Sony pakt uit met homo-label

12/01 Sony pakt uit met apart homo-label

Met het nieuwe label Music With A Twist wil de platenmaatschappij Sony een nieuwe markt aanboren, met name die van de homo's en lesbiennes, zo heeft de BBC woensdag bericht op zijn website.Sony is momenteel naarstig op zoek naar getalenteerde holebi's om hun muziek op de wereld los te laten. Of de luisteraars ook aanhangers zijn van de homoseksuele liefde moeten zijn, werd niet bekendgemaakt. Met het nieuwe label wil Sony het signaal de wereld insturen dat homoseksualiteit "ok" is. De platenreus vindt dat een label voor homo's niet anders is dan een label voor pakweg hiphoppers. Aangezien hiphop ook een eigen label gekregen heeft bij verschillende platenbonzen, verdient de holebimuziek dat volgens Sony dus ook. Music With A Twist wil in juni een eerste plaat op de markt brengen, om samen te vallen met de National Gay Pride, een feest waarop de holebi's in de VS volledig uit de bol gaan. Daarnaast staan ook nog verschillende compilatiealbums op het programma.

American Muslim

American Muslim’s Haj Guide Is a Big Hit in MinaSiraj Wahab, Arab News

“Every good deed done by a Muslim, however small, will be rewarded by Allah,” says Yousuf Baaghil.

MINA, 12 January 2006 — Nothing could be more rewarding for a Muslim than to be able to do good deeds while in preparation for the journey of a lifetime. One American Muslim, Yousuf Baaghil, a lawyer from San Francisco, has been able to do just that.
Prior to setting off on the pilgrimage, last year Baaghil and his wife went to a local Islamic center and took classes in order to learn about the Haj rituals. It was a very intensive training course during which an enormous amount of material was presented.

At home, after the final class, Baaghil’s wife attempted to create a semblance of order out of all the information they had been given. It was a difficult task and the harder she tried to make some sense of the stack of information before her, the more confused she became.
Baaghil soon joined in the effort and even after consulting all their notes and turning to numerous textbooks on Haj, they were more confused than ever.

Most of the books explaining the pilgrimage were weighty volumes, filled with hundreds of pages of information. A straightforward guide to the rituals simply did not exist. So the couple made it their mission to create one.
“Haj and Umrah at a Glance,” is a one-page guide based upon the books of Sheikh Muhammad Naasirruddeen Al-Baanee. The idea behind the guide is that Muslims can fold the guide into a small size, tuck it anywhere and carry it at all times during the pilgrimage. An attempt was made to cram on the one sheet every detail of importance to a first-time pilgrim. This includes tiny illustrations of key points and a diagram of the Holy Mosque, plus prayers and supplications that are written in Arabic with transliteration and translation in English.

“While every Haj group has a well-informed guide it is not possible to catch hold of this person all the time and there are moments when you are all by yourself and you have no idea how to perform the ritual or you need clarification on what ritual will come next,” said Baaghil.
Initially, Baaghil distributed printed copies of the guide himself. Then with help, he set up a website, www.islamicbulletin.org, to enable individuals to download the guide in PDF format, wherever they might be.
Within just a few months of the guide appearing on the Internet, Baaghil was deluged with requests to create similar guides in other languages. Through the website people volunteered their language services and now the guide is available in six languages — English, Turkish, Indonesian, French, Spanish and Urdu. All can be downloaded free of charge.
This year, Baaghil and his wife made the trip to Saudi Arabia in order to perform Haj. While in the Kingdom, Baaghil took the opportunity to present himself at the offices of the Ministry of Haj to discuss the possible distribution of “Haj and Umrah at a Glance” to the pilgrims.
“I was pleasantly surprised that the staff at the ministry were already aware of the guide!” exclaimed Baaghil with a smile. “They ran a trial this year in which they downloaded the PDF files in different languages, printed the guide on glossy paper in color and distributed thousands of copies to pilgrims before the Haj. I was told that it was well received. Every good deed done by a Muslim, however small, will be rewarded by Allah. This is a small deed from my side and I hope it will aid many Muslims in enriching their Haj experience.”

Hadj : Stampede kills 345 pilgrims

Stampede kills 345 Hajj pilgrims


Hundreds of pilgrims have been crushed to death and hundreds more injured, during a stoning ritual on the last day of the Hajj, the kingdom's health minister has said.
Hamad bin Abdullah al-Manei, Saudi Arabia's health minister, said: "So far, the number of confirmed death is 345 and the number of injured in hospital is 289."

Al-Maneh said the stampede was caused by "unruly pilgrims, and a problem of luggage."

"Today, just after sunset, there was a big rush among the pilgrims which led a group of them to be killed or wounded."

A medical source at Mina General Hospital told AFP the number of injured had reached 600.

Following the crush at the northern entrance of Mina's Jamarat Bridge, an eyewitness, who gave his name only as Saeed, told Al Jazeera: "It was very difficult to reach the first Jamarat-throwing and I saw bodies lined up on the ground. One pilgrim has lost his family among the crowd."

Police made a circle around the place trying to get people out, he added. The incident took place at noon prayer.

One Egyptian pilgrim on the scene told AFP: "I saw pilgrims falling under the feet of other pilgrims. I don't know how many people died, but I know that it is in the dozens."
Dangerous ritual
"I saw pilgrims falling under the feet of other pilgrims"Egyptian eyewitnessThe stoning of Satan is the riskiest episode of the Hajj as pilgrims jostle to ensure their pebbles touch the pillar. Weaker people risk being trampled on by the masses.
A total of 251 people were trampled to death in the 2004 Hajj as people panicked during the ritual stoning.
The stoning ritual, which is spread out over three days, marks the final part of the Hajj pilgrimage for the more than two million Muslims who have flocked to Makka from around the world.

In 2003, 14 pilgrims, including six women, were killed in a stampede during the first day of the stoning ritual, and 35 died in 2001, while in 1998 the Hajj saw 118 killed and more than 180 hurt at Mina.
The deadliest toll of the pilgrimage was in July 1990 when 1426 pilgrims were trampled or asphyxiated to death in a stampede in a tunnel, also in Mina.
Following a journey made by Prophet Mohammed over 1400 years ago, pilgrims flocked to the plain of Arafat, south of Mina, on Monday to pray for mercy in the central rite of the Hajj.Five pillars
Security has been increased forthis year's HajjBefore coming to Mina on Tuesday, many spent the night in the sacred site of Muzdalifah where they collected pebbles for the stoning ritual.The Hajj is one of the five pillars of Islam and a once-in-a-life time duty for all Muslims physically able to undertake it.
The latest tragedy comes days after 76 people were killed when a hostel in the heart of Makka collapsed last week.
Almost 60,000 security, health, emergency and other personnel were involved in organising this year's Hajj, trying to prevent the deadly incidents that have marred it in recent years from being repeated.
Aljazeera + Agencies

