Friday, December 7, 2007

EU-Africa summit seeks action on Darfur and Mugabe


By Axel Bugge Reuters - LISBON (Reuters)

Human rights groups urged European and African leaders gathering for their first summit in seven years on Friday to act on Sudan's Darfur crisis and confront Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe over rights abuses.

Activists hoped the 73 leaders from the world's largest trading bloc and its poorest continent would put rights at the top of their agenda at the summit, which will aim to create fresh partnerships on issues like immigration and development.

Previous attempts to hold the summit have failed over Mugabe's attendance but this time the EU, mindful of growing Chinese influence in Africa, decided to hold the summit and invite Mugabe, who arrived late on Thursday.

Mugabe is seen by African leaders as an independence hero and many said they would not attend if he was not invited. Prime Minister Gordon Brown decided to boycott the summit because Mugabe would be there.

Foreign Secretary David Miliband told BBC radio on Friday it would have been "absurd" to sit down next to Mugabe "through a discussion of good governance, of human rights, and pretend there wasn't absolute meltdown going on in Zimbabwe."

Ana Gomes, a Portuguese member of the European parliament, said Europe defends human rights but often fails to act due to the need to secure allies.

"Europe often closes its eyes with the pretext that they are western allies against terrorism, saying there is progress when there is no progress," Gomes said.

A group of 40 African and European parliamentarians was joined by 50 human rights groups in urging the leaders to tackle the plight of thousands of civilians in Sudan's Darfur region.

"MPs, campaigners and human rights activists are all asking the same question: how can our leaders ignore one of the world's worst crises?" asked Glenys Kinnock, a member of the European Parliament.

"Especially when (Sudanese) President (Omar Hassan al-) Bashir, the man primarily responsible for so much of the suffering, is in their midst," she said in a statement.

The U.N. Security Council approved in July a U.N.-African Union peace mission of 26,000 soldiers and police for Darfur. But U.N. peacekeeping chief Jean-Marie Guehenno has cast doubt on the mission due to restrictions imposed by Sudan.

TRADE TENSIONS

Business leaders from the two continents meet on Friday before the summit on Saturday and Sunday, where tension over trade is likely to be a hot topic.

The EU says it needs to clinch new Economic Partnership Agreements with former European colonies in Africa, and other regions of the world, before a World Trade Organization waiver of current preferential treatment expires on December 31.

Some African nations have complained they will face too much competition and are being strong-armed into signing new deals.

"We all agree that we should be allied to Europe ... but the method is outdated," Senegal's President Abdoulaye Wade said on television station France 24 on Thursday. "You can't put us in a strait-jacket, that won't work."

On Friday Ivory Coast initiated an interim trade deal with the EU, making the world's largest cocoa producer the first West African country to sign such a bilateral deal, which will have provisional trade terms until a broader EPA is signed.

But bigger African economies such as South Africa and Nigeria have refused to sign EPAs.

(Reporting by Axel Bugge, Ingrid Melander, Henrique Almeida, Sergio Goncalves and Elisabete Tavares, Editing by Mary Gabriel)

Copyright © 2007 Yahoo! All rights reserved.

Wednesday, December 5, 2007

China to evict 1.5M for Olympics




By BRADLEY S. KLAPPER, Associated Press Writer
December 5,2007

GENEVA - China continues to evict 13,000 people each month in preparation for the Beijing Olympics, despite worldwide attention and increased scrutiny, a housing rights group said Wednesday.

The Center on Housing Rights and Evictions said a recent trip to the Chinese capital confirmed an estimate it made earlier this year that 1.5 million people would be displaced by the time the 2008 Games are held.

Beijing says the group is grossly inflating the number of people being relocated as a result of the Olympic preparations, and that residents are content with the compensation they have received.

"Despite courageous protests inside China, and condemnation by many international human rights organizations, the Beijing municipality and Beijing Organizing Committee of the Olympic Games have persisted with these evictions and displacements," said Jean du Plessis, the Geneva-based COHRE's deputy director.

The group — which claimed in June that 1.25 million had already been displaced — said it returned to Beijing in August and found that forced evictions were continuing unabated.

In September, the Beijing municipality demolished several buildings in a run-down neighborhood called the "petitioners' village" in Fengtai District, which provided housing for thousands from all over China who came to complain to the central government about land seizures, forced evictions and corruption, COHRE said.

"Evictions in Beijing often involve the complete demolition of poor peoples' houses," the group said. "The inhabitants are then forced to relocate far from their communities and workplaces, with higher transportation costs driving them further into poverty.

"In Beijing, and in China more generally, the process of demolition and eviction is characterized by arbitrariness and lack of due process. In many cases, tenants are given little or no notice of their eviction and do not receive the promised compensation."

