Sudan's not-so-good good guys

A break from covering Europe.
I have been researching a story on Tabitha Shokaya, the health minister of Sudan, for months now. It’s for the New Scientist; the attraction for them is that she is a female science graduate in a war zone, in the country with the world’s greatest humanitarian crisis. A health minister of a government accused of committing genocide (by the US house of representatives): I phoned the snarky Sudanese embassy, who said I should write a letter via them, then they might get back. Another phone call and I got the health ministry in Sudan’s phone number: got through to a guy – assistant, smart-sounding, English-speaking - who could get me through to Her Excellency, gave me his email, weeks went past, another phone call got his phone number, which was the wrong number. Finally I called a British journalist, Peter Moszynski, whom I had met at a British Medical Association garden party in the summer, who told me he had adopted one of the Lost Boy war orphans (children make very good fighters, and they can be drugged) , brought him to London, made him into a rap star (long story), Africa’s greatest, and the now millionaire young man had turned on Peter and sued and impoverished him for taking him out of his natural environment – ie a refugee camp where owning a plastic receptacle that can be hired out to the highest bidder counts as being a rich person.
After telling me this story, Moszynski had recommended me Shokaya; I was looking for someone to profile in Africa, and he told me of this woman of contrasts in the Sudanese government, facing enormous chalenges; he now gave me the phone number of a man called Suleiman Rahel, an exile politician, who in turn gave me Shokaya’s number.
The war in Darfur, western Sudan, is usually thought of – by the common public – as one happening between two, rather monolithic, forces: the rebels of Darfur, and the "Muslim" Government of Sudan.
What is seldom discussed is that the Government of Sudan is a coalition with the SPLM, the Southern Sudan people’s liberation movement, who clinched a very generous peace deal last year, after decades of fighting the north. They are “black”, “Christian” and have the right to secede from the rest of rest of Sudan on 2011, subject to a referendum, bringing more than their fair share of oil wealth with them. Sudan is now Africa’s third biggest oil exporter. (Carl Bildt stuck his filthy nose in, blog passim). Until then they have 9 out of 27 seats in the national coalition government in Khartoum. What role have they been playing in the government’s decisions – a government in which their membership often seems to be forgotten?
According to inside sources, they lie low, and don’t care very much for the plight of the Darfurians. They say: “They are all Muslim anyway (like Khartoum) and what did they do for us when we were fighting as rebels were fighting the government?” And they rather enjoy the discomforts that their coalition partners and erstwhile opponents, the National Congress Party, have with the international community.
Yet, my source reveals, this attitude is becoming increasingly noticed in the ministries of the west – including Britain’s ministry for Africa, the department for international development – and disliked. The SPLM were supposed to be the good guys; they wanted a united, secular democratic Sudan; and they if anyone ought to show grace towards a rebel movement with similar aspirations to their own – the aspiration of their community to achieve equal footing with Khartoum.
Yet, now that they have the oil guarantee they are just waiting for the secession deadline.
Furthermore, they don’t seem to be running their own part of the country that well.
Forty percent of the Government of southern Sudan’s budget – subordinate to the joint SPLM-NCP Khartoum government under the federal system – is spent on security. How much is spent on health? According to NGOs I spoke to, Southern Sudan has some of the worst health indicators in the world, obscured by pan-Sudan statistics. In parts of eastern Sudan, the maternal mortality rate is one-third. The AIDS rate is soaring because of the newly-open borders with Uganda, rapes from the war, and widespread denial and low condom use. Malnutrition rates at 20 percent are extremely high. NGOs, which feed the south, are hamstrung by bureaucracy and failure to have their security guaranteed, so many have pulled out./ New legislation has just been passed – which the SPLM didn’t stop – that allows the sequestration of NGOs’ assets, some thanks you might think. Failure to communicate between the different layers of bureaucracy means NGOs who received the green light from Khartoum need re-authorisations to operate at state level. There are too many chiefs and not enough Indians – too many specialists and not enough barefoot doctors. A large part of the medical corps are working in London anyway. Food aid now has to be rerouted through Khartoum rather than the more convenient Kenya.
It seems to me Tabitha Shokaya, whom I am re-interviewing tomorrow, should reverse the poor impression of the SPLM by showing she is actually doing a good job, both on behalf of her region and the Sudan over which she is, after all, federal health minister.
This means presenting a plan for tackling the cascade of health problems just mentioned; dealing with the security situation in Darfur that prevents aid getting through. Then – persuading her boss, president Omar al-Bashir, to devote more of the oil largesse to health - which even in northern Sudan is poor. These things, will I am told, restore the somewhat battered reputation of the SPLM in the West.

I've seen things

Self mockery is the signal of modernity

I remember 1992, the first time I went to Auschwitz with my girlfriend.
We came back to Krakow, got drunk on vodka, fell asleep, woke up and discovered we had covered each other’s forearms with tattoos and prison numbers – in ballpoint pen. Later we got drunk on more vodka as we discussed war and history, and made love. Krakow was just a haze.
Poland has always had that effect, on me anyway. Its overwhelming maudlinness, its frequent ugliness and let’s face it excellent social lubricants – and, these days, a patched up heart - always brings out the same reaction, and earlier I wrote a piece of spirited free association, immediately after a week-long study visit to Poland with other journalists last week, paid for by the foreign ministry.
The reason for the ministry's exercise in public diplomacy is that
Poland, which comes bottom in many EU social and scientific indicators, and has a bit of a problem in Brussels with its conservative leadership, is clearly trying to promote itself as a modern, youthful, vibrant society and economy. We were asked to write a short piece on what we think of Poland as a new member of the EU. I think Poland's membership is great, but my opinion is irrelevant. More profitable is to answer the question: what does the rest of Europe think of Poland as an EU member - and how can Poland make itself more popular and successful.