It's the demography, stupid

Features

It’s the demography, stupid
By Mark Steyn


Most people reading this have strong stomachs, so let me lay it out as baldly as I can: Much of what we loosely call the western world will not survive this century, and much of it will effectively disappear within our lifetimes, including many if not most western European countries. There’ll probably still be a geographical area on the map marked as Italy or the Netherlands— probably—just as in Istanbul there’s still a building called St. Sophia’s Cathedral. But it’s not a cathedral; it’s merely a designation for a piece of real estate. Likewise, Italy and the Netherlands will merely be designations for real estate. The challenge for those who reckon western civilization is on balance better than the alternatives is to figure out a way to save at least some parts of the west.
One obstacle to doing that is the fact that, in the typical election campaign in your advanced industrial democracy, the political platforms of at least one party in the United States and pretty much all parties in the rest of the west are largely about what one would call the secondary impulses of society—government health care, government day care (which Canada’s thinking of introducing), government paternity leave (which Britain’s just introduced). We’ve prioritized the secondary impulse over the primary ones: national defense, family, faith, and, most basic of all, reproductive activity—“Go forth and multiply,” because if you don’t you won’t be able to afford all those secondary-impulse issues, like cradle-to-grave welfare. Americans sometimes don’t understand how far gone most of the rest of the developed world is down this path: In the Canadian and most Continental cabinets, the defense ministry is somewhere an ambitious politician passes through on his way up to important jobs like the health department. I don’t think Don Rumsfeld would regard it as a promotion if he were moved to Health & Human Services.
The design flaw of the secular social-democratic state is that it requires a religious-society birth rate to sustain it. Post-Christian hyper-rationalism is, in the objective sense, a lot less rational than Catholicism or Mormonism. Indeed, in its reliance on immigration to ensure its future, the European Union has adopted a twenty-first-century variation on the strategy of the Shakers, who were forbidden from reproducing and thus could only increase their numbers by conversion. The problem is that secondary- impulse societies mistake their weaknesses for strengths—or, at any rate, virtues—and that’s why they’re proving so feeble at dealing with a primal force like Islam.
Speaking of which, if we are at war—and half the American people and significantly higher percentages in Britain, Canada, and Europe don’t accept that proposition—than what exactly is the war about?
We know it’s not really a “war on terror.” Nor is it, at heart, a war against Islam, or even “radical Islam.” The Muslim faith, whatever its merits for the believers, is a problematic business for the rest of us. There are many trouble spots around the world, but as a general rule, it’s easy to make an educated guess at one of the participants: Muslims vs. Jews in “Palestine,” Muslims vs. Hindus in Kashmir, Muslims vs. Christians in Africa, Muslims vs. Buddhists in Thailand, Muslims vs. Russians in the Caucasus, Muslims vs. backpacking tourists in Bali. Like the environmentalists, these guys think globally but act locally.
Yet while Islamism is the enemy, it’s not what this thing’s about. Radical Islam is an opportunist infection, like AIDS: it’s not the HIV that kills you, it’s the pneumonia you get when your body’s too weak to fight it off. When the jihadists engage with the U.S. military, they lose—as they did in Afghanistan and Iraq. If this were like World War I with those fellows in one trench and us in ours facing them over some boggy piece of terrain, it would be over very quickly. Which the smarter Islamists have figured out. They know they can never win on the battlefield, but they figure there’s an excellent chance they can drag things out until western civilization collapses in on itself and Islam inherits by default.
That’s what the war’s about: our lack of civilizational confidence. As a famous Arnold Toynbee quote puts it: “Civilizations die from suicide, not murder”—as can be seen throughout much of “the western world” right now. The progressive agenda —lavish social welfare, abortion, secularism, multiculturalism—is collectively the real suicide bomb. Take multiculturalism: the great thing about multiculturalism is that it doesn’t involve knowing anything about other cultures—the capital of Bhutan, the principal exports of Malawi, who cares? All it requires is feeling good about other cultures. It’s fundamentally a fraud, and I would argue was subliminally accepted on that basis. Most adherents to the idea that all cultures are equal don’t want to live in anything but an advanced western society: Multiculturalism means your kid has to learn some wretched native dirge for the school holiday concert instead of getting to sing “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” or that your holistic masseuse uses techniques developed from Native American spirituality, but not that you or anyone you care about should have to live in an African or Native-American society. It’s a quintessential piece of progressive humbug.
Then September 11 happened. And bizarrely the reaction of just about every prominent western leader was to visit a mosque: President Bush did, the Prince of Wales did, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom did, the Prime Minister of Canada did… . The Premier of Ontario didn’t, and so twenty Muslim community leaders had a big summit to denounce him for failing to visit a mosque. I don’t know why he didn’t. Maybe there was a big backlog, it was mosque drivetime, prime ministers in gridlock up and down the freeway trying to get to the Sword of the Infidel-Slayer Mosque on Elm Street. But for whatever reason he couldn’t fit it into his hectic schedule. Ontario’s Citizenship Minister did show up at a mosque, but the imams took that as a great insult, like the Queen sending Fergie to open the Commonwealth Games. So the Premier of Ontario had to hold a big meeting with the aggrieved imams to apologize for not going to a mosque and, as The Toronto Star’s reported it, “to provide them with reassurance that the provincial government does not see them as the enemy.”
Anyway, the get-me-to-the-mosque-on-time fever died down, but it set the tone for our general approach to these atrocities. The old definition of a nanosecond was the gap between the traffic light changing in New York and the first honk from a car behind. The new definition is the gap between a terrorist bombing and the press release from an Islamic lobby group warning of a backlash against Muslims. In most circumstances, it would be considered appallingly bad taste to deflect attention from an actual “hate crime” by scaremongering about a purely hypothetical one. Needless to say, there is no campaign of Islamophobic hate crimes. If anything, the west is awash in an epidemic of self-hate crimes. A commenter on Tim Blair’s website in Australia summed it up in a note-perfect parody of a Guardian headline: “Muslim Community Leaders Warn of Backlash from Tomorrow Morning’s Terrorist Attack.” Those community leaders have the measure of us.
Radical Islam is what multiculturalism has been waiting for all along. In The Survival of Culture, I quoted the eminent British barrister Helena Kennedy, QC. Shortly after September 11, Baroness Kennedy argued on a BBC show that it was too easy to disparage “Islamic fundamentalists.” “We as western liberals too often are fundamentalist ourselves,” she complained. “We don’t look at our own fundamentalisms.”
Well, said the interviewer, what exactly would those western liberal fundamentalisms be? “One of the things that we are too ready to insist upon is that we are the tolerant people and that the intolerance is something that belongs to other countries like Islam. And I’m not sure that’s true.”
Hmm. Lady Kennedy was arguing that our tolerance of our own tolerance is making us intolerant of other people’s intolerance, which is intolerable. And, unlikely as it sounds, this has now become the highest, most rarefied form of multiculturalism. So you’re nice to gays and the Inuit? Big deal. Anyone can be tolerant of fellows like that, but tolerance of intolerance gives an even more intense frisson of pleasure to the multiculti masochists. In other words, just as the AIDS pandemic greatly facilitated societal surrender to the gay agenda, so 9/11 is greatly facilitating our surrender to the most extreme aspects of the multicultural agenda.
For example, one day in 2004, a couple of Canadians returned home, to Lester B. Pearson International Airport in Toronto. They were the son and widow of a fellow called Ahmed Said Khadr, who back on the Pakistani-Afghan frontier was known as “al-Kanadi.” Why? Because he was the highest-ranking Canadian in al Qaeda—plenty of other Canucks in al Qaeda but he was the Numero Uno. In fact, one could argue that the Khadr family is Canada’s principal contribution to the war on terror. Granted they’re on the wrong side (if you’ll forgive me being judgmental) but no can argue that they aren’t in the thick of things. One of Mr. Khadr’s sons was captured in Afghanistan after killing a U.S. Special Forces medic. Another was captured and held at Guantanamo. A third blew himself up while killing a Canadian soldier in Kabul. Pa Khadr himself died in an al Qaeda shoot-out with Pakistani forces in early 2004. And they say we Canadians aren’t doing our bit in this war!
In the course of the fatal shoot-out of al-Kanadi, his youngest son was paralyzed. And, not unreasonably, Junior didn’t fancy a prison hospital in Peshawar. So Mrs. Khadr and her boy returned to Toronto so he could enjoy the benefits of Ontario government healthcare. “I’m Canadian, and I’m not begging for my rights,” declared the widow Khadr. “I’m demanding my rights.”
As they always say, treason’s hard to prove in court, but given the circumstances of Mr. Khadr’s death it seems clear that not only was he providing “aid and comfort to the Queen’s enemies” but that he was, in fact, the Queen’s enemy. The Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, the Royal 22nd Regiment, and other Canucks have been participating in Afghanistan, on one side of the conflict, and the Khadr family had been over there participating on the other side. Nonetheless, the Prime Minister of Canada thought Boy Khadr’s claims on the public health system was an excellent opportunity to demonstrate his own deep personal commitment to “diversity.” Asked about the Khadrs’ return to Toronto, he said, “I believe that once you are a Canadian citizen, you have the right to your own views and to disagree.”
That’s the wonderful thing about multiculturalism: you can choose which side of the war you want to fight on. When the draft card arrives, just tick “home team” or “enemy,” according to taste. The Canadian Prime Minister is a typical late-stage western politician: He could have said, well, these are contemptible people and I know many of us are disgusted at the idea of our tax dollars being used to provide health care for a man whose Canadian citizenship is no more than a flag of convenience, but unfortunately that’s the law and, while we can try to tighten it, it looks like this lowlife’s got away with it. Instead, his reflex instinct was to proclaim this as a wholehearted demonstration of the virtues of the multicultural state. Like many enlightened western leaders, the Canadian Prime Minister will be congratulating himself on his boundless tolerance even as the forces of intolerance consume him.
That, by the way, is the one point of similarity between the jihad and conventional terrorist movements like the IRA or ETA. Terror groups persist because of a lack of confidence on the part of their targets: the IRA, for example, calculated correctly that the British had the capability to smash them totally but not the will. So they knew that while they could never win militarily, they also could never be defeated. The Islamists have figured similarly. The only difference is that most terrorist wars are highly localized. We now have the first truly global terrorist insurgency because the Islamists view the whole world the way the IRA view the bogs of Fermanagh: they want it and they’ve calculated that our entire civilization lacks the will to see them off.
We spend a lot of time at The New Criterion attacking the elites and we’re right to do so. The commanding heights of the culture have behaved disgracefully for the last several decades. But, if it were just a problem with the elites, it wouldn’t be that serious: the mob could rise up and hang ’em from lampposts—a scenario that’s not unlikely in certain Continental countries. But the problem now goes way beyond the ruling establishment. The annexation by government of most of the key responsibilities of life—child-raising, taking care of your elderly parents—has profoundly changed the relationship between the citizen and the state. At some point—I would say socialized health care is a good marker—you cross a line, and it’s very hard then to persuade a citizenry enjoying that much government largesse to cross back. In National Review recently, I took issue with that line Gerald Ford always uses to ingratiate himself with conservative audiences: “A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take away everything you have.” Actually, you run into trouble long before that point: A government big enough to give you everything you want still isn’t big enough to get you to give anything back. That’s what the French and German political classes are discovering.
Go back to that list of local conflicts I mentioned. The jihad has held out a long time against very tough enemies. If you’re not shy about taking on the Israelis, the Russians, the Indians, and the Nigerians, why wouldn’t you fancy your chances against the Belgians and Danes and New Zealanders?
So the jihadists are for the most part doing no more than giving us a prod in the rear as we sleepwalk to the cliff. When I say “sleepwalk,” it’s not because we’re a blasé culture. On the contrary, one of the clearest signs of our decline is the way we expend so much energy worrying about the wrong things. If you’ve read Jared Diamond’s bestselling book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, you’ll know it goes into a lot of detail about Easter Island going belly up because they chopped down all their trees. Apparently that’s why they’re not a G8 member or on the UN Security Council. Same with the Greenlanders and the Mayans and Diamond’s other curious choices of “societies.” Indeed, as the author sees it, pretty much every society collapses because it chops down its trees.
Poor old Diamond can’t see the forest because of his obsession with the trees. (Russia’s collapsing even as it’s undergoing reforestation.) One way “societies choose to fail or succeed” is by choosing what to worry about. The western world has delivered more wealth and more comfort to more of its citizens than any other civilization in history, and in return we’ve developed a great cult of worrying. You know the classics of the genre: In 1968, in his bestselling book The Population Bomb, the eminent scientist Paul Ehrlich declared: “In the 1970s the world will undergo famines—hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death.” In 1972, in their landmark study The Limits to Growth, the Club of Rome announced that the world would run out of gold by 1981, of mercury by 1985, tin by 1987, zinc by 1990, petroleum by 1992, and copper, lead, and gas by 1993.
None of these things happened. In fact, quite the opposite is happening. We’re pretty much awash in resources, but we’re running out of people—the one truly indispensable resource, without which none of the others matter. Russia’s the most obvious example: it’s the largest country on earth, it’s full of natural resources, and yet it’s dying—its population is falling calamitously.
The default mode of our elites is that anything that happens—from terrorism to tsunamis—can be understood only as deriving from the perniciousness of western civilization. As Jean-François Revel wrote, “Clearly, a civilization that feels guilty for everything it is and does will lack the energy and conviction to defend itself.”
And even though none of the prognostications of the eco-doom blockbusters of the 1970s came to pass, all that means is that thirty years on, the end of the world has to be rescheduled. The amended estimated time of arrival is now 2032. That’s to say, in 2002, the United Nations Global Environmental Outlook predicted “the destruction of 70 percent of the natural world in thirty years, mass extinction of species… . More than half the world will be afflicted by water shortages, with 95 percent of people in the Middle East with severe problems … 25 percent of all species of mammals and 10 percent of birds will be extinct …”
Etc., etc., for 450 pages. Or to cut to the chase, as The Guardian headlined it, “Unless We Change Our Ways, The World Faces Disaster.”
Well, here’s my prediction for 2032: unless we change our ways the world faces a future … where the environment will look pretty darn good. If you’re a tree or a rock, you’ll be living in clover. It’s the Italians and the Swedes who’ll be facing extinction and the loss of their natural habitat.
There will be no environmental doomsday. Oil, carbon dioxide emissions, deforestation: none of these things is worth worrying about. What’s worrying is that we spend so much time worrying about things that aren’t worth worrying about that we don’t worry about the things we should be worrying about. For thirty years, we’ve had endless wake-up calls for things that aren’t worth waking up for. But for the very real, remorseless shifts in our society—the ones truly jeopardizing our future—we’re sound asleep. The world is changing dramatically right now and hysterical experts twitter about a hypothetical decrease in the Antarctic krill that might conceivably possibly happen so far down the road there’s unlikely to be any Italian or Japanese enviro-worriers left alive to be devastated by it.
