mubarak’s fall, protesters pelted the police van with water bottles, stones and their flip-flops in a sign of contempt.

The detention was a significant victory for Egypt’s protest movement, which has been in an increasingly tense tug-of-war with the country’s new military rulers over the shape of the post-Mubarak future.

Protesters have been pushing hard for the apparently reluctant military to prosecute Mubarak. Tens of thousands held the biggest rally in weeks last Friday in Cairo’s central Tahrir Square to demand his arrest, and some protesters accused the military of protecting the former president.

Activists were now watching whether the military leadership is willing to definitively bury the remnants of Mubarak’s authoritarian rule and open up a transition many accuse it of monopolizing.

“The generals don’t know how to absorb that there are two forces,” columnist and activist Wael Abdel-Fattah said, referring to the military and the “revolution” protesters. “They try to say you can rest now, we will do everything. They don’t want to admit that there is another force that also dictates its will.”

“The next steps are for sure more difficult, to build a democratic system: elections, free media, and cleansing the current institutions,” said Abdel-Fattah, a founder of a group pressing for transitional justice in Egypt.

Shady el-Ghazali, a member of the coalition of youth activists who organized the 18-day protest movement against Mubarak, called the detentions “a positive step forward, even if it was late in coming.”

“This is the beginning of the return of trust in the military, but it can only happen if more steps are taken,” he told The Associated Press. “We hope that the message has reached them and that they allow the people to participate in the decision-making.”

Relations have soured in recent weeks between protesters and the Armed Forces’ Supreme Council, the body of top generals that holds power. Activists complain the military has been acting in ways reminiscent of Mubarak’s regime, putting protesters in military prisons, where some were reportedly tortured, or on swift trial before military courts.

Many Egyptians said the generals were heavyhandedly dictating the course of Egypt’s transition and not doing enough to ensure the remnants of Mubarak’s regime don’t retain power and thwart hopes for real democracy. The tensions came to a peak on Saturday, when troops stormed Tahrir Square before dawn, killing at least one protester and arresting dozens of others.

Military generals defended their tactics, saying military courts and “deterrent” action was needed to protect the uprising and prevent the country from descending into chaos. But in a signal they feel the pressure, Maj. Gen. Mohammed al-Assar said this week, “People must be reassured that their demands will be met.”

After Mubarak’s detention, the youth coalition canceled a planned demonstration Friday to demand Mubarak’s prosecution. But el-Ghazali said the protests could resume if other demands are not met, including the release of jailed activists and the review of military convictions of protesters. The coalition called for the dissolving of the former ruling party and the sacking of Mubarak-appointed governors, university deans and local city councils, all seen as levers of his regime.

The very idea of Mubarak being in custody facing possible prosecution would have been unimaginable only four months earlier, when the longtime president’s regime seemed firmly entrenched.

Even after being forced from power, he seemed untouchable, living with his family at a palace in Sharm el-Sheikh, though they were barred from travel and their assets were frozen.

On Sunday, Mubarak issued a defiant prerecorded message — his first address since his ouster — denying the corruption allegations against him and his family and inviting investigators to check his assets.

Prosecutors immediately announced that they would question him. On Tuesday night, Mubarak was taken to a Sharm el-Sheikh hospital because of heart troubles, and prosecutors said they would question him there so his health could be monitored.

Hours later, the public prosecutor announced early Wednesday that Mubarak was ordered detained in the hospital for 15 days for investigation. Authorities said later they were discussing whether to move him to a military hospital in Cairo. Mubarak has a history of health problems and underwent gallbladder surgery in Germany last year.

In its announcement, posted on the social networking site Facebook, the prosecutor said Mubarak and his sons were being investigated for allegations of killings of protesters, corruption, squandering of public funds and abuse of authority for personal gain.

Hundreds were killed during the 18-day uprising against Mubarak, when police opened fire and cracked down on the crowds. Officials say 365 were killed, but the Front to Defend Egypt Protesters, a group that provides medical and legal assistance to the demonstrators, said 685 people had died as of March 7.

Later Wednesday, prosecutors announced a new arrest — that of former parliament speaker Fathi Surour, a prominent ruling party figure who led the legislature since 1991 until it was dissolved following Mubarak’s fall. He was ordered detained for 15 days for investigation on allegations of amassing wealth and misuse of power.

“It is great that there will be trials and that they reach to the president. It is a precedent that will change history: to have a president tried according to the law because his people revolted against him,” said Abdel-Fattah.

But “this is not the end of the revolution. The real aim is a democratic structure, based on justice. The trial in it is a symbolic step. It was the people who brought Mubarak to trial not the army.”

_____

Associated Press writer Maggie Michael in Cairo contributed to this report.