A corpse lies on a slab in the center of the Uzbek town of Andijan, May 14. (AFP Photo)

Hundreds of protesters are reported to have been gunned down in bloody clashes with government forces that have ravaged eastern Uzbekistan. One human rights observer in the eastern city of Andizhan said that up to 500 people may have perished in the shootings and the gun battles that followed. A doctor spoke of “many, many dead“, witnesses said 200 to 300 people were shot dead, and an AP reporter saw at least 30 bodies in Andijan. As night fell, tension was high, with armoured vehicles positioned at crossroads and trucks blocking main thoroughfares. Terrified demonstrators tried to flee the country, seen as a key ally by Britain and the US in the war on terror.
As blood-spattered bodies were lifted from the streets of Andizhan, survivors and thousands of others packed their bags and headed for neighbouring Kyrgyzstan. Some made it across the border and were in refugee camps.
In a severe rebuke to London and Washington’s approach to the region, Britain’s former ambassador to the country said the countries had swallowed Uzbek propaganda that sought to portray the democracy movement as a brand of Islamic extremism.
Craig Murray told the IoS that the Government had to take some responsibility for the unfolding events because it had failed to support those trying to oppose the dictatorship of President Islam Karimov. He revealed that he visited Andizhan a year ago and met those trying to build a democratic opposition movement. In a bid to bolster their cause he asked the UK government to fund them. His requests were turned down by the Foreign Office.
“The Americans and British wouldn’t do anything to help democracy in Uzbekistan,“ he said. Uzbekistan provides a base for US forces engaged in anti-terrorism operations in neighbouring Afghanistan.
The former ambassador, who left the Foreign Office earlier this year after accusing the British Government of accepting intelligence gained under torture by Uzbek authorities, had called for the pro-democracy activists to be supported by the West, as elsewhere in the former Soviet Union. His requests to London were turned down.
“The Americans were making a distinction between human rights training, which they were happy to do, and pro-democracy training, which they weren’t.“
The Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, insisted yesterday that the UK had “consistently made clear to the authorities in Uzbekistan that the repression of dissent and discontent is wrong and they urgently need to deal with patent failings in respect of human and civil rights“.
Andrew MacKinlay, Labour MP for Thurrock and a senior member of the Foreign Affairs Committee in the last parliament, said: “I deeply regret that [the Foreign Office] did not do more to help the pro-democracy movement.“
Sir Menzies Campbell, deputy leader of the Liberal Democrats, said, “Rather than use force to impose democracy, as in Iraq, should we not be more assiduous in promoting democratic movements in countries like Uzbekistan?“
Battles raged on Friday when rebel gunmen sprung hundreds of people they regard as political prisoners from a jail in Andizhan.
As bodies were picked up from the streets yesterday, Saidzhakhon Zainatbitdinov, an independent human rights worker said: “The total number of deaths could reach 500 people.“ Earlier, President Karimov claimed that 10 police and troops had been killed, and many more “rebels“.
The Kremlin expressed its concern over the “danger of the destabilisation of the Central Asian region“.
ANTIWAR.COM

Mothers work harder than anyone else, putting in 100 hours a week in cleaning, childcare and the school run. The average mother also puts in 25 hours of paid work, slaves long into the night at the ironing board, has barely six hours’ sleep and views weekends as yet another (sparkling) window of opportunity for still more housework.
’Supermum!’ inevitably read the headlines on the results of a survey of 1,000 British women by market researchers, My Voice. ’Supermad!’ is a more accurate label to stick on this army of maternal martyrs since, in many cases, they have nobody to blame but themselves. Or, more precisely, that inner voice of conditioning that says, not only do they have to do it all, they have to do it well.
Seven out of 10 women have partners who ’help’ without being asked. Mothers, however, see the home as ’their job’, while 50 per cent say they do the chores because they do them better and faster than men could. That way insanity lies.
At the beginning of the last century, a record was kept of the daily lives of 30 working-class families living in Lambeth, south London. Maud Pember Reeves in ’Round About a Pound a Week’ records that while the men earned, at home, wives really were domestic slaves.
’Mrs T’, for instance, had six children living in two rooms upstairs in a house with no running water. The day began at dawn and ended at 10pm--scrubbing clothes, mending and darning, cleaning the grate and feeding the husband, a builder’s handyman, who ’dislikes the noise of a family meal, and insists on having both breakfast and tea cooked especially for himself and eats alone’.
In the 1950s, Andy Capp, the cloth-capped cartoon character created by Reg Smythe, personified the stereotypical male attitude that the home was ’women’s work’. In one cartoon, Florrie, Andy’s wife, is prostrate on the sofa. ’Yer look proper poorly, Florrie,’ Andy says. ’Don’t yer bother about the washin’ up tonight. Do it in the mornin’.’
Today, of course, there a women who, as a result of the blight of unequal pay, hold down three jobs (one probably as domestic skivvy for a middle-class matriarch) in order to feed and clothe a family as the single head of the household. They easily put in a 100 hours a week. But many of the other so-called ’Supermums’ are the General Pattons of the kitchen--they just hate to relinquish control, even at the cost of health and happiness.
Instead, they create a domestic tyranny in which the men are clobbered not because they don’t do their bit, but because they don’t do it ’right’, according to some mythical standard of perfection known only to the Great Housewife in the Sky.
’Do less’ should be every mother’s mantra. Do less--and make sure that what is done is properly valued at current market prices. If men were permitted to do more, then the abysmally low value now attached to the business of caring would inevitably rise, to everybody’s benefit. A labour of love is fine, but not at pauper’s rates.
Change is occurring on the domestic front. Women who have a larger salary than their husbands are apparently happily handing over the vacuum cleaner and the school run, and allowing their spouses to become trainee domestic gods (albeit, strictly supervised), while other ’Supermums!’ are in revolt.
Yvonne Roberts
OBSERVER.CO.UK