In a globalized economy, the environmentalists want us to worry about First World capitalism imposing its ways on bucolic, pastoral, primitive Third World backwaters. Yet, insofar as “globalization” is a threat, the real danger is precisely the opposite—that the peculiarities of the backwaters can leap instantly to the First World. Pigs are valued assets and sleep in the living room in rural China—and next thing you know an unknown respiratory disease is killing people in Toronto, just because someone got on a plane. That’s the way to look at Islamism: we fret about McDonald’s and Disney, but the big globalization success story is the way the Saudis have taken what was eighty years ago a severe but obscure and unimportant strain of Islam practiced by Bedouins of no fixed abode and successfully exported it to the heart of Copenhagen, Rotterdam, Manchester, Buffalo …
What’s the better bet? A globalization that exports cheeseburgers and pop songs or a globalization that exports the fiercest aspects of its culture? When it comes to forecasting the future, the birth rate is the nearest thing to hard numbers. If only a million babies are born in 2006, it’s hard to have two million adults enter the workforce in 2026 (or 2033, or 2037, or whenever they get around to finishing their Anger Management and Queer Studies degrees). And the hard data on babies around the western world is that they’re running out a lot faster than the oil is. “Replacement” fertility rate—i.e., the number you need for merely a stable population, not getting any bigger, not getting any smaller—is 2.1 babies per woman. Some countries are well above that: the global fertility leader, Somalia, is 6.91, Niger 6.83, Afghanistan 6.78, Yemen 6.75. Notice what those nations have in common?
Scroll way down to the bottom of the Hot One Hundred top breeders and you’ll eventually find the United States, hovering just at replacement rate with 2.07 births per woman. Ireland is 1.87, New Zealand 1.79, Australia 1.76. But Canada’s fertility rate is down to 1.5, well below replacement rate; Germany and Austria are at 1.3, the brink of the death spiral; Russia and Italy are at 1.2; Spain 1.1, about half replacement rate. That’s to say, Spain’s population is halving every generation. By 2050, Italy’s population will have fallen by 22 percent, Bulgaria’s by 36 percent, Estonia’s by 52 percent. In America, demographic trends suggest that the blue states ought to apply for honorary membership of the EU: in the 2004 election, John Kerry won the sixteen with the lowest birth rates; George W. Bush took twenty-five of the twenty-six states with the highest. By 2050, there will be 100 million fewer Europeans, 100 million more Americans—and mostly red-state Americans.
As fertility shrivels, societies get older—and Japan and much of Europe are set to get older than any functioning societies have ever been. And we know what comes after old age. These countries are going out of business—unless they can find the will to change their ways. Is that likely? I don’t think so. If you look at European election results—most recently in Germany—it’s hard not to conclude that, while voters are unhappy with their political establishments, they’re unhappy mainly because they resent being asked to reconsider their government benefits and, no matter how unaffordable they may be a generation down the road, they have no intention of seriously reconsidering them. The Scottish executive recently backed down from a proposal to raise the retirement age of Scottish public workers. It’s presently sixty, which is nice but unaffordable. But the reaction of the average Scots worker is that that’s somebody else’s problem. The average German worker now puts in 22 percent fewer hours per year than his American counterpart, and no politician who wishes to remain electorally viable will propose closing the gap in any meaningful way.
This isn’t a deep-rooted cultural difference between the Old World and the New. It dates back all the way to, oh, the 1970s. If one wanted to allocate blame, one could argue that it’s a product of the U.S. military presence, the American security guarantee that liberated European budgets: instead of having to spend money on guns, they could concentrate on butter, and buttering up the voters. If Washington’s problem with Europe is that these are not serious allies, well, whose fault is that? Who, in the years after the Second World War, created NATO as a post-modern military alliance? The “free world,” as the Americans called it, was a free ride for everyone else. And having been absolved from the primal responsibilities of nationhood, it’s hardly surprising that European nations have little wish to re-shoulder them. In essence, the lavish levels of public health care on the Continent are subsidized by the American taxpayer. And this long-term softening of large sections of the west makes them ill-suited to resisting a primal force like Islam.
There is no “population bomb.” There never was. Birth rates are declining all over the world—eventually every couple on the planet may decide to opt for the western yuppie model of one designer baby at the age of thirty-nine. But demographics is a game of last man standing. The groups that succumb to demographic apathy last will have a huge advantage. Even in 1968 Paul Ehrlich and his ilk should have understood that their so-called “population explosion” was really a massive population adjustment. Of the increase in global population between 1970 and 2000, the developed world accounted for under 9 percent of it, while the Muslim world accounted for 26 percent of the increase. Between 1970 and 2000, the developed world declined from just under 30 percent of the world’s population to just over 20 percent, the Muslim nations increased from about 15 percent to 20 percent.
1970 doesn’t seem that long ago. If you’re the age many of the chaps running the western world today are wont to be, your pants are narrower than they were back then and your hair’s less groovy, but the landscape of your life—the look of your house, the lay-out of your car, the shape of your kitchen appliances, the brand names of the stuff in the fridge—isn’t significantly different. Aside from the Internet and the cellphone and the CD, everything in your world seems pretty much the same but slightly modified.
And yet the world is utterly altered. Just to recap those bald statistics: In 1970, the developed world had twice as big a share of the global population as the Muslim world: 30 percent to 15 percent. By 2000, they were the same: each had about 20 percent.
And by 2020?
So the world’s people are a lot more Islamic than they were back then and a lot less “western.” Europe is significantly more Islamic, having taken in during that period some 20 million Muslims (officially)—or the equivalents of the populations of four European Union countries (Ireland, Belgium, Denmark, and Estonia). Islam is the fastest-growing religion in the west: in the UK, more Muslims than Christians attend religious services each week.
Can these trends continue for another thirty years without having consequences? Europe by the end of this century will be a continent after the neutron bomb: the grand buildings will still be standing but the people who built them will be gone. We are living through a remarkable period: the self-extinction of the races who, for good or ill, shaped the modern world.
What will Europe be like at the end of this process? Who knows? On the one hand, there’s something to be said for the notion that America will find an Islamified Europe more straightforward to deal with than Monsieur Chirac, Herr Schröder, and Co. On the other hand, given Europe’s track record, getting there could be very bloody. But either way this is the real battlefield. The al Qaeda nutters can never find enough suicidal pilots to fly enough planes into enough skyscrapers to topple America. But, unlike us, the Islamists think long-term, and, given their demographic advantage in Europe and the tone of the emerging Muslim lobby groups there, much of what they’re flying planes into buildings for they’re likely to wind up with just by waiting a few more years. The skyscrapers will be theirs; why knock ’em over?
The latter half of the decline and fall of great civilizations follows a familiar pattern: affluence, softness, decadence, extinction. You don’t notice yourself slipping through those stages because usually there’s a seductive pol on hand to provide the age with a sly, self-deluding slogan—like Bill Clinton’s “It’s about the future of all our children.” We on the right spent the 1990s gleefully mocking Clinton’s tedious invocation, drizzled like syrup over everything from the Kosovo war to highway appropriations. But most of the rest of the west can’t even steal his lame bromides: A society that has no children has no future.
Permanence is the illusion of every age. In 1913, no one thought the Russian, Austrian, German, and Turkish empires would be gone within half a decade. Seventy years on, all those fellows who dismissed Reagan as an “amiable dunce” (in Clark Clifford’s phrase) assured us the Soviet Union was likewise here to stay. The CIA analysts’ position was that East Germany was the ninth biggest economic power in the world. In 1987 there was no rash of experts predicting the imminent fall of the Berlin Wall, the Warsaw Pact, and the USSR itself.
Yet, even by the minimal standards of these wretched precedents, so-called “post-Christian” civilizations—as a prominent EU official described his continent to me—are more prone than traditional societies to mistake the present tense for a permanent feature. Religious cultures have a much greater sense of both past and future, as we did a century ago, when we spoke of death as joining “the great majority” in “the unseen world.” But if secularism’s starting point is that this is all there is, it’s no surprise that, consciously or not, they invest the here and now with far greater powers of endurance than it’s ever had. The idea that progressive Euro-welfarism is the permanent resting place of human development was always foolish; we now know that it’s suicidally so.
To avoid collapse, European nations will need to take in immigrants at a rate no stable society has ever attempted. The CIA is predicting the EU will collapse by 2020. Given that the CIA’s got pretty much everything wrong for half a century, that would suggest the EU is a shoo-in to be the colossus of the new millennium. But even a flop spook is right twice a generation. If anything, the date of EU collapse is rather a cautious estimate. It seems more likely that within the next couple of European election cycles, the internal contradictions of the EU will manifest themselves in the usual way, and that by 2010 we’ll be watching burning buildings, street riots, and assassinations on American network news every night. Even if they avoid that, the idea of a childless Europe ever rivaling America militarily or economically is laughable. Sometime this century there will be 500 million Americans, and what’s left in Europe will either be very old or very Muslim. Japan faces the same problem: its population is already in absolute decline, the first gentle slope of a death spiral it will be unlikely ever to climb out of. Will Japan be an economic powerhouse if it’s populated by Koreans and Filipinos? Very possibly. Will Germany if it’s populated by Algerians? That’s a trickier proposition.
Best-case scenario? The Continent winds up as Vienna with Swedish tax rates.
Worst-case scenario: Sharia, circa 2040; semi-Sharia, a lot sooner—and we’re already seeing a drift in that direction.
In July 2003, speaking to the United States Congress, Tony Blair remarked: “As Britain knows, all predominant power seems for a time invincible but, in fact, it is transient. The question is: What do you leave behind?”
Excellent question. Britannia will never again wield the unrivalled power she enjoyed at her imperial apogee, but the Britannic inheritance endures, to one degree or another, in many of the key regional players in the world today—Australia, India, South Africa—and in dozens of island statelets from the Caribbean to the Pacific. If China ever takes its place as an advanced nation, it will be because the People’s Republic learns more from British Hong Kong than Hong Kong learns from the Little Red Book. And of course the dominant power of our time derives its political character from eighteenth-century British subjects who took English ideas a little further than the mother country was willing to go.
A decade and a half after victory in the Cold War and end-of-history triumphalism, the “what do you leave behind?” question is more urgent than most of us expected. “The west,” as a concept, is dead, and the west, as a matter of demographic fact, is dying.
What will London—or Paris, or Amsterdam—be like in the mid-Thirties? If European politicians make no serious attempt this decade to wean the populace off their unsustainable thirty-five-hour weeks, retirement at sixty, etc., then to keep the present level of pensions and health benefits the EU will need to import so many workers from North Africa and the Middle East that it will be well on its way to majority Muslim by 2035. As things stand, Muslims are already the primary source of population growth in English cities. Can a society become increasingly Islamic in its demographic character without becoming increasingly Islamic in its political character?
This ought to be the left’s issue. I’m a conservative—I’m not entirely on board with the Islamist program when it comes to beheading sodomites and so on, but I agree Britney Spears dresses like a slut: I’m with Mullah Omar on that one. Why then, if your big thing is feminism or abortion or gay marriage, are you so certain that the cult of tolerance will prevail once the biggest demographic in your society is cheerfully intolerant? Who, after all, are going to be the first victims of the west’s collapsed birth rates? Even if one were to take the optimistic view that Europe will be able to resist the creeping imposition of Sharia currently engulfing Nigeria, it remains the case that the Muslim world is not notable for setting much store by “a woman’s right to choose,” in any sense. I watched that big abortion rally in Washington in 2004, where Ashley Judd and Gloria Steinem were cheered by women waving “Keep your Bush off my bush” placards, and I thought it was the equivalent of a White Russian tea party in 1917. By prioritizing a “woman’s right to choose,” western women are delivering their societies into the hands of fellows far more patriarchal than a 1950s sitcom dad. If any of those women marching for their “reproductive rights” still have babies, they might like to ponder demographic realities: A little girl born today will be unlikely, at the age of forty, to be free to prance around demonstrations in Eurabian Paris or Amsterdam chanting “Hands off my bush!”
Just before the 2004 election, that eminent political analyst Cameron Diaz appeared on the Oprah Winfrey show to explain what was at stake:
“Women have so much to lose. I mean, we could lose the right to our bodies… . If you think that rape should be legal, then don’t vote. But if you think that you have a right to your body,” she advised Oprah’s viewers, “then you should vote.”
Poor Cameron. A couple of weeks later, the scary people won. She lost all rights to her body. Unlike Alec Baldwin, she couldn’t even move to France. Her body was grounded in Terminal D.
But, after framing the 2004 Presidential election as a referendum on the right to rape, Miss Diaz might be interested to know that men enjoy that right under many Islamic legal codes around the world. In his book The Empty Cradle, Philip Longman asks: “So where will the children of the future come from? Increasingly they will come from people who are at odds with the modern world. Such a trend, if sustained, could drive human culture off its current market-driven, individualistic, modernist course, gradually creating an anti-market culture dominated by fundamentalism—a new Dark Ages.”
Bottom line for Cameron Diaz: There are worse things than John Ashcroft out there.
Longman’s point is well taken. The refined antennae of western liberals mean that, whenever one raises the question of whether there will be any Italians living in the geographical zone marked as Italy a generation or three hence, they cry, “Racism!” To fret about what proportion of the population is “white” is grotesque and inappropriate. But it’s not about race, it’s about culture. If 100 percent of your population believes in liberal pluralist democracy, it doesn’t matter whether 70 percent of them are “white” or only 5 percent are. But, if one part of your population believes in liberal pluralist democracy and the other doesn’t, then it becomes a matter of great importance whether the part that does is 90 percent of the population or only 60, 50, 45 percent.
Since the President unveiled the so-called Bush Doctrine—the plan to promote liberty throughout the Arab world—innumerable “progressives” have routinely asserted that there’s no evidence Muslims want liberty and, indeed, Islam is incompatible with democracy. If that’s true, it’s a problem not for the Middle East today but for Europe the day after tomorrow. According to a poll taken in 2004, over 60 percent of British Muslims want to live under sharia—in the United Kingdom. If a population “at odds with the modern world” is the fastest-breeding group on the planet—if there are more Muslim nations, more fundamentalist Muslims within those nations, more and more Muslims within non-Muslim nations, and more and more Muslims represented in more and more transnational institutions—how safe a bet is the survival of the “modern world”?
Not good.
“What do you leave behind?” asked Tony Blair. There will only be very few and very old ethnic Germans and French and Italians by the midpoint of this century. What will they leave behind? Territories that happen to bear their names and keep up some of the old buildings? Or will the dying European races understand that the only legacy that matters is whether the peoples who will live in those lands after them are reconciled to pluralist, liberal democracy? It’s the demography, stupid. And, if they can’t muster the will to change course, then “what do you leave behind?” is the only question that matters.
This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 24, January 2006