I have before me a document from the Rzeszow investment agency, which informs me that the university of Rzeszow has twenty-thousand students and there “more and more graduates every year”. Heineken, we are told, has invested here, and labour costs are a fifth of what they are in the UK. Rszeszow is a partner city of Klagenfurt. Every tenth IT specialist in Poland graduated from the city.
I read this yadda, yadda at home, given to me after an investment seminar in that city on Monday– and I find my mind alas drifting back, to misty autumn streets in the old town of Krakow, holding the hands of a tragic Polish girl in tight skirt, black tights and a masters degree in philosophy, who told me all about Sobibor, Treblinka, Auschwitz, the Warsaw uprising – and Czeslaw Milosz. Statistics about how Rszeszow region is the trade cross-roads for south eastern region of Europe do not tether me to the here and now, I am afraid. So now to the essence of this article.
Why is this? Why is the tragedy of Polish history much more interesting than the groovy new Poland of the EU future that the foreign ministry wants to promote. Is it only me, and my personal history, or would others have the same perception? If the latter is the case, I think the foreign ministry should take stock.
I think the latter is the case. Not all investors or tourists care about history of course, but that is the wrong approach: there are many would be investors who do know about Polish history who could be persuaded to come if that knowledge is linked with the hard facts about investment opportunities. The sorrow and the pity could make a difference between a French firm buying into Malaysia or buying into Poland.
This campaign has to be managed carefully, so as not to put off those not interested in history at all, and perhaps to hold back the innate tendency of Poles to be off-puttingly gloomy and or a bit arrogant about their past when allowed to be themselves. Last week I met Poles who were cravenly lost in a transatlantic businessman's identity; but I suspect there are strong countervailing, pompous nationalist forces in today's Poland of the Kaczynskis that will act backwardly on the collective personality.
May I propose some slogans which, while they might not be used - should not be used - are markers for the new identity not in what they say but the manner in which they deal with Poland's property: its past, That is, mocking, sardonic and subversive, sending up native tendencies and showing rather than just stating that Poland is a modern country, since mockery is the pre-eminent modern idiom.

Holocaust

So: the current investment and tourism slogan is “the heart of Europe”, a cliché if there ever was one, and not even unique, since about half a dozen other countries lay claim to the same thing. It's accompanied by a cute heart that reminds me of some nice girl with a ponytail presenting some investment campaign or other but doesn't really communicate much.
How about something invoking the holocaust; it is a huge taboo at the moment, and the British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen, with his alter ego Borat the Kazakh reporter, is becoming a cult figure in the US for his film, where he travels around the country making faux-naif jokes about Jews which people take at face value. The film gets five star reviews in the US and British media, and liberals everywhere love its sophistication, because the joke is on the anti-semites.
So - on the mockery theme - where Australia has “where the hell are you, mate” as its campaign which is very successful. Poland could have something like “People used to come here to work for free”; or “Millions came and never left”, which echoes yet subverts a whole history of serious investment/ corporate recruitment slogans.
Okay, so maybe not. But you get the gist. Moving on to a less controversial subject a picture of the Mazurian lakes in autumn, emphasising the emptiness. "They have all gone to work in England." Or, a picture of a bottle of expensive bottle of vodka and the words "Rarer than a successful cavalry charge."
My time is up. Polish history packs a wallop, if managed and mediated rightly.
ENDS

The happiest country, the saddest country

Back in London, how to sum up Poland?
What a Gothic country! It’s a country of dignity and elaborate politeness, of perpetual autumn and rainy potholed streets over which presides some Stalinist monstrosity of other, of wide, unexplained urban spaces; of ubiquitous Polish eagles. Of aching, pathetic innocence and underlying toughness. It’s an erotic country of small female gifts and gestures; of police brutality and corruption. It is proud and noble to make tears well up in your foreign observer’s throat, yet also dependent on what the “West” thinks – yesterday, today and I suspect always.
Of Scandinavian work ethic, Prussian militarism, American religiosity and Balkan backwardness. It’s the smell of sweat, cigarettes, rye bread and vodka; the sound of American accents in business centres.
It’s overwhelmingly white and a long, long way from Brussels or London, London on a Sunday afternoon in Hyde Park where all the roller bladers in many ethnic varieties gather.

It is Janusz walking his little white lapdog under the moonlit naked trees who sniffled a little, voted for Kaczynskis and wanted to go the army to protect his girlfriend. It is Henryk in Cracow punching his palm and saying “I was a security guard in Chicago.” And saying: “I khate Jews.” So did his friends, all in bomber jackets, hunched over Lech beers. Henryk was about 40. This in a country where the Jews are not a nation but a nomination. It was the drive (a secret policeman?) who drove our bus, spooning Zurek soup at a lunch stop saying “the roads are no better than ten years ago.” Where driving at night is like being a member of Bomber Command, over blackout Germany, and the fifth gear is seldom used. It is Marcin, the Danish-speaking diplomat, who says: “Kaczynski is is my boss. We are always inviting foreign journalists.” Who adds: “But I can’t understand why half my friends go to church every Sunday.”

Poland is memories of Pascal’s wager and what came after vodka, which is the Information, and which comes at night. The memory and the flavour, boiled cabbage and dirty snow, umschlag platz and empty offices ringing phones. High ceilings and low toilet pans, and women’s better memories. The deserted spa hotel and the fateful offer of coca-cola. The cross on the hill, the cross on the other hill, and the end.

It is being asked to take your shoes off at Rzeszow Aurport, noted terror target. It is the investment conference.
It is the Lowry paintings, outside Lodz railway station. It is the land of the Easter baskets and proffered sausage. Of the lost millions, though this time to west. You’ve seen it in some old film somewhere. It is one legged men in propaganda films about the lost borderlands, hopping down a village streets, in image as black as a crow, to cheap, potent fiddle music. The young intellectual with his spatulate fingers talking about the election of the bishop of Warsaw.

It is of carpeted hotel bars that look like a German rock star’s lavatory, that are never staffed, that play radio stations that only play radio jingles.
It is the devoted love of Polish boys and girls, docile, enviable Slavic love, of the peeled orange and the shared rucksack. It is the purposeful long distance coach with men who’d better learn English fast. It is the self destruction of success; fomented by twin potato heads in a nation that never seems to laugh, at least at itself.
It is of the second chances that belong to all of us, coming over the bridge, after the road, and seeing Stalin’s gothic super-ego lit like the Empire State building. It is the happiest country; it is the saddest country. And it is better to love than to hate.