The group said it was pleased the International Olympic Committee is taking housing rights more seriously, including guaranteed commitments that local people would not be displaced in its deal with Russia for the 2014 Winter Games, which will be hosted by the Black Sea resort of Sochi.

In August, the director of Beijing's construction committee said only about 40,000 people were being relocated yearly, and about 2,000 were moved to build new venues for the games. Sui Zhenjiang also said residents were adequately compensated, adding that 16,000-17,000 "affordable" houses had been built in the city of 15 million.

"The 1.5 million figure is definitely wrong," Sui said of COHRE's estimation.

COHRE also criticized Myanmar and Slovakia on Thursday for "pervasive housing rights violations" in 2007.

It said Myanmar, also known as Burma, was responsible for the "mass displacement of more than 1 million civilians from their lands and homes."

Slovakia was cited because "municipalities deliberately neglect to improve — or indeed actively strive to worsen — the housing conditions of Roma," also known as Gypsies, said Claude Cahn, COHRE's advocacy chief.

Copyright © 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

Tuesday, December 4, 2007

Sir Ian Blair- Chief of Police, London UK resignation demanded


News article by Lee Barnes 2nd July 2005

The head of the Metropolitan Police Sir Ian Blair, a close friend of Tony Blair and whose wife is a solicitor and who once worked with the Prime minister’s wife Cherie Blair, should resign.

Sir Ian was found guilty of racial discrimination this week against white police officers after his force was found to have racially discriminated against three white officers who were disciplined after falsely being alleged to have made racist remarks at a training day. The employment tribunal said Sir Ian, barely five months into his post, had hung his own officers “out to dry”. Met Commissioner Sir Ian Blair was found by an employment tribunal to be guilty of prejudicing internal disciplinary proceedings against the three CID officers and of treating them unfavourably.

Sir Ian, who at the time of the allegations was Scotland Yard's deputy commissioner in charge of diversity, was said to have trusted the word of an Asian female officer, Detective Sgt Shabnam Chaudhri, over that of the three white officers, who were later cleared of any wrongdoing by the force's most senior Asian officer, Deputy Assistant Commissioner Tarique Ghaffur.

Blair’s intervention

Det Constable Tom Hassell, 60, Acting Det Inspector Paul Whatmore, 39, and Det Sgt Colin Lockwood, 55, today won their claim for racial discrimination against the Met. The tribunal panel, sitting in Stratford, east London, ruled in favour of all three officers, saying they had been treated differently because of their race. The hearing was told Sir Ian's attempted intervention was made without his having investigated the case or seeing the evidence used by the police investigations board.

The panel ruled their suspension had been justified but Sir Ian's later intervention was wrong. Chairman Ian Pritchard-Witts said: "We take the view that what this deputy commissioner wanted was an example.

"We ta ke the view, using his own words, that white officers were to be hung out to dry. He prejudiced the matter, why else ask for a judicial review of his own officers' decisions. It points unerringly to unfavourable treatment."

Findings “hurtful”

Sir Ian has said that the finding of the tribunal that the Metropolitan Police were institutionally racist against indigenous white officers was hurtful to the force. Rank and file officers believe that he has betrayed their fellow officers now regard the Metropolitan Police as an anti-white racist police force operating to a New Labour political agenda.

Sir Ian described the remarks at the heart of this week's employment tribunal defeat as Islamophobic: "That language was gratuitous, offensive and deliberate. Officers can expect to be disciplined for using language like that. I want this force to have no place for racism".

If I was one of those officers I would now look at suing Sir Ian for Libel and abu se of authority within the Police. Not only is the language not racist as defined in common law, but it is also a fact that Islam is a religion not a race. Therefore Sir Ian is merely further damaging the reputations of the officers themselves. The fact that Sir Ian can still call those officers ' racist', after having been found guilty of racism himself by the Tribunal, shows the arrogance and utter incompetence of the man.

Guardian interview

In an interview with the Guardian Sir Ian Blair reveals that he intends to continue to racially cleanse the police force of white officers for political reasons and make to make his force less white, less male and more in line with the politics of the Labour Party.

Sir Ian said the Met and British policing had no choice but to embrace diversity, because it somehow 'delivered better protection to the public': "Issues about understanding diversity, about respect for different communities, respect for different tra ditions in many occupations is broadly a moral case. For the police service and Metropolitan police in particular, it is a fundamental, brutal business case. You can't police London without understanding the diverse communities we serve.

"How can you police the Chinese community, the Tamil community, emerging east European communities, north African community, how can you do this without understanding and showing respect to the cultures of which this city is made up?

"That's why I'm so unrepentant."

