Ezell War and Greg Fall of the Broken Arrow Police Department are delivering an old message with a new beat when they visit schools to talk about staying off drugs and avoiding strangers.

They get their message across with a hip-hop rhythm and they said kids eat it up.

Fall said the duo’s role as the “Hip-Hop Cops” started as a joke during a presentation at a school, when one of them began rapping about staying off drugs and the other chimed in.

Fall said a lot of kids today relate to that kind of music, so it helps get the point across.

What started as four-line raps have been expanded into whole songs, and the Hip Hop Cops call out for audience participation.

Fall said the duo has gotten good feedback from a lot of kids.

The orange glow of the giant natural gas flares in the oil fields around Basra represents this bustling city’s wealth of natural resources. But for the impoverished people who live near them, the flames only serve as a reminder of their inability to share in the riches that lie beneath their feet.

Poverty is rampant in Basra, Iraq, despite its oil fields. Few area residents can find jobs at the nearby refinery. Up to 80 percent of Iraq’s oil comes from the Basra area.

The area around Basra, Iraq’s second largest city and main port, accounts for as much as 80 percent of the country’s oil production. It has emerged as Iraq’s best hope for stability and prosperity as it prepares to sell off its top undeveloped oil fields to foreign companies at an auction next month. Of the five largest fields that will be bid on, four are in or around Basra.

Despite the riches trapped below its oil fields, though, this city of three million is among Iraq’s poorest places.

People in neighborhoods within a few miles of fields with so much oil that it floats atop the surface in huge black pools live amid mud and feces. Carts pulled by overworked donkeys compete with cars for space on streets. Childhood cancer rates are the highest in the country. The city’s salty tap water makes people ill. And there is more garbage on the streets than municipal collectors can make a dent in.

The hundreds of thousands who live in the villages around the fields all dream of finding oil work, but that is unlikely. Those who apply are almost always told they lack the education or experience for oil work. But they believe that their only real deficiency is a lack of connections and money for bribes.

“People sit here in the evenings and they watch the flames and wonder how rich they would be if they had only one hour of those oil exports,” said Naeem al-Moussuawi, who lives in one of the poorer villages in the Basra area.

Last month, after Iraq’s Oil Ministry announced that it planned to hire workers for its Basra-based South Oil Company, thousands of people waited in line for applications — some for days. Among them were men in tattered clothing with bare, muddy feet. When the line got unruly, the police were called. Some applicants were beaten. More than 27,000 applications were filled out for 1,600 jobs — most of which require a college education or experience, and most Basrans have neither.

In the village of Asdika, oil pipelines run along the perimeter, and several thousand people live in ramshackle houses of gray cinder blocks and plastic sheeting for roofs.

There is no garbage collection, and household trash is thrown outside to rot in the sun. There is no sewer system, so wastewater from houses is dumped outside, attracting thousands of flies to the lakes of raw sewage that have formed outside most homes. Almost everyone is unemployed.

The village is on government property — an oil field — and its existence is illegal. Residents say the police show up occasionally and threaten to bulldoze the houses.

Hussein Flaeh, 29, an unemployed father of two, has lived in Asdika since 2003. Fifteen members of his family live in a concrete-block house with three small rooms. One recent morning, Mr. Flaeh’s youngest child, Essam, born two weeks ago, was placed outside to get some fresh air. The baby’s face was almost immediately covered by hungry flies.

Asked whether he had ever applied for a job at the oil refinery, Mr. Flaeh appeared perplexed and did not answer. Pressed, his gentle face turned hard.

“You can’t even reach it,” he said. “Don’t even talk about it.”

Government officials in Basra have called for a fee of $1 on each barrel of oil produced in the province, which would then be used for local projects instead of going to the central government. But even if Basra suddenly became awash in oil money, the construction of new housing, offices and even farmland would be prohibited because almost everything is situated atop untapped reserves of crude oil.

“Ninety percent of Basra is an oil field,” said Ahmed al-Sulati, a member of the local provincial council. “We can’t build anything here. We need to have more housing in some neighborhoods, but we can’t because we are surrounded by oil.”

In the meantime, Mr. Sulati said, “We are getting sick from breathing gas, and the streets are getting destroyed by the oil trucks.”

During a recent speech, Ali Ghalib Baban, Iraq’s minister of planning, said Basra was on the cusp of being “one of the world’s most important economic centers.”

But in the village of Shuiba, so close to the city’s refinery and major fields that the air is heavy with the smell of petroleum, farmers have stopped growing tomatoes and now rent their fields to truck drivers who park their tankers there for about 80 cents a night.

It is the village’s single school, however, that is the source of most of Shuiba’s concerns. Some classes have more than 55 students packed inside, and boys and girls must be taught together, which has led some parents to keep their daughters at home. There are no bathrooms, and some classrooms have no electricity. The school grounds are littered with piles of garbage.

Oil workers live on the opposite side of the village.

In the poorer half of Shuiba, the workers are regarded with envy and loathing. Not a single resident from the poor side has been hired for an oil job.

“Everyone would like to work for the oil company,” Mr. Moussuawi said. “We know we are poor and many of us are not well educated. The problem is they see the trucks full of oil and they wonder where the money is going.”

But even in Shuiba’s better-off half, adjacent to Basra’s sprawling refinery, residents say they have unmet needs. The housing is neat, there is no trash and the streets are paved, but there is crowding and rising unemployment even among the college-educated sons and daughters of oil company managers, they say.

“You need to know somebody or pay a bribe to work there,” said Najim Khadim, 26, the son of Shuiba’s unofficial mayor, Mohammed Khadim, who has worked for 38 years at the refinery, where he is a supervisor.

The son, who has a college degree in chemistry, said not even his father had been able to help with a job. The going rate for bribes for a job, he said, is $2,000 to $5,000, which he said he refused to pay.

A visitor is brought a glass of tap water. It tastes as salty as the water in the rest of town.

Duraid Adnan and Iraqi employees of The New York Times contributed reporting.

Source New York Times

New Stitchers joined the Pans Gang at the Gothenburg on November 5th!

The Prestonpans Tapestry now has ‘almost’ every panel signed up for with new recruits just joined from Dunbar and Glasgow, Falkirk and Dunblane ….

Andrew Crummy, Artistic Director, has completed all 80+ black pencil sketches [which are the basis of sign off with local communities] and is well on with creating the full size paintings for the stitchers which are then outlined on the linen using a light box.

Dorie Wilkie, Head Stitcher, is launching a series of StitchIn Sessions over the coming months as well as the guide already provided at the website.

Gillian Hart as Convenor of the Stitchers is working to despatch the linens and the wools across the nation …

…and a new ‘Tapestry 2010 Parade Group’ led by Prince Charles Edward himself [aka Arran Johnson seen below writing letters at Borrodale House] will be convened at end November. Its responsibilities also include the accompanying full colour souvenir book and the development of the dvd/ website.

Click for PICTURES

In 1312, after the Council of Vienne, and under extreme pressure from King Philip IV, Pope Clement V issued an edict officially dissolving the Order. Many kings and nobles who had been supporting the Knights up until that time, finally acquiesced and dissolved the orders in their fiefs in accordance with the Papal command. Most were not so brutal as the French. In England, many Knights were arrested and tried, but not found guilty.

Much of the Templar property outside of France was transferred by the Pope to the Knights Hospitaller, and many surviving Templars were also accepted into the Hospitallers. In Spain, where the king of Aragon was against giving the heritage of the Templars to Hospitallers (as commanded by Clement V), the Order of Montesa took Templar assets.

The order continued to exist in Portugal, simply changing its name to the Order of Christ. This group was believed to have contributed to the first naval discoveries of the Portuguese. Prince Henry the Navigator led the Portuguese order for 20 years until the time of his death.

