Howard W. French (http://www.howardwfrench.com)

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A Continent for the Taking

Africa first captivated New York Times journalist Howard W. French more than twenty-five years ago, but his knowledge of and passion for the continent has the depth of a lifetime association. His experiences there awakened him as nothing before to… read more

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Commentary & Reviews · Interviews

September 29 2006
Copyright The Financial Times

Shinzo Abe, Japan’s new prime minister, on Friday pledged to create a
“new Japan” that was more assertive abroad and more proud of its
traditions at home.
In his first policy address since becoming prime minister, Mr Abe, 52,
told a joint session of parliament that his administration would make
education more patriotic, diplomacy more robust and act to rewrite a
constitution “drafted almost 60 years ago when Japan was under
occupation”.
He also said his administration, packed with like-minded social
conservatives, would try to instill greater pride and patriotism, which
he argues has been stifled by an exaggerated sense of guilt following
defeat in the second world war.
“The time has come for us to step forward, with quiet pride in our
hearts to create a new country.” He added: “I want to undertake reform
of awareness so society as a whole shares family values.”
Mr Abe, the first prime minister born since the end of the second world
war, is attempting to set a different tone from the administration of
Junichiro Koizumi, which came to power in 2001 at a time of economic
crisis.
Mr Abe argues that, with the economy returned to a modicum of health,
it
is time to address issues postponed throughout the post-war period when
Japan was primarily concerned with generating fast economic growth.
He said he would seek to strengthen the prime minister’s office, a
process begun by Mr Koizumi as a way of neutralising what he often
considered the dead hand of the bureaucracy. Mr Abe has handpicked more
advisers to work in his office than is customary, with some of the top
appointments aimed at establishing a US-style national security
council.
Mr Abe did not spend much time in his speech addressing how to improve
strained relations with China and South Korea, aside from saying he
would work for “future-oriented discussions”, a phrase often employed
by
his predecessor.
His administration is pushing hard for early summit meetings with both
China and South Korea, and government officials said on Friday that an
early meeting with Roh Moo Hyun, South Korea’s leader, was possible
following a positive telephone conversation between the two leaders the
previous day.
On the economy, Mr Abe said he would put more priority on cutting
expenditure than raising taxes and pledged to keep government borrowing
below Y30,000bn. However, he would not “run away” from tax increases,
he
said.
He also said he would push to revive local economies, some of which are
not experiencing the near-boom conditions of big cities such as Tokyo
and Nagoya, and ensure that those left behind had a “second chance”.
In an interview with the Financial Times on Friday, Akira Amari, trade
and industry minister, played down suggestions that Mr Abe’s
revitalisation plan would be expensive or lead to more government
interference.
“What we are aiming at is equality of opportunity in all stages of life
and in all places,” he said. “Since we have a free market economy we
are
obviously not aiming at equality of results. It is obvious that there
will be disparities of outcome.”
Copyright The
Financial Times Limited 2006

Posted at 10:43 PM · Comments (0)

Sep 28th 2006 | DAR ES SALAAM

DEVELOPMENT economists use it as a measure. If Tanzania can haul itself
out of poverty, others can too. But if it cannot, there will have to be
another rethink about the way that aid money is spent.

For the moment, Tanzania is one of east Africa’s few good-news stories.
That isn’t saying much. The country remains wretchedly poor,
inefficient, with little medical care in its remote areas, few roads and with
frequent power cuts, even in Dar es Salaam, the largest city. But donors,
disillusioned by the corruption and/or brutality that goes on
elsewhere, are happy to pour money into somewhere that is, at least, both
peaceful and stable.

And in Jakaya Kikwete, Tanzania has found a president committed to
doing his best to cut poverty. A long-serving former foreign minister, Mr
Kikwete was elected in December with 80% of the vote. He remains hugely
popular.

He is helped by the efforts of his predecessors, particularly the
sturdy Benjamin Mkapa. The country’s GDP growth is expected to be 5.8% this
year, rising to 6.7% next year, and inflation has been low for years.
Tanzania’s relative lack of graft means that some donors now put their
money directly into the national budget with few strings attached.
Britain hopes to deposit $170m a year into Tanzania’s coffers in this way
for the next few years?ust the kind of predictability of giving that the
aid community has called for.

The question is whether the Tanzanian government will be able to spend
the money wisely. Prioritising is difficult. For instance, it takes Mr
Kikwete over an hour, in an interview, just to outline the basic needs:
more schools, universities and hospitals; more roads. Mr Kikwete’s
party, Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM), has set ambitious targets for all these
shortages. Lack of clean water is a particular worry. “It tortures our
women,” says Mr Kikwete, with feeling. CCM’s manifesto calls for
doubling the access to drinking water by 2010.

Overhauling the largely subsistence agricultural sector could be even
more important. If yields can be increased through subsidised irrigation
and fertilisers, and if peasants can diversify their production from
maize, “we can say bye-bye to poverty,” promises Mr Kikwete. That is an
old tune?gronomists have been humming it since the 1960s. But this time
the plans are backed by road-building schemes, new technologies, market
mechanisms and, just possibly, enough donor money to underwrite the
subsidies.

Much also rests on how CCM performs. The party has dominated national
politics since independence, with disastrous economic results in the old
days. It is no longer socialist?he old mantra of self-reliance is more
of a sentiment than an ideology now?ut nor is it yet a businessman’s
party. Though the past few years have brought in some foreign investors,
especially in gold mining, there are few signs of the kind of
innovative policies that might attract significant investment or lure back
educated Tanzanians from abroad.

Still, CCM can take credit for Tanzania’s strong sense of
“togetherness”: it is a place where loyalty to the country often counts for more
than tribal or religious identity. Mr Kikwete is an observant Muslim. The
first president, Julius Nyerere, was a pious Roman Catholic; the church
is considering him for sainthood. Togetherness may also explain why CCM
remains as dominant as it still is: at last year’s election, it won 202
of the 232 parliamentary seats.

Mr Kikwete travels with minimal security. He scrolls through several
hundred text messages on his mobile phone each day, most of them from
ordinary citizens who have somehow obtained his number. Sometimes he texts
back. He is clearheaded on international issues. He is happy to
contribute three battalions to a prospective UN peacekeeping force in the
Darfur region of Sudan, he says, so long as someone else foots the bill.

Perhaps the biggest reason for hope lies glittering below the ground.
The government’s demand for a bigger cut in revenues means that its
relations with foreign gold-mining concerns are strained. But the country
remains rich in deposits of gold and other minerals. Some reckon that
there is $20 billion in nickel deposits alone, somewhere down there in
the earth.

Copyright ?2006 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All
rights reserved.

Posted at 5:59 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright - Financial Times

Zambia’s Copperbelt, an industrial hub set amid torrid African bush, is one of the world’s richest stores of the metal. During British rule the region formed the backbone of the colonial economy and served as a cradle of Zambian nationalism. In the 1970s Maoist China, in a mark of solidarity with southern Africa’s newly independent states, built the Tanzam Railway linking Zambia’s Copperbelt with the Indian Ocean ports of Dar es Salaam and Mombasa.

Today China - as an emerging economic colossus hungry for raw materials - is back in Zambia as a direct investor. Like past foreign patrons, the Chinese are taking no chances with their new prize.

In July six workers at the Chinese-owned Chambishi mine were shot and wounded after rioting over wages. This was the company’s second serious incident in just over a year. In April 2005 a massive and still unexplained blast levelled an explosives factory on the premises, owned by China’s NFC Mining Africa, killing 46 people. A witness says rescue workers were still retrieving body parts from the scene the next day.

Both incidents had a brief impact on world copper prices. They also stirred resentments in Zambia against the Chinese, a growing economic and diplomatic force there as they are around Africa. Now the issue has ricocheted directly into Zambian politics as the country prepares to vote in today’s general election. Michael Sata, a maverick populist challenging the investor- and donor-friendly incumbent Levy Mwanawasa for the presidency, has accused Chinese investors of underpaying and neglecting the safety of Zambian workers, and vows to limit foreign ownership of Zambian mines to 51 per cent.

In an unusual diplomatic intervention, this month Li Baodong, Beijing’s ambassador to Lusaka, said Chinese investors were holding back from committing funds pending the outcome at the polls. He also warned that China might sever relations with Zambia if Mr Sata won. While Beijing later distanced itself from Mr Li’s remarks, the incident starkly illustrated China’s ascendancy on a continent traditionally dominated by the US, France and other western powers.

