I will end my internet connection in few hours so thought id post an update. Anh gau bong yeu im comin yaay!poof

Life and Debt
This is an AMAZING one...very deep,touching, well written and narrated, and amazing cinematography...if you are into development isse you can not miss this



others i recently watch.. these ones are tense.u cant help feeling ouraged and sad how history of racism,oppression and violence keep repeating itself in every level. At the same time a very hopeful song of praise for humanity.

Hotel Rwanda


Shake hands with the devil
this one is an inspirationg and outraging story of a man , a hero who keeps the victory of humanity alive when everything is destroyed and killed, when everything seems to fail.



The Take
by Avi Lewis and Naomi Klein is rather dissapointing to me even though the story of the workers i believe is very powerful and inspirtional. The film has some "over scripted" scenes which takes away its credit, and the tone of the narrator is very typical Klein, too much bashing by the writer (Klein) rather than letting the workers speak out enough for themselves. It does not illustrate enough the process of struggle of the workers either, and waste too much time on many protest scenes just as Klein spent over lengthy and repetitive part on culture jam and reclaim the street in No Logo. However the movie is quite inspiring and makes me want to learn more about the victory of these workers.

Hôm nay trời lạnh quá... mình thấy người mệt mỏi mà không sao ngủ được. Hạnh phúc thật nhỏ nhoi như một chiếc hạt dẻ. Vỏ hat dẻ cứng cáp giúp hạt bé nhỏ nhoi vượt qua mọi bão giông. Hạnh phúc như nhân hạt dẻ rất bùi, mềm và ngọt. Nhưng để thưởng thức được hương vị ấy hạt dẻ cần được nướng vừa để không bị cháy, bị đắng. Thật là khó :(..

wonder what people's thought on this

TREVOR GRUNDY


THABO Mbeki is known as the West's "point man" in Africa - the one head of state on the impoverished continent whom George Bush and Tony Blair can really trust.

But ahead of the G8 summit at Gleneagles, the 62-year-old South African President is facing growing pressure to immediately distance himself from Robert Mugabe and his regime in Zimbabwe or stay well away from Scotland next month.

"Make poverty history is the slogan," says David Coltart, the Scottish-born shadow minister of justice in Zimbabwe. "To do that, we must first make Mugabe history."

The dictator is currently carrying out the mass destruction of urban shanties and homes throughout Zimbabwe - a mass punishment on those who voted for the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) in the General Election last March.

Speaking from his home in Bulawayo, Coltart, whose grandfather James Robert Coltart was the Deputy Lord Provost of Edinburgh before the Second World War, said: "These are terrible times, especially for poor people. Nothing like this was done by the white regime when this country was called Rhodesia before 1980.

"Some of the scenes I have seen in the last few weeks are truly shocking and what is so awful is that the world does not seem to appreciate what's going on here, or care. The world is looking the other way and Thabo Mbeki is a disgrace to Africa because he is pretending to do something to change Zimbabwe with his now futile and dangerous policy of quiet diplomacy.

"Mugabe is taunting and defying the world by ordering the destruction of thousands of homes which have made over one million simply starving ordinary people homeless.

"Mugabe is encouraged by Mbeki and, so far, President Bush and Prime Minister Blair have remained mute on the eve of the Gleneagles summit."

The leader of Zimbabwe's small but extremely active Jesuit Community in Zimbabwe, Father Oskar Wermter, said: "This is definitely cruder and more brutish than anything the white minority did to Africans in Rhodesia."

University of Zimbabwe lecturer Eldred Masunungwe added: "Anarchy is breaking out all over Zimbabwe. Soon there will be an uncontrollable explosion of public anger against Mugabe and when he goes, I fear we will see the rapid rise of another dangerous demagogue. When we reach that point, all hell will break out in southern Africa."

A million black urbanites - many of them women with babies on their backs but no food or shelter in sight - are facing a Zimbabwean winter and the third year of drought.

After visiting devastated townships around Harare, Bulawayo, Mutare and Gweru, British Labour MP Kate Hoey last week wrote: "Tony Blair should be insisting that the South African President condemns the excesses of Mugabe's regime. If he won't, the invitation to Gleneagles Summit should be withdrawn."

Ordinary black Zimbabweans who make a living by trading in shanty town markets were last week shown on television knocking down their own concrete homes - watched by armed police and riot squads.

"This is a tsunami style disaster," one told Ms Hoey, one of the few British MPs to have visited Zimbabwe.

Zimbabwe, which was food rich on gaining independence a quarter of a century ago, is now on the brink of nationwide starvation. Inflation runs at 400% and fuel queues snake around the capital seven days a week.

But sources in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, said that at the Gleneagles summit, Mbeki and the outgoing Tanzanian leader, President Ben Mkapa, plan to tell G8 leaders that the time has come to bring Mugabe "in from the cold".

Both say he won a "free and fair" election in March and that the West must talk to the Zimbabwean dictator if it wants to see the end of poverty in Africa.

William Gumede, the prize- winning South African journalist who has just written a book about Mbeki, said: "The truth is, President Mbeki is frightened of Mugabe.

"They once clashed over how to deal with the situation in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Now Mbeki backs off when Mugabe is around.

"At public meetings, Mugabe attacks Mbeki and tells fellow Africans that he is in danger of becoming a stooge of the West and that he was never a real freedom fighter, just a man appointed to power by Anglo American and white businessmen to do their bidding."