Can north and south ever be reconciled? These days, this seems to many to be the biggest question facing the World Trade Organisation (WTO). In September 2003, a block of developing nations led by India and Brazil managed to bring the Doha round of world trade talks to a screeching halt in a key meeting in Cancœn, Mexico, by demanding that the rich world lower barriers to agricultural trade. Though strenuous effort has put Doha back on track, agriculture remains a sticking point between the rich, mostly northern countries and the poorer, mostly southern ones. Difficulties abound in other areas as well, particularly services.
The race to replace Supachai Panitchpakdi, the outgoing WTO director-general, has reflected this division. By this week, the competition had narrowed to two candidates: Pascal Lamy, a former European Union trade commissioner from France; and Carlos PŽrez del Castillo, a former ambassador to the WTO from Uruguay. Unsurprisingly, Europe lined up behind Mr Lamy, while Latin America and the Middle East backed Mr PŽrez del Castillo; America remained publicly neutral. Luckily for Mr Lamy, he picked up enough developing-country support to push him over the top and, on Friday May 13th, he got the nod.
The outgoing director-general pledges continuing support for the WTO and the Doha round. The WTO posts news on the Doha agenda. The EU outlines its trade policy towards China and the big issues in agriculture. America’s trade representative, Rob Portman, commends the textile industry for responding to competition from Asia. President Bush discusses the Central America Free-Trade Agreement.
Mr Lamy is in many ways the riskier choice. Mr PŽrez del Castillo, a former chairman of the WTO’s general council, has a knack for building consensus that, some believe, would help steer the organisation through the tough times ahead. Mr Lamy, on the other hand, is seen as a tough negotiator--a skill that should come in handy during upcoming talks--but also as a risk-taker, taking controversial positions on big questions. He has been an enthusiastic supporter of widening trade talks to include the “Singapore issues“: trade facilitation, transparency in government procurement, investment and competition policy.
There are also worries that Mr Lamy’s ties to Europe will lead him to side with the richer nations on contentious issues. But those ties may enable him to push Europe to make difficult concessions--for instance, over its subsidy-soaked common agricultural policy--that Mr PŽrez del Castillo would have had a hard time securing. Though the head of the WTO has little statutory power to affect agreements, which are hammered out by ministers at meetings, he has strong powers of persuasion.
Mr Lamy could hardly be taking over at a more trying time. Around the world, enthusiasm for free trade seems to be on the wane. Partly this is due to the success of earlier trade talks--having made substantial progress in freeing up markets for goods, WTO ministers now must reach agreement on tougher areas, such as agricultural commodities and services, that anger powerful domestic constituencies.
YALEGLOBAL.YALE.EDU