Elsewhere in Africa, the growing Chinese presence has been greeted with a mixture of appreciation and resentment. Lax regulatory regimes have allowed Chinese goods, traders and workers to move into the continent’s underserved markets with relatively little hindrance. On the positive side, poor African consumers like the cheap goods China exports to their countries. Beijing has also proved a pragmatic, sleeves-up economic partner for governments at odds with the US, from Sudan to Zimbabwe.

But tensions have flared over various issues, from China’s use of its own nationals to rebuild war-ruined infrastructure in Angola to its export of cheap clothing to South Africa, which trade unions there say is destroying local industry. In Zambia, in addition to mining, Chinese investors have moved into sectors as diverse as farming, timber and retail.

In some cases, the newcomers have angered Zambians by importing Chinese citizens for unskilled jobs in areas such as construction. “We need capital and we need skills but we take exception to someone bringing labourers in,” says Chileshe Mulenga, director of Zambia’s Institute for Social and Economic Research and a supporter of Mr Sata.

Chinese investors have also been criticised for deploying poorly-paid and under-equipped Zambians in dangerous jobs. In June Zambian authorities closed the Chinese-owned Collum Coal Mining Industries, based in southern Zambia. This followed reports that workers were being sent underground without protective clothing or boots.

The workers involved in last year’s explosion at Chambishi were unskilled and, according to unions, unprepared for work with hazardous materials. “That explosion happened due to negligence,” says Albert Mando, general secretary of Zambia’s National Union of Mining and Allied Workers. “You need experienced people to work there, but they decided to employ casual labour and cheap workers who didn’t know the dangers of an explosion.”

NFC was greeted as a saviour when it paid Dollars 20m (Pounds 11m, Euros 16m) for 85 per cent of the Chambishi mine in a 1998 privatisation deal, averting a threat of closure. But since then, against a background of soaring copper prices, tensions have flared between workers and management over wages and other issues.

In the July clash, one worker was shot by Zambian police at the plant after employees rioted, according to Xu Riyong, Chambishi’s company secretary. Another five were taken to hospital after they stormed into the Chinese residence, prompting expatriate management to open fire, says Mr Xu, who expresses regret for the incident.

Labour relations have recently improved since the implementation of a new collective agreement with workers. “When we came, conditions of service for employees were quite bad,” says Mr Mando. “We negotiated with them and conditions started improving.”

In addition to criticising foreign investors, Mr Sata has also promised a more assertive relationship with donors, who finance a large portion of the poor country’s government budget. “I think China’s relationship (with Zambia) is very imperialistic and that the attitude of western donors is also very imperialistic,” says Guy Scott, general secretary of Mr Sata’s PF party. “We had the western powers and then the Russians here in the Seventies,” he says. “Now we have the Chinese.”

Recent opinion polls show Mr Mwanawasa’s government fending off the threat from the PF leader. But even if he loses the election, Mr Sata does appear to have put Mr Mwanawasa’s government on the defensive. The Zambian president last week ordered the arrest and prosecution of investors in the copper industry who violated labour laws.

Support for the opposition candidate certainly runs high in Kamwala, an area of modest trading shops in Lusaka. Mabvuto Nkoma, a 24-year-old trader selling gauzy women’s skirts made in Dubai for Hong Ling, a Chinese-owned trading company, is one of many local people who say they will vote for Mr Sata. “I like the way he talks,” Mr Nkoma says of the candidate. “I want a government that will encourage people to build (infrastructure) - not just investors who will come here to start trading.”

Posted at 1:44 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright Council on Foreign Relations

September 25, 2006

China caused an uproar in Western media this month when it announced new press restrictions, dictating that foreign news agencies must distribute their stories through the state-controlled Xinhua news agency. The move targets wire services like Reuters and Bloomberg that provide financial information directly to clients (Asia Times), and is part of a recent surge in protectionist provisions (TIME) limiting international companies in China from doing business ranging from real estate investment to mergers acquisitions. Chinese officials responded to Western criticism by defending the new regulations (NYT), saying they are a means to standardize the news and not a way for Xinhua to get a cut of the wires’ profits. Premier Wen Jiaobao backtracked on the measures (BBC) during a visit to London when he said Beijing “will ensure the freedom and rights of the foreign news media.”

The controversy over new media restrictions highlights Chinese media censorship, discussed in this new Backgrounder, which watchdog organizations say Beijing has stepped up under President Hu Jintao. The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) reports the regulations tighten a 1996 agreement allowing direct distribution of financial news to clients. CPJ also says there are more than thirty journalists currently jailed in China, including reporters and researchers employed by The New York Times and The Straits Times of Singapore. In their 2006 report on the state of the media in China, Reporters Without Borders says “nothing escapes the censors who stoke up a climate of fear within editorial offices.” The organization ranked China 159th out of 167 countries in its 2005 index on press freedom worldwide.

Beijing exerts media controls through systematic restrictions as well as through financial incentives for journalists to exercise self-censorship, explains Ashley Esarey, an expert on East Asian media, in a Freedom House report (PDF). The Congressional-Executive Commission on China outlines the government agencies that institutionalize censorship. U.S. companies such as Yahoo! and Google are complicit in building the “Great Firewall of China,” reports Human Rights Watch, summarizing how the government blocks information moving from the global Internet to China’s Internet. In the International Herald Tribune, Howard W. French writes about a Chinese web portal editor who was fired after the site posted a survey asking respondents if they would choose to be Chinese in a future life and 64 percent answered “No.” He suggests Beijing could dub September “Thought Control Month” if this and other recent moves to control freedom of speech weren’t so troubling.

Despite Beijing’s attempts to step up media control, it may only be a matter of time before the censorship wall comes down. An editorial in the Christian Science Monitor says that as China becomes a thriving participant in the global economy, even if its leaders believe they can keep bolstering repressive press censorship measures, “The tide of history and the inexorable flow of news is against them.” Experts say the determination of young Chinese—including more than 100 million internet users—to gain free access to news means “Beijing will ultimately lose the information war (LAT).” The blogosphere has proven a difficult space to grasp for China’s censoring bodies. Despite official pronouncements in July that blog and chat room supervision would be tightened (South China Morning Post), Beijing can’t control leaks about domestic unrest, as shown by the recent case of a reappearing riot video (GlobalVoices.org).

Posted at 9:18 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright Slate
Posted Wednesday, Sept. 27, 2006, at 7:07 PM ET

Once upon a time my night table groaned from the weight of the magazines I piled onto it: weeklies, monthlies, quarterlies, and one-offs; U.S. and international; men’s magazines, political rags, the newsweeklies, and all the various city, computer, sports, car, and music titles. Paris Review. Science. The Nose. National Lampoon. Outside. Mondo 2000. Stereo Review. Fortune. Sight & Sound. Raygun.

My magazine ocean refused no river, including fashion magazines like Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, which I had come to appreciate through the interpretive lens of a junior-high school classmate, with whom I routinely served detention-hall sentences. We did our time in the home-economics classroom, which was well-stocked with fashion magazines, and it was under his tutelage that I learned to appreciate the fashion spreads and lingerie advertisements as a kind of subversive, highly stimulating pornography.

But some time in the late 1990s, I lost my magazine jones. I still bought magazines but didn’t consume them the way I once did. Had they become too formulaic, or had my familiarity with the magazine template inured me to being impressed anymore? Or had the Web replaced my magazine habit?
Click Here!

I got rejonesed about magazines last year, when the editors of Stop Smiling put me on their press list. After a couple of issues of the five-or-six times a year Chicago-based arts and culture magazine, I found myself looking forward to the next, something I can’t say about any other periodical. Stop Smiling is smart. It’s idiosyncratic. It’s a little like Dave Eggers’ old magazine Might in that it’s beautiful to look at, only it’s irony-free. And it brims with the romanticism for magazines that Harold Hayes applied to Esquire, Kurt Andersen and Graydon Carter squeezed into Spy, and Louis Rosetto drenched Wired with.

By calling Stop Smiling my favorite magazine, I don’t intend to cripple it with praise. It’s not ready to be cast in bronze and join the magazine pantheon of Esquire, Spy, Wired, the late-1960s Playboy, and Andre Laguerre’s Sports Illustrated. Yet no other magazine in print commands my cover-to-cover attention the way Stop Smiling does. And the miracle of the magazine is that it does most of its magic with interviews!

I’ve always disdained the long magazine interview, regarding it as the low-budget way to pad an issue with copy. Real magazines hire reporters to write real articles. The exception to this rule has been Playboy, which once put as much energy into interviews as other magazines do to features.