Gumede said that Mbeki - despite his bravado in front of TV cameras when he is with Bush and Blair - is a recluse.

"He sits silently, on his own, in a tweed jacket, smoking a pipe. Africans laugh at his English accent and the way he keeps himself to himself - not at all like his predecessor Nelson Mandela. He dares not say a word against Robert Mugabe, who treats him like a junior member of the African Club."

Yet last week Mbeki shocked many by sacking his deputy, 63-year-old Jacob Zuma, who had been caught up in a corruption scandal.

Observers in Pretoria said it was the most momentous political development since the end of apartheid in South Africa.

"It was a defining moment for South African democracy," said a senior trade unionist, who asked not to be named.

"If Mbeki can sack his own deputy who is so popular with the ruling African National Congress [ANC], surely he can distance himself from Robert Mugabe, who the world detests. What on earth is stopping him from doing that? We all are asking if Mugabe has some strange hold or power over Mbeki."

Church leaders say there is method in Mugabe's apparent madness.

One senior Roman Catholic in Bulawayo said: "Mugabe knows his government can no longer feed 11.8 million people.

"He wants to halve the population by throwing out so-called foreigners - all whites, Malawians, Angolans and Mozambicans who live there - many of them in the shanty towns.

"He also wants to drive urbanites into the countryside - Pol Pot style - where they can be brutally taught to support Mugabe and the ruling party, Zanu (PF). We are horrified that Thabo Mbeki has not yet uttered a word of condemnation after helping to dismantle apartheid."

Last month, the Zimbabwean who is now in charge of all land "reform" programmes, 76-year-old Didymus Mutasa, shocked even members of Zanu PF when he said: "We would be better off with only six million people in Zimbabwe. They would be people who support the liberation struggle. We don't want all these extra people."

A group of Catholic bishops said: "A great crime has been committed against poor and helpless people. We warn the perpetrators. History will hold you accountable."

"History will," said David Coltart, "but not yet the man who most counts in Africa, President Thabo Mbeki.

"Thabo Mbeki was to be central in not only an African renaissance but as the man who would usher in a new age of prosperity through his Western supported policy called NEPAD (New Economic Plan for Africa). But he has lost all credibility."



This article:

http://news.scotsman.com/international.cfm?id=674702005

Zimbabwe:

http://news.scotsman.com/topics.cfm?tid=155

Websites:

CIA World Factbook - Zimbabwe
http://www.odci.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/zi.html

MDC (Movement for Democratic Change)
http://www.mdczimbabwe.com/

New Zimbabwe
http://www.newzimbabwe.com/index.html

The Zimbabwean
http://www.thezimbabwean.co.uk/

ZANU PF
http://www.zanupfpub.co.zw/

Zimbabwe Government online
http://www.gta.gov.zw/

WTO commitments mean pricier street beer in Vietnam
grrrrr ****WTO... keep finger crossed that we do not have to go hungry because not able to buy imported rice oneday.



Vietnam is set to increase taxation on draft beer (bia hoi) sold in the street to meet its commitments to the World Trade Organization, reported a senior leader from the Taxation Department June 17.
Mr. Quach Duc Phap, chief of the Taxation Policy Department under the Ministry of Finance, confirmed Vietnam will increase a special consumption tax on Vietnam’s popular draft beer in the coming months.

The move is to meet the requirements of member countries during negotiations on Vietnam’s WTO entry, where it was suggested that Vietnam levy a tax on draft beer to match that on canned, bottled, and fresh beer.

The leader noted the rate of taxation on draft beer has yet to be decided.

Earlier in 2004, the special consumption tax on draft beer was reduced from 50 percent down to 30 percent

There is a possibility that Romeo will be speaking at my university convocation on friday...I'm so excited!..

General Romeo Dallaire
by Terry Allen
Amnesty International NOW magazine, Winter 2002


Gen. Romeo Dallaire defied U.N. orders to withdraw from Rwanda. Without the authority, manpower, or equipment to stop the slaughter, he saved the lives he could but nearly lost his sanity.
***
In an indifferent world, Gen. Romeo Dallaire and a few thousand ill-equipped U.N. peacekeepers were all that stood between Rwandans and genocide. The Canadian commander did what he could-did more than anyone else-but he sees his mission as a terrible failure and counts himself among its casualties.
After a 100-day reign of terror, some 800,000 Rwandan civilians were dead, most killed by their machete-wielding neighbors. Dallaire had sounded the alarm. He'd begged. He'd bellowed. He'd even disobeyed orders. "l was ordered to withdraw...by [then-U.N. Sec. Gen. Boutros] Boutros Ghali about seven, eight days into it. .. and I said to him, 'I can't, I've got thousands' -by then we had over 20,000 people-'in areas under our control,"' Dallaire said in a recent interview with Amnesty Now. The general's hands, always moving, rose beside his face as if to block the memories. "The situation was going to shit....And, I said, 'No, I can't leave."'
The U.N. had sent Dallaire and 2,600 troops, mainly from Bangladesh and Ghana, to Rwanda to oversee a peace accord between the region's two main groups, Hutus and Tutsis. But on April 6,1994, eight months after the peacekeepers arrived, a plane carrying the Rwandan and Burundian presidents, both Hutus, was shot down over Kigali, the Rwandan capital. Hutu-controlled radio blamed the Tutsis and immediately began calling for their extermination, