Assault on Democracy

Hugo Chávez has long considered Noam Chomsky one of his best friends in the west. He has basked in the renowned scholar's praise for Venezuela's socialist revolution and echoed his denunciations of US imperialism.

Venezuela's president, who hasrevealed that he has had surgery in Cuba to remove a cancerous tumour, turned one of Chomsky's books into an overnight bestseller after brandishing it during a UN speech. He hosted Chomsky in Caracas with smiles and pomp. Earlier this year Chávez even suggested Washington make Chomsky the US ambassador to Venezuela.
The president may be about to have second thoughts about that, because his favourite intellectual has now turned his guns on Chávez.
Speaking to the Observer last week, Chomsky has accused the socialist leader of amassing too much power and of making an "assault" on Venezuela's democracy.
"Concentration of executive power, unless it's very temporary and for specific circumstances, such as fighting world war two, is an assault on democracy. You can debate whether [Venezuela's] circumstances require it: internal circumstances and the external threat of attack, that's a legitimate debate. But my own judgment in that debate is that it does not."
Chomsky, a linguistics professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, spoke on the eve of publishing an open letter  that accuses Venezuela's authorities of "cruelty" in the case of a jailed judge.
The self-described libertarian socialist says the plight of María Lourdes Afiuni is a "glaring exception" in a time of worldwide cries for freedom. He urges Chávez to release her in "a gesture of clemency" for the sake of justice and human rights.
Chomsky reveals he has lobbied Venezuela's government behind the scenes since late last year after being approached by the Carr centre for human rights policy at Harvard University. Afiuni earned Chávez's ire in December 2009 by freeing Eligio Cedeño, a prominent banker facing corruption charges. Cedeño promptly fled the country.
In a televised broadcast the president, who had taken a close interest in the case, called the judge a criminal and demanded she be jailed for 30 years. "That judge has to pay for what she has done."
Afiuni, 47, a single mother with cancer, spent just over a year in jail, where she was assaulted by other prisoners. In January, authorities softened her confinement to house arrest pending trial for corruption, which she denies.
"Judge Afiuni has suffered enough," states Chomsky's letter. "She has been subject to acts of violence and humiliations to undermine her human dignity. I am convinced that she must be set free."
Amnesty International and the European parliament, among others, have condemned the judge's treatment but the intervention of a scholar considered a friend of the Bolivarian revolution, which is named after the hero of Venezuelan independence, Simón Bolívar, is likely to sting even more.
Speaking from his home in Boston, Chomsky said Chávez, who has been in power for 12 years, appeared to have intimidated the judicial system. "I'm sceptical that [Afiuni] could receive a fair trial. It's striking that, as far as I understand, other judges have not come out in support of her … that suggests an atmosphere of intimidation."
He also faulted Chávez for adopting enabling powers to circumvent the national assembly. "Anywhere in Latin America there is a potential threat of the pathology of caudillismo [authoritarianism] and it has to be guarded against. Whether it's over too far in that direction in Venezuela I'm not sure, but I think perhaps it is. A trend has developed towards the centralisation of power in the executive which I don't think is a healthy development."
Chomsky expressed concern over Chávez's cancer and wished the president a full and prompt recovery.
Chomsky's book Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance became a publishing sensation after Chávez waved a copy during a UN address in 2006 famous for his denunciation of President George W Bush as a devil.
Its author remains fiercely critical of the US, which he said had tortured Bradley Manning, alleged source of the diplomatic cables exposed by WikiLeaks, and continued to wage a "vicious, unremitting" campaign against Venezuela.
The Chávez government deserved credit for sharply reducing poverty and for its policies of promoting self-governing communities and Latin American unity, Chomsky said. "It's hard to judge how successful they are, but if they are successful they would be seeds of a better world."
Leonardo Vivas, co-ordinator of Latin American initiatives at the Carr Centre, said that Afiuni's case was the most prominent example of the erosion of justice in several Latin American countries. The centre hoped that Caracas would now heed Chomsky.
"He is one of the most important public intellectuals in the US and is respected by the Venezuelan government."
The decision to lobby publicly was taken because quiet diplomacy had limits, said Vivas.
Chávez, who is convalescing in Cuba, has a reputation for lashing back at criticism, raising the risk that the Afiuni initative could backfire.
"That could happen," said Vivas. "But that would mean recognition of the problem."