Even with the absorption of Templars into other Orders, there are still questions as to what became of all of the tens of thousands of Templars across Europe. There had been 15,000 “Templar Houses”, and an entire fleet of ships. Even in France where hundreds of Templars had been rounded up and arrested, this was only a small percentage of the estimated 3,000 Templars in the entire country. Also, the extensive archive of the Templars, with detailed records of all of their business holdings and financial transactions, was never found. By papal bull it was to have been transferred to the Hospitallers, whose library was destroyed in the 16th century by Turkish invaders. Some scholars believe that some of the Templars fled into the Swiss Alps, as there are records of Swiss villagers around that time suddenly becoming very skilled military tacticians. An attack was led by Leopold I of Austria, who was attempting to take control of the St. Gotthard Pass with a force of 5,000 knights. His force was ambushed and destroyed by a group of about 1,500 Swiss peasants. Up until that point, the Swiss really had no military experience, but after that battle, the Swiss became renowned as seasoned fighters. Some folk tales from the period describe how there were “armed white knights” who came to help them in their battles.

Little is known about what became of the Templar’s fleet of ships. There is record of 18 Templar ships being in port at La Rochelle, France on October 12, 1307 (the day before Friday the 13th). But the next day, the fleet had vanished.

A year ago, it was Prop 8 that sullied my joy at the official end of the Bush era. One year later, this once proud son of the State of Maine is appalled. 52.7% of the voting electorate there voted yes to the question, “Do you want to reject the new law that lets same-sex couples marry and allows individuals and religious groups to refuse to perform these marriages?” In this denial of rights, some will see a brave defense of traditional values. I see the hideous specter of legally sanctioned discrimination.

Being gay is like being black, white or Latino. It’s genetic, not a matter of choice; and it’s recurrent in the population — generation after generation, throughout human history. (If you don’t believe me, read the Iliad.) There’s also pretty good scientific evidence — empirical, not moral — to prove that being gay is one of the normal expressions of human sexuality, along with heterosexuality. The latter is more prevalent, but both are normal. To deny normal, law-abiding people their civil rights is no better than racism. It’s that simple.

Gay marriage, therefore, is a straight-up civil rights issue; ultimately, it will take a Supreme Court decision or an amendment to the US Constitution to make this right. That’s almost inconceivably hard work, but ending slavery — an institution preserved by our ‘founding fathers’ in our most treasured document — was no picnic either.

Apparently, it’s also time to disentangle the issue of church and state with respect to this issue. That would mean that only the government would have the exclusive right to marry a couple legally. Let’s take all churches, synagogues, mosques, shrines, etc. out of the mix altogether. This won’t put the clergy out of work; they can still perform their symbolic ceremonies after the real wedding, marriage itself should be a purely civil affair.

Finally, and on a personal note, I feel real personal sadness here. I have live most of my life out of state, but I have always been proud of Maine’s libertarian tradition, which was based less on personal likes and dislikes and more on keeping the government out of the private sphere. Sadly, a majority of Maine voters seem to think that government should have the right to tell people how to live their personal lives. So much for innocence!

By Michael B. Laskoff

November 9 marks the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Most analysts and historians agree that former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev played a pivotal role in the events leading up to the fall of the Berlin Wall and beyond. His policies of “perestroika” – restructuring – and “glasnost,” or openness, paved the way for the dissolution of communist power in Eastern Europe and ultimately led to the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Robert Legvold from Columbia University says a key factor was Gorbachev’s decision that he would not use force to suppress reformist aspirations in Eastern Europe.

“Increasingly he made it apparent to the East Europeans that the Soviet Union would not do what it had done many times in the past: 1953 in Berlin, 1956 in Hungary and Poland, 1968 in the Czech Republic and so on,” Legvold said.

In July 1989, the so-called “Brezhnev Doctrine” was replaced by what one Gorbachev adviser described as the “Sinatra Doctrine,” based on the singer’s song “My Way”. In other words, the adviser said East European countries were now able to go their own way – politically and economically.

In early October, Gorbachev marked the 40th anniversary of East Germany by attending celebrations in East Berlin.

Serge Schmemann, former Moscow and Bonn Correspondent for “The New York Times” says Gorbachev was tough with East German leaders as tens of thousands of people marched with candles through the streets of the city.

“A huge march through Berlin. And at that time, Gorbachev made it clear to [Erich] Honecker, the East German leader, that he was not going to prop him up – that if he doesn’t get with it he’s going to be dumped by history. So the message from Gorbachev was not just symbolic, it was right there- I mean they were announcing to the East Europeans that we’re not going to prop you up – and that was huge,” Schmemann said.