The fact is Mr. Blair, that ' racism ' also includes adopting pro-active racist policies against whites and such anti-white racism does not make up for historical racism against ethnic minorities. It merely increases distrut of the Police themselves. The adoption of racist, sexist policies that seek to ethnically cleanse the Police force of white, male officers would be regarded as illegal and repugnant if the officers to be expelled on the basis of their race wer e black or female. Therefore the adoption of racist policies against white officers is a declaration that the police no longer regard whites in the capital, and within the Force itself, as citizens with equal civil rights compared to ethnic minority Londoners and police. Therefore the Metropolitan Police is now a racist police force whose policing priorities are defined by how successful those racist policies are when measured against the ethnic cleansing of white officers from the police force.

Need to cut crime

The paternalistic racist notion that the various ' communities ' in London give a proverbial toss about how anti-racist the Metropolitan Police actually is demeans those who from all ethnic groups within London who just want the Police to cut crime. The fact that Sir Ian has adopted the Neo-Marxist ideology and rhetoric of 'Identity Politics' shows that he has politicised the Police force itself.

The rise in Identity Politics within the Police Force is a manifestation of the New Left within British Society. The New Left have shifted their ideological struggle against the British State, away from ' State ownership of the means of Production ' to ' State control over the Outcomes of Reproduction '. Instead of creating a Socialist Economy based on Marxist economics, they seek to impose a Marxist society through the struggle for ' Equality '. They have co-opted the language of Liberalism and human rights to enact an agenda that is Marxist and anti-individualistic.

Having lost the Economic struggle in our Global Capitalist system, the New Left now seek to Impose 'Equality' on society by moving the Marxist struggle away from the re-distribution of wealth in society to the re-distribution of rights in society. The Marxist Revolution has shifted from Class Warfare to a pseudo-anti-racist struggle based on ' empowering ' various nominated ethnic groups. The struggle has also moved from economics to a “Culture Struggle”. The New Marxist vanguard are now the ethnic minority groups, and their white lackeys in the Establishment power structures like the Police and the Courts, that seek to destroy the existing social order from within the system itself.

Group rights

In the Doublespeak of the PC Police and Neo-Marxist vanguard , the use of words such as ' chinese community' , ' black community', ' jewish community ', ' Irish community ' etc etc is the Neo-Marxist rhetoric of what is now defined by the New Left as ' Group Rights '. The use of the language of the concept of so called ' Group Rights ' by the Neo-Marxists is used to promote the concept of an ' inclusive society ' or an inclusive Police Force. This is nothing more than a justification for State controlled social engineering and allocation of rights and powers on a discriminatory and arbitrary political basis. But in reality the concept of group rights merely Balkanises society and the police into competing racial, ethnic , religious, sexual and cultural blocs battling for power and position within society or the police itself. This leads eventually to Society or the institution, such as the Police, being torn apart from within. In the name of inclusiveness, the individual’s self identity is denied and nullified and instead they become part of some faceless amorphous bloc where the notion of individuality itself is relegated to an inferior and powerless status. As the power and status of the ' Group ' grows more powerful then the more power it demands, until eventually the whole of society or the institution is in thrall to that group.

In this Balkanised State the politicians and Judges then engineer and control society by allocating power and rights only to those that they allow to claim them, and thereby the Establishment Elite becomes the sole master over all citizens and allocate rights only to those they want to have power in society itself.

If a senior White Police officer had been found guilty of racially discriminating against black officers 'and hanging them out to dry' then they would have been made to resign from the Police force within 24 hours. The fact the journalistic placemen in the media are now lining up to defend Sir Ian shows how corrupt the media itself has become, as it seeks to defend its new Establishment lackeys from being cast out of the power structures they have been put into to subvert from within.

For the sake of the respect for the police and so that White Londoners can have faith in the Metropolitan Police Sir Ian must resign. If he doesn’t then we will have no choice but to regard the Metropolitan police as an institutionally racist body which has embarked upon an overt political and racist agenda against white Londoners.

If Sir Ian stays then we know that the Metropolitan Police is no better than the paramilitary wing of the Labour Party and a political police force perceived by white communities in the capital in the same way that the RUC were in Ireland within the Catholic community.

When Sir Ian became commissioner in February he pledged to modernise the capital's force, and vowed to be more responsive to the public: "I want to ensure that it's the public that shapes the Metropolitan police; that's my absolute determination."

This is utter rubbish, as the public are a non-divisible group who have the same rights and have the same responsibilities as everyone else. By adopting the political language of Group Rights within the Police Force Sir Ian has in fact politicised the police and destroyed the very notion of their existing in London 'the public'. Now Sir Ian must pander to the power of the self appointed spokesman and leaders of 'communities' instead of protecting the public as a non-divisible group.

Sir Ian described the remarks at the heart of this week's employment tribunal defeat as Islamophobic: "That language was gratuitous, offensive and delibe rate. Officers can expect to be disciplined for using language like that. I want this force to have no place for racism".

It is now time that Sir Ian resigned from his job.

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