China is the global epicenter of pirating and counterfeiting. By its government’s own estimate, China’s domestic trade in bogus goods accounts for $19 billion to $24 billion annually.
That is undoubtedly a significant understatement, and it doesn’t even include the stolen technologies and phony brands China exports to the rest of the world. Since welcoming China into the World Trade Organization in 2001, the United States has had a historic opportunity to stop the Chinese piracy trade. So far, the Bush administration has failed to seize it.
On joining the WTO, Chinese leaders assumed certain obligations to the other 147 member states. Specifically, as a signatory to the Trade-Related Intellectual Property System, China pledged to accept minimal standards of patent, copyright and trademark protection; to treat foreigners’ and its own citizens’ intellectual properties equally; and to submit to the WTO’s procedures for settling disputes.
Four years later, China has not met its intellectual property obligations, and the United States has failed to leverage the WTO mechanisms that might bring China into compliance. Although China has passed intellectual property laws that accord with WTO requirements, the Office of the United States Trade Representative reported to Congress last December that enforcement of those laws was inconsistent, ineffective and discriminatory against foreigners. The same report found intellectual property infringement in China to be rampant, with violations worsening.
In effect, China has created a Potemkin village of intellectual property protections. Fortunately, the WTO provides a way to confront that problem. If the United States can prove to a three-judge WTO panel that China is out of compliance and is harming intellectual property owners, it can seek damages. If the WTO grants such a judgment, the United States can impose tariffs on Chinese goods. Those monies could then be distributed among American complainants.
The United States has used these mechanisms in the past. From 1995 to 2000, the Clinton administration filed 13 intellectual property cases at the WTO against other nations. All of them were resolved to the United States’ satisfaction.
The United States Chamber of Commerce, hardly a protectionist group, has called for the Bush administration to initiate such a case against China at the WTO. But the administration remains strangely passive in the face of Chinese pirating and counterfeiting. In fact, this administration has not filed a single intellectual-property case, against any nation, at the WTO since it took office.
The United States has paid a high price for those languishing WTO protections. A decade ago, the United States agreed to eliminate all import quotas on textiles in exchange for the developing world’s acceptance of intellectual property protections. The United States has kept its side of that deal, sacrificing almost one million domestic apparel and textile jobs to foreign producers since 1994.
China, the greatest violator of the WTO’s intellectual property requirements, is also the biggest beneficiary of that arrangement: Chinese producers now supply 25 percent of the clothing in the United States and are expected to provide 75 percent by 2010.
The United States should bring an intellectual property case against China at the WTO.
NYTIMES.COM

Britain not only conveniently still forgets the crimes of its imperial past, but it has also again begun to romanticise its colonial achievements and declare them a proper source of pride.
By barely a generation after the ignominious end of the British empire, there is now a quiet but concerted drive to rehabilitate it, by influential newspapers, conservative academics, and at the highest level of government. Just how successful this campaign has already been was demonstrated in January when Gordon Brown, chancellor of the exchequer and Tony Blair’s heir apparent, declared in east Africa that “the days of Britain having to apologise for its colonial history are over“.
Speaking four months earlier at the British Museum, an Aladdin’s cave of looted treasures from Britain’s former colonies, Brown insisted: “We should be proud. . .of the empire“.
Brown’s extraordinary remarks passed with little comment in the British media. But the significance of a Labour chancellor’s support for what would until recently have been regarded as fringe rightwing revisionism was doubtless not lost on his target audience.
This is a man who, despite his neoliberal enthusiasms and tense alliance with Blair, has always liked to project a more egalitarian, social democratic image than his New Labour rival. His imperial turn will have given an unwelcome jolt to anyone hoping that a Brown government might step back from the liberal imperialist swagger and wars of intervention that have punctuated Blair’s eight-year premiership.
Brown’s demand for an end to colonial apologies was part of an attempt to define a modern sense of British identity based around values of fair play, freedom and tolerance. What modernity and such values have to do with the reality of empire might not be immediately obvious. But even more bizarre is the implication that Britain is forever apologising for its empire or the crimes committed under it. As with other European former colonial powers, nothing could be further from the truth. There have been no apologies.
There has been no serious attempt in Britain to face up to records or the long-term impact of colonialism on the societies it ruled, let alone trials of elderly colonial administrators now in Surrey retirement homes. The British national school curriculum has more or less struck the empire and its crimes out of history. The standard modern world history textbook for 16-year-olds has chapter after chapter on the world wars, the cold war, British and US life, Stalin’s terror and the monstrosities of Nazism--but scarcely a word on the British and other European empires which carved up most of the world, or the horrors they perpetrated.
What are needed are not apologies or expressions of guilt so much as education, acknowledgment, some measure of reparation and an understanding that barbarity is the inevitable consequence of attempts to impose foreign rule on subject peoples. Like most historical controversies, the argument about empire is as much about the future as the past. Those who write colonial cruelty out of 20th-century history want to legitimise the new imperialism, now bogged down in another colonial war in Iraq--just as those who demonise past attempts to build an alternative to capitalist society are determined to prove that there is none. If Brown really wants to champion British fair play, and create a new relationship with Africa, he would do better to celebrate those who campaigned for colonial freedom rather than the racist despotism they fought against.
MONDEDIPLO.COM