A few weeks later Honecker was gone. And a month after Gorbachev’s visit, the Berlin Wall came down.

Robert Legvold says the fall of the Berlin Wall accelerated the demise of Communist Party rule throughout Eastern Europe – a demise that started in Poland in June with the overwhelming victory of the Solidarity Trade Movement in free elections.

“It was a cascade. Everything was sort of building at about the same time and the only thing that suggests a chain is the sequence: first Poland, then East Germany, then Czechoslovakia and Hungary and ultimately Bulgaria and Romania.”

Serge Schmemann says what happened in Romania at the end of December 1989 was very violent.

“Romania was the only one where there was shooting and about a thousand people lost their lives in Timisoara and elsewhere. And of course [Nikolai] Ceausescu and his wife were executed after a very hasty little something that passed for a trial,” Schmemann said.

Legvold and others say the fall of the Berlin Wall marked the end of the Cold War.

“The institutional basis for the Cold War so far as it was focused in Europe, disappeared because the Warsaw Pact, as the opposing alliance, military alliance to NATO, was scrapped. And of course that meant that soviet power, military power in Eastern Europe and on the border with West Germany, in East Germany, was now going to be pulled back. So for both institutional and conceptual reasons, it was the end of the Cold War,” Legvold said.

Serge Schmemann says the fall of the Berlin wall has had a profound impact on US-Russian relations.

“It changed the entire map of the world. And it changed mainly our psychology. We all grew up – I mean I certainly did – in a Cold War psychology. There were ‘good guys’, ‘bad guys’- there was ‘them’ and ‘us’ – there were two powers. If you had Zaire acting up, either they or we would control it in the interest of the great competition. So the loss of that has created a dynamic that we have not yet sorted out,” Schmemann said.

British historian Frederick Taylor says the fall of the Berlin wall has had a very negative psychological impact on Russians, especially the elite. He cites as an example former Russian president and now prime minister, Vladimir Putin.

“Putin was a KGB officer in Dresden, East Germany when the wall came down – and was well-known in the city. So he experienced it first hand, going from being a conqueror, in essence the person who walks down the street and is greeted with respect and fear in this satellite country, this puppet government subjected to the USSR’s control. He goes within a matter of weeks to being somebody who has really no influence over what is happening inside East Germany and in fact, of course, he soon ended up back in Russia. But I think a lot of people felt like him, shared that experience of humiliation at the loss.”

Historians say bringing back Russia to its former superpower status has been a key element of Putin’s and current President Dmitri Medvedev’s foreign policy.

Taylor says the fall of the wall has had another unforeseen consequence.

“The thaw in the Cold War allowed all these strange monsters – and we’re talking about probably Islamist terrorism and various other things – to emerge out of the kind of murk as the ice melted. And I think we’re still dealing with those problems. We have a world which is much more open. But in a way, that frozen world controlled fairly rigidly by two power blocs was, as long as you weren’t actually directly on the fault-line, was a safer place to live in. Whereas now anything can happen.”

And says Frederick Taylor, it usually does.

ROBIN and Barry Gibb are so overpoweringly familiar that just sitting opposite them feels odd. Robin, now 59 and still pencil-thin, is the sharper, the more protective of the two. Robin’s the one you can imagine having an actual stand-up fight in defence of the Bee Gees’ good name, while Barry, 63, seems rather more relaxed, beatific even, his snow-white hair artfully draped over his shoulders, a small smile never far from his lips. The pair arrange themselves on the long black sofas at the back of Studio A at Hit Factory, in Miami, Florida, looking entirely at home. Of course, they should do — in the mid-1970s, Barry, Robin and their late brother, Maurice, pretty much moved in here to create some of the biggest-selling records of all time. By that time, they had already enjoyed enormous success as a neo-psychedelic pop-rock group signed to the same management company as the Beatles. Then they had split. Then they had suffered three full years without a single hit.