Chomsky's letter


Judge María Lourdes Afiuni has suffered enough
With this public letter I want to express my open support of the liberty of judge María Lourdes Afiuni, detained in Venezuela since December 2009. In November of last year I was informed of her situation by the Latin American initiative of the Carr Centre for human rights policy at Harvard University. Ever since, I have been directly involved in mediation efforts with the Venezuelan government, with the purpose of releasing her from prison through a gesture of clemency by President Chávez.
Judge Afiuni had my sympathy and solidarity from the very beginning. The way she was detained, the inadequate conditions of her imprisonment, the degrading treatment she suffered in the Instituto Nacional de Orientación Femenina, the dramatic erosion of her health and the cruelty displayed against her, all duly documented, left me greatly worried about her physical and psychological wellbeing, as well as about her personal safety.
Those reasons motivated me in December 2010 to address, jointly with the Carr Centre, a petition for an official pardon from the president in the context of the yearly presidential amnesties.
In January I received with relief the news that Venezuela's attorney general had suggested house arrest for judge Afiuni given her fragile health condition, which ended up with emergency surgery. Being in her house with her family and with adequate medical attention has been without doubt a significant improvement of her situation.
However, judge Afiuni has suffered enough. She has been subject to acts of violence and humiliations to undermine her human dignity. I am convinced that she must be set free, not only due to her physical and psychological health conditions, but in conformance with the human dignity the Bolivarian revolution presents as a goal. In times of worldwide cries for freedom, the detention of María Lourdes Afiuni stands out as a glaring exception that should be remedied quickly, for the sake of justice and human rights generally and for affirming an honourable role for Venezuela in these struggles.
For the above reasons I want Venezuelans to be aware of my total solidarity with judge Afiuni, while I affirm my unwavering commitment with the efforts advanced by the Carr Centre in Harvard University to release her from imprisonment. At the same time, I shall keep high hopes that President Chávez will consider a humanitarian act that will end the judge's detention.
@Guardian
Pic : Maria Lourdes Afiuni

Libya Updates

The Libyan announcement of a unilateral ceasefire made by foreign minister Moussa Koussa leaves several important questions unanswered. Is it simply a ploy to divide the UN after the approval of the security council resolution? And how will a ceasefire be monitored and verified? Will the UN be allowed in? Fighting was reported from the port of Misrata shortly before his press conference in Tripoli. His offer of dialogue has already been rejected by the Benghazi-based rebels. The Gaddafi regime is pretty low on credibility so there will be plenty of scepticism about this statement. And Koussa pointedly refused to answer any questions after dropping his bombshell.
Ian Black in Tripoli (Guardian)
pic : Another picture of Libyans celebrating in Benghazi after the UN vote. Photograph: Patrick Baz/AFP/Getty Images

Street Life,Street Death

Here's an interesting Economist article about HIV/AIDS management in critical areas.It reveals how a derogatory attitude  hampers the fight to curb the spread of AIDS.

Pedram

At a glance, the calf-length cape that a good-looking young model swirled around on stage appeared to be made of shaggy sheepskin, wildly inappropriate for the tropical climate of Pattaya, a seaside resort in Thailand. In fact its composition was more apt, if no less uncomfortable: hundreds of dangling prophylactics. Pattaya has one of Thailand’s highest concentrations of go-go bars, massage parlours and other shop windows for the sex trade. Parts of it call to mind Sodom-on-Sea. But this “Condom Fashion Show” was not part of the sleaze. It was staged at a recent United Nations-led “consultation”. The theme—sex workers and HIV, the virus that causes AIDS—was deadly serious, and the effort to turn it into burlesque rather heroic.

The consultation differed in more fundamental ways from the usual run of international conferences. Several dozen sex workers from eight countries (Cambodia, China, Fiji, Indonesia, Myanmar, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea and Thailand) attended as full-fledged participants, not just models in the fashion show. Sex workers are on the front line in the struggle against an epidemic that in Asia still claims 350,000 new infections each year. A 2008 report prepared for the United Nations by an independent commission confirmed that “men who buy sex are the single-most powerful driving force in Asia’s HIV epidemics.” It is thought that about 10m Asian women sell sex to 75m men, who in turn have a further 50m regular partners.