Vote against Turkey with your euro note

Reading the news over breakfast in a Krakow hotel, about the next big enlargement headache...if you thought Poland was big to swallow!
As suspension of EU Turkey negotiations loom, as Turkey is set to refuse to respond to an EU deadline to open its ports to Cyprus, I recall meeting in Brussels a group of French campaigners who have found an innovative use for the euronote: as a pan-European voting slip for situations when national governments fail to oblige with an immediate referendum or election. The group, Rayez la Turquie, argues that against the wishes of Europe's citizens European leaders are marching the EU towards Turkish integration with Europe. There is apparently going to be a referendum in France on this, but not for several years, and having passed through all the various preconditions, Turkey's membership might then already be a fait accompli. Few if any of the other member states will be holding referenda. The campaigners' solution? Use the Euro note is a signal of protest by crossing out with a ballpoint pen the Turkey that appears in the bottom hand corner of the reverse side of the note, which is decorated with a map ofEurope. "Cross Turkey out" is the campaigners' rather direct slogan - what, pray, would it translate to in German? Rayez la Turquie assures Turkophobes that the notes will remain legal tender - "they cannot refuse the money" - particularly if the cross is a subtle one. They hope, perhaps optimistically, that from a European population 65% against Turkish membership - 350 million - at least one million people are committed enough to vandalize the currency. At a defacing rate of 100 notes a month, that's 1.2 billion euro notes with Turkey crossed out in 12 months. With the average European poll producing only a million votes either way, what politician could resist such an avalanche of protest?The group's jolly ideas opens the horizons. For recondite observers of euroland monetary politics, there is the opportunity to cross out the central bank chief and substitute one's own candidate. Anglophobes who thinkBritain is a retardant to the European project can cross out the UK - but that could be confusing as British eurosceptics - those with euro notes in their possession - might take to doing that too. Crossing out the euro symbol itself would be a less ambiguous signal.

How Poland can make itself liked in one easy step

About a dozen European Union journalists have been wined and dined in Poland in last week, by the foreign ministry, which wanted to know what we thought of Poland. There is a disparity between what Europe thinks of Poland and Poland thinks of Europe. In the EU consultants Anholt’s global nation brands index of 35 countries, polling thousands, the country is near the bottom, 30th place. On the other hand, Poland gives the European Union its top position. Almost no one else in the whole world, apart from the Czech Republic and Argentina, likes Europe as much as Poland does.
Why is Poland so poorly perceived? Perhaps partly because of distorted or ignorant reporting, or absent reporting. My fellow journalists on a trip this week were not overly knowledgeable about Poland, which must irritate the proud elite of this country no end. Our first session started: “We let you ask the questions, since we find there are some basic misconceptions about Poland.” My friends made progress, learning to say please and thank you in Polish by the end of the week.
It is frustrating but not much can be done in the short term; and it is instructive to realise that perception of a country probably depends as much on the underlying reality – reality at least seen by insiders with integrity - and it is this we must now examine.
One pan European value is arguably free speech.
Last February the rallying cry was “we are all Danes now”; Europeans set aside their differences over common agricultural policy, the constitution and the various day-to-day events of Brussels and newspapers across the continent republished the offensive Mohammed cartoons that got Jyllands-posten in trouble with Arab opinion worldwide.
It is a safe bet that a European country that has a poor track record on freedom of speech is going to be worse regarded by its fellow Europeans than a country with a better record. Poland under even the Kaczynski brothers at least seems to be aware of the propaganda value of freedom of speech, since on the last day we were taken to a government-funded Belarusian language radio station, Radio Racija, “Radio rationality”, which sends dozens of hours of programming on various wavelengths, Belarusian music and politics, into that authoritarian country, a traditional sphere of interest for Poland, a country where president Aleksander Lukashenko has ruled since 1994 and won elections in March this year with eighty percent of the vote, a distinctly dodgy result.
I am sure Belarus deserves its near bottom ranking on the Reporters sans Frontieres list, though I was surprised that the brave reporters – who look like the men who ran the freedom movement show in Poland and Hungary in the eighties, bearded, cardiganed, idealistic – were not actually jailed for their reports; they travel freely in and out of Belarus; there is minor psychological hassle from the police, but their worst difficulties seem to be failure to receive accreditation and prohibition to talk to Belarusian government officials. What is instructive to make is a comparison between Belarus – widely held to undemocratic – and Poland itself, a member of the EU which has signed up to an acquis that includes guarantees of freedom of speech.

Poland bottom

What were not told on the tour, and I am not surprised, is that Poland itself is the bottom-ranking EU country for freedom of speech (58th place, far below neighbours Czech Republic and Hungary). The editor of one satirical magazine was fined for criticising the Pope; the editor of another magazine had to cut an offending article out of 80,000 copies before could get put on the streets for an article calling the Kaczynski brothers liars; and the state authority in charge of monitoring broadcasting, KRRIT, fined a private Polish TV station Polsat 125,000 euros after a guest on a Polsat talk show made fun and mimicked the voice of the presenter of the Radio Maryja group, which has acted virtually as a mouthpiece for the Kaczynskis among the catholic, rural, uneducated poor that form their base. This same state council has never once criticised Radio Maryja for its frequent anti-Semitic remarks.
What this means for what isn’t said in Poland as a result of these “signals” is anyone’s guess: there could be a great deal of self censorship that prevents people from crossing the line into persecution. There is a ban on photographing the Kaczynskis in profile. (see photo).