It’s a long, long way from being in such a crushing slump that you’re reduced to banging out gigs between your oldies in a Yorkshire variety club to writing and recording a soundtrack album that sells in excess of 30 million copies, but the Bee Gees made that journey in just three years. The soundtrack to Saturday Night Fever made the Bee Gees as famous as it is possible for a human being to be. Yet 50 years after they began singing together at home in Manchester, a lot of their music still sounds utterly remarkable, whether it’s the late-1960s hipster Bee Gees of albums such as Idea and Horizontal, the global-superstar Bee Gees of Nights on Broadway, You Should Be Dancing and Jive Talkin’, or the radio-eating, grown-up super-pop Bee Gees of How Deep Is Your Love or You Win Again. There is a reason that their catalogue of songs is one of the most profitable in pop history. “It’s taken us six years to come back from Maurice’s death,” Barry says. “His passing scattered everything to the wind. Robin drove himself on, but I couldn’t find the passion, I couldn’t force anything else out. I thought we were done.” Products of a showbusiness home — their father Hugh was a band-leader who met their mother, Barbara, at one of his gigs — the Gibb brothers began singing together in cinemas while growing up in Manchester. In 1958, the family emigrated to Australia, and the three boys began performing professionally, playing pubs and speedways, singing on TV, even doing pantomime. Four years later, they would leave Australia by boat. The Bee Gees arrived in Southampton in February 1967 — three weeks later, they’d signed a five-year management deal with Robert Stigwood, the director of NEMS Enterprises, a company owned by the manager of the Beatles, Brian Epstein. Stigwood insisted on a group, so the brothers’ Australian friends Vince Maloney and Colin Peterson were hired. They signed a deal with Polydor and delivered a huge hit, New York Mining Disaster 1941. The band’s debut LP, Bee Gees 1st, was a critical and commercial smash. Wonderfully picturesque songs such as Harry Braff and Every Christian Lion-Hearted Man Will Show You pointed clearly towards a Britpop sound still 30 years in the future. Just teenagers, the brothers became part of the pop royalty of the day. In 1969, the Bee Gees released the double-LP epic Odessa, an album so rich in fantastic songs and ideas — Melody Fair, “an Eleanor Rigby sort of thing”, is brilliantly dramatic, while Whisper Whisper is surely the sharpest, most morally complex song ever written about a drug-dealer — that, 40 years later, it remains a remarkable document to free-spirited creativity. “Odessa was our madness,” Robin says. “We were recording in the studio the Beatles had been in, and we were unafraid to work with whatever came into our heads.” Sadly, more progressive recordings were scaring off their fan base. Arguments followed and the brothers fell out. Between 1970 and 1975, the Bee Gees scored only a handful of hits. It was the opening track of 1975’s Main Course record that pushed the brothers into a whole new stratosphere of fame and success. Jive Talkin’ was an immediate, huge hit in America and Britain, as was the follow-up, Nights On Broadway, which featured Barry’s crystalline falsetto. Their next album, Children Of The World, went platinum, with You Should Be Dancing kicking off a string of hits. The brothers were recording in France when Stigwood called to ask if they would be interested in creating the soundtrack to a new — as yet untitled — film. The film was 1977’s Saturday Night Fever, and the album produced six No. 1 hits. Night Fever was the Bee Gees’ first UK No. 1 for a decade. “Fever introduced the most creative recording period in our lives,” Barry says. “The following five years, we had a ball. We were the biggest thing around.” By the end of the 1970s, the Bee Gees were involved in a multi-million-dollar lawsuit with Stigwood, and they stopped recording as a group. Barry wrote Guilty for Barbra Streisand and Heartbreaker for Dionne Warwick, while the brothers came together to write Islands In The Stream for Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton, as well as creating the startling Chain Reaction for Diana Ross. No new Bee Gees album would emerge until ESP — and the hit You Win Again — in 1987, their first UK No. 1 for eight years. The 20th — and, to date, last — Bee Gees album, This Is Where I Came In, had definite echoes of their late-1960s pop-rock glories and was released in 2001. “We’ve made some of the best records of all time,” Robin says.