Stop Smiling pinches a little of its interview philosophy from the Charlie Rose program and a tad from the Paris Review. Like the Rose show, it surrenders to its subject a platform for their views. Like the Paris Review, it doesn’t interrogate as much as it encourages subjects to talk about their work, their methods, and their muses. So the interviews of Ralph Steadman, Jim Jarmusch, Philip Gourevitch, Stuart Dybek, Lewis Lapham, Robert Wyatt, Kurt Vonnegut, Joyce Johnson, Hugh Hefner, Norman Mailer (interviewed by his son), George Lois, Bruce Robinson, et al., end up belonging to the subjects more than they belong to Stop Smiling. This sounds like a prescription for a flaccid, indulgent magazine, but it doesn’t work out that way. By picking interesting people to talk to and allowing them to say what’s on their minds, the editors produce beguiling copy. Stop Smiling’s oral history of Hunter S. Thompson bested Rolling Stone’s similarly constructed special issue about the Doctor in every way.

As romantics of a bygone era, Stop Smiling’s editors can’t resist republishing old A.J. Liebling and Mike Royko or resuscitating unpublished Terry Southern. The magazine’s two top editors are old men trapped in young men’s bodies—editor in chief and founder, JC Gabel, is 30, and Managing Editor James Hughes is 27—and their cultural compasses point to the past.

Sure there are interviews with Dave Eggers, Ricky Gervais, and Vince Vaughn, and pieces about Sufjan Stevens and Laura Dawn, but old guys and dead guys are the magazine’s main event. Gabel writes about New Yorker founder Harold Ross. An essay about the Grove Press calls its history “the secret playbook for the birth of everything cool.” Stanley Kubrick’s archivist tells all. Saul Bellow is eulogized. Harriet Monroe is remembered. Kenneth Patchen, George Plimpton, Studs Terkel, Orson Welles, William S. Burroughs, City Lights Book Store—practically anything gray or rotting can provide Stop Smiling with editorial sustenance.

Viewing culture through a rearview mirror can be disastrous for a magazine, especially one staffed by young people who don’t know as much as older people. But I’ve yet to read a Stop Smiling’s cultural retrospective and not learn a lot. Each issue of Stop Smiling boasts a theme—”the Boxing Issue”; “the Chicago Issue”; “the Rebels + Outlaws Issue”; “the Downfall of American Publishing”; and “the U.K. Issue,” to name a few. I find myself imagining future issues I hope the magazine gets around to doing—the art of drugs, war and peace, gangsters, the West, and H.L. Mencken.

Stop Smiling isn’t everybody’s magazine of choice. Earlier this year when the magazine published its love poem to the city of Chicago, the Chicago Reader (PDF) rightly accused it of boosterism. “When you cuddle up with your subjects, are you serving your readers?” the Reader asked less than rhetorically.

I guess it depends on who you’re cuddling, and who your readers are. I’m as ready for Abu Ghraib-style interviews of novelists, filmmakers, poets, and painters as anybody, but I’m not sure what purpose it would serve. But I could be wrong. Every journalistic spine I’ve ever cracked could have benefited from a little more starch.

Stop Smiling brings analogue pleasures to a digital world. I salute it for its lack of pretension (something that being in Chicago, rather than New York, may account for), its intellectual legibility, and its graphic soundness. Thanks to it, my night table groans once more.

******

Posted at 12:18 PM · Comments (0)

My first solo photography show, the fruit of three years of regular shooting of Shanghai’s fast-disappearing old neighborhoods in medium format black and white, is opening October 3 at Galerie Zero, in Berlin, on Oct. 3. (Visitors welcome!) The details can be found in the link below.
High quality, 4-color print catalogues including reproductions of 50 of the images are available upon request for $15. Please contact me at: globetrotter@howardwfrench.com.
Gelatin silver prints are also available.
Disappearing Shanghai will also be showing at the Angkor Photography Festival, in Cambodia, from 11/25 to 12/1/06.

For details of the Berlin show, please seee:

Posted at 12:41 AM · Comments (0)

My first solo photography show, the fruit of three years of regular shooting of Shanghai’s fast-disappearing old neighborhoods in medium format black and white, is opening October 3 at Galerie Zero, in Berlin, on Oct. 3. (Visitors welcome!) The details can be found in the link below.
High quality, 4-color print catalogues are available upon request for $15. Please contact me at: globetrotter@howardwfrench.com.
Gelatin silver prints are also available.
Disappearing Shanghai will also be showing at the Angkor Photography Festival, in Cambodia, from 11/25 to 12/1/06.

http://www.zero-project.org/next.html

Posted at 12:41 AM · Comments (0)

Africa: Girl Power

AfricaFocus Bulletin
Sep 23, 2006 (060923)
(Reposted from sources cited below)

Editor’s Note

“Girls who complete secondary school are up to five time less
likely to contract HIV than girls with no education,” according to
a new ActionAid review of over 600 research studies. But in Africa,
an estimated 22 million girls have never been to primary school.

The contribution of girls’ education to development is widely
acknowledged by international agencies and researchers, the report
notes. But obstacles such as school fees, as well as armed
conflicts, poverty, and other factors still hinder rapid expansion
of girls’ education. Expanding secondary as well as primary
education is critical to combatting HIV/AIDS, this new report
stresses.

This AfricaFocus Bulletin contains the press release and executive
summary from the ActionAid report on Girl’s Education, Sexual
Behaviour and AIDS in Africa. The full report is available on the
ActionAid UK website (see
http://www.actionaid.org.uk/100520/press_release.html).

A wide variety of reports and data on girls’ education is available
at the website of the United Nations Girls’ Education Initiative
(http://www.ungei.org), including announcement of a CD-ROM with
more than 100 recent resources on girls’ education and HIV
prevention (http://www.ungei.org/infobycountry/247_950.html).

++++++++++++++++++++++end editor’s note+++++++++++++++++++++++

Girl Power: Girls’ Education, Sexual Behaviour and AIDS in Africa

ActionAid
http://www.actionaid.org.uk/100520/press_release.html

14 August 2006

Girls educated to secondary and tertiary levels are more likely to
wait before having sex, are much more likely to use condoms when
they do have sex, and are therefore at much less risk of
contracting HIV, according to a new report released on 15 August.

One of the latest trends in the development of AIDS in Africa is
its increasing feminisation. In Africa, 6.3 million young people
aged 15-24 are living with HIV & AIDS, and 74% of those are young
women and girls.

In a systematic review of over 600 pieces of research on girls’
education, sexual behaviour and HIV, ActionAid has shown that
secondary education provides African girls with the power to make
sexual choices that prevent HIV infection.

The research shows that before 1995, educated girls were more
vulnerable to AIDS. Post 1995, as sex education improved and a
greater understanding of HIV prevention developed, more educated
girls became less likely to contract HIV.

Report author, Tania Boler said: “Young women receiving higher
levels of education are likely to wait longer before having sex for
the first time, and are less likely to be coerced into sex.
Strikingly, girls with more education are far more likely to use
condoms and they are less likely to contract HIV.”

The report’s findings challenge the increasingly vocal lobby which
claims it is inappropriate to promote condoms widely in the fight
against HIV.

“This report demonstrates the value of promoting condoms to a broad
population including young people, and not only to high risk groups
such as sex workers,” said Tania Boler.

ActionAid finds that education gives girls power, reduces
vulnerability and helps them make more independent, confident
choices about their sexual behaviour.
The report shows that:

* Schools and teachers are the most trusted source for young people
to learn about HIV, and that school attendance ensures greater
understanding of prevention messages. It also strengthens girls’
control, confidence and negotiating abilities to decide if to have
sex, and when they do, whether to use a condom.

* Peer group solidarity within school strengthens girls’ social
networks and creates more responsible attitudes to sexual
behaviour, safer sex and HIV.

* Conversely, girls who drop out of school are more likely to enter
into adult sexual networks, where older partners with more
experience and power dictate the ‘rules’ of sexual engagement.

* Poverty and vulnerability to HIV are closely linked. More
educated women have better economic and social prospects and
consequently have more choices.

Despite the role of education in protecting girls from HIV
infection, 110 million children worldwide do not receive an
education. In Africa, 22 million girls have never been to primary
school. Children still have to pay to go to primary school in 92
countries.

ActionAid recommends the abolition of school user fees in
developing countries to achieve maximum access to education,
broadening the curriculum to include sex education, encouraging
teenage mothers back into education and that condoms should be more
widely available for young people.

************************************************************

The Impact of Girls’ Education on HIV and Sexual Behaviour

ActionAid
http://www.actionaid.org.uk/100520/press_release.html

August 2006

This year marks the 25th anniversary of the first diagnosis of
AIDS. This year, over one hundred countries pledged to ensure
universal access to AIDS prevention, treatment and care by 2010.
However, despite these grand promises, countries and donors are
failing to launch the type of large-scale prevention efforts that
are needed to reverse the spread of HIV.