But it is instructive to see how the Kaczynskis treat the less fettered foreign press as an indication regards their attitude to domestic media: famously the German liberal paper Die Tageszeitung said the twins resembled potatoes in July and that their experience of abroad was “limited to the spittoons at Frankfurt airport”.
This prompted prime minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski to call on the German government to apologise for the paper’s remarks, much in the manner ironically the worldwide Muslim councils showed their failure to understand separation between government and media by asking the Danish prime minister to apologise for the cartoons back in February. Warsaw regional prosecutors launched an investigation into whether the paper broke article 135 of a Polish law that imposes a sentence of up to three years for journalists who insult a Polish head of state. A favoured catholic newspaper, Nasz Dziennik, meanwhile listed 16 German correspondents in Poland and told people to remember their names. Tageszeitung’s Warsaw correspondent was banned from speaking to Polish officials, RSF reported.
Before I went out to Poland, I was intrigued by reports that Jaroslaw – who lives with his mother – is gay, since his brother, Lech, the president, has earned the ire of the European commission by banning gay pride marches in Warsaw and he himself has argued for banning gay teachers in schools. There have been allusions to it. Apparently Lech Walesa said on a recent TV programme, Teraz My, that at his birthday party a decade earlier, “Lech Kaczynski brought has wife and Jaroslaw brought his husband.”
I asked the foreign editor of Gazeta Wyborcza if this was true, and he shrugged, and his colleague dissembled. I took the answer as a no. Such caution does not surprise since, according to Gay City News, a US publication that quotes extensively from insider Polish homosexual journalist sources, one TV journalist, Mikolaj Kunica, who refused to edit out an interview remark by an old Kaczynski friend that indicated his possible gayness was fired by the head of Polish television.
It is probably a good idea if Poland does what it takes to move up the press freedom rankings as it prepares to promote itself as a good EU member. The essence of salesmanship is that you have to have a good product – and even then it might not work. This great country deserves all the success.

I've seen things

Europe as a bladerunner fantasy...

(see below, and see above)

The Bladerunner metaphor that explains Brussels

What is Europe about....an occasional series.

I have been engaged in vigorous exchanges of email with some American friends over Europe recently. They are north-eastern academics, picture thirtysomethings in woollen V-neck sweaters, scattered in elite campuses set in rolling wooded hills across the north-east. They are anglophile, with anglophile prejudices.Onen group's preconceived idea has been that it is some elitist project, driven by irreligious jacobin commission officials - unstable, unanchored in the wishes of the majority, driven by a desire to impose an abstract system of governance on a group of organic societies. They are followers of the Anglo-Irish philosopher Edmund Burke. They tend to think the revolution is going to fail. Another group has argued that the EU is heir to the Third Reich; they point to the elitism of the EU institutions; the fact that an early version of the EU was on the third reich drawing board, that Germany has bankrolled the EU for much of its existence; that European socities are poor at integration, that we have anti-semitism and a very rightwing parties (I know, but that is what they think). They also think that the EU - based on my description -seems to developing an elite kind of person, the superior European, different and manner and very contemptuous of the "democratic" American...and others. They have a point. There are in Brussels a lot of youngish Germanic men in horn-rimmed flasses and sidecombed hair, thin noses and superior intelligence - bureaucrats who plan the new Europe who make you think, mmmm, I wonder what they would have been doing sixty-five years ago, probably subcategorising people of Jewish ancestry according to the blood status of their grandparents into Mischling grade I or Mischling grade II. In those days they would have banned bad genetic blood lines of humans; today they ban genetic crops. Facing these arguments - whose common factor is that Europe is a pretty elitist place, I tell them a little story about dreams. While the European institutions gift their employees with extra-ordinary means to fulfil their potential, this is under threat - and that's bad. Let the threat to the elitists be told with reference to a well-known science fiction story. Confused? You won't be. Read on.
You, my intelligent American friend, D, a journalist, are in Brussels. It is lunchtime, Albert Speerstrasse, the long parade route that runs to the centre of Brussels. Actually it is called rue de la loi. They cleared workers housing twenty years ago, small organic housing, with squares and parks. Now the area is just one of concrete office blocks housing the 26 directorates that run the affairs of 500 million people.At lunchtime, thousands of European officials pour out of the Berlaymont, and the Justsus Lipsius, the two biggest buildings in a parade of low skyscrapers in the area. Many hold the Financial Times. Hundreds are milling around in the lobby of the Council; many have neckscarves and compact trolley suitcases of airhostesses. There is an intense sense of busyness, as high heels clack on the black marble floors under a high atrium ceiling. You always liked European girls; they are all in skirts, and you wonder who they will be spending the night with....most girls do, after all, have someone or other. Their average age is about 27. There are few north Italian aquiline faces: no blacks, Arabs, no obvious Jews. (There are in fact very few Jews working in the EU) The friend emerges: his name is Christophe Langenmarck. You hail a black mercedes limousine cab. He tells you immediately he is balling an interpreter; he also tells you he was working on legislation with the Americans about the new European Galileo satellites. He takes you to the Place Jourdan, a square preserved from the developers where you can have sancerre and halibut in the spring sunshine. He tells you he has been listening to Gary Numan. That it is the music of the new Europe.Hard, metallic. Then he tells why he liked Bladerunner. Because the replicants seem to be the bad guys, but it emerges that they are the good guys. They are the aristocrats. They are created by the inferiors, human beings, and their violence when escaping to earth can be explained by the fact they are looking for the one gift denied them: a normal lifespan. They have to be killed. Deckard - Harrison Ford - the bladerunner - is dispatched to kill them. He kills all but the leader, Roy, who saves Deckard just as he expires himself, under his replicant's shortened lifespan. At the end of the movie, Deckard himself realises he is a replicant - and will probably die shortly. Humankind used a replicant to kill replicants, the only one to take them on.
"You destroyed the EU," Christophe says. "You are a bladerunner."
And then your friend quotes the last line by Roy in the film. ""I have seen things you wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I have seen seabeams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die."
He doesn't have to spell it out: what he means is that the clever people who work for the commission, travelling business class all over the world, see and meet people the average voter and reader of your paper never has, never would. They meet the top thinkers, top politicians, visits killing fields and refugess camps, protected forests, the Houston space centre and the inner sanctum of the Kremlin. And out of this they have a vision for a greater Europe - a greater Europe for all, but led by them.
On your way back home on the London tubr from Heathrow airport, you pass all the commuter homes, containing suburban lives, as you read the Evening Standard headline that the EU will dissolve itself within three years. You feel rather sad for those who saw things people wouldn't believe.