“And that’s because we’re not afraid of trying new things. We’re only really afraid of losing an idea.” Would they like to start again? “God, no!” Robin laughs out loud. “Pop music used to be so much more gregarious, more flamboyant. Today, it’s so conservative.” “We’ve had incredible happiness and incredible sadness in our lives,” Barry says. “But we know there are songs we have written that will always touch people.” — The Sunday Times ■ The Ultimate Bee Gees, a collection of greatest hits celebrating the band’s 50th anniversary, is released today through Reprise/Warner Music.

Source: NST Online

Unlike sudden epidemics, such as swine flu or bird flu, which receive extensive coverage for their novelty and surprise, malaria has been around a long time and remains a widespread and deadly pandemic.

No other infectious disease, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, inflicts a more devastating economic toll, keeping whole populations trapped in poverty. As Jeffrey Sachs, the preeminent economist and author of The End of Poverty (Penguin Press, 2005), once wrote, “Malaria and poverty are intimately connected.”

Malaria is a mosquito-borne disease, and thus specific to a tropical climate. (It was only eradicated in the US in 1951; in fact, the CDC was established in Atlanta in 1946 with the primary purpose of eradicating malaria).

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), there were 247 million cases of malaria in 2006, causing nearly one million deaths, mostly among African children.

Nearly half of the world’s population is at risk of malaria, particularly those living in lower-income countries. Baruch Blumberg, the American physician and Nobel laureate in virology, once stated that half of all human deaths from the beginning of time can be attributed to malaria.

Beyond the human toll, the economic toll is significant: In high-rate areas, malaria decreases GDP by as much as 1.3% in countries with high levels of transmission. Over the long-term, these annual losses have separated countries with and without malaria, particularly in Africa.

The health costs of malaria are considerable for individuals and governments in already-poor situations. According to the WHO, in some countries the disease accounts for up to 40% of public health expenditures, 30% to 50% of inpatient hospital admissions, and 60% of outpatient health clinic visits.

People and communities already in poverty who can’t afford treatment are sent deeper into poverty.

Malaria and other tropical diseases, such as hookworm and Schistosomiasis (blood flukes), “occur in the setting of poverty and they promote poverty,” says Dr. Peter Hotez, professor and tropical-disease expert at George Washington University, in an interview with Minyanville. They are all preventable and curable; for malaria, the cost of insecticide-treated bed nets is $10.

In a Time editorial in 2007, Sachs wrote, “Not only does malaria sap worker productivity and scare away business investment, but it also, paradoxically, increases the rate of population growth. Instead of having two or three children, couples in a malarial region often choose to have six or seven — unsure how many will survive.”

The unintended consequences are important: With so many children, poor families can’t invest much in each child’s education. And women are also constrained because child rearing consumes so much of their adult lives.

Where malaria has been eradicated, there have been clear economic success stories: in Greece, Italy, and Spain after World War II, and even the American South after the war.

According to a research paper Sachs published in 1998, in the South there were 135,000 cases of malaria with 4,000 deaths in 1935. Large-scale drainage projects in the 1930s, followed by insecticide spraying after the war, brought malaria under control by the end of the 1940s. In the next decade, the South caught up economically with the rest of the country.

Finally, health experts are starting to predict that, as global warming intensifies, malaria will begin showing up in areas unaccustomed to it.

Source: The Minyanville

It is probably no coincidence that the state offensive against the outlawed CPI (Maoist) which controls a swathe of territory in the forested parts of central India has been accompanied by a focussed media intervention by human rights activists demanding an instant and unconditional cease-fire. That human rights groups make their appearance when state action is necessitated against terrorists and insurgents is all too familiar. This is not to suggest that all the earnest and well-spoken men and women who appear on TV chat shows to denounce “state terror” and shed tears on behalf of the poor constitute the overground faces of the underground. Yet, it is undeniable that these well-groomed ‘activists’ have a vision of India that is remarkably at odds with the national consensus.

