The Hypocrisy Weblog

The European Union has now put it’s foot down and denying Serbia membership if they fail to bring Bosnian Serb military leader Ratklo Mladic to the war crimes tribunal in The Hague. This is something valuable for the quality and internal bond of the European Union, making it a factor of justice in Europe.

However, these strict rules need to be applied to prospect countries such as Turkey – where over a half million kurds are being oppressed on a dialy basis by the Turkish regime.

(From The Guardian)

EU tells Serbia: no Mladic, no entry

Simon Jeffery and agencies
Wednesday May 3, 2006

The European Union today suspended membership talks with Serbia over its failure to deliver the Bosnian Serb military leader Ratklo Mladic to the war crimes tribunal in The Hague.

Mladic is the UN tribunal’s second most wanted war crimes suspect from the Yugoslav wars after Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb political leader. Both are charged in connection with the massacre of more than 7,000 Muslim men and boys at Srebenica.

Announcing the decision to suspend talks, the EU enlargement commissioner, Olli Rehn, said:”Serbia must show that nobody is above the law and that anybody indicted for serious crimes will face justice.”

The western Balkans are a key area for EU enlargement, with supporters of the process arguing that the 25-member bloc has a choice between promoting stability and living with a volatile collection of states on its borders.

The talks had been intended to conclude a stabilisation and association agreement with Serbia, the first step towards EU membership.

But Mr Rehn’s announcement, made after consulting the chief UN prosecutor, Carla Del Ponte, could further destabilise Serbia’s shaky, centre-left coalition. Vojislav Kostunica, the Serbian prime minister, is dependent for parliamentary support on nationalist hardliners who oppose Mladic’s extradition.

In a statement to the press, Mr Kostunica said Mladic was “hiding all alone” after a crackdown on his support network, and called on him to surrender.

He said his government had done “absolutely everything in its power” to capure Mladic and send him to The Hague.

Ms Del Ponte later accused Serbia of misleading UN prosecutors by telling them Mladic’s capture was imminent.

Because of his precarious position, Mr Kostunica was reported to have been trying to persuade Mladic to give himself up voluntarily.

His government faces a summer with plenty of potential for conflict with nationalists: Montenegro votes on dissolving its three-year union with Serbia on May 21, and the ethnic Albanian majority in Kosovo – officially a Serbian province – is seeking full independence in talks under way in Vienna.

The Serbian deputy prime minister, Miroljub Labus, said yesterday the suspension of membership talks would represent a serious defeat for liberal parties advocating closer cooperation with the EU. He predicted that it would have “serious repercussions” on the political situation in Serbia.

Slovenia is the only former Yugoslav republic that is a member of the EU, but Croatia and Macedonia have both signed stabilisation and association agreements with the bloc, which is due to expand to 27 members next year with the entry of Romania and Bulgaria.

Croatia’s membership talks were delayed over its failure to surrender General Ante Gotovina to the UN tribunal to face charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The impasse was broken in October last year when EU national leaders decided to begin talks with Turkey, too. Gen Gotovina, the third most wanted suspect after Mladic, was arrested on the Spanish island of Tenerife the following December.

Say what you want about George W Bush, but he did right in criticizing Wyclef Jean for making a spanish version of the american national anthem, “The star-spangled banner”.

To have a version of a nation’s national anthem in another language than the official language(s) of the nation in question sends out the wrong signals.

It was certainly a long time since I could say that I agree with the statements of George W Bush, but now it has happened.

German city of Mannheim switches to Linux, ZDnet UK writes.

The German city is on target to complete the first stage of a major migration to Linux this year.

“In the first phase, due to be completed this year, Windows NT servers will be replaced by 110 Linux servers. After the first phase the city council hopes around 3,700 desktops will follow the servers onto the open source OS. So far Mannheim is still using Microsoft desktop applications, but has commissioned a study to look into the introduction of OpenOffice.org, the open source productivity suite.”

Apparently, Microsoft’s withdrawal of support for Windows NT in 2004 had a major part to play in the city’s decision to migrate to the open source alternative. IBM is the technical partner in what is called Mannheim’s “gentle migration”.

This project is very important for the open source movement, as well as those companies having open source software and solution as a core part of their business. If this migration goes through without major pains, more cities and entire nations will (hopefully) consider to switch to the cheaper (and better) open source alternative.

Ah, so now it finally happened, the bird flu is now inside the borders of the EU. The greek island of Inousses is reported to have sick turkeys on it’s farms, though it is not yet known if these sick birds have lethal H5N1-strain of the bird flu virus, or a virus that “only” transmits between birds and not bird to human.