British junior doctors fear foreign competition

Covering Europe, you see a lot of old people behaving selfishly. (the vigour of youth, the guile of the old.) But young people can behave badly too; back in London, I met up with a number of junior doctors whom I had met earlier this year at their annual conference. My conclusion: Junior doctors in Britain are under pressure – and they have started acting mean. And they do not want to be quoted on this.
They are suffering unprecedented competition for junior doctors’ posts due to a number of factors. The launch of a number of programmes that bring doctors who have spent time off sue to illness, travel or having families back into the profession. The establishment of six medical schools in the last few years, churning out thousands of extra graduates. The creation of a new specialised health professional – the care practitioner, who can do some of the jobs doctors can do – anaesthesia, surgery, general medicine – but lack the doctor’s breadth of experience and judgment. They are also much cheaper and quicker to train and employ. Then, uniquely in 2007, a shorter foundation programme of two years introduced in 2005 whose graduates will emerge to compete directly with the first graduates from the earlier, three year programme.
Then there is competition both from EU doctors and from those further overseas, the overwhelming majority from India.
None of this has been balanced by an expansion in nearly as many doctors’ posts, despite the shortages demanding to be filled by the introduction of the European working directive and its shorter hours.
The average junior doctor’s position now has several hundred applicants for it. You don’t need to be an economist to see the irrationality of training doctors at £30,000 from A-levels through to graduation only to dump most of them on to the dole queue. Something had to give. It was the overseas, commonwealth doctors.
They have been coming for decades; unlike other international workers, who required work permits, graduate doctors from overseas could just apply, on the same basis as any British citizen, for any hospital job. The NHS needed them: their English language skills were excellent; their undergraduate training based on the British system. They in turn got excellent postgraduate training – the seven long years of twenties and early thirty-hood being so called house doctors, then specialist registrars, before graduating, subject to professional exams, to the desired goal, the acme of medicine – a consultant’s position. Then they would return to India where an NHS training was a badge of excellence enabling its benefactor to command huge private fees.
Under not so subtle pressure from the youth wing of the British Medical Association, the doctors’ trade union, the government stopped the work permit free regime in March and ruled that Indian doctors would only be able to fill a vacancy in a hospital only if it could be proved that the post could not be filled by a suitably qualified British or EU graduate.
While many Indian doctors in their late stage of postgraduate training, those in their first two years and those looking for work are in jeopardy: the first training posts are usually six month contracts and when these run out these doctors will, basically, have to go home, since it is extremely unlikely hospitals will be able to prove that hundreds of EU and British applicants ahead of the Indians in priority are unable to fulfil the junior posts’s requirement, which are classic first step the ladder menial tasks
No one keeps records but, of the 40,000 doctors of Indian origin working in the NHS, you cpould be talking of a few thousand vulnerable Indian junior doctors.
Dr Prasada Rao, chairman of the association and a general practitioner in Stoke-on-Trent, spoke for many when he said: “We are concerned that the UK is beginning to turn its back on the vital links that we have with the Commonwealth.”
Some British doctors expressed outrage at the decision: “It is basically a kick in the teeth,” said Dr Jim Stuart, clinical director of the Manchester Royal Infirmary’s A&E department.
For many, if not all, of the doctors who have just turned up from India and were looking for their first jobs, or have been here a short term in one or two short contracts and have no other job to go to, it marks a brutal end to a dream. On top of med school back in India, the investment of a fare to England, the fees for tests proving linguistic and professional competence, there is the cost of rent and lodging in the UK. The investment was accompanied by the hope of being able to earn back the costs; but every evening, the Shri Mahalakshmi Hindu temple in east London dispenses free food to indigent doctors from the Asian subcontinent.
Dr Rao told me from the BMA’s annual conference that there had been no change in the situation since March; and that several demands for concessions to be given a grace free period for unemployed doctors to find a job for two years had gone unheeded.
Looking at Indian junior doctors’ websites, there is a certain resentment about the EU, which is perceived as imposing these laws and whose doctors are thought of as being less well trained and compatible with the British system. But while EU doctors cannot be denied entry to the UK, there was no EU pressure to rescind the permits to Indian doctors. It was a British government decision, pushed by the BMA, and useful to blame on the EU. Still,. It’s yet another indication of how Britain is becoming more European.

The French disguise their linguistic aspirations

What is the English translation of the French word multilingualisme?
Has any francophone politician ever used it in any sense other than “proceedings ought to be carried out in French instead”.
This morning the agreeable Jean Claude Juncker, the Luxembourg prime minister who also chairs the monthly meeting of eurozone finance ministers, gave a rather witty breakfast speech on the euro, entirely in French, because he said (in English), he had a commitment to diversity of European languages. “Otherwise everyone will be speaking English.”
But diversity of two is not much better than diversity of one. No? How many French-speaking politicians preaching multilingualism ever go on to make a speech, or take questions, in German? As it happens Juncker is one of the few francophone top leaders who could have done so; but didn’t.
As the French preach multilingualism repeated eurostat indicators show that the French are no better at speaking Europe’s other main languages than the British (and are among the less competent at English). French history is not known for tolerating France’s minority languages.
Ah, here comes the new Brussels unauthorised dictionary definition, from our cynical man in the interpretation booths. “Multilingualisme: n. A disguised aspiration for French linguistic hegemony. Colloq. ‘We are going to knock you Brits off your perch.’”