It is a tribute to Indian democracy and the high level of social tolerance that there is a special attempt to accommodate dissenting voices, indeed put them on par with those who espouse common decencies. Despite assertions that India is a “sham democracy”, civil society treats contrarian positions with a degree of generosity that is sometimes absent from Western democracies. Unlike the boisterous protests that greeted the appearance of the leader of the racist British National Party on a BBC current affairs programme, no one bats an eyelid when the ‘activists’ emerge from the woodwork to defend either Islamist terrorists waging jihad on India or Maoists who behead policemen without inhibition and remorse. Likewise, despite the tut-tutting that greeted the outpouring of Marathi xenophobia through the ballot box, there were few who believe that legal activism is the way to check the forward march of Raj Thackeray.

However, it is one thing to accommodate ‘activists’ as talk-show guests, partly because they inhabit the same social circle as other media professionals, it is a separate matter to accept their earnest arguments.

The central plank on which Maoist-friendly activists rest their claim is the equivalence between the Indian state and the Maoist insurgents. By demanding an unconditional cease-fire, the champions of civil liberties have elevated a non-state player to the level of the state. Whereas all democratically-elected politicians assert a willingness to discuss all outstanding problems, as long as the Maoists abandon the gun, the activists deny the state a monopoly over violence. In short, they project the Maoists as a parallel Government exercising dual power in large parts of India. Conceding political parity to the Maoists would imply state recognition of dual sovereignty. It would open the floodgates of similar demands, not least in Jammu & Kashmir, the North-East and, who knows, even Azamgarh.

Accommodation of activists in TV chat shows is a measure of democratic generosity; acceptance of their demands is a recipe for national disaster.

The second point that is invariably made by the activists is that democracy and development have bypassed the poor and particularly the Adivasis. The marginalised have, consequently, risen in revolt against the state which, incidentally, has become an instrument of greedy multi-nationals and venal land sharks.

The most surprising facet of this caricatured projection of India is the number of gullible takers it has. The belief that the ‘roots’ of Maoism lie in poverty and underdevelopment is about as compelling as the belief that suicide bombers are actually protesting against social alienation (in the West) and an iniquitous world order (elsewhere). Left-wing extremism isn’t necessarily born out of poverty; it is sustained by those who take advantage of poverty. The Maoists have a direct political interest in preventing development works and improvement in communications. The common feature of Bastar, Gadchiroli and Jungle Mahal in western Midnapur is the systematic manner in which Maoist cadre have destroyed hand pumps, schools and prevented road-building. It is a combination of enforced impoverishment and physical isolation that create the conditions for Maoists to build a base. The fear of the gun does the rest.

There are a lot of things wrong with the Indian state and rapid industrialisation during the Nehruvian era was accompanied by Soviet-style disregard for those who were dispossessed by progress. However, political awareness and greater economic prosperity have contributed to some meaningful redistribution of resources that have benefited poor districts. In Orissa, for example, Kalahandi was the symbol of destitution in the mid-1980s. Today, it is one of the biggest contributors to the State’s rice economy. Would such a dramatic transformation have been possible if the Maoists had somehow managed to turn it into a red zone? On the contrary, every single development initiative would have been forcibly resisted and the state would have been painted as an instrument of oppression by the practitioners of ‘soft’ Maoism. Rolling back the Maoist menace is a precondition for progress.

Finally, it is important to stress that Maoism is addicted to violence as the means of political change. This is stating the obvious but it is worthwhile reiterating the insatiable Maoist thirst for human blood. An individual human life is viewed by the red terrorists as worthless in the context of the larger struggle. This callousness was a feature of Maoism in China and the spilling of blood is the thread that links the early-Maoism of Charu Mazumdar to the contemporary Maoism of the colleagues of Kobad Ghandhy. To some weirdos trigger happiness may seem utterly romantic; to decent Indians it is evidence of depravity, arrogance and inhumanity.

Source :

It just goes to show you that you can never get away with war crimes. In Germany, an 88-year-old man who served with the Waffen SS is on trial for allegedly murdering three civilians in the Netherlands during World War II. Prosecutors say that Heinrich Boere confessed to killing a pharmacist, a bike-shop owner and another person, but that he escaped to Germany after the war and has spent the last several decades avoiding the authorities. The defense says it might argue that Boere was merely following orders.

Source: Crime Scene KC