Eid days in Jordan

Eid Days



The Jordan Times took to the streets of the capital to find out how citizens will be spending the Eid holiday

Mohammad Hani
Supermarket owner
Every Eid Al Adha Mohammad Hani heads off to prayer with his sons. To him, Eid is a time of the year to step back and look at the bigger picture.
“It's a very spiritual time for our family during which we like to think of others; from family members we haven't seen for a while to other people in need of help,” Mohammad explains.
The family follows their morning prayers by the annual tradition of sacrificing and offering the meat to the less fortunate; “ it is our duty to God. I do it to thank Him for the blessings in our lives by sharing a little with others less fortunate. We should try to give more often,” says Mohammad.
The rest of the day he spends with the family visiting relatives where they drink Arabic coffee and try fresh home made mamoul cookies, a holiday speciality stuffed with dates, walnuts or pistachio.
Mohammad speaks of his life-long aspiration of performing Hajj with great passion.
“It is not just a duty but an obligation in Islam and one of its five pillars.” Already have performed the umrah, a less essential pilgrimage in Islam, Hajj is in his plans for the near future.
“I know it will be a physically trying experience, but it is all worth it to reach that point of inner peace and closeness to God.”

Adel Khalil
Cosmetics shop owner
“I will start the first day of Eid Al Adha, with the Eid prayer, a special prayer for Muslims performed at dawn on the first day of Eid. I will accompany three of my children to the prayer,” said the 39-years- old businessman.
Khalil said that after the prayers he will go with his 59-year old father, his children and some of his relatives, to the graveyard to visit the tombs of his relatives and friends.
“This is something traditional in Islam, I usually go with other members of my family members to visit the tombs of our relatives and beloved friends and pray for them over the Eid period. To visit the tombs of relatives and friends and pray for them is something common in Islam,” Khalil told The Jordan Times.
“After we return from the graveyard, all my family members, my parents and sisters gather for breakfast and share opinions on what to do during Eid. Then, after breakfast I give my kids and parents the Eidiah (a money gift usually given to children and female relatives during Eid).
After afternoon prayers, Khalil said he will buy a sheep, slaughter it, keep some of it and distribute the rest to poor neighbours.
“I usually buy two or three sheep at Al Adha Eid but this Eid I will buy only one because I cannot afford it because the price of sheep is now more than JD132,” said Khalil.
“During the rest of Eid, I will visit relatives, friends and accompany my children to the amusement park. After all, Eid is for kids and us fathers are there just to provide the money,” said Khalil laughing.

Sara Dudin
University student
To Sara, Eid is all about spending time with her family. “Everyone is so busy throughout the year, so Eid is an excellent occasion for us to get together,” she explains.
This Tuesday, Sara will be waking up early to visit her relatives and enjoy lunch in a restaurant with her parents and four sisters.
“As a kid, Eid was about the presents and getting money from my parents. I've come to realise growing up a different meaning to it in spending time with my family and its spiritual aspect.”
“Now I see myself as a child in my younger sisters,” she adds. Sara smiles as she points to her eight-year-old sister Dina, who shyly hides behind Sara's back.
By the spiritual aspect, Sara means Hajj, a dream she has not fulfilled but is in her plans for the future. “I can imagine it to be an extraordinary experience — for all these people to come together regardless of race or background and join each other for the single purpose of worshipping God.”
While sacrificing is not an annual tradition in her family, it is still a valuable part of Eid Al Adha. “It helps us become less self-centred and think of others less fortunate.”
With the first day of Eid all about the family, following days give Sara time to share the celebrations with her friends.
“We like to visit each other on the second day, and in the later days we go out somewhere. Unfortunately this year final exams won't give us the chance.”

