December 2001

World News
Posted: Monday, December 31, 2001

• Sharon Blocks Cease-fire Proposal
• Media Bias: The 2001 Awards...
• The United Front Against Liberty
• Sharon, Bush, Bin Laden Most Hated Men of Year in Saudi
• Turkish troops go after Kurds in northern Iraq
• 5,000 Civilians Flee Indian Shelling
• Bush fires reach Sydney suburbs BBC
• Deadliest Year in Palestinian Territories Since 1967 War
• Heath told ministers to help 'white' immigrants...
• North Korea pledges "do or die spirit" to guard socialism
• Cluster bombs dropped in 103 Afghan cities: UN

The War in Afghanistan
Posted: Saturday, December 29, 2001

Excerpted from Lakdawala lecture, New Delhi

By Noam Chomsky

The threat of international terrorism is surely severe. The horrendous events of Sept. 11 had perhaps the most devastating instant human toll on record, outside of war. The word "instant" should not be overlooked; regrettably, the crime is far from unusual in the annals of violence that falls short of war. The death toll may easily have doubled or more within a few weeks, as miserable Afghans fled -- to nowhere -- under the threat of bombing, and desperately-needed food supplies were disrupted; and there were credible warnings of much worse to come. MORE

The Rape of Afghanistan

By Rasil Basu

An unexpected fall-out of the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon was the sudden concern of the American and other governments with the plight of Afghan women. MORE

Mugabe seeks more oil from Libya
Posted: Thursday, December 20, 2001

The president of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe, is in Libya for talks with Colonel Gadaffi on possible further aid to help ease Zimbabwe's crippling fuel shortages.

The Zimbabwean Energy and Transport Minister, Edward Chindori-Chininga, who is accompanying Mr Mugabe, said that under a deal agreed earlier this year, Libya was supplying 70% of Zimbabwe's fuel requirements. MORE

Neighbours back Mugabe

Violence associated with Zimbabwe's land reform programme is declining and the government is committed to holding free and fair elections, according to Southern African ministers.

The ministers also repeated their opposition to sanctions at the Southern African Development Community meeting in Angola's capital city, Luanda. MORE

Anguilla anti-colonial struggle
Posted: Monday, December 17, 2001

By Tonya Carter

WHERE HAVE ALL THE LEADERS GONE?

Independence must be first conceived. As Anguillians stand now, there is an unconscious deep-rooted psychological dependence.

It is my belief that "Independence begins in the mind!" Many of us who make a business out of predicting the future are guilty of one common error. According to Warren Bennis, "a futurists should never let himself be tempted into premature optimism."

Where have all the leaders gone?

All around the world desperate societies are asking this very same question and Anguilla is definitely no exception. Leaders are lacking important qualities and this is why there is something dangerously wrong in Anguilla today. These qualities were evaluated in Warren's book 'THE UNCONSCIOUS CONSPIRACY' and are as follows:

1) INTEGRITY - standards of morals and intellectual honesty on which we base our individual conduct and from which we cannot swerve without a sense of betraying and cheapening our better selves. This can only be restored by each of us asserting our own. By the very existence, people of integrity lend new hope to our society.

2) DEDICATION - finding something to believe in with passionate conviction and intensity. We must remain committed to our brethren, our institutions, and our ideas. 'Labour is in a real sense its own reward'.

3) MAGNANIMITY - to be noble of mind and heart; generous in forgiving, above revenge or resentment. This is very important especially in Anguilla and the wider Caribbean where victimization is carried out.

4) HUMILITY - learning not to confuse your own ego and pride and self-importance with the true issue at stake. It is the ability to learn from the mistakes rather than having mistakes pointed out. This quality is very important as was indicated my Mr. V. A Vanterpool in his articles that highlighted the prerequisites for independence and agreed upon by the AIM.

5) OPENESS - the willingness to listen to any new idea or suggestion and also involve the openness to change. The leaders of Anguilla must be open minded when dealing with the issue of independence and any other issues. This also leads me to the state the paradox - confidentiality is good, secrecy is bad. There is a difference between confidentiality and secrecy. There must be transparency and accountability but everything that goes on within Government cannot be discussed with the public.

6) CREATIVITY - This is something that most of us seem to lose as we leave childhood. A publisher defines genius as 'someone who sees things very clearly but sees them with the eyes of a child'. To rediscover creativity, we must find ways of recreating our sense of wonder, of heightening, even altering our consciousness. 'The more our work makes us specialists, the more we must strive to become generalists in other matters, to avoid becoming lopsided'. If there is to be a change in the mentality of Anguillians about the much talked about political Independence from Britain, it must rely on three things - participation of the people involved in the change; trust in the people who are the basic proponents, advocates or leaders of the change and thirdly, clarity about the change.

One cannot really overemphasize the fact that we are living in an era where human resource development is paramount to economic, social and political development. 'Where have all our leaders gone' is not directly aimed at those in 'leadership positions’ as such but rather to us ALL. We should all be leaders rather than followers. And to those brave Anguillians who took the stand in 1967, they were indeed leaders and not followers. I applaud them and I join them in the celebration of Separation Day.

I hope that the readers of this article do not misunderstand my article. I see great things happening for Anguilla but we must first obtain those chief qualities that I mention, namely: humility, creativity, magnanimity, integrity, dedication and openness. Not just for our elected officials but for all of Anguilla.