The AIDS epidemic continues to evolve, staying one step ahead of
our attempts to prevent it. There are 13,500 new HIV infections
every day. One of the latest facets of this dynamic disease is the
increasing feminisation of AIDS: in Africa, where the HIV and AIDS
epidemic has hit hardest, 74% of young people living with HIV are
women.

HIV prevention campaigns often fail to address the increased
vulnerability of young women because they fail to deal with the
simple fact that many women lack the power to determine who to have
sex with, or when and how to have sex. The new challenge is how to
empower young women to assert their sexual and reproductive rights.
Of the possible solutions, giving girls an education is widely
recognised as the best way to provide this girl power.

However, in the rush to tackle the AIDS crisis, our response has
forged ahead of the evidence, especially as some of the research on
girls’ education and vulnerability to HIV has yielded mixed
results. The most rigorous way to make sense of the different
pieces of evidence is to conduct a systematic review examining all
possible evidence according to a predetermined set of criteria. To
date, there has only been one such review, which was conducted four
years ago a long time in the context of a rapidly evolving AIDS
epidemic.

Given the importance of basing our response to HIV on solid
evidence, ActionAid collaborated with the researcher from the
original review James Hargreaves and conducted a systematic review
of all the research published between 1990 and 2006 in eastern,
southern and central Africa to address the following research
questions:

1 What is the impact of girls’ education on sexual behaviour and
HIV?

2 What difference does primary or secondary education make to
women’s vulnerability to HIV?

3 What are some of the possible mechanisms underlying the
relationship between HIV and girls’ education?

The results show strong evidence that, early in the epidemic
(before 1995), more highly educated women were more vulnerable to
HIV than women who were less well educated. The most likely reason
is that more highly educated people had better economic prospects,
which influenced their lifestyle choices such as mobility and
number of sexual partners. They were also more likely to live in
urban areas where HIV prevalence rates were highest. At that stage,
there was also a general information vacuum about HIV and AIDS in
Africa.

However, as the epidemic has evolved, the relationship between
girls’ education and HIV has also changed. Now, more highly
educated girls and women are better able to negotiate safer sex and
reduce HIV rates. The more education the better. Across all the
countries reviewed, girls who had completed secondary education had
a lower risk of HIV infection and practised safer sex than girls
who had only finished primary education. Put simply, education is
key to building “girl power”! There are also inter-generational
benefits of education, with more highly educated adults having a
positive bearing on young women’s condom use. Moreover, more
education empowers boys and men to practise safer sex, thus
reducing their own, and their partners’, risk of infection.

Despite the power of girls’ education and numerous international
commitments to education, the reality is that the vast majority of
girls in Africa will not complete primary education, let alone
manage to get to secondary school. A key obstacle is the rising
cost of education. Most children in Africa have to pay to go to
primary school, paying increasing amounts as they rise through the
grades, particularly if they enter secondary school. This leads to
the exclusion of many children from education, especially girls.

If we are to see the real benefits of educating girls, then fees
need to be removed and governments and donors need to be urged to
invest more in primary and secondary education. Any increase in
funding to education should not be seen as an alternative to the
universal goals of HIV prevention, care and treatment but rather as
a complementary response that lays a solid foundation for our HIV
prevention efforts.

The gap between the epidemic and the response is - in some
countries - narrowing. This report shows that it is possible to
stay ahead of the virus but only when individuals (particularly
women and girls) have the power to choose who they have sex with,
and when and how they do so. Educating girls and women is one huge
step towards turning around the AIDS epidemic in Africa.

Summary of results

Formal education can influence vulnerability to HIV in five
different ways:

1 Expose girls to HIV and AIDS education, which helps prevent HIV.
2 Provide psychosocial benefits for young women, helping them to
build their self-esteem and capacity to act on HIV prevention
messages.

3 Lead to better economic prospects, which in turn lead to
lifestyle changes that can influence HIV vulnerability.

4 Influence the level of power within sexual relationships.

5 Affect the social and sexual networks of girls.

Impact of girls’ education on HIV rates

In total, over 600 articles were identified for the review, of
which only 45 met the review criteria. Of these, 22 articles
examined the impact of education on HIV rates and revealed the
following findings:

* Before 1995, 10 out of 13 articles showed girls’ education had a
negative impact on HIV infection rates (more education, more HIV).

However,

* After 1995, none of the research showed more highly educated
women to have higher rates of HIV infection. Half of the articles
reviewed showed no association between HIV and education, and the
other half showed girls’ education to have a positive impact on HIV
vulnerability (more education, less HIV).

* An additional five studies examined HIV rates over time and found
HIV vulnerability to be decreasing in the most educated groups and
increasing or remaining stable in the least educated groups.

These findings suggest that the impact of girls’ education on HIV
is changing as the epidemic evolves. The evidence shows that, as
the epidemic matures, the impact of girls’ education reverses and
starts having a positive impact. This changing relationship between
education and HIV rates is strongly supported by studies taken over
time in four countries. A change is occurring in which more highly
educated women are becoming less vulnerable to HIV and at the same
time, less well educated women are becoming more vulnerable.

Impact of girls’ education on sexual behaviour

The studies looked at a wide range of sexual behaviour outcomes and
the results can be summarised as follows:

* Six out of eight articles showed that girls who had received more
education were more likely to start having sex at a later age. None
of the articles showed a link between more education and earlier
sexual activity or sexual debut.

* 10 out of 13 articles showed that higher levels of girls’
education were related to higher levels of condom use. Again, none
of the articles suggested that more education might lead to less
condom use.

* Education was also related to levels of coercive sex,
transactional sex, age difference between partners, and
relationships with commercial sex workers. However, the number of
studies are too small to find any trends.

The most striking finding is that more highly 5 educated women are
more likely to use condoms during sex. The finding on earlier
sexual activity is slightly more difficult to interpret as it is
also likely that the relationship actually works the other way:
earlier sexual activity impacts negatively on education. Put
simply, young women who are sexually active are more likely to get
pregnant and therefore drop out of school.

Boys’ or girls’ education?

Is the impact of education on HIV vulnerability different for young
women and men? Our analysis shows no striking gender differences.
The fact that education helps to protect against HIV holds true as
much for boys as for girls. Although the focus of this report is on
young women, empowering young men through education is as much a
part of the solution to the HIV epidemic as targeting young women.
However, focusing on girls’ education remains important as girls
tend to have less access to education and are therefore more
vulnerable to HIV and AIDS.

Primary or secondary education?

There were six studies that compared the results for primary and
secondary education. In all of these studies, completion of
secondary education was related to lower HIV risk, more condom use
and fewer sexual partners compared with completion of primary
education. These results tentatively suggest that more education is
linked to better protection against HIV. The relative importance of
investing more resources in primary or secondary education is less
clear but self-evidently, no girl will be able to access secondary
school unless she has been to primary school. Tens of millions of
girls are still excluded even from the first grade at school.

Of course, it should be noted that even when they have completed
secondary education, women are still vulnerable to HIV infection.
In other words, education helps protect women but many other
measures are also needed.

Mechanisms

Very few of the studies reviewed attempted to look at the
underlying mechanisms through which girls’ education might impact
on HIV vulnerability. The scant evidence that does exist suggests
that increased condom use is likely to be a factor. Economic status
is clearly also a factor, although it is hard to separate this from
education. Eight studies tried to show the relative strengths of
education and economic status and their bearing on HIV
vulnerability:

* One study shows education is more important than economic status.
* Two studies show economic status is more important than
education.

* Five studies show it is impossible to separate education and
economic status.

Recommendations

1 Prevention messages need to address gender and power dynamics
within sexual relationships, so that both girls and boys can become
confident enough to overcome negative stereotyping and peer
pressure.

2 The education sector response to HIV and AIDS needs to be
prioritised and all schools should provide comprehensive sexual
health education with a special focus on HIV and family planning.
Promoting condoms is a message that is working and should be
encouraged.

3 Schools should foster gender equality, promote positive role
models and challenge negative gender stereotyping. Zero tolerance
should be shown towards sexual violence and towards teachers having
sexual relationships with students.

4 Schools need to respond to the problem of teenage pregnancy by
providing comprehensive sex education to reduce pregnancy and
improve sexual health. Part of the response should include policies
on how to encourage teenage mothers to return to education.

5 In order to expand girls’ education, all forms of school fees in
primary education should be abolished. This policy must be
accompanied by adequate planning and resources to cover the loss in
funding from the fees and also to meet the increased demand when
education becomes free. The quality of education provision must not
suffer and governments should resist the practise of hiring
non-professional teachers.