Khalid Daoud
Marketing specialist at Motorola International
“I came to Jordan last Thursday to visit my grandfather and grandmother and the rest of my relatives. I also wanted to spend the Eid here in Amman to visit two of my friends, who will get married during the Eid and then leave for the US. They are so dear to my heart and I wanted badly to see them because they are planning to remain in the US for good and it will probably be years before I get the chance to see them,” said Daoud, a Jordanian expatriate who lives in Dubai.
Daoud believes that this Eid is special for him.
“This Eid is special as I came to Amman over the past Eids as a university student, but this time I came to Amman to sign a deal for my work,” said the 25-year old marketing specialist.
Daoud says he prefers to spend Eid in Amman rather than in Dubai with his immediate family, as he misses his friends here and enjoys catching up on the news and spending time visiting the places he loves.
“I plan to stay until next Saturday and during this time I will meet with old friends, university colleagues and hang out in Petra, Wadi Rum and Aqaba.
“It seems that the Eid will be rainy and cold in Amman, so we will travel to where it is warmer,” Daoud told The Jordan Times.
Interviews By Razan Nasser and Mohammad Ghazal -Jordan times

Hadj pilgrims

Hajj pilgrims begin stoning ritual


More than two million Muslim pilgrims have begun the ritual stoning of the devil that signifies the climax of the annual Hajj pilgrimage.
Pilgrims flocked to the site at Mena's Jamarat Bridge to cast the first set of stones before the crowds arrived.They must stand and stone three thick walls in a symbolic casting out of the devil and rejection of temptation.The occasion is subject to strict security as it had witnessed deadly stampedes in the past, like in 2004 when 250 pilgrims were trampled to death.In a message marking Tuesday's Eid al-Adha holiday, King Abdullah and Crown Prince Sultan of Saudi Arabia said: "We ask God to make this Eid one of peace and stability for Muslims and the whole world and unite Muslims in goodness and inspire them to do what is right."Tight securityThis year's pilgrimage has been overshadowed by the collapse of a Makka hostel that killed 76 people on Thursday and warnings of a possible spread of bird flu due to the huge crowds.Saudi Arabia has deployed a record 60,000-strong security force to control the huge crowds and avert attacks by Islamist militants opposing the US-allied Saudi royal family.
An estimated 2.5 million pilgrimsare expected in MakkaPilgrims must perform the stoning ritual three times. Many will stay in Jamarat until Thursday, the end of the five-day Hajj, whose rules were laid out by the Prophet Mohammad 1400 years ago. The Hajj is a journey every able-bodied Muslim is urged to complete at least once in his/her lifetime.
The government has reorganised access to the Jamarat area and promised to remove pilgrim squatters who camp there.Symbol of equality
Pilgrims, male and female, complete the first stoning session and then go to Makka to circle the Kaaba, which symbolises the house of God, dressed in white robes meant to eradicate class and make all Muslims equal.The state-appointed preacher at the Grand Mosque, Sheikh Abdulrahman al-Sudeis, urged Muslims in his Eid sermon to remember their Muslim brothers in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and in Iraq
He also said the West was using the phenomenon of terrorism to scare people away from Islam. "Muslims are being described in insulting terms to distort the image of Islam and scare people away from it," he said.
During Eid, Muslims slay livestock as a reminder of Abraham's willingness to sacrifice his son Ismail at God's command. Pilgrims buy special coupons from hajj organisers that represent the slain animal.
The collapse of a Makka hostelhas cast a shadow on the Hajj
Makka, a trading city that relies on the pilgrim traffic to sustain the local economy, comes alive as pilgrims flock to the Grand Mosque and circle the Kaaba and then queue at barbers for a haircut.The Saudi authorities were embarrassed by the collapse of the hostel in Makka, which was only 30 years old, amid the midday bustle of a narrow market street. The legitimacy of Saudi Arabia's ruling house rests in the eyes of many Muslims on its ability to host some 2.5 million hajj pilgrims every year.
Reuters

