An Indian woman looks at a photo exhibition on the 1984 Bhopal gas tragedy in the central Indian city of Bhopal, Dec. 2. (Reuters Photo)

A report from London-based Amnesty International, "Clouds of Injustice: Bhopal 20 Years On", says "new research" has revealed that more than 7,000 people died immediately after the deadly methyl isocyanate leak in Bhopal in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh on December 3, 1984, and 15,000 others have died of related diseases since then. The human-rights group faults the Indian government for accepting an "inadequate final settlement" without allowing survivors to participate in the resolution of the case. "This undermined the victims' right to a remedy, which includes compensation, rehabilitation, acknowledgement of the harm they have suffered, and for those responsible to be held to account," the report says.
The gas leak at the fertilizer plant owned by Union Carbide India Ltd (UCIL), now a subsidiary of Dow Chemical, led to one of the world's worst environmental disasters. Union Carbide blamed the tragedy on sabotage by a disgruntled employee. Activists say substandard safety precautions and faulty plant design hastened the disaster.
Dow has denied any continuing liability in the case. In a statement, the firm noted: "Dow never owned or operated the Bhopal plant." A Dow spokesman said the liabilities, "both the moral as well as the legal ones," were resolved many years ago. UCIL was jointly owned by Union Carbide Corp (UCC), the Indian government and private investors. Union Carbide sold its shares in UCIL in 1994, and UCIL was renamed Eveready Industries India Ltd, which remains a significant Indian company today.
The Amnesty report is critical of UCC, which owned 50.9% of the equity of UCIL and therefore had majority control of UCIL's voting shares. An internal memo suggests that UCC was aware that its technology entailed safety risks, increased by the fact that the chemical to be produced and bulk stored in Bhopal was an "ultra-hazardous substance".
"Union Carbide has not still cleaned up the Bhopal site, and toxic wastes continue to pollute the environment and groundwater," the report says. "UCC, UCIL and Dow have publicly stated that they have no further responsibility for the effects of the gas leak, and continue to refuse to appear before the court in Bhopal. However, the question of liability has yet to be decided by US courts and criminal charges against UCC are still open and pending."
The human-rights group has urged people around the world to put pressure on Dow and the Indian government. Dow, Amnesty says, should clean up the groundwater and remove the stockpiles of toxic and hazardous substances left by the company when it abandoned the site; promptly make public all information it has on all reaction products released on the day of the gas leak and full information regarding their toxicity and impact on people and the environment; and appear before the Bhopal court in the criminal case.
Meanwhile in Bhopal, toxic wastes continue to pollute the environment and contaminate water that surrounding communities rely on.
Last April, survivors of the tragedy toured the United States in an effort to initiate a program of relief and rehabilitation for other survivors. Two survivors--Rashida Bee and Champa Devi Shukla--cited the failure of the United Nations to address the ongoing humanitarian crisis.
"People continue to die at the rate of one a day. Yet the UN agencies, such as UNICEF [United Nations Children's Fund], WHO [World Health Organization] and ILO [International Labor Organization] remain silent," said Bee.
ATIMES.COM

The German federal police, the BKA, was once famous for its relentless, coolly efficient pursuit of terrorists. Hundreds of BKA agents eliminated the first three generations of the Red Army Faction, a terror organization that killed scores of politicians and civilians in the 1970s and 1980s. Then the hunt was on for the fourth generation. Hundreds of millions of dollars were invested; again, legions of agents were dispatched.
But finally, in 1997, BKA experts admitted there may never have been a fourth-generation Red Army Faction. The experts had been hunting a phantom. Lone-wolf terrorists or isolated veterans had committed the few, random attacks that occurred.
It was a striking example of how a police force--and a whole nation--fell for propaganda from the terrorists, which was pumped up by almost obsessive media hype. Looking at the current reporting on Al Qaeda, the question is: Is history repeating itself?
This month, at the BKA's annual conference, Germany's top investigators and international experts discussed what they had discovered since Sept. 11 about Al Qaeda. The main thing they have learned is that there is less than meets the eye.
Yes, Al Qaeda was once centralized, structured and powerful, but that was before the U.S. pulverized its camps and leadership in Afghanistan.
In other words, this battle in the war on terror might already be over. It's as an ex-CIA agent once said: "I quit the agency at the end of the Cold War because I was tired of politicians making me describe the Soviet Union as a 20-foot giant--when it was really only a dwarf."
For more than three years, Al Qaeda has been described by investigators, academics and self-styled experts as an almost uncontrollable menace. It was said to work closely with organized crime, to have access to unlimited funds, to have hidden those funds in gold and diamonds, to be capable of moving its money with a sophisticated finance system to whatever country Osama bin Laden chose to attack next.
The media tended to believe the worst and amplify it. The general idea was that a perfect crime such as 9/11 needed a perfect organization behind it. Most of the descriptions of Al Qaeda proved more legend than fact.
Al Qaeda never had a "macro-financing" structure, said Judge Jean-Louis Bruguiere, the dean of Europe's anti-terrorism investigators. In fact, analyzing the clusters of activists, he found that there were never large flows of external money financing any attack. In nearly a decade of searching, all Bruguiere was able to find was "micro-financing" activists raising the little money they needed to survive and commit their crimes through credit card or debit card fraud. They turned out to be petty thieves, not grand gangsters.
The terrorists did not need a lot of money to finance the attacks in Madrid, Bali and Tunisia. "They could carry around the money they needed in cash," said Nikos Passas of Northeastern University in Boston.
But being less structured doesn't mean the terrorists are less dangerous or easier to stop. Investigators admit that 3 1/2 years after 9/11, they know next to nothing about the motives of Islamic terrorists. Knowing so little means they have few means to predict--or prevent--future acts.
LATIMES.COM