6 Expansion of the Fast Track Initiative (FTI) a pledge made by the
international community to make sure that all countries have enough
resources to provide basic education should be encouraged. Donors
need to prioritise filling the immediate resource gap in FTI ($510
million) and the long-term gap of $10 billion.

7 Macroeconomic constraints that prevent governments from expanding
their spending on girls’ education need to be removed. To get all
girls into school and to keep them there requires the recruitment
of millions of new professional teachers. This means lifting public
sector wage bill caps imposed by the International Monetary Fund
(IMF) and generating open public debate about the trade-offs
between driving towards low inflation targets and ensuring adequate
spending on education and HIV and AIDS.

8 More focus needs to be placed on removing the bottlenecks between
completion of primary school and access to secondary school,
particularly for girls. This will require significant expansion of
secondary schooling in many countries and specific interventions to
remove the obstacles faced by girls wishing to continue their
education.

9 More research on young people, HIV vulnerability and teenage
pregnancy is desperately needed. All data should be separated by
gender. More longitudinal studies are also needed to understand the
reasons why education might protect against HIV, as well as
research comparing the impact of primary and secondary education on
HIV vulnerability. Finally, systematic reviews of existing
literature should be encouraged in order to build upon the research
that already exists, rather than reinventing the wheel.

*************************************************************
AfricaFocus Bulletin is an independent electronic publication
providing reposted commentary and analysis on African issues, with
a particular focus on U.S. and international policies. AfricaFocus
Bulletin is edited by William Minter.

AfricaFocus Bulletin can be reached at africafocus@igc.org. Please
write to this address to subscribe or unsubscribe to the bulletin,
or to suggest material for inclusion. For more information about
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By HOWARD W. FRENCH
Published: September 22, 2006 - Copyright The New York Times
For the complete article, please see the link below.

SHANGHAI, Sept. 21 — Every weekday this summer, Rose Lei drove her daughter, Angelina, 5, to a golf complex at the edge of central Shanghai for a two-hour, $200 individual lesson with a teaching pro from Scotland.

Chinese students play with teachers in the FasTracKids program in Shanghai. The goal of the program is to teach teamwork and leadership skills.

But now that the school year has started, little Angelina will have to cut back on the golf, limiting herself to weekend sessions at a local driving range. In addition to her demanding school schedule, she will be attending private classes at FasTracKids, an after-school academy for children as young as 4 that bills itself as a junior M.B.A. program.

Ms. Lei, 35, a former information technology expert and the wife of a prosperous newspaper advertising executive, is part of a new generation of affluent parents here who are planning ways to cement their children’s place in a fast-emerging elite.

A generation ago, when people still dressed in monochromes and acquiring great wealth, never mind flaunting it, was generally illegal, the route to success was to join the right Communist Party youth organization or to attend one of the best universities.

Now the race starts early, with an emphasis not on ideology but on the skills and experiences the children will need in the elite life they are expected to lead. In addition to early golf training, which has become wildly popular, affluent parents are enrolling their children in everything from ballet and private music lessons, to classes in horse riding, ice-skating, skiing and even polo.

The intense interest in lifestyle training speaks not just to parents’ concern for their children’s futures but also to a general sense of social insecurity among China’s newly rich.

“These people are rich economically but lacking in basic manners, and they are not very fond of their own reputation,” said Wang Lianyi, an expert in comparative cultural studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, in Beijing. Of the 35 million Chinese who traveled overseas last year, he said, many were shocked to discover that they were often viewed as having bad manners.

To address that, some of the newly affluent, like Ms. Lei, take their young children for extended stays overseas. London and New York are popular choices, because the children can get a head start on speaking Western-accented English.

Others are signing up for finishing schools popping up in China, which promise to train youngsters how to become proper ladies and gentlemen in the highest Western tradition.

The best known of these programs is run by a bluntly spoken Japanese woman, June Yamada, who charges about $900 for a two-week course that includes a brief stay at a five-star hotel here. Teenagers must bathe before dinner, take afternoon tea, wear formal dress and relearn how to walk, how to eat, how to dance and how to engage politely with members of the opposite sex.

“I don’t just teach them what to do and what not to do, I teach the girls how to be women, and the boys how to be men,” said Ms. Yamada, a former fashion writer who wrote a popular book on manners here. “We’re probably the most expensive school in Shanghai, but nobody is complaining and they keep coming back, so we must be doing something right.”

Ms. Yamada said she insisted that a parent attend the classes with any student she accepted, “because if the parent is spitting watermelon seeds or chicken bones right out of their mouth at home, what is the use of all the fine things we are teaching?”

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It’s late on a Friday afternoon in summer, and the city has the deserted feel that it gets just before a weekend. The streets are empty; taxis have their for hire lights on at the witching hour, the time when they’d normally be headed for the garage. But on the fifth floor of 1755 Broadway, a nondescript office building on the corner of West 56th Street, work—serious work—is in progress. The “Fall Books” issue of The New York Review of Books is being put to bed. “I’ll be here all weekend,” says Robert Silvers cheerfully.

On my way up in the elevator, I had wondered if Silvers would be wearing a tie: I’ve never seen him without one. The tie is there but askew, the top button of his white shirt undone. Instead of his usual dark suit, he’s got on a red cardigan. For anyone else, this would be like showing up at the office on casual Friday in a T-shirt and ripped blue jeans.

It’s been a difficult time. In June, Barbara Epstein, Silvers’s co-editor at the Review for 43 years, died of lung cancer at the age of 77. He has been commuting from Lausanne, Switzerland, where his longtime companion, Grace, Countess of Dudley, is recovering from a serious car accident.

Between us on a table in the windowless conference room is a recent issue: volume LIII, number 13. The cover lists a sampling of its contents: the venerable Harvard professor Stanley Hoffman on three books about American foreign policy; Russell Baker on Roger Angell’s memoir, Let Me Finish; and a dispatch from Bolivia by the Latin American journalist Alma Guillermoprieto. It’s an eclectic but impressive mix—one that has made The New York Review of Books the premier journal of the American intellectual elite virtually since its inception during the New York newspaper strike of 1963.

Also in this issue are eleven brief tributes to Epstein by such old friends as Larry McMurtry and Gore Vidal. I myself knew her only from literary cocktail parties, but Luc Sante’s portrait brings her back: “She was funny, mischievous, infectiously enthusiastic, occasionally prodigal, sometimes incorrigibly teenaged, the best sort of company. The world is a much lonelier place without her.”

So is the masthead, which now contains, after editor, the single name Robert B. Silvers. Magazines are not, by nature, co-edited: Their identities depend upon the imposition of a single voice and sensibility. Paris Review was the expression of George Plimpton; Granta was the expression of Bill Buford. But The New York Review of Books was the co-expression of Silvers and Epstein, two strikingly original people who managed to speak with one editorial voice. The question being asked these days by the magazine’s loyal readers and contributors is, can it survive under the editorship of a 76-year-old literary widower who, however robust, hardworking, and determined, will now have to grapple with the burden of going it alone?

There are larger questions, too. Can The New York Review of Books survive without its founders’ specific genius. political and literary journalism it practices? A typical Review piece runs to 4,000 or 5,000 words, is pitched to readers who often have several advanced degrees, and may contain footnotes. Its intellectual and physical heft—the “Fall Books” issue came in at 100 pages—requires the kind of attention that becomes harder and harder to sustain with every new technological gadget we hitch to our belts or curl around our ears. The audience that grew up reading the Review is now in its fifties or older. Will the Review find a new audience with a younger demographic, or will it wither away like the state in Friedrich Engels’s prophecy, to be supplanted by new vessels of intellectual content? For its overwhelmingly liberal, hypereducated urban readership, it’s hard to imagine a Reviewless world.

The genesis of the Review is a literary legend by now. One night during the early weeks of the strike, Jason Epstein, then an editor at Random House, and his wife, Barbara (they were divorced in 1980), were having dinner with Robert Lowell and his wife, Elizabeth Hardwick, the Epsteins’ neighbors on West 67th Street.

Their block, between Central Park West and Columbus, is on a leafy street lined with elegant old apartment buildings known for their wood-paneled walls and double-height living rooms—“the last gasp of true?/?Nineteenth Century Capitalistic Gothic,” as Lowell once described it. But the artists for whom these grand ateliers were originally built had long since departed for more affordable neighborhoods, replaced by editors and writers who held down actual jobs.