Asylum and immigration in Britain today

Asylum and immigration in Britain today

At the New Labour and Tory Party conferences, inflammatory speeches reaffirmed that both parties are prepared to whip up prejudice against asylum seekers and immigrants. This issue clearly has the potential to deeply divide society and raises many questions which have to be addressed by working class and trade union activists. HANNAH SELL outlines the socialist approach.
INDELIBLY MARKED AS a liar by the Hutton enquiry, Tony Blair went to this year’s Labour Party conference a wounded man, desperate to use his annual address to rebuild his standing. The resulting speech had many nauseating qualities but perhaps the foulest was his blatant attempt to restore his own popularity by whipping up prejudice by talking about ‘derailing the gravy train’ for asylum seekers.
Nor was this just a one-off conference ploy. Home Secretary David Blunkett is implementing a series of measures designed to create the impression that New Labour is heroically manning the barricades to prevent a flood of ‘bogus’ asylum seekers entering the country (see box 1). At Tory Party conference, Oliver Letwin went even further, talking about locking up all asylum seekers on a ‘far, faraway island’. Perhaps it is not surprising that he had no idea which island would agree to his plans. After all, his first brainwave was the poll tax when he worked as an assistant to Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s!
However, none of the proposals of New Labour or the Tories will prevent immigration into the country, any more than any of the increasingly repressive legislation of the previous decade has been able to do. Nor are they primarily designed to do so. Rather, they are political ploys arising from a fear of the far-right gaining from anti-asylum sentiment and, in Labour’s case, aimed at distracting workers from the government’s responsibility for the decay of our public services. Far from undercutting the far-right by stealing their clothes, however, New Labour increases the possibility of the British National Party (BNP) and its ilk growing. BNP leader, Nick Griffin, has described Blunkett as the BNP’s ‘best recruiting sergeant’.
It is not the immigration policies of successive governments that have led to an increase in the number of asylum seekers over the last decade. Capitalism at the start of the 21st century means an increasingly unstable and violent world, and this has led to growing numbers of people leaving their homes to try and find safety and security elsewhere. Repressive regimes, war and conflict, economic crises and environmental disasters are the conditions that create refugees internationally. In the modern world, where travel is more possible than ever before, it is inevitable that people try to escape from terrible conditions. And those conditions are the consequences of the capitalist system which is based on exploitation, competition and the pursuit of profit; a system which New Labour and the other main political parties represent. This system condemns 1.2 billion people to live on less than $1 a day. The richest 200 companies have combined sales worth more than the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of all but ten nations in the world. Globally, $1 trillion a year is wasted on military spending. It is a system of economic crises, increasingly leading to whole states ‘failing’, a system that is stagnating on a global scale.
While capitalism’s instability has increased the numbers who leave their homelands, international migrants – defined as people who live outside their homeland for a year or more – only account for under 3% of the world’s population: a total, in 2000, of maybe 150 million people, less than the population of Brazil. Only twelve million of these are refugees or asylum seekers – people who have been forced to leave their countries to escape war, persecution or natural disaster. The rest have moved for economic or other reasons. And the vast majority of those who are refugees do not come to Europe. It is the world’s poorest countries that both produce and bear responsibility for most refugees. During 1992-2001, 86% of the world’s refugees originated from developing countries, and also provided asylum to 72% of the global refugee population. If you consider global refugee and asylum seeking populations in relation to the host country’s size, population and wealth, the UK ranks 32nd. Taking the greatest burden are Iran, Burundi and Guinea.
Still it is true that there has also been an increase in immigration to the European Union (EU), including Britain. Over the last decade, an average of 1.2 million people entered the EU legally each year. Overall, the numbers have tailed off over the last couple of years, although they remain at a higher level than they were before the 1990s. It is, however, very difficult to get an accurate picture. The Economist magazine compared information from the Belgian and Italian governments on migration between the two countries and found it was completely different!
In a country like Britain, with relatively few internal checks, it is even harder to keep accurate records. Nonetheless, two definite conclusions can be drawn. Firstly, net immigration has been at a higher level than at any time over the last 150 years. Secondly, only a minority of these are asylum seekers. In fact, the majority come for a specific job and pay taxes from the moment they arrive. Contrary to the tabloid media’s attempts to lump together all immigrants, in 1999, for example, only 28% of non-British immigrants were asylum seekers. However, the number of asylum seekers has increased. In 2002, 84,130 people applied for asylum in Britain.
A boost to profits
THIS IS A change from the previous century. Between 1870 and 1920 Jewish immigration to Britain from Russia and Eastern Europe was at least as great as current levels of immigration. However, despite this there was a net outflow of over 2.6 million. This was largely due to emigration to the British colonies and the US. Only in the 1950s was there net immigration as the capitalist class appealed to workers from South Asia and the Caribbean to fulfil the need for cheap labour. Even so, net immigration was only about 12,000 over the decade. Also, this was against the background of the post-war economic expansion which meant that, unlike today, living standards for many workers in Britain were improving significantly. In the 1980s, when Thatcher declared immigration a ‘problem’, there was a net outflow.
The propaganda of the capitalist media and the mainstream political parties declares that current levels of immigration are unmanageable. But this is not their real position. On the contrary, immigration, both legal and illegal, is useful to them. The Economist argued in its 2002 survey of migration: "The gap between labour’s rewards in the poor and the rich countries, even for something as menial as clearing tables, dwarfs the gap between the prices of traded goods from different parts of the world. The potential gains [profits] from liberalising migration therefore dwarf those from removing barriers to world trade".
Immigration offers an invaluable opportunity for capitalists to compensate for an aging population in Europe and, at the same time, force wages down. It is an extension of neo-liberal policies. The globalisation of the world economy has been used to increase profits. One aspect of this is the moving of production to countries where labour is cheaper. Now they are trying to globalise labour by encouraging cheap-labour workers to travel to richer countries, thereby driving down wages there. This is particularly true with public and private services which cannot be moved around. This is taking place across Europe. The European Commission concluded that "more sustained immigration flows are increasingly likely and necessary. The trend towards a shrinking working-age population in Europe in combination with various push factors in the developing countries is likely to generate a sustained flow of immigrants over the next decade". In Britain, the government’s Actuary Department (which calculates population) estimates that immigration will account for 60% of the growth in the working-age population between 2002 and 2006.
Risk of social upheaval
THE ECONOMIST EXPLAINS, from the capitalist point of view, that the limitations to this are not practical but political: "But those gains can be made only at great political cost. Countries rarely welcome strangers in their midst".
The arrival of new immigrants has always had the potential to create dangerous instability. The nation state is the basic unit of capitalist society, whilst at the same time holding back its development. Today, in the era of globalisation, the productive forces – industry, science and technique – have long outgrown their national base. Therefore, the capitalists strain against the limitations of the nation state. However, they can only partially surmount it. The big corporations are, almost without exception, still based in, and tied to, particular countries. They rely on the market and political superstructure of their home nation. An intrinsic part of that superstructure is a national consciousness which the capitalist class taps into, for example, to win support for its wars. However, the capitalists cannot switch national consciousness on and off at will.
British capitalism felt it had no choice but to limit immigration at the end of the 1960s, despite the economic advantages it could have gained by speeding it up, because they feared the potential for social instability. Recently published cabinet papers from 1972 reveal how Tory prime minister Ted Heath called for harsh measures to prevent a second influx of Ugandan Asians, despite feeling that this was against Britain’s interests and his own better judgement. Today, when the lives of workers in Britain are, in general, becoming more difficult – as working hours increase and public services deteriorate – the potential for instability and conflict is clear.
New Labour has attempted to bridge the gap between the political advantages of attacking asylum seekers and cracking down on ‘illegal’ immigrants, and the capitalists’ desire for cheap labour by increasing the number of legal ‘economic’ migrants into Britain. The anti-asylum seeker propaganda that runs through its ‘crackdown’ has massively increased prejudice against asylum seekers, immigrants in general, and against more long-standing ethnic minority communities.
At the same time, the number of people working legally in Britain who were born abroad has increased from 1.8 million in 1995 to 2.6 million today. The largest increases are in South Africans and Australians. The sectors that use most migrant labour are healthcare, education, cleaning, food manufacture, catering and hotels. Until recently, the government’s policy of dramatically increasing ‘economic’ migration has been formally limited to skilled workers taking specific jobs. Many of these are in the public sector, such as nurses, teachers and doctors.
A recent opinion poll showed that 70% of people support immigrants taking these jobs if it means that a skills shortage will be filled. However, the shortages that exist in many parts of the public sector reflect New Labour’s unwillingness to adequately resource training or public-sector workers’ wage rises, in particular. As a result of stress and low pay, 40% of newly qualified teachers leave teaching within their first three years in the job. The response of New Labour has not been to increase wages and staffing levels to tempt more teachers to teach. Instead, in London in particular, it has relied on immigrant workers to plug the gap. With the promise of better pay and conditions, teachers and nurses from other countries are encouraged to move to Britain. As a result, the Jamaican government has complained that 600 teachers moved abroad this year to work, mainly in Britain and the US. Last year, South Africa accused the British government of ‘plundering’ staff. However, the better pay and conditions are far from luxurious. In one London school, immigrant teachers were housed in Portakabins in the school playground!
Unskilled labour
IN THE FUTURE, New Labour intends to go further by allowing a quota of unskilled workers into the country every year. At the same time, it is claiming to clamp down on illegal immigration. For the capitalists, however, illegal immigration is the best unskilled labour of all. The Economist said: "Illegal migrants are the most employment-hungry, market-sensitive arrivals of all. In the United Sates, points out Roberto Suro, director of the Pew Hispanic Centre, they provide just-in-time labour: ‘A meat-packing plant in Iowa can say to the foreman, next month, we need 5% more workers for three months. On the day they are needed, they’ll be there. It’s extremely efficient’. To convince their voters that migration is under control, governments have to curb the illegal sort. But they would be foolish, in doing so, to lose the flexibility and employability that illegals contribute".
In the same article, The Economist described a survey by the National Research Council (NRC) into the effects illegal immigrants have in the US. NRC concluded that, overall, immigration had reduced the wages of groups competing with immigrants – predominantly the low paid – by 1-2%.
This is one reason that Blunkett’s plan to introduce ID cards may not be carried through. Many in the cabinet are opposed because they see it as an expensive and bureaucratic scheme which will bring limited benefits. Some sections of big business, as reflected in The Economist, are opposed for the same reasons. They are happy with large numbers of ‘illegals’. Britain already has a low-paid, ‘flexible’ workforce. But as far as capitalism is concerned, wages can never be too low or employment practises too ‘flexible’. Workers with no rights and on slave wages are a useful tool in forcing down wages.
ID cards are not the only policy of Blunkett’s which is unlikely to be implemented. Most of his proposals, while they may serve his propaganda purposes, are impractical. For example, the much vaunted policy of building twelve to 15 asylum centres, mostly in the countryside, theoretically to house 40% of all asylum seekers, is running into problems. The residents of rural and suburban ‘Middle England’, whom New Labour sees as a key audience, have not proved amenable to having the centres built in their ‘backyards’. As a result, New Labour has not yet come up with one definite site. The government may be forced to rethink, just as it was on the call for ‘asylum centres’ outside of the EU.
Without doubt, however partially they are implemented, New Labour’s plans will lead to increased misery for asylum seekers. But they will not stop people fleeing persecution and war coming to Britain. As long as capitalism remains, asylum seekers will continue to exist in large numbers. In Britain, as in other countries, the numbers will ebb and flow with the passage of crises and wars. For example, the increase in asylum applications last year was mainly from Iraq and Zimbabwe. Occasionally, policy decisions – such as the government declaring that Iraq and Zimbabwe are safe – can cut numbers. But the next war or famine will lead to a new upsurge.
A socialist approach
WHAT ATTITUDE SHOULD socialists take to the question of asylum? We are fighting for the abolition of capitalism and for the development of socialism on a world scale. Only on this basis would it to be possible to harness science and technique to build a society that could meet the needs of all humanity. In a socialist world no-one would need to flee hunger or war. At the same time, part of the struggle for socialism is for humanity’s right to move. Passports and immigration controls are portrayed by the capitalists as permanent and immutable yet they were introduced over the last 100 years. Under modern capitalism, capital is free to traverse the world. Yet people are considered criminals if they try and leave their home country (unless, of course, they are required as cheap labour). Only on the basis of socialism would it be possible to have the genuine free movement of peoples.
Under capitalism the issue of immigration remains a powerful propaganda weapon in the hands of the ruling class. To counter this, socialists must adopt a skilful approach. We have to steadfastly oppose the scapegoating of asylum seekers and economic migrants, and fight for their rights. However, in doing so we are aiming to convince as many workers as possible of this position. To adopt, as some on the left do, a headline slogan like ‘asylum seekers welcome here’ is a mistake. It will never gain the ear of the vast majority of working-class people in Britain. Even amongst the most thinking sections of workers, who are aware of how the government uses asylum to deflect attention from its neo-liberal policies, there is a feeling that Britain cannot cope with more than a limited number of asylum seekers. Amongst broader sections of the working class the wave of anti-asylum seeker propaganda has had a marked effect. There is a feeling that their numbers are partly responsible for the dilapidated state of public services. And while racism is clearly a strong element in the most vitriolic anti-asylum feeling, this is not a simple question. It is undoubtedly true that the anti-asylum feeling is stronger in towns with small black and Asian populations, or in predominantly white suburbs on the edges of more mixed towns, than it is in London, where two-thirds of immigrants settle and 28% of the population are from ethnic minorities. (Incidentally, this proves that it is not overcrowding that causes anti-asylum feeling, as London is by far the most densely-populated part of Britain.) Nonetheless, anti-asylum seeker feeling does not only exist among white workers, but also among second and third generation immigrants from the neo-colonial world. Several opinion polls show that, as a result of the deluge of propaganda against them, the broadest hostility is towards Eastern European refugees rather than those from Africa or Asia.
That is not in any way to suggest that racism is no longer an issue in Britain. Racism has been an integral part of capitalism since its infancy when it was used to justify the slave trade. Later, racism was adapted to justify the colonial powers carving up the world between them. Today, racism is still ingrained in British society. The increased wealth and privilege of a small minority of black and Asian people is used to disguise the fact that we continue to live in a deeply unequal society. On average, black and Asian workers earn only three-quarters of the wage of their white counterparts. And black people are five times as likely to be stopped by the police. Nonetheless, hostility towards asylum seekers, as the newest arrivals on the bottom rung of the ladder, is not simply a question of race.
Socialists have to counter this hostility with a class approach. It is the poor, the world’s huddled masses, who have to face impossible obstacles to claiming asylum and the vitriol of the mainstream parties and media. Even though many asylum seekers do not come from the poorest strata in their country of origin, by the time they have spent their resources to cross the world, they generally arrive in Britain with nothing. By contrast, anyone with over £250,000 in their bank account, from wherever they came, is welcomed with open arms. Russian oligarchs, like Boris Berezovsky (who made his millions on the backs of Russian workers, and faces charges of money laundering in Russia), are granted political asylum. At the same time, it is not the rich but the poorest sections of the indigenous working class who are on the sharp end of low pay and New Labour’s cuts, and who have been most affected by anti-asylum seeker vitriol.
Whilst defending the rights of asylum seekers we must link that directly to our programme to fight to improve the living conditions of working people as a whole and to the struggle for socialism. Socialists have to oppose the persecution and jailing of asylum seekers, along with the rest of Blunkett’s reactionary legislation, highlighting issues such as the building of detention centres and the prosecution of those without papers. We have to defend the right of asylum, of families to be reunited and of asylum seekers to work. We should call for an end to the forced dispersal system and for asylum seekers to live where they choose, with central government providing local authorities with the necessary resources. Any plans to provide housing for asylum seekers in new areas should not be done secretly through NASS (National Asylum Support Service – the secretive government agency that currently deals with asylum seekers) but openly and under local authority control.
Trade union action
AT THE SAME time, it is necessary to work out a more detailed programme in individual communities where there has been a sudden influx of asylum seekers. We always fight to prevent working-class communities having to suffer further over-stretching of limited services. Government policy means that this is the effect of the sudden arrival of new asylum seekers. We have to call for community campaigns to secure extra resources – more teachers, doctors, language support and so on – in some cases, even as a precondition to the arrival of new groups of asylum seekers. In doing so we should always strive to build a united campaign of asylum seekers and local communities.
However, probably the most critical aspect of this discussion is the role of immigrants in the workplace. The organisation of immigrants into trade unions is not a new issue for the British working class, but it will form a vital aspect of both the struggle against low pay and the struggle against racism in the coming years. As far back as 1839, when William Cuffay (who was born in St Kitts in the Caribbean), founded the garment workers’ union, immigrant workers have played a role greater than their numbers in the British labour movement. The labour movement at its best has also played the key role in fighting racism. In the 1950s, for example, the railway workers’ union played the leading role in getting rid of the colour bar in many London pubs. This flowed from a realisation that the only way to stop bosses using workers from the Caribbean as cheap labour was to unionise them and launch a common struggle for decent pay. In the 1970s trade unions were instrumental in the battle to defeat the far-right racist National Front.
It is as a result of these traditions that black and Asian workers formed a strong bond with the labour movement, even though the majority did not come from an urban background in their home countries. In the 1970s, black and Asian workers played a key role in many industrial struggles. The Grunwick strike against low pay in 1976, which largely involved Asian women, was one of the most important battles of the decade. Even today, after the general fall in union membership in the 1990s, Afro-Caribbean workers still have a higher level of union membership (32.4%) than the workforce as a whole (26.6%). However, amongst newer immigrants, levels are much lower – 11% for workers born in Eastern Europe, for example.
If the trade union movement fails to win the new generation of immigrants, the pay and conditions of all workers will be undermined. The potential for heroic struggles was demonstrated in the US by the strike of Mexican janitors. They faced the risk not only of the sack but deportation and hostility from the trade union bureaucracy (dramatised in the Ken Loach film, Bread and Roses). However, it is not automatic that immigrant workers will be won to the labour movement. Socialists have to argue for a programme around which to do that. Key to this would be launching a serious struggle for a minimum wage of £8 an hour with no exemptions. We should specify that all workers, regardless of their legal status, should receive the minimum wage. There are currently between 48 and 123 government inspectors investigating employers who do not pay the minimum wage. Of the 56,000 complaints made by workers only 26 resulted in action being taken against the employers! The trade union movement should launch a massive ‘crackdown’ on the slave-labour bosses, in opposition to government ‘crackdowns’ on illegal immigrants working.
We must also campaign for the trade union movement to fight for all migrant workers to be employed on equal pay and conditions to indigenous workers in order to prevent immigration being used to lower wages. This is particularly urgent in the public sector, where there is a higher level of union organisation and New Labour is using migrant workers to plug gaps.
If the trade union movement as a whole launched a serious struggle against low pay, specifically taking up the rights of immigrant workers, it would transform the political landscape. At the same time as arguing for such a struggle, where socialists have significant influence, a campaign on this kind of programme can have a real effect in uniting the different sections of workers in Britain, both immigrant and indigenous.