A Chinese student holds red ribbons, the international symbol for AIDS awareness, as she attends a ceremony to mark World AIDS Day in a Beijing theater, Dec 1. (Reuters Photo)

Dec. 1 was World AIDS day, and this provides an appropriate backdrop to underline how frightening it is to compare the HIV-AIDS pandemic in sub-Saharan Africa to the situation in the Middle East and Northern Africa (MENA).
Although HIV-AIDS infection rates in the MENA region remain much lower than those in sub-Saharan Africa, and the disease has not become an epidemic; it is growing silently, and the number of those infected in North Africa, for example, has trebled between 2001 and 2003. While countries such as Egypt face other epidemics, such as Hepatitis C, HIV-AIDS is poised as the next disaster. While official adult infection rates for the MENA region are at 0.3 percent, compared to sub-Sahara's 7 percent, this figure may be drastically underestimated considering reluctance to test for the virus and widespread ignorance.
In MENA, new infections are increasing, with 92,000 reported new infections in 2004. Sudan has the largest number of infected people (2 percent of the adult population lives with HIV), while dramatic increases have also been recorded in Libya and Iran.
Drug abuse in Egypt, Libya and Iran has been identified by the Joint United Nations Program on HIV-AIDS, or UNAIDS, as one of the largest contributors to the spread of the virus, and many of the drug users, it has been reported, are either married and-or do not practice safe sex. Sex workers, spouses or partners of people who use drugs are at a very high risk of being infected, putting the general population at greater risk.
In sub-Saharan Africa the most serious problems have been the stigmatization of people living with HIV-AIDS and cultural and religious norms working against safe sex and sex education. Even stronger societal norms exist in the MENA region, and the silence surrounding sexual behavior may allow the disease to spread and multiply as it did in Southern and Eastern Africa. It is common both in Northern Africa and the Middle East to blame HIV-AIDS on a breakdown of traditional and religious morality, making safe-sex education controversial. However, sex education will be imperative if the region is to avoid a full-fledged epidemic. Governments in sub-Saharan Africa have adopted an advocacy scheme called "ABC"--abstinence, be faithful and-or use a condom.
The stigmatization of HIV-positive persons has been and remains a serious issue in MENA and sub-Saharan regions where religious leaders of all faiths claim the disease is punishment for sins.
Public education on HIV-AIDS has clearly been a problem in MENA, in the same way it has been in southern and eastern Africa. In Egypt, the Health Ministry has set up a hotline to talk confidentially to any person about HIV-AIDS and safe sex. However, reports indicate that when public education is attempted in universities, the lecturers have to be very careful not to offend religious leaders.
In Iran the government has made the important decision of giving high school students AIDS education. This is impressive, considering how difficult it has been to persuade southern African governments to provide sex education to high school students.
HIV and AIDS spread on fear. Sexual conduct has always been an intensely private matter and most societies discourage sex before marriage. There is, therefore, a strong societal disincentive to admit to having had extra-marital sex. Thus, fear of societal isolation means that people resist testing for HIV. The stronger the societal pressures, the stronger the fear. This fear can only be counteracted by a strong education campaign to persuade citizens to test for HIV.
DAILYSTAR.COM.LB