Reuters posted an article, which both speaks about the greek newsmedia running amok (as usual) and a small island of 600 whose population is around 680 people, mostly elderly, being invaded by a horde of scoop-hungry journalists and where the whole world of these 680 people getting thrown upside down, where neighbours turn on neighbours and where fingers are pointed.

Also, the mainland of Greece is being svept by panic, and all bird flu vaccines are sold out at local pharmacists. This is really bad planning from the Greek state’s side, as the limited amount of vaccine should only be given to those individuals that are needed to keep the country going – it shouldn’t be a “up for grabs” kind of system. If there is a pandemic, then the lack of planning from the Greek government’s side will bite them in their backsides, but more important: the citizens will suffer from this, in fact – the whole of Europe will suffer.

As the bird flu found in Turkey was of the deadly H5N1-strain, I am worried, to say the least. If this virus mutates further, the vaccine that we have today is totally useless, and we’ll be seeing people dying like flies, economies collapsing and general human suffering.

If there is a god, I hope he / she is fair to us in our near future.

Tim Grieve writes:

“When Tom DeLay appeared on “Hardball” this week, he complained about the unfairness of the grand jury process that led to his indictment. “You know, grand juries, it’s all one-sided,” DeLay said. “It is all what [the prosecutor] presents to the grand jury, how he spins, how he presents it.” DeLay said that Travis County District Attorney Ronnie Earle has had him under a cloud for two years while “never talking to me, never talking to me, never asking me to testify.”

It’s a good story for someone who could use a little sympathy just now. It just happens not to be true. “

Read more here.

On the Salon.com Blog, Geraldine Seale writes about the reasons of Paul Wolfowitz being appointed the head of the World Bank after working close-knit to the Pentagon.

A short yet informative piece.

PS. Salon.com is ad-supported, so you might have to look at an ad before getting to the actual Blog.

No-one can miss that today’s the 11th of September. Of course there are the 11th of September attack in New York city in 2001, but there is also uthe Chilean coup of 1973, which was supported by the United States – something to think about…

Then you have the tragic murder of Sweden’s foreign minister Anna Lindh in 2003.

So, Hurricane Katrina has now died down and the aftermath is painfully clear. There are talks about over 10.000 deaths, women and children are getting raped, people are getting murdered, looting is widespread. There are many thoughts that goes through one’s mind when thinking about the events alongside the american gulf-coast.

My very first thought, beside feeling appalled&disgust a quick comparison to both Iraq and Somalia came to mind. Everyone have heard about both Iraqis and Somalians “acting like animals”, but the events in New Orleans clearly show that it’s not a racial nor a religious problem that people do act like animals – it has to do with socio-economic prerequisite. Of course, one can’t “free” an individual from guilt due to that, but this is the root of the evil. I just hope that those that talk about arabs as animals will think again before saying this, as similar actions happened in their own backyard.

I must say that I’m also surprised over the late and inadequate response from the american government. Michael Moore took the opportunity to publish an open letter to his archenemy George W Bush stating:

“I especially like how, the day after the hurricane, instead of flying to Louisiana, you flew to San Diego to party with your business peeps. Don’t let people criticize you for this — after all, the hurricane was over and what the heck could you do, put your finger in the dike?”

This is really really bad!!! (Do note that I don’t go wild over Michael Moore in general) I’m shocked to see that all focus wasn’t on New Orleans when it was clear that a possible category 5 hurricane was about to hit this city, laying beneath the sea’s waterlevel. Yes, it is not the central governments fault that the infrastructure is bad and not enough to handle a storm even weaker than the one that hit New Orleans – this should have been handled on a local level, but there should be at least some advance planning in case of a possible emergency. It’s a disgrace that a country such as the United States of America can’t handle a crisis like this. It’s a shame that countries that want to send aid to the area are refused due to the “logistics not being in place to handle such aid”.

I heard on the Swedish news that the airplane that was filled with water-cleanining machinery, instant-housing equipment and mobile network-related equipment (yes, Swedish authorities together with Ericsson have an emergency team that can go out and set up temporary mobile networks in distaster areas) was set to “return to hangar” due to no official request coming from the american administration for, well-needed, help. Just imagine that the houses would make a difference for many of those having to live in sports-arenas, packed like sardines in a tinbox – having bullets flying by their heads.