Box 1
New Labour’s latest crackdowns
2002
July: The ‘right’ of asylum seekers to apply for special permission to work is taken away.
November: Any applications from ten EU accession states – Cyprus, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia – are automatically considered unfounded, with no right of appeal. Applications from these states fell from 285 in October to 40 in March.
December: Sangatte centre at Calais closed after intense pressure from the British government.
2003
January: Those who do not claim asylum immediately they enter Britain lose the right to benefits.
January: Anyone with refugee status in another part of the European Economic Area cannot receive benefits.
January: Visas become necessary for Jamaicans travelling to Britain.
February: Treaties with Bulgaria and Romania make it easier to return failed asylum seekers.
February: Asylum applications by post are banned.
February: Visas become necessary for Zimbabweans travelling to Britain.
February: Applications from Albania, Bulgaria, Jamaica, Macedonia, Moldova, Romania, Serbia and Montenegro are automatically considered unfounded.
More measures planned by the government include:
The introduction of a citizenship ceremony and a requirement that those seeking citizenship should have a knowledge of life in Britain.
The arrest and prosecution of any asylum seeker without documentation.
The building of twelve to 15 asylum centres each holding around 750 people, with the capacity to hold around 40% of all asylum seekers. Several of these to be located in rural areas.
The possible introduction of ID cards which would have to be shown to get a job, or use the NHS or other services.
Box 2
What are conditions really like?
If an asylum seeker gets into Britain, this is what they face as they wait for a judgment:
A person over 25 is entitled to £38.26 a week in state benefits; 18-25 year-olds get £30.28.
These benefits are 70% of the income support level considered to provide the ‘absolute necessities of existence’. Asylum seekers are not allowed to work.
Asylum seekers are entitled to housing but a fifth of the housing they occupy is classified as unfit for human habitation.
Previously it was the duty of local authorities to provide this. Responsibility is now with the National Asylum Support Service (NASS). NASS has a policy of ‘dispersing’ asylum seekers across Britain. In order to get housed, asylum seekers are forced to move to wherever NASS chooses. Only 58 of 440 English and Welsh councils are part of the dispersal system. The overwhelming majority are in poorer working class areas where resources are overstretched.
Most asylum seekers are in privately-rented accommodation. Often it is in low quality property converted into overcrowded, substandard housing for rent to asylum seekers via NASS. Councils have no control over this and usually are not informed. One result is that, when an asylum claim is successful, NASS immediately stops funding their housing. Penniless asylum seekers, who have not yet had any opportunity to find work or save for a deposit on a house or flat, are left homeless and at the mercy of a local authority that was previously unaware of their existence.

Sources
Overworked, Underpaid and Over Here, TUC, July 2003
Survey on Migration, The Economist, November 2002
Special reports on Diasporas, Migration, and Emigration, The Economist, January, August, September 2003
Asylum City, The Asylum Coalition, September 2002
Response to the Lord Chancellor’s Consultation on Proposed Changes to Publicly Funded Asylum Work, Asylum Aid, August 2003
Asylum Statistics United Kingdom 2002, National Statistics Office, August 2002
British Public Attitudes and Ethnic Minorities, Cabinet Office Innovation Unit, July 2001
Progress Report on the Minimum Wage 2002, Low Pay Commission, January 2003

Hadj

Muslims pray for salvation as Hajj draws near



MECCA (AP) — Pilgrims, their eyes welling with tears, circled the Kaaba, raising their hands heavenward in prayer Saturday, asking for God's bounty and forgiveness.
Millions of Muslim faithful, the men in white robes and women covered head to toe, were in Islam's holiest city to prepare for the Hajj, the faith's most sacred ritual, which begins Sunday. They clutched prayer books and recited the Holy Koran, asking salvation during their visit to the Baitullah, or House of God. For many Muslims, the Hajj — one of Islam's five pillars — signals their spiritual rebirth and the burial of past transgressions.
The pilgrimage is required of all Muslims who are able, as is the profession that there is only one God and Mohammad is His prophet, prayer five times daily, the giving of alms and fasting during the Holy Month of Ramadan.
Facing the Kaaba, Zeinab Abdouazizi from a Bangladesh raised her voice in prayer: "Oh Allah, give me health and strength so that I can raise my children and make them stand on their feet. I beg you to give similar strength to my husband and make his trade bloom and make my children good Muslims and obedient."
Rabee'a Assuity, an Egyptian government clerk, was candid and clear. Resting a moment under the scorching sun, he paused and prayed: "Oh, God you know best what I need, an apartment for my son Adel so he can get married and a job for my daughter Samiha." Nearby, Ahmed Zain from Lebanon spoke into his cellphone asking his wife at home what he should pray for her.
After listening, he could be heard to say "I prayed for that. What else do you want?" It was not unusual to hear pilgrims issuing prayers brought from distant lands on behalf of friends. The faithful believe the Almighty is especially close and receptive in the House of God.
Abdi Berri Youssef, who lost his legs in the Somali civil war and whose son pushed him through the crowd in a wheelchair, raised his hands and called out: "Oh, God of the whole world, I am defenceless, give me strength and endurance, nothing else." Daouwd Zeinalabidine, a Nigerian lawyer: "Oh Allah, my creator and my benefactor praise is for you. You are the one who deserves to be obeyed till the end. I ask you forgiveness and seek purity of my soul." He told a reporter he had also prayed for "peace for myself, for my country and for the whole world." In a corner of the vast, marbled-columned mosque, a group of Iraqis sought peace as well.
"Oh Allah, the God of all human all beings, bring peace and tranquility back to our country," the group responded after a prayer leader.
Like most Shiites pilgrims, Jawadi Azghar from Iran held the book of supplications, the Mafatih Al Jinan, or the "Keys of Paradises," as he prayed: "Oh God, you are the most generous. You answer the wishes of your obedient servant and never disappoint him. Whenever he knocks at your door you open it wide and bring him closer to you. Oh God, you forgive all the sinners who come asking mercy. How can I ask others for help when you are my guide? How can I forget you when you sit deep in my heart.
“I ask you to bestow all your bounty on me. I ask you to reward me with a conscience that assures my heart and clears my insight."
As he finished, he broke into tears.
In the Koran, God tells Muslims: "Pray to me, I listen to your needs." About two million pilgrims from around the world were expected to perform the rites of the Hajj, which begins Monday.
About 60,000 troops are at the ready to ensure everything runs smoothly, which they all-too-often haven't in recent decades.
Jordan Tmes 8/1/06

Arabs and Globalization

Arabs and Globalization: Encroaching Identity Crisis Ramzy Baroud, Aljazeera.net English. —

Thanks to “Western imperialism” and the “shrewd ways of international Zionism” Arabs, we are told, remain out of touch with an array of social and cultural crises that have plagued their societies.
Problems and challenges in the Arab world are molded in so clever a way that the blame for them falls on someone else.
Contextualizing social diseases within a larger political framework is often helpful, but in the Arab world this practice is grossly misused. Washington’s Middle East foreign policy tells a great deal about the US political culture, the Middle East’s receptiveness to the abuses imposed by that culture and mute response to the subsequent challenges posed. But these US abuses should provide neither a platform for corruption nor an excuse for Arab nations’ utter failure to provide any sort of alternative. Nor should these abuses serve as justification for the Arab world’s ills and problems such as official corruption, institutional nepotism, political extremism, indifference regarding human rights, racism, and the unscrutinized embrace of globalization.
Equally demoralizing to many Arabs, who are hoping to face these challenges head on, is this overindulgence in cosmetic touches. Governments, or officially funded organizations try to battle their poor reputation by holding conferences, seminars, symposiums and many other “impressive” gatherings to discuss issues such as education, human rights and family issues. They invite “experts” who are often selected by virtue of their glamour-generating names and titles, rather than the value of their expertise. Nothing comes out of such gatherings or is expected.
Meanwhile, the invaluable human assets in the Arab world are squandered. Millions of Arab scholars, scientists, physicians and other professionals feel compelled to emigrate to the West, despite the dire need for their leadership and guidance back at home. Lack of enough opportunities at home is only one of the reasons.
The other is that in corrupt societies, individuals are valued and therefore classified based on anything but their merit. Globalization becomes more problematic in weak nations or “client states” with easily penetrable economies. In Western societies accustomed to the nature and progression of free market economies, a filtering process is not totally unfeasible. Arab nations, deeply rooted in their own tradition, are left hapless before the cheap commercialization of the global market and unfiltered social trends that follow.
I have seen little Arab kids, innocently celebrating the end of Ramadan in a special Burger King tent on the rhythm of a hip-hop song replete with obscenities. As appalling as this may sound, the unfiltered global market culture is undoubtedly forging a collective identity crisis among the young generation in the Arab world.
Erik Erikson, who is known as the “father of psychosocial development” is renowned for constructing the concept of the “eight stages of development” in the life of the human being. According to Erikson, failure to fulfill the growth requirements of any of the eight designated stages ultimately leads to an identity crisis. I see no way around denying this collective identity crisis plaguing the Arab world. Furthermore, the current strategy of hosting fancy yet unproductive conferences with beautiful buffets and generous honoraria is as empty an answer as blindly pinning the blame on an overgeneralized foe. It is uncertain which developmental stage Arab nations find themselves in today. But if this current identity predicament is left untreated, then the subsequent desperation, alienation and extremism we now witness may become the reprehensible norm, rather than the exception.