Jason Epstein had already made his name in the literary world by figuring out, as a 25-year-old editor at Doubleday, that a market existed for quality paperbacks. Thus was born Anchor Books, which offered to a newly literate middle and upper-middle class cheap yet elegant editions of the classics, along with new titles destined to become classics—the “backlist,” as such books are called in the business. By now, of course, it would be hard to imagine publishing without Epstein’s discovery: If you removed every trade paperback from the shelves of Barnes & Noble, there would be nothing left but the “frontlist” hardcover titles allotted their six-week window before being returned to their publishers or pulped.

Among the books on the first Anchor list was To the Finland Station, by Edmund Wilson, the dean of American letters. Wilson’s narrative account of the intellectual background to the Russian Revolution, which he traced back to the works of Marx, Engels, and their philosophical precursors Hegel, Taine, and Michelet, was an ideal prototype for Epstein’s concept: Written in workmanlike prose, it combined the virtues of journalism and scholarship. It was informative and easy to read—upper middlebrow.

In the early days of the Epsteins’ marriage, Barbara was “the wife,” a familiar type in that pre-feminist era, when in even the most progressive intellectual circles smart and sexy women deferred to their husbands. Born in Boston of Russian- and German-immigrant parents, she entered Radcliffe at the age of 16 and fell in with the arts-and-letters crowd. “The day we met she was sitting in the Radcliffe College cafeteria, smoking,” wrote the novelist Alison Lurie in one of the memorial tributes published over the summer in the Review. “Her black turtleneck Jersey, unstructured hair, and stack of books not on any assigned list instantly marked her as what would presently be called a beatnik.” She was known around campus as “Bubsey.”

The poet John Ashbery was also a classmate and friend. They met their freshman year, in the fall of 1945, on the steps of Widener Library. “I was struck by her clothes,” Ashbery recalls. “She had a ragbag, pre–Annie Hall look, odd bits of costume.” They “took tea” at the Window Shop on Brattle Street and attended chic Brit films like Black Narcissus and Whisky Galore.

Epstein’s first post-college job was at Doubleday, where she discovered and edited Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl. A stint at Partisan Review—a useful training ground with its stable of high-strung, at times bellicose contributors—prepared her for the next and last chapter of her long working life in literature.

“There is a whole sort of Cultural Establishment,” Wilson noted in the journal he kept, chronicling the literary life. The Epsteins and Lowells were “the headquarters of the literary department.” Still only in their thirties, they were a celebrated pair, Scott and Zelda minus the alcohol-fueled marital theatrics—a power couple, to invoke the groveling term of our own status-obsessed day. They even made it onto the guest list for Truman Capote’s Black and White Ball at the Plaza, destined to become a mythic social event. Held in honor of the Washington Post’s publisher, Katharine Graham, the ball was attended by 500 of the host’s glamorous friends, from Frank Sinatra and Mia Farrow to Lionel and Diana Trilling—in a literal sense, the smart crowd.

Their parties were famous. On any given night, you might find in the Epsteins’ high-ceilinged living room a cross-cultural crowd of iconic sixties figures: Lillian Hellman, Jane Jacobs, Abbie Hoffman, Philip Roth. “One was always aware that there was a large and complicated world out there,” recalls the Epsteins’ daughter, Helen, now a science writer at work on a book about aids in Africa. (The Epsteins’ other child, Jacob, is a TV writer in Hollywood.) “The whole place would be flung into turmoil—servants running around everywhere, a hundred people gathered in the living room. Then there would be Dad’s oddball interests, some guy who had invented the first mail-order catalogue, this person who had made a high-end cooking pot, or the great mathematician Norbert Wiener.” It was before the age of militant moderation that has seized the aging boomer intelligentsia of Manhattan—before the Death of Fun. “These evenings at the Epsteins’ are so strenuous that I am usually a wreck the next day,” Wilson complained.

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Copyright The New York Times
Published September 22, 2006

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THE alto saxophonist and composer Ornette Coleman, one of the last of the truly imposing figures from a generation of jazz players that was full of them, seldom talks about other people’s music. People generally want to ask him about his own, and that becomes the subject he addresses. Or half-addresses: what he’s really focused on is a set of interrelated questions about music, religion and the nature of being. Sometimes he can seem indirect, or sentimental, or thoroughly confusing. Other times he sounds like one of the world’s killer aphorists.
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Lee Friedlander for The New York Times

Ornette Coleman in his apartment in Manhattan. At 76, he remains busy; “Sound Grammar” is the name of both his new album and his new record label.
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Tunes Worth Talking About (September 22, 2006)
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Lee Friedlander for The New York Times

“There is no bad music, only bad performances,” Mr. Coleman said. His current band includes his son.

In any case, other people’s music was what I wanted to talk to him about. I asked what he would like to listen to. “Anything you want,” he said in his fluty Southern voice. “There is no bad music, only bad performances.” He finally offered a few suggestions. The music he likes is simply defined: anything that can’t be summed up in a common term. Any music that is not created as part of a style. “The state of surviving in music is more like ‘what music are you playing,’ ” he said. “But music isn’t a style, it’s an idea. The idea of music, without it being a style — I don’t hear that much anymore.”

Then he went up a level. “I would like to have the same concept of ideas as how people believe in God,” he said. “To me, an idea doesn’t have any master.”

Mr. Coleman was born, in 1930, and raised in Fort Worth, where he attained some skill at playing rhythm and blues in bars, like any decent saxophonist, and some more skill at playing bebop, which was rarer. He arrived in New York in 1959, via Los Angeles, with an original, logical sense of melody and an idea of playing with no preconceived chord changes. Yet his music bore a tight sense of knowing itself, of natural form, and the records he made for Atlantic with his various quartets, from 1959 to 1961, are almost unreasonably beautiful.

Following that initial shock of the new came a short period with a trio, then a two-year hiatus from recording in 1963 and 1964, then the trio again, then a fantastic quartet from 1968 to 1972 with the tenor saxophonist Dewey Redman (who died three weeks ago), then a period of funk-through-the-looking-glass with his electric band, Prime Time. Mr. Coleman is still moving, now with a band including two bassists, Greg Cohen and Tony Falanga, and his son, Denardo Coleman, on drums.

He has a kind of high-end generosity; he said that he wouldn’t think twice about letting me go home with a piece of music he had just written, because he would be interested in what I might make of it. But there is a great pessimism in his talk, too. He said he believes that most of human history has been wasted on building increasingly complicated class structures. “Life is already complete,” he said. “You can’t learn what life is. And the only way you die is if something kills you. So if life and death are already understood, what are we doing?”

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By Howard W. French - Copyright The International Herald Tribune

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 21, 2006

SHANGHAI The question seemed innocuous enough when it appeared in an online poll this month on the popular Chinese Internet portal Netease: Would you like to be Chinese in the next life?

It is the answer that proved dangerous. Sixty-four percent of respondents replied no, with some of them commenting that to be Chinese lacked dignity.

Many foreign readers of such news might have felt a sense of surprise by the results. After all, why would such a clear majority of respondents prefer not to be citizens of a country that has progressed so dramatically on so many levels in the last generation? Moreover, with signs of prosperity springing up everywhere, what would motivate a large number of the participants to invoke a lack of dignity in their lives?

The Chinese government supplied the beginnings of an answer in the days that followed the poll. The editor of Netease was removed from his job, effectively banned from meaningful work for having conveyed opinions deemed contrary to the official view.

Upon further inquiry, it turns out there may be other contributing factors behind the disciplining of the Netease journalist. One that was advanced by people with knowledge of the case is that the editor had also recently run a news item about the Uighur opposition figure Rebiya Kadeer.

Never mind that the one and only source for the Netease story was an official statement by the Chinese Foreign Ministry. That statement was meant for circulation by foreign journalists outside of China in relation to the Uighur activist’s nomination for a Nobel prize, and was not meant for use domestically, where she is all but officially a nonentity. As one can easily see, adding this supposed infraction to the mix hardly improves the picture.

China has been on a such a roll lately in terms of the exercise of an antiquated style of control over news and information that in a cheekier moment one might be tempted to propose officially proclaiming September “Thought Control Month.” To get a picture of why cheekiness isn’t called for under the circumstances, and of how a nation’s sense of dignity could be imperiled, it helps to count the ways.

Advancing with dual motives, economic gain and censorship, the government has recently announced measures that would tighten control over foreign media, namely their distribution of information within China. Under the new setup, Xinhua, a state organ with strong roots in China’s totalitarian past, would be both agent and censor.

Article 11 of the new regulations contains the kind of vague, omnibus language that animates this country’s national security laws, which conceivably allow the arrest of anyone at any time for anything. It suffices to invoke national security. In that spirit the new Xinhua guidelines prohibit news being released in the country from “endangering China’s national security, reputation and interests.”