The aura of incompetence shines around George W Bush, and he will not be able to joke this one away like he usually does. I am not a “Bush-hater”, this is written from a neutral stand-point, so all pro-Bush people out there, do not bother to try and dissect and cut down this blogpost, thank you. The effects for the republican party will be vast. People who regularly do not vote, will probably register to vote in order to punish the party that in their eyes did nothing to help them, their relatives, their friends, their class.

If the spindoctors fail, we will all see a democrat majority and a democrat president next time around…

According to ZDnet and several other news-sources, The Bush administration objects to the creation of the new porn top-level domain “.xxx” due to mentioned administration having concerns about a virtual red-light district reserved exclusively for Internet pornography.

This is despite the fact that the “.xxx” top-level domain is already approved through ICANN.

My comment: I understand why the current Bush administration is objecting to the “.xxx” top-level domain: rightwing-conservative politicians are trying to gain political points by being against everything that is immoral – totally logical. What is illogical is that a new “.xxx” top-level domain could make it easier to filter out unwanted sites in firewalls, both at workplaces, schools and in homes. What is totally forgotten it seems are all the millions and millions of pornsites listed under .com, .net, .org etc etc. This is a total charade from the current american administration, and I hope that it will stay in words. In my eyes, a “.xxx” top-level domain would make the Internet a little bit safer!

From the New York Post;

YASSER STASHED BILLIONS ALONG SHADOWY MONEY TRAIL

In his four decades as Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat has run a murky financial empire that includes far-flung PLO investments in airlines, banana plantations and high-tech companies, and money hidden in bank accounts across the globe.

Jaweed al-Ghussein, a former PLO finance minister, said Arafat and the PLO were worth $3 billion to $5 billion when he quit in 1996. No one will say how much the organization and its boss are worth now — some estimates say as little as a few million. But as Arafat, 75, fights for life in a hospital near Paris, Palestinians fear that what’s left will disappear or be pocketed by Arafat cronies.

“It’s the money of the Palestinian people,” said Palestinian legislator Hassan Khreishe. Arafat has long resisted proper accounting for the funds, which include Arab payments to the PLO in the 1970s and 1980s, and Western aid to his self-rule government, the Palestinian Authority, after interim peace deals with Israel in the 1990s.

Arafat lived frugally, but needed large sums to maintain loyalties. He would register investments and bank accounts in the names of loyalists, both to buy their support and protect the holdings from scrutiny and seizure, al-Ghussein said. Only Arafat had the full picture, he said, and it’s not clear whether he has left a will or any financial records.

Mohammed Rashid, Arafat’s financial adviser, denied his boss was rich. “Arafat has no personal property in any part in the world,” he told Al-Arabiya television on Sunday. “He doesn’t even have a tent, a house, an orchard or any account that we can call personal in the name of Yasser Arafat.” However, Forbes magazine ranked him No. 6 on its 2003 list of the richest “kings, queens and despots,” estimating he was worth $300 million. Shalom Harari, a former top Israeli intelligence official, said Arafat has stashed away $700 million.

Two names frequently come up in connection with Arafat’s money — Rashid and Arafat’s wife, Suha. Rashid has handled hundreds of millions of dollars in Palestinian Authority revenue Arafat diverted from the treasury. Suha Arafat, Arafat’s wife of 13 years and mother of his daughter, lives in Paris and has received monthly payments of $100,000 from Palestinian coffers, according to a senior official.

Al-Ghussein said the big money from the Arab world started flowing in 1979. For a decade, the PLO received about $200 million a year, $85 million of it from Saudi Arabia, he said. Al-Ghussein said that during that period, he would hand Arafat a check for $10.25 million every month from the PLO budget, ostensibly for payments to PLO fighters and families of those killed in battle.

Much of the Arab money dried up after Arafat infuriated his patrons in 1990 by siding with Saddam Hussein during Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. But Saddam gave Arafat $150 million in three payments, al-Ghussein said. The PLO investments are said to have ranged from an airline in the Maldives to a Greek shipping company, banana plantations, a diamond mine in Africa and real estate.

A senior Palestinian Authority official with detailed knowledge of financial transactions said much of the money has been lost. Some of the companies went bankrupt. In other cases, Arafat cronies absconded with the cash. Some frontmen for PLO investments died, and the holdings passed to their families.

If all of this, or even parts of it can be proven, then the legacy of Yasser Arafat will be forever tainted. Of course, as the article suggests, I doubt that Yasser Arafat was and is alone in acting in such a manner, but the article above sure helps explaining why Yasser Arafat was able to cling on to power for so long; he had a great deal of help from his “friends”, and this help came at a high price, which in the end is payed by the Palestinian people.