MEP attacked for supporting cult

The favourite project of the European parliament's most prominent Human Rights campaigners, Edward McMillan-Scott MEP (blog passim), has been dismissed by a Chinese diplomat. McMillan-Scott has been prominent at backing claims by the outlawed Falun Gong religious group that their political prisoners are used for "organ harvesting": that is, they are killed as demand for their kidneys, hearts and livers arises from rich foreign buyers.
In May McMillan-Scott (left, on another crusade) went to China to interview two Falun Gong activists who had been released from prison, where they had been tortured. They were now unemployed as the police had refused to sign a document saying they were not fit to work and could be taken on.
When McMillan-Scott left, his interpreter, a western national, was arrested and questioned, and McMillan-Scott's assistant says one of the two activists has since "disappeared".
In August McMillan-Scott accompanied the Canadian lawyer, human rights campaigner and former deputy foreign minister David Kilgour to Australia and New Zealand on a consciousness-raising trip for the claims, which have been widely circulated in the western media, but never fully corroborated. Kilgour published a report earlier this year which included telephone transcripts with prison hospital directors which suggested that Falun Gong body parts could be supplied at short notice. Websites advertise organs in English for tens of thousands of dollars; given the known shortage of voluntary donors in China, and the short waiting times offered, the report concluded that there had to be a large "pool" of donors from which organs who could be harvested.
The government official, who did not want to be named, said: "Falun Gong people are lunatics. Their claims are shit; they say are persecuted because they want to escape China's one child policy and receive asylum in the States or Europe. Their way to get asylum is to say that they are persecuted," he said.
Falun Gong involves breathing exercises in the Yoga position, and is regarded as cranky but harmless, in the west, where it has millions of adherents, particularly among youngish and alternative people. In China it has been banned since 1999. Falun Gong's worldwide circle of supporters mount vigils outside Chinese embassies around the world, and frequently demonstrate on Chinese government visits,
"In China, on the coast, people live normal consumer lives, 99 percent of the population is happy, and growing richer. The leader of this evil cult, Li Hongzhi, is a lunatic. He said he would have flown to Paris on a celestial wheel if his friends hadn't stopped him and put on a plane. They also believe in UFOs."
"Of course they are against the government, but they are fanatics, like the 7/7 bombers. But their mouths pour out lies. We have a saying: in a dog's mouth you cannot expect ivory teeth."
Amnesty international have said they are continuing their own investigations into the report. A spokesman said their investigations continued to be hampered y the particular difficulty of collecting reliable evidence in China, including official restrictions on access for international human rights organizations
Dr Stephen Wigmore, head of the ethics committee of the British transplant society,k has warned against Europeans going to China for organ transplants until the issue is clarify Until camps are given full access to ied. But McMillan Scott - founder of the European Democracy initiative, and strong promoter of democracy in the Middle East - has warned that China's reputation could suffer when showcasing itself at the 2008 Olympics.

Horrific tale of human Chinese takeaway

Heroic Mr MacMillan Scott

Edward MacMillan Scott doubtless has numerous talents.. He is vice president of the European parliament, after all. One of these talents is the ability to pick a good assistant. Congratulations Jennifer Forrest, for going to China with your boss and coming back with a detailed and gruesome account of how Falun Gong prisoners are treated. Falun Gong is a harmless spiritual belief system, sometimes called the new Chinese Yoga, the daily practice of which by millions of Chinese people gets up the Chinese government’s noses. The police force arrests FG practitioners after tip offs, and put them labour camps, and calls them insane.
Then they are slaughtered for their organs, and these are transplanted into westerners. There is no cumbersome judicial process. Like fish in a Chinese fish restaurant, they are just, kept alive, indefinitely, until needed. Until the cell door key turns. Talk about Chinese takeaway! They are still alive when strapped to the operating table. Their hair is taken for wigs, every organ torn out, by experienced surgeons working in teams; stored, and used. The husk of the body is thrown into an incinerator. Hippocrates would not have been impressed.
Always detail! And Forrest provides it. She and Macmillan met two practitioners at a seedy, anonymous, identified hotel in Peking. One was Can Dong, aged 36, another Niu Junping, aged 52. There were filmed and interviewed with their backs turned. There was an interpreter; he was arrested immediately afterwards and questioned by police for seven hours. .
China is hosting the Olympics in 2008.
Can Dong told the MEP that he started practising Falun Gong in 1995, before the persecutions. He liked its peaceful principles; a subsequent eye problem was cured by its practice. Nine days after he got married, he was arrested. He has seen his wife for three weeks in the last four years.
He made jade jewellery for export to Europe in the camp, was kept in cells with dozens of other political prisoners, including Tiananmen square protesters and Buddhists. The police tortured him with sleep deprivation He is unemployed. He is one of the lucky ones.
Sterling chap that he is, McMillan Scott took at a business card and said to Can Dong that if he needed help, give him a call! No doubt they will do lunch next time Dong passes through Brussels.
Then, man number two. His story. Nu Jinjian’s wife was still breast feeding when she was throwin in jail. She spent 10 hours a day from the ceiling with a rope a round her neck, her topes only just touching the ground. He had to spend 100,000 yuan to secure her release. He showed the MEP and his assistant the burns he had suffered while being prodded with an alectric baton; he was eventually released with the help of a doctor. He is unemployed, bevause the police have to sign a document declaring a citizen fit for work and, as said, they think the Falung gong are insane.
McMillan-Scott asked Niu Jinping whether there was anything seditious about Falun Gong. He said no. And then the MEP flew back to Europe.
I have summarised the document, so don’t do it justice. But it is a good little report, much better than the usual shit MEPs put out.
Now, my story. A few weeks ago I went down to the House of Lords. There I talked to Lona; due to my inferior interviewing skills compared to Forrest, and the fact that I lost my notes that day, all I can remember is that Lona worked 16 hour days in her labour camp, made chopsticks, her friends had to do some of her quota to or the cops would punish the whole team for being tardy; she had her blood and extensive health tests taken. She was given food that made her dizzy and confused, Lona renounced Falun Gong and was released. Shortly after, on 19 May her husband was arrested, and sentenced to 2.5 years in a labour camp; the government seems to like these conjugal swing door arrangements. Her friend who was with her in Paris was beaten with iron bars; another she believes has been harvested.