Facing mounting foreign criticism over this announcement, Beijing has been at pains to say that Xinhua will not seek unfair competitive advantages from the arrangement, and that foreign news operations will not be restricted in their work because of it.

Would that were so. The Xinhua move comes on the heels of a proposed law that prohibits both foreign and domestic media from unauthorized reporting on “sudden news.” News, by its very nature, tends to be sudden, so it would be hard for anyone who values access to information to find a charitable interpretation for this, no matter the spin.

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Copyright The South China Morning Post

Saturday, September 16, 2006

A restaurant themed on the Cultural Revolution has opened on a narrow
street in Guangzhou’s military district, but its owners are worried
coverage in a local newspaper yesterday could invite unwanted attention
from the authorities. At the Da Guo Fan Restaurant, waiting staff
outfitted like Red Guards greet customers with “Tong zhi [comrade] ni
hao”. Customers are shown into rooms with red and yellow decor, the
walls lined with photos and posters of Mao Zedong , Lin Biao , Liu
Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping - key figures of the turbulent period between
1966 and 1976.

There is a statue of Mao, group photos of Red Guards and slogans
exhorting intellectual youths to go to the countryside and be
courageous, but no sign of the excesses of the Cultural Revolution which
might upset the authorities. Red Guards are seen studying and
celebrating the Lunar New Year, not leading struggle sessions against
enemies of the revolution. “It’s very sensitive now because of the new
law that bans businesses from using pictures and statues of leaders.
Besides, we are still applying for our licence,” said a restaurant staff
member, who identified himself only as Zhang.

“After this we might also have the cultural department supervising us,”
he said. “Nobody has bothered us in the past two months and normally the
commerce bureau will not give us any problem, but now that it’s in the
news, higher-up authorities might require them to do something.” One of
the owners, Wen Xuedong , a Guangzhou native, declined a request for an
interview. Mr Zhang said Mr Wen had moved the restaurant from Zengcheng
to downtown Guangzhou because “farmers there could not afford to dine at
the restaurant and did not appreciate history”.

Touched by his own experience of the Cultural Revolution - his father
was sent to a cadres’ school to reform his thinking - Mr Wen had
collected the posters and photos and downloaded Cultural Revolution
material from the internet. A customer said he had been to the
restaurant a few times but “the food is common country cuisine” and he
expected it to lose money if it counted on history to draw customers.
“That period made us feel uncomfortable. Why remember it when we are
living so comfortably now?”

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Copyright - Slate

Posted Monday, Sept. 18, 2006, at 11:40 AM ET

Pope Benedict XVI. Click image to expand.Pope Benedict XVI
There are many popes within Christianity—the Coptic Church has one, and the Eastern Orthodox Church also boasts a patriarch or holy father—but we have acquired the habit of using the term to describe only the bishop of Rome (as the 39 Articles of the Anglican Church describe him), and this is a pity for many reasons. It confers a sort of supreme authority on the leader of only one Christian sect, and it therefore helps to give non-Christians the impression that the representative of Roman Catholicism represents rather more of the “West” than he actually does.

Attempting to revive his moribund church on a visit to Germany, where the Roman congregations are increasingly sparse, Joseph Ratzinger (as I shall always think of him) has managed to do a moderate amount of harm—and absolutely no good—to the very tense and distraught discussion now in progress between Europe and Islam. I strongly recommend that you read the full text of his lecture at the University of Regensburg last Tuesday.

After the most perfunctory introduction, Ratzinger goes straight to his choice of quotation, which is taken from 14th-century Byzantine Emperor Manuel II. This potentate supposedly once engaged in debate—the precise time and place is unknown—with an unnamed Persian. The subject was Christianity and Islam. The Byzantine asks the Persian to “show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.” (On the face of it, not a very open-ended inquiry.) But, warming to his own theme, the purple-clad monarch of Constantinople allegedly added that “to convince a reasonable soul, one does not need a strong arm, or weapons of any kind, or any other means of threatening a person with death.”
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Now, you do not have to be a Muslim to think that for the bishop of Rome to cite this is the most perfect hypocrisy. There would have been no established Byzantine or Roman Christianity if the faith had not been spread and maintained and enforced by every kind of violence and cruelty and coercion. To take Islam’s own favorite self-pitying example: It was the Catholic crusaders who sacked and burned Christian Byzantium on their way to Palestine—and that was only after they had methodically set about the Jews, so the Muslim world was actually only the third victim of this barbarity. (Sir Steven Runciman’s A History of the Crusades is the best source here.) Yet of all the words he could have chosen, to suggest that religion might wish to break its old connection with conquest, intolerance, and subjugation, Ratzinger had to select an example that was designed to remind his hearers of the crudest excesses of the medieval period. His mention of Manuel II was evidently not accidental or anecdotal. He refers to him repeatedly and returns to him again in the closing paragraph, as if to rub it in.

And of course now we hear, as could have been predicted, the pathetic and unconvincing apologies issued by his spokesmen and finally Ratzinger himself. These will only serve to convince infuriated Muslims that by threatening reprisal, calling for the severing of diplomatic relations with the Vatican, and issuing a few more sanguinary fatwas, they can force yet another retreat. The usual things have happened: the shooting of a nun in Somalia and the desecration of Christian churches in Palestine. And so the ecumenical “dialogue” goes on.

To read the bulk of the speech, however, is to realize that, if he had chanced to be born in Turkey or Syria instead of Germany, the bishop of Rome could have become a perfectly orthodox Muslim. He may well distrust Islam because it claims that its own revelation is the absolute and final one, but he describes John, one of the apostles, as having spoken “the final word on the biblical concept of God,” and where Muslims believe that Mohammed went into a trance and took dictation from an archangel, Ratzinger accepts as true the equally preposterous legend that St. Paul was commanded to evangelize for Christ during the course of a vision experienced in a dream. He happens to get Mohammed wrong when he says that the prophet only forbade “compulsion in religion” when Islam was weak. (The relevant sura comes from a period of relatively high confidence.) But he could just as easily have cited the many suras that flatly contradict this apparently benign message. The familiar problem is that, if you question another religion’s “revelation” and dogma too closely, you invite a tu quoque in respect of your own. Which is just what has happened in the present case.

The Muslim protesters are actually being highly ungrateful. When the embassies of Denmark were being torched earlier this year, Rome managed a few words of protest about … the inadvisability of profane cartoons. In almost every confrontation between Islam and the West, or Islam and Israel, the Vatican has either split the difference or helped to ventriloquize Muslim grievances. Most of all, throughout his address to the audience at Regensburg, the man who modestly considers himself the vicar of Christ on Earth maintained a steady attack on the idea that reason and the individual conscience can be preferred to faith. He pretends that the word Logos can mean either “the word” or “reason,” which it can in Greek but never does in the Bible, where it is presented as heavenly truth. He mentions Kant and Descartes in passing, leaves out Spinoza and Hume entirely, and dishonestly tries to make it seem as if religion and the Enlightenment and science are ultimately compatible, when the whole effort of free inquiry always had to be asserted, at great risk, against the fantastic illusion of “revealed” truth and its all-too-earthly human potentates. It is often said—and was said by Ratzinger when he was an underling of the last Roman prelate—that Islam is not capable of a Reformation. We would not even have this word in our language if the Roman Catholic Church had been able to have its own way. Now its new reactionary leader has really “offended” the Muslim world, while simultaneously asking us to distrust the only reliable weapon—reason—that we possess in these dark times. A fine day’s work, and one that we could well have done without.

Posted at 11:33 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright AP

Monday September 18, 12:19 AM

The Toyama No. 5 apartment block is quiet at midday _ laundry flapping from balconies, old people taking an after-lunch stroll. But the building and its nearby park may be sitting on a gruesome World War II secret.

A wartime nurse has broken more than 60 years of silence to reveal her part in burying dozens, perhaps hundreds, of bodies there as American forces occupied the Japanese capital.

The way experts see it, these were no ordinary casualties of war, but possible victims of Tokyo’s shadowy wartime experiments on live prisoners of war _ an atrocity that has never been officially recognized by the Japanese government, but is well documented by historians and participants.

The neighborhood on the west side of Tokyo is deeply troubled.

“I feel sorry for remains with such a sad history,” said Teppei Kuroda, a college senior who lives there. “I think they should be dug up and mourned properly.”

Their first burial was anything but dignified.

Former nurse Toyo Ishii says that during the weeks following Japan’s surrender on Aug. 15, 1945, she and colleagues at an army hospital at the site were ordered to bury corpses, bones and body parts _ she doesn’t know how many _ before the Americans arrived.