— Ramzy Baroud is a veteran Arab-American journalist and editor in chief of PalestineChronicle.com and head of Research & Studies Department at Aljazeera.net English.

Hadj naar Mekka

2,5 miljoen moslims trekken van Mekka naar Mina


MEKKA - Zo'n 2,5 miljoen moslims zijn zondag begonnen aan de hadj, de jaarlijkse bedevaart van Mekka naar Mina, zoals de profeet Mohammed 1.400 jaar geleden ook deed.De hadj is een tocht die elke moslim een keer in zijn leven moet ondernemen. Mannen en vrouwen van alle leeftijden en nationaliteiten, gekleed in het wit en met sandalen aan de voeten, begonnen na het ochtendgebed aan de tocht naar het even verderop gelegen Mina. Elk jaar vallen er helaas ook doden bij de pelsgrimstocht. Ook dit jaar begon de hadj al met een drama toen drie dagen geleden een hotel in het hartje van de stad Mekka instortte. Daarbij kwamen 76 mensen om en raakten 62 anderen gewond. De reddingoperaties liepen vrijdag af en de brokstukken van het hotel werden geruimd De Saudische autoriteiten zijn in de hoogste staat van paraatheid om verdere drama's te vermijden. Dit jaar zijn zo'n 60.000 veiligheidsagenten en hulpverleners gemobiliseerd om de hadj in goede banen te leiden. In 2004 vielen er 251 doden in het gewoel en in 1990 kwamen 1.426 mensen om. In 1997 vielen bij een brand 343 doden onder de pelgrims. De autoriteiten willen ook vermijden dat er onrust of ziektes uitbreken onder de pelgrims of dat er aanslagen worden gepleegd.

evaluatie WTO slotverklaring door M.Maes 11.11.11

/ Top niveau / Nieuws /
WTO: Te weinig ontwikkeling in de de nieuwe slottekst

De nieuwe versie van de slotverklaring is uit! Dat geeft altijd aanleiding tot enig trek- en duwwerk aan de het documentatiecentrum van de conferentie. De tekst was aangekondigd tegen de middag en haalde die belofte net: om 14u was hij er. Er was abnormaal veel volk in het conferentiecentrum en in het NGO-centrum. Iedereen heeft zijn zeg gehad. Nu was de tijd gekomen om te kijken wat dat opgeleverd had. Iedereen dook dus meteen met zijn/haar neus in de tekst. In het NGO-centrum gingen mensen in groepjes bij elkaar zitten om opinies uit te wisselen. Om 18u30 begon de vergadering van de delegatieleiders (in feite mogen er vier of vijf personen per delegatie binnen). Het was helemaal geen levendige bijeenkomst: was iedereen moe (er was de hele nacht vergaderd - door sommigen toch), of was niemand enthousiast over de tekst. Gezien toch meer dan 60 landen het woord namen, was er blijkbaar toch nog een en ander mis. De bijeenkomst duurde uiteindelijk maar liefst vijf uur en half. Ik zat in de vergadering en heb dus niets gemerkt van de hevige rellen in de stad, hoewel ik iets vermoedde toen ik hoorde dat EU-Commissaris Mandelson, met de boot gekomen was. Het Conferentiecentrum kijkt uit op de zee tussen Hong Kong-eiland en Kowloon en dat is tenminste een toegangsweg waar er nooit opstroppingen zijn. Mandelson was in zijn nopjes over zijn zeelanding en gaf het gastland een pluim voor de goede organisatie. Dat is iets waarover trouwens iedereen het eens is, tenzij misschien de 900 opgepakte manifestanten. Volgens de lokale TV waar ik heel even een glips van zag na de bijeenkomst van de delegatieleiders, waren dit de ergste rellen in 16 jaar. Maar binnen was daar dus nauwelijks iets van te merken. Terug naar de delegatiebijeenkomst. Ondanks de grote verscheidenheid aan opmerkingen was er toch een grote eensgezindheid over een drietal punten: - algemene ontgoocheling dat de tekst over tariefvrije en quotavrije markttoegang zo zwak was en een veel te grote achterpoort openliet (vooral omdat de VSA wil een aantal belangrijke producten uitzonderen en zich niet vastpinnen op een termijn); - algemene ontgoocheling dat er nog geen regeling was voor de Afrikaanse katoenlanden(vooral omdat de VSA zijn steun aan de Amerkaanse katoenboeren niet wil of kan afschaffen); - algemene ontgoocheling dat de EU nog altijd geen datum wil plakken op de afschaffing van haar exportsubsidies (er staan wel twee datums in de tekst, maar tussen vierkante haakjes: 2010 en "5 jaar na de inwerkkingtreding"). De ontwikkelingslanden, en vooral de G90 (Afrika, ACP, minstontwikkelde landen) vonden verder dat er veel teweinig "ontwikkeling" in de tekst zat. Daarmee bedoelden ze dat er wel allerlei regelingen instonden voor de aanpak van de liberalisering in landbouw, industriele producten, diensten enz, maar teweinig over hoe de ontwikkelingslanden dit moesten gaan toepassen en wat dit aan ontwikkeling zou opbrengen. De kleine Caribische landen zeiden dat de rijke landen teveel aan hun eigen belangen dachten. Ze vonden ook dat "ontwikkeling" in de WTO-teksten altijd verschijnt als "iets minder liberaliseren' dan ontwikkelingslanden, maar dat er geen echte doordachte ontwikkelingsaanpak inzit, geen reflectie over hoe ontwikkelingslanden hier beter van worden. Zambia zei namens de minstontwikkelde landen dat de paragrafen in de tekst over de minstontwikkelde landen niets betekende, maar gewoon holle rhetoriek was. Voor wat NAMA betreft (markttoegang voor niet-landbouwproducten, vooral industriele producten) waren vooral de Afrikaanse landen niet bereid om zomaar de Zwitserse formule te aanvaarden die zeer scherpe tariefverminderingen met zich mee zouden brengen. Daarvoor moest er bijvoorbeeld eerst meer duidelijk komen over de mate waarin de ontwikkelingslanden die formule zouden moeten toepassen. Ook India en Brazilie hadden daar vragen over. De G90 (ACP-Afrika-Mistontwikkelde landen) waren ook nog lang niet gelukkig met de wijzigingen aan de GATS-bijlage. Ze erkenden dat er al een aantal zaken waren opgenomen die ze hadden voorgesteld, maar dat de tekst toch nog tevergaand was. Vooral Sint Lucia, die sprak namens de Caribische landen, was daar zeer duidelijk over: voor ons zijn deze onderhandelingsteksten niet zomaar teksten, zij maken het verschil tussen eten op tafel of niet, tussen onderwijs of niet, tussen gezondheidszorg of niet. En Jamaica voegde er aan toe: wij zijn er van overtuigd dat de nieuwe aanpak in de GATS-onderhandelingen niet onschadelijk is, maar integendeel gevaarlijk. Conclusie: de GATS-bijlage moet nog verder worden verbeterd. Ondanks de opmerkingen van de ontwikkelingslanden was EU-Commissaris Mandelson niet onder de indruk: we vinden dat er hier een algemeen gebrek is aan "ambitie' en we kunnen niet begrijpen waarom. Er zit niets voor ons in NAMA en GATS en in landbouw is er onvoldoende erkenning van de hervormingen die we gedaan hebben. Toegegeven: Mandelson vond het ook maar niets dat de tekst nog zo zwak was over de vrije marktoegang voor de minstontwikkelde landen. Mandelson vond ook, en hij werd daar in bijgetreden door de VSA, dat er nog een werkplan voor 2006 in de tekst moest en vooral een datum tegen wanneer er cijfers op tafel zouden komen. De VSA had al een datum in het hoofd: 31 maart. De vergadering (is eigenlijk geen goed woord, want de delegaties praten niet met elkaar, ze geven gewoon en voor een hun opmerkingen) eindigde om 23u55 met de aankondiging van verdere consultaties en onderhandelingen (in de Green Room) en een nieuwe bijeenkomst van de delegatieleiders tegen zondagmiddag. Ondertussen is die Green Room aan de gang en volgens de informatie die er uit sijpelt is zou de EU nu toch toegegeven hebben op de datum voor de afschafing van de exportsubsidies: namelijke 2013 (wat ongeveer hetzelfde is als "5 jaar na de inwerkkingtreding"). Eerder op de avond hadden wij al gehoord dat de 20 van de 25 Europese Ministers het eens konden zijn met deze datum. Vijf landen waren tegen: Frankrijk, Italie, Hongarije, Ierland en Polen. Belgie kon akkoord gaan als de EU in ruil nog wat kon binnen halen in NAMA en Diensten (dit is spijtig omdat de ontwikkelingslanden zo al vinden dat er nu al zoweinig ontwikkeling in de nieuwe ontwerpslotverlaring zit). Marc Maes is medewerker van 11.11.11, de koepel van de Vlaamse Noord-Zuidbeweging.