Kilgour report backs up

Often the movement demonstrates outside Chinese embassies abroad, often imaginatively. (see picture) This time Lona was - soberly dressed - down at the Lords to give eyewitness support to David Kilgour.
Kilgour is an upper-class Canadian, as patrician tall, blue eyes, craggy, lanky, wit as dry as the prairie wind. Top family – his brother-in-law is John Bruton, ex PM.
He has been an MP for decades, and was its deputy foreign minister until last year . The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation calls him the only romantic figure in Canadian foreign affairs – its Lawrence of Arabia. He cares about some things more than others. He traded in his vote with the one minority government of Paul Martin so that the Canadians would put boots on the ground in Darfur. Which didn’t happen; because the government fell on another issue.
Since May he and David Matas, the director of Helsinki Watch Canada, have putting together a report on the organ harvesting. They have put their considerable reputations on the line
Here are their analysis of the disgusting persecutions of the Falun Gong: I won’t say more here. http://investigation.go.saveinter.net/
Did I say that China will be hosting the Berlin Olympics in 1936?
.

Chinese scientists to flood Europe

China is coming.
They sold us cars, shoes, bras, computers. Now their scientists are set to flood into Europe. For those who remember how Britain balked at giving residency permits to 50,000 elite Hong Kong Chinese at the 1997 colony handover, the potential numbers are staggering.
Over 1.2 million will be eligible for a golden handshake package to fill the boffin skills gap. Europe doesn't produce enough scientists to compete with the rest of the world.
The continent is not giving birth to enough young people, those young people that are born don't want to go into science because it is too difficult and unrenumerative, and those that do go into science use their degrees to get into good finance jobs, not research or teaching.
The result: Europe no longer wins Nobel prizes.
The golden handshake - including visa, residence and employment permit free permission to settle anywhere in Europe - and a 45,000 euro annual stipend while looking for posts is sure to attract the growing number of post graduates emerging from China's universities - but who go straight into local unemployment, or a low paid job.
Even in booming China, there is not enough business to support the five million science graduates annually from, among others, the astonishing 25 research universities that are in the process of being built. (Europe can't even get its single Institute of Technology off the ground.)
Those that do employ Chinese scientists, such as Microsoft research lab Asia, get the pick of the crop. Its director was recently quoted as saying "In China, if you are one in a million, there are 1,300 people like you." Its creative output outdoes all the other three Microsoft research labs - including the one in Cambridge, England, and in Seattle, according to an interview Bill Gates gave last year. But Microsoft is as yet still in a minority.
"Chinese graduates used to be able to walk into a secure state job in China," says Jianji An, a Chinese diplomat "But because of the expansion of numbers and a new free market philosophy, no longer."
The visas will be granted subject to competitions announced on the commission's website and the programme was launched at an EU-China summit in Brussels this week, which I attended, during which China's continuing contribution to the Galileo global positioning satellite programme and its support for the ITER fusion reactor were also affirmed.
China is the largest single external shareholder in the EU's GPS Galileo project - whose recently mooted extension of use to military purposes to recoup outlays worries Washington. And the country gave Europe political support on the fusion reactor project, tipping the vote for its location from Japan to Cadarache in France - despite Japan's proximity. "The official reason was we were worried about earthquakes, but really it was a political decision," said one Chinese diplomat. All three projects indicate a deepening of relations between Europe and China on science issues, despite China's poor human rights reputation.
China has also been deepening its links with the US science community: the US national science foundation opened an office in Beijing in May, in order to collaborate more closely
on global problems like climate change, ecological disasters and the spread of contagious diseases. China is launching a moon probe next year (see picture) and hopes to be the first power to return to the moon, perhaps by 2015. But young Chinese scientists are being deterred from studying and working in the US because of the complexities of visa regulations introduced since 9/11.
Any Nobel prize boost works both ways, as the exodus of researchers to Europe - almost half as many as Europe has already - could bring with it enormous technology transfer benefits if and when the Chinese return home. "We don't see it as a brain drain, but a brain train," said one diplomat. Science policy analyst Michael Lubell of the American Physical Society was recently quoted as saying that if the twentieth century had the arms race, this century would have the brains race. But at the same time as the summit, I met an MEP and his assitant who showed me the dark side of China, more of which later.

EU's Bosnia peacemaker turns bad in Africa

Carl Bildt, Lundin Oil and Sudan

Carl Bildt, bien connu in Brussels as one of the EU's former top diplomats, has just been appointed Sweden's foreign minister.
And since Sudan and its 200,000 dead is topical at the moment, it might be a good moment to take a look at Bildt's links with the Swedish oil firm accused, so that prospecting and pumping could take place in the oil rich state, of killing and displacing thousands of innocent Sudanese civilians. Their crime: to live on top of, and en route to oilfields that the company was seeking to develop.