A mass grave of between 62 and more than 100 possible war-experiment victims was uncovered in a nearby area in 1989. But Ishii’s account _ publicly released in June _ could yield a far larger number and a firmer connection to Unit 731, Japan’s dreaded germ and biological warfare outfit.

“If the bones are actually there, they are likely related to Unit 731 itself, because the facility that used to stand in that part of the compound was closely linked to the unit,” said Keiichi Tsuneishi, Kanagawa University history professor and expert of Japan’s wartime biological warfare.

Ishii’s disclosure led to a face-to-face meeting with Health Minister Jiro Kawasaki and a government pledge to investigate. But it may be a long time before anything is confirmed. Health Ministry official Jiro Yashiki rules out a speedy exhumation.

“People still live there and we can’t visit each family to remind them of the bones … just imagine how they feel about it,” he said. “What if we find nothing after all the trouble?”

The 84-year-old nurse’s story is the latest twist in the legacy of Japan’s rampage through Asia in the 1930s and ’40s.

From its base in Japan-controlled Harbin, China, Unit 731 and related units injected war prisoners with typhus, cholera and other disease as research into germ warfare, according to historians and former unit members. Unit 731 also is believed to have performed vivisections and frozen prisoners to death in endurance tests.

The 1989 find, during construction of a Health Ministry research institute at the former army medical school site in Tokyo, revealed dozens of fragmented thigh bones and skulls, some with holes drilled in them or sections cut out.

Police denied any evidence of a crime, and the bones weren’t properly analyzed until two years later. In 2001 the Health Ministry concluded that the remains _ many of them of non-Japanese Asians _ were most likely from bodies used in “medical education” or brought back from the war zone for analysis at the medical school.

The ministry said the bones could not be directly linked to Unit 731, though it acknowledged that some interviewees had suggested they were shipped from Manchuria, northern China, where the unit was based.

In 2002, the Health Ministry built a memorial repository for the bones. But it has refused repeated requests for DNA tests from relatives of several Chinese believed to have perished in Unit 731.

Ishii says she was never involved in nor knew about experiments on humans. Her account dwells on the final chapter of the war and the rush to conceal it.

In an interview at her Tokyo home, she said she was assigned to the hospital’s oral surgery department in 1944.

She said the hospital had three morgues, where bodies with numbered tags around their necks floated in a formalin-filled pool, awaiting dissection. Body parts were preserved in bottles.

After the surrender, workers piled the bodies and bottles in carts and brought them to empty lots in the compound, she said.

“We took the samples out of the glass containers and dumped them into the hole,” she wrote in a statement to the government in June. “We were going to be in trouble, I was told, if American soldiers asked us about the specimens.”

She said a hospital official told her years later that a public housing complex for the families of senior doctors and hospital officials, including himself, was built at the site to cover up the mass grave. That complex was later replaced by Toyama No. 5.

Posted at 3:39 PM · Comments (0)

The following link contains details of my first solo photo exhibit, which opens at the Zero Gallery in Berlin on Oct. 3. Visitors welcome!:

http://www.zero-project.org/howard_french.html

Posted at 10:05 AM · Comments (1)

http://www.npl.co.uk/blueskies/

Posted at 11:09 PM · Comments (0)

An intriguing part of the conversation between the Byzantine Emperor
Manuel
II Paleologus and “an educated Persian” now made world-famous by Pope
Benedict XVI, is that the Persian seems to have no name. There is no
mention
of it in the speech made by the Holy Father during his “Apostolic
Journey”
to the University of Regensburg on 9/12.
The Persian must have been an intellectual of some importance if he was
good
enough to merit an audience with an “erudite” emperor. Does his name
exist
in the original text, since it was “presumably the Emperor himself who
set
down this dialogue, during the siege of Constantinople between 1394 and
1402”? Was the name mentioned in the version produced by Professor
Theodore
Khoury, which the Pope has read, and which he used in a speech on a
critical
aspect of a sensitive theme at a time of conflict, on the Islamic
doctrine
of “holy war”? I ask because names lend greater credibility to text.
Was the
name omitted because Muslims of the educated kind preferred anonymity?
Not
at all. Imam Ghazali and Ibn Khaldun were household names at the time
of
this dialogue.
There are other uncertainties in the Pope’s speech, which purports to
be
about “Faith, Reason and the University: Memories and Reflections” in
which
he quotes Manuel’s ignorant, but, given the history of the early and
medieval Church’s continual diatribe against Islam and its Prophet,
predictable view. This discussion on “holy war” appeared in the seventh
conversation and was “rather marginal to the dialogue as a whole”. It
is
interesting that Pope Benedict should select what was “rather marginal”
for
emphasis and ignore the apparently more substantive issues that were
discussed. What is genuinely disconcerting is that the Holy Father
should
accept Manuel’s taunting, erroneous and provocative depiction of the
Prophet’s message without any qualification. Pope Benedict is not at
all
disturbed by phrases as insulting as “evil and inhuman, such as his
command
to spread by the sword the faith he preached”. This is utterly wrong,
as
even a cursory understanding of Islam would have made apparent. Are the
Pope’s speechwriters equally biased or ignorant? The Pope treated
Manuel’s
observation and commentary as self-evident truth.
I have a further question: Why didn’t the Pope quote the Persian
scholar’s
answer to Manuel? It was a conversation, after all. Are we to believe
that
the Persian gave no answer, that he did not challenge such a rant? He
could
not have been much of a scholar in that case. If he did not reply he
justifies his anonymity.
I am not erudite enough to have read the dialogue in the original
Greek, or
Professor Khoury’s edited version of it. I can only go by the Pope’s
speech
in Germany.
Some uncertainties can be explained by the distance of six centuries,
as for
instance the sentence that the conversation took place “perhaps in 1391
in
the winter barracks near Ankara”. The fact that we are reading Manuel’s
record, rather than the Persian’s, also explains why it lays more
stress on
the emperor’s view of theology.
What is aggravating is that the Pope has been free with assumptions,
and
liberal with its first cousin, innuendo. The peaceful piety of Manuel
becomes an indictment of Islam, which is held to be violent in
preference
and doctrine. The innuendo is cleverly expressed, indicating that some
effort has been taken to be clever. The famous verse of the Quran, that
“There is no compulsion in religion”, is juxtaposed with the
proposition
that “According to the experts, this is one of the Suras of the early
period, when Mohammed was still powerless and under threat”. The
implication
is that when he was not under threat, he drew out his sword and went on
a
rampage. This is the kind of propaganda that the Church used to put out
with
abandon in the early days, adding gratuitously comments about believers
and
“infidels”. This is the line that those who have made it their business
to
hate Muslims, use till today. But the Vatican had stopped such
vilification,
and it is unfortunate that Pope Benedict has revived it.
If he had consulted a few experts who understood Islam, he might have
been
better educated on “holy war”.
It is absolutely correct that no war verse was sent down to the Prophet
during his Mecca phase. Despite the severest persecution, to the point
where
he almost lost his life, he never advocated violence. There are
innumerable
verses in the Quran extolling the merits of peace, and a peaceful
solution
to life’s problems — including a preference for peace over war. The
Quran
treats Christians and Jews as people of the Book, despite the fact that
they
did not accept the Prophet’s message. It praises Jesus as “Ruh-Allah”,
or
one touched by the spirit of Allah (this is the best translation I can
think
of). Mary, mother of Jesus, is accepted as virgin, although the Quran
is
equally clear that Jesus is a man, and not the son of God.
The war verses are sent to the Prophet only when he has been in Medina
for
some time, and has become not only a leader of the community but also
head
of a multi-faith state. War, in other words, is permitted as an
exercise in
statecraft, and not for personal reasons, including persecution.
Further, it
is circumscribed with important conditions. Surely no one, including
Pope
Benedict, believes that a state cannot ever take recourse to war?
Indeed,
the history of the Vatican is filled with war. The Quran’s view of war,
as
an answer to injustice, certainly merits more understanding than
censure.
Manuel’s view is better understood in the context of his times. He was
monarch of a once-glorious but now dying empire. The Ottomans had been
slicing off territory for centuries; the first Crusade had been called
by
Pope Urban II three centuries before to save the Byzantines from Muslim
Turks. The heart of the empire, Constantinople, was now under serious
threat. If Tamerlane (another Muslim) had not suddenly appeared from
the
east and decimated the Ottomans, Constantinople might have fallen
during
that siege which so depressed Manuel. It was hardly a moment when the
Byzantines could have the most charitable view of an Islamic holy war.
What