A simple and effective way to cut HIV transmission is to ensure that sex workers have access to condoms, know how to use them and always do so. Yet the UN estimates that only a third of Asia’s sex workers are reached by HIV-prevention programmes. And in some countries possession of condoms is taken as evidence of involvement in prostitution, and hence a cause for harassment, extortion or detention.

Yet sex workers themselves are normally excluded—or exclude themselves—from the air-conditioned conference halls where officials and NGOs discuss their plight. One reason is a poor grasp of English, a language, one male Thai sex worker complained, that “we learned only from our clients”. More importantly, sex workers often suffer from official disdain or condescension and are seen as the problem, not the solution.

Of course, the sex industry has not been ignored in the battle against AIDS. Thailand’s early successes are perhaps best-known. It was the first country in Asia to launch a “100% condom-use programme” in the early 1990s, and it managed to cut HIV prevalence sharply. The danger now is of complacency.

The best prevention schemes involve sex workers themselves. As a Chinese delegate put it, given the chance they do a far better job of educating and helping peers than do the UN or government. Myanmar, not normally cited as an outpost of progressive policy, has an HIV-prevention scheme seen as a model. Population Services International, an international NGO, has set up a “peer-to-peer” network with 18 drop-in centres around the country. There, 350 staff, mostly former or present sex workers themselves, dispense advice, discounted condoms and treatment for sexually transmitted infections. HIV prevalence among sex workers dropped from over 30% in 2000-06 to 18% in 2008.

Still, a Burmese sex worker made a passionate intervention at the conference lamenting the stigma her profession carries. In Myanmar as elsewhere, sex workers suffer at the hands of the authorities. And the worst perpetrators are often the police and other official protectors. Take Cambodia, recognised for bringing down HIV prevalence, partly through a condom-use programme. In 2008 a law on “the Suppression of Human Trafficking and Sexual Exploitation” led to the closure of brothels and a shift of the sex trade to bars and other places, complicating measures to prevent HIV. Worse, Human Rights Watch says, it has helped the police to beat, rob and rape sex workers “with impunity”.

A group of Cambodians wrote: “Our lives and our industry have been ruined by the anti-trafficking industry. We used to work in a brothel where we have safety and solidarity… Now we are scattered on the street where it is more dangerous.”

This is an extreme example of two problems besetting efforts to help sex workers. One is that, in most places, sex work is illegal, and almost everywhere frowned upon. Indonesian delegates complained that a new “Puritanism” accompanying a slow Islamisation of public life is forcing the sex trade underground and so making it more dangerous. As our debate showed, arguments for and against decriminalising prostitution are fierce and complex. But as long as it remains a criminal act, sex workers will be vulnerable to arbitrary abuse.

Second, the debate about sex work has become drowned in a campaign against human trafficking. That campaign, however justified its goals, fosters an assumption that all sex workers ply their trade against their will. Yet most migrant sex workers have left home for good reasons of their own—among them a desire to work away from their families, and to earn more money.

Parts of the debate, such as terminology, are as old as the oldest profession. One side regards “sex worker” as a dangerously obfuscatory euphemism. The other sees “prostitute” as degrading and derogatory. One sees those who sell sex inevitably as the victims of exploitation. But those seeking to be heard in Pattaya wanted recognition as independent actors who have made their own choices. They demand to be treated with basic human dignity just as they are.

Sad News

American special forces were within "seconds" of rescuing the kidnapped British aid worker Linda Norgrove when she was fatally wounded by a suicidal explosion triggered by one of her captors, Nato said yesterday.

Details of how close the pre-dawn operation came to freeing the 36-year-old from a mud-walled compound in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan emerged during a briefing in the capital, Kabul.

US soldiers had already fought their way into the stronghold in the village of Dineshgal, in Kunar province, when the blast occurred on Saturday. One of the kidnappers is believed to have been wearing a suicide vest and standing beside Norgrove when it detonated.

After US medics reached her they gave emergency first aid and evacuated her by helicopter. She died shortly afterwards. Seven insurgents were reported to have been killed in the raid.

The blast occured "seconds before rescuers arrived", a Nato military spokesman said yesterday. "[US special forces] had entered the compound … [but] an insurgent detonated an explosive device that was attached to his person. He was in close enough proximity to Ms Norgrove. She was wounded. Soldiers – who were on the scene very, very shortly afterwards – attempted to provide medical care at the scene. She was evacuated straight away but succumbed to her wounds."