Bildt, 57, was Sweden's prime minister from 1991-94, and his lasting achievement is to persuade the sceptical Swedes to join the EU. They are still the EU's most reluctant members: net support is five percent, lower than the UK figure. Next he became the EU's peace broker in the Balkans,
In a peripatetic lifestyle subsequent to that, picking up speaking assignments - he was the adjudicator at a Brussels conference on EU foreign policy a few months ago - writing foreign policy articles, leading (as a largely absent leader) his moderate party to another defeat, he also picked up a good dozen or so consultancies and board memberships - including that of Lundin Oil, run by his good friend, Adolf Lundin, the income from which helped support and indeed make Bildt rich during his quest for a formal position from 2001 to his appointment in Stockholm last week.
Adolf Lundin appears to have been the classic oil entrepreneur: born in 1932, trained as an engineer, he started his career with Royal Dutch Shell, but then struck out on his own, with his company Lundin oil in Switzerland, on the philosophy of taking big risks - prospecting in often dangerous areas - and winning big. When Lundin died - by coincidence, after a battle with leukaemia, long retired - in the same week as Bildt got his new job - his newly elevated friend praised the oil magnate fulsomely to Swedish newspapers: "He was a man of the small saver, not the elegant salons. He was a great entrepreneur who had no fear of failure; of a kind we really need more of in Sweden."
One of Lundin's projects was in the Congo; another was in the Sudan, where his company was one of several risk-taking independents that started prospecting in the late nineties the rich oil potential in the savannah land areas that which made up the border area between the rebel, black south and the Arab north, ruled by an Islamist regime, who had been at war for twenty years.
In an interview with the newspaper Dagens Nyheter's veteran Africa correspondent, Anna Koblanck, in April 2001, Bildt explained the positive benefits of Lundin's prospecting and development in the area.
Arguing that Lundin's presence provided stability he said: "We give opportunities to development and an increased security against attacks and war. If the international presence disappeared it would increase attacks and insecurity.”
The truth, however, is a bit different, at least according to a number of contemporaneous press and NGO reports, from Human Rights Watch, Amnesty, and, most bluntly, Christian Aid:
"Wide stretches of southern Sudan are being
subjected to a ruthless ‘scorched earth’ policy to clear the way for oil exploration and to create a cordon sanitaire around the oilfields. As new areas of exploration open up, and oil companies facilitate troop movements by building roads across swampland and bridges across rivers, the war expands and the scorched earth advances.”
Explorations started in March 1999, when Lundin drilled an exploratory well at Thar Jath,10 miles from the Nile, and reported finding as many as 300 million barrels of ‘excellent’ reservoir quality oil in its concession known as block 5A. According to the report, a month later, the government moved troops to Thar Jath and adjacent areas,
displacing tens of thousands of people. Fighting led to suspension of drilling, and but it began again in January 2001 ‘within days of the
inauguration of the 75 kilometre all-weather road’, built by Chinese workers and paid for by Lundin at the cost of $400,000 per kilometre.
While the road was being built, a government airstrip extended, the oilfield tripled in size, and government militias and troops and burnt and depopulated the entire length of the road in preparation for its completion.
In visits to a neighbouring area, Christian Aid found thousands of villagers telling the same tale: Antonov planes arriving to bomb the villages. helicopter, burning the villages and killing anyone who was unable to flee – in most cases, the old and the very young.
‘All the villages along the road have been burned,’ said John Wicjial Bayak, a local official who had been driven from a village close to the oil road. ‘You cannot see a single hut. The government doesn’t want people anywhere near the oil.’

List of atrocities

In other atrocities featuring in the report, one village was bombed ten times
before government troops finally burned out the residents. One of the first villages attacked was Chotyiel, in October 1999. On hearing gunships, 80-year-old Liu-Liu ran to the forest with six of his grandchildren. ‘We dug a hole for the children and put a blanket on top,’ he said. ‘Then soldiers came to burn the houses. Helicopters
flew overhead. If they saw you, they killed you. We stayed 20 days in the forest eating wild fruit. It was not easy to move as we had blind people there. The Arabs are forcing the road to the village. They’re going to Rier, to the
oilfield.’
Then in March 2000 government troops supported by Antonovs and helicopter gunships attacked the village of Dhorbor, on the first stretch of the oil
road. Local officials reported more than 30 villagers killed.
On 11 May 2000 it was the turn of the village of Guit. Mary Cuoy heard shots at 4am. ‘I had a 3-year-old grandchild sleeping with me,’ she said. ‘I took her by the hand and left everything. In the morning, some people went back and saw soldiers taking the cows. Every hut was burned.’
The worst atrocity happened in the village of Nhialdiu, when on July 15 2000, government militia attacker the village already swollen with refugees, rounded up all the elderly, put them in a hut and torched it.
“Tens of thousands of people were displaced – many went to Khartoum, where they remain,” Andrew Pendleton, a senior programme officer at Christian Aid who authored the report, told me last week. “We had many people on the ground reporting for us, including Julie Flint.”
Another drilling closure followed, then more killings – documented by Sudan watcher and journalist Eric Reeves - where a helicopter gunship n the
and Lundin pulled out of block 5A in 2003, selling its share of the concession to Malaysian Petronas.
Today, the argument has shifted to who knew what and when. A lawsuit in US federal courts is taking place where Talisman, a Canadian company that operated the concession next to Lundin's is sued by Sudanese plaintiffs saying that they operated hand in glove with the government, according to Reeves.
Lundin enjoyed the same sort of security, and the Human Rights watch reports makes it clear Lundin - and therefore Bildt - knew of the campaigns carried out as the road was being built in the year 2000, since it was completely obvious to anyone in the area. The Christian Aid report quoted an aidworker saying in August of that year: “As one flies along the new oil road , the
only sign of life are the lorries travelling at high speed
back and forth to the oilfield. Small military garrisons are clearly visible every five kilometres.”
Eric Reeves says. " Lundin knew, had to have known, what was happening. I sent
what I wrote to them; and pretence of ignorance of what was happening
in Block 5a is just that: pretence.
“Carl Bildt is simply lying if he says that the oil company did not know
what was occurring in its concession. If nothing else, I told them."
In his peripatetic years, Bildt has kept a blog (www.bildt.net) and weekly newsletter in both English and Swedish where he pontificates freely on global issues, ranging from essays on the Peace of Westphalia, Hard and Soft power to analyses of the Russian security. Strangely, in seven years of newsletters, he can only once find the space to comment on the Sudan. He wrote: "Lundin could simply leave Sudan, and I can simply leave Lundin. But if that happens there will be a bunch of other rich buyers of the concession. That would be the simplest. But what would be the better for that?"
The whole thing is quite sensitive as Bildt has made Swedish relations with United States a priority, yet the US has had comprehensive trade sanctions against Sudan since 1997 - no companies, including oil companies, are allowed to operate in the country. New laws by California and a growing number of other states are forbidding their business from buying into companies - any from any country - that has investment in Sudan; Lundin still retains concessions in one sector.
As for Bildt, who left his Lundin responsibilities on his appointment and stands to make a small fortune from selling shares in a Lundin sister company, it’s interesting to speculate what he is thinking. His boss, the new Swedish prime minister, confessed to the press two ministers’ transgressions – hiring cleaners under the table and failing to pay their TV licences. The Swedish press were not happy and they were sacked. Bildt’s doings are far more controversial; yet it seems strange Bildt hasn't been mentioned in this context. With Koblanck a member of staff, Dagens Nyheter at least must be aware of Bildt's activities in Sudan. To this writer, it is sad that Europe's most prominent campaigner against ethnic cleansing seems to implicated in it happening in Sudan.