Come let us reason together and in the mean time...let us continue striving to educate the people about the future of Anguilla!

Tonya Carter
Student~Anguilla
British West Indies

Naipaul: greatness and ungraciousness
Posted: Tuesday, December 11, 2001

by Tony Deyal

IT WAS always widely believed in Trinidad that at some time in his life, Vidia Naipaul would receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. It was also always widely believed, and not only in Trinidad, that he would never receive a noble prize an award for graciousness, gratitude or the Chaucerian gentilesse.

I first met Vidia Naipaul on Miguel Street, Presentation College, San Fernando. I immediately related to Naipaul's characters. Later in life when one of my friends, in the throes of unrequited love and betrayal, climbed a tree and invited us to stone him, my respect for Naipaul as both chronicler and seer grew enormously. I felt that he really knew his people. It is only afterwards that I recognised that while he knew us, we were definitely not his people.

It was some time before I read The Suffrage of Elvira. It had fooled me on two counts. Like Dickens little Philip Pirrups' infant tongue which converted his name to Pip, my limited vocabulary converted suffrage to sufferage. Having met at least one neighbour named Eldica, and another lady named Eltie, I assumed Elvira was a woman. I had no great expectations that the book was anything but the travails and triteness of the life of some woman. I stuck to Zane Grey. El Paso came before Elvira. MORE

Sperm Donor Must Pay Child Support - Report
Posted: Monday, December 10, 2001

STOCKHOLM (Reuters) - A court in Sweden has ruled that a man who donated sperm for artificial insemination, enabling a lesbian couple to have three children, must pay child support after the two women separated, a Swedish newspaper reported on Sunday. MORE

My parent and my pimp - Child prostitution in Jamaica
Posted: Friday, December 7, 2001

By Stephen-Claude Hyatt, Jamaica Gleaner

ALL THROUGHOUT the world, the theme of prostitution and more specifically, child prostitution, has been given much attention. In quite a few countries, "red light" districts have been established to promote the age-old trade of selling one's body for favours, as legal. Even in Jamaica, women of the trade and other individuals, have been protesting to make same legal and harassment free, and rallying for the establishment of "red light" districts here.

The reality, however, is that the modern prostitute is no longer only female, as there are a growing number of men and children who have either worked their way in or are forced into the "industry". The reality within the Jamaican society these days, is that we have children, who have been encouraged and even forced by their parents to sell their bodies for money and favours.

Many Jamaican women, for years, have been content with the understanding that their teenaged daughters are sexually involved with mature men, old enough to be their fathers, in exchange for taking care of the family. What is not known is that there are Jamaica women who will send their daughters and sons out nightly to "work the beat" and take money home to them. Many of these children are not allowed back into the home unless a certain amount of money is made nightly. MORE

John Pilger on Washington's war crimes
Posted: Thursday, December 6, 2001

"This gang in Washington is out of control"
Little did we know. Since September 11, the U.S. mainstream media has been saturated with pro-war propaganda straight out of the Pentagon and the State Department. Not a hint of an antiwar opposition has been allowed to leak in, even on editorial pages. MORE

Rep. Ron Paul's Heroic Address On The 'War On Terrorism'
Posted: Thursday, December 6, 2001

"The world today is being asked to side with the U.S. in a fight against global terrorism. This is only a cover. The world is being asked today, in reality, to side with the U.S. as it seeks to strengthen its economic hegemony. This is neither acceptable nor will it be allowed. We must forge together to state that we are neither with the terrorists nor with the United States." MORE

The dream of replacing Arafat
Posted: Tuesday, December 4, 2001

by Jonathan Freedland - The Guardian
Is Ariel Sharon trying to kill Yasser Arafat? Can this be the policy of the prime minister of Israel, to kill the man renowned the world over as Mr Palestine, symbol of an entire nation? MORE

Consenting apartheid
Posted: Tuesday, December 4, 2001

by Matthew Taylor Guardian UK
Riots in Britain's towns and cities, the growth in racist violence, the apparent rejection by some British Muslims of the values and policies of their chosen country; all this appears to suggest the failure of the liberal dream and of its translation into the policy and practice of multiculturalism. As our idealism fades, so we turn increasingly to the law to enforce attitudes that we once might have hoped to have instilled. MORE

African Artifacts Suggest an Earlier Modern Human
Posted: Sunday, December 2, 2001

By John Noble Wilford
NY Times

More than 70,000 years ago, people occupied a cave in a high cliff facing the Indian Ocean at the tip of South Africa. They hunted grysbok, springbok and other game. They ate fish from the waters below them. In body and brain size, these cave dwellers were definitely anatomically modern humans. MORE

Bush orders backing for rebels to topple Saddam
Posted: Sunday, December 2, 2001

America intends to depose Saddam Hussein by giving armed support to Iraqi opposition forces across the country, The Observer has learnt.
President George W. Bush has ordered the CIA and his senior military commanders to draw up detailed plans for a military operation that could begin within months. MORE

Carnage as suicide bombs hit Jerusalem
Posted: Saturday, December 1, 2001

Guardian UK - Twin suicide blasts and a car bomb explosion plunged a night of revelry in the heart of Jewish West Jerusalem into a slaughterhouse last night, killing at least eight Israelis, and injuring more than 170 others. MORE

Previous Page | Trinicenter Home

Homepage | U.S. Crusade | News Sources | Zimbabwe Special | Venezuela
Back to Top