Her grieving family, gathered in their croft on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides, were yesterday waiting to be given a full account of the events since her abduction before issuing a statement.

Her 60-year-old father, John, a retired civil engineer, and her 62-year-old mother, Lorna, who launched the charity Western Isles Beach Clean Up, were too upset to talk. They were joined during the day by Linda's sister Sofie. The family had already recorded a video pleading for her release but the Foreign Office had advised that publicising her identity at that stage would only place her at greater risk.

The rescue mission came three weeks after Norgrove was seized by insurgents as she drove from Jalalabad, where she worked for the US aid organisation Development Alternatives Inc (DAI), to inspect an irrigation project she had overseen.

An intrepid traveller, Norgrove had risked the journey into one of Afghanistan's more dangerous districts in the company of three trusted local workers. After her Afghan staff companions were liberated by their captors, the security forces became fearful that Norgrove was about to be taken over the nearby border into Pakistan. Tribal leaders were reported to have been trying to negotiate her release from Dineshgal, where she was being held. They complained their efforts were hindered after local roads were blocked by coalition troops.

Tributes to Norgrove's dedication poured in over the weekend. Although she grew up in the Outer Hebrides, the family would spend five weeks every second winter in third world countries.

After gaining a first class degree at Aberdeen University, she researched how national park management in Uganda affected the indigenous population and eventually secured a PhD from Manchester University in 2002. She became an environmental specialist at the World Wildlife Fund in Peru before going on to work for the UN in Afghanistan and Laos.

Norgrove had returned recently to Afghanistan to join DAI. Its chief executive, James Boomgard, said: "Linda loved Afghanistan and cared deeply for its people, and she was deeply committed to her development mission. She was an inspiration to many of us."

Scotland's first minister, Alex Salmond, said: "Ms Norgrove was a dedicated aid worker who was doing everything she could to help people in Afghanistan – hopefully that legacy of service in a humanitarian cause can be of some comfort to her loved ones in their time of grief."

The foreign secretary, William Hague, defended the decision to launch a rescue operation. "Responsibility for this tragic outcome rests squarely with the hostage-takers," he insisted. "From the moment they took her, her life was under grave threat. Given who held her, and the danger she was in, we judged that Linda's best chance lay in attempting to rescue her."

In the aftermath of the third fatality among British aid workers in Afghanistan since the summer, both the Foreign Office and the Department for International Development insisted there were no plans to alter advice given to those travelling into potentially hostile regions.

In July, Shaun Sexton, 29, from Northumberland, a former member of the Parachute Regiment, died during an attack on DAI offices in Kunduz, northern Afghanistan. He had been working as a security guard. A month later the British doctor Karen Woo and nine others were killed by gunmen in the north-eastern province of Badakhshan in what police said was a robbery. She had been with Christian International Assistance Mission, a charity providing eye care in remote villages.

Community devastated as hope turns to grief

Among the windswept, isolated crofting community in the Outer Hebrides where Linda Norgrove grew up, many came forward yesterday to offer condolences to her family as they tried to come to terms with their loss.

Norgrove, who grew up in the settlement of Mangersta, in the district of Uig on the Isle of Lewis, was remembered as both "caring and clever" by one her teachers and praised for commitment to overseas aid.

Margaret Macleod, who taught Linda and her younger sister, Sofie, said: "She was a truly lovely girl. She was always concerned about the welfare of her friends and classmates. She was a bright, caring and calm girl and I hoped those qualities would help her in the situation she faced.

"The whole community is devastated and deeply upset – heartbroken by her death. Her parents are really wonderful and caring people. Linda's mother, Lorna, was inspired by her daughter's work in the third world to get involved in things like Water Aid. It is an absolute tragedy what has happened."

The family were remembered in prayers at Uig Church yesterday. Its Church of Scotland minister, Hugh Stewart, said: "We have been praying for the family and Linda's safe release since she was taken. Sadly this has ended tragically and the whole community is feeling this very badly and deeply. It is a very close-knit community. We will continue to remember the family in our prayers."

The area's former GP, John Hay, added: "We watch the horrors of Afghanistan on television without thinking it will touch a place like this. But this tragic incident brings home that the war even impinges here and shows that the effects of the conflict in Afghanistan can reach anywhere.

"The whole community will feel this loss very badly and will be devastated by it. The Norgroves are a well respected and much liked and admired family. Our hearts and prayers go out to them."