Mahmoud Abbas was recently selected chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organisation. As the sole candidate of Fatah, the faction that dominates the PLO and the Palestinian National Authority, he is almost certain to be elected on Jan. 9 as president of the PNA, replacing Yasser Arafat in both key positions.
This "smooth transition" will be a great relief to many Western peace processors. In their view, not only has the "biggest obstacle" to peace been removed with the departure of Arafat, but the man set to succeed him is someone long prepared to climb down on final status issues, such as Beit-ul-Moqaddas, refugees, settlements and the character of a Palestinian state.
The notorious secret agreement Abbas reached with Israel's former Justice Minister Yossi Beilin in October 1995, which has since become the benchmark for any other subsequent blueprints, including the "generous offer" at Camp David, the Clinton proposals and the Geneva Initiative, foresees 130 Israeli settlements on occupied Palestinian lands remaining where they are and being "removed" from the Palestinian land only by virtue of their annexation to Israel.
The Beilin-Abbas agreement also envisioned allowing Israeli military forces to stay in the Jordan Valley. Worst still was Abbas' acceptance that the village of Abu Dis be deceptively renamed "Al Quds"--the Arabic name for Jerusalem--and made the capital of the Palestinian state, while the real occupied city of Beit-ul-Moqaddas, is simply surrendered in toto to Israel.
Another great source of comfort for Abbas' Western admirers is his declared opposition to all forms of Palestinian violence against Israel. Long before his brief tenure as prime minister, he traveled the length and breadth of the region, campaigning against "the arming of the Intifada", and lamenting the great damage the Intifada has caused the Palestinians.
It is on the basis of such credentials that Arafat was put under severe Western pressure to appoint Abbas as his prime minister, after Arafat himself was excommunicated by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and, under Sharon's direct influence, the United States. The fact that Abbas lasted only four months in office and reaped only failure intensified the blame on Arafat for having obstructed his prime minister, rather than raising any questions as to Abbas' true qualifications or the wisdom of the demands and expectations placed on the Palestinians to perform miracles while Israel waged a cruel and relentless war against them with full American backing.
Yet, here is Abbas again, at the very top of the realm, this time with no obstruction from Arafat and with the enthusiastic approval of all those who have been waiting to leap at the opportunity of reviving the failed peace process.
Abbas has wasted no time reiterating his firm position against violence. He told UK Foreign Secretary Jack Straw he hoped the PNA would soon be able to announce "an end to all military actions, full calm, a full end to violence", according to The Independent (Nov. 26).
A PLO official said, according to the report: "Abbas had been seeking a halt to all operations against Israeli civilians, including Jewish settlers in the West Bank and Gaza--a formula that would not apply to attacks on Israeli armed forces in the occupied territories."
No one could disagree with that, what Abbas actually seems to be offering is a complete, unconditional end to all armed resistance and self-defence against Israeli aggression in exchange for no commitment from the Israeli occupier or its American and European backers and enablers that Israel will halt its aggression against Palestinians and their land.
JORDANTIMES.COM

Ukraine and Turkey are the two most vexing questions geography and history have bequeathed the European Union. Ukraine is equally a problem for Russia itself, since it is Russia's "near abroad." But just how near?
Modern Russia's origins were as an eastward projection of the Slavic union first formed in ninth century Ukrainian Kiev. The cultural, and implicitly the political, frontier between the two societies has been indistinct ever since. That is why the presidential election in Ukraine is being described as a test of East vs. West. Massive support for the officially defeated candidate, Viktor Yushchenko, has come mainly in the western Ukraine, historically close to Poland and Lithuania. Until the First World War, part of it belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
It is mostly Uniate in religion, a church whose liturgy is oriental and orthodox in form, but which is united with Roman Catholicism and the papacy. Eastern Ukraine, now a region of decaying industry, is Orthodox in religion and Russian is widely spoken there. The Russians call it "little Russia." The notion of the election as an East-West conflict evokes the cold war pattern, but this is an oversimplification and a disservice to both eastern and western Ukrainians, as well as to the country's neighbors.
The region is one of overlapping and interacting civilizations, but there are no serious ethnic divisions and Ukrainian nationalism has never been a powerful force--at least until now. This is not the Balkans.
The threats of a civil war or of some form of Russian military intervention heard last week are probably exaggerated, although there have been Western diplomatic reports that Russian special police officers have (illegally) been brought into Ukraine to back the claims of Russia-supported Viktor Yanukovich. Nearly everyone involved in the controversy over the real election result, the EU and the United States included, is attempting to find a compromise that will leave the democratic structure of the government intact, Ukraine independent and its future open.
For the European Union, the problem is, where does its "Europe" really end, and what exactly is the EU finally to become? Beyond Ukraine is Russia, and Asia begins in Russia.
Turkey raises a different version of the same question, since, while the Turks in the past dominated a major part of southeastern Europe, Turkey itself is not a European society; its territory is mainly in Asia; its language has no links to the European languages; its religion is not Christian; and its neighbors are Middle Eastern and Caucasian.
The current notion in Russia that Western Europe as well as the United States is deliberately encroaching on areas of Russian national interest--the latter in Georgia and elsewhere in the Caucasus, and now both by their support for Yushchenko in the Ukraine--is extremely dangerous. It is dangerous to President Vladimir Putin's Russia, as much as to everyone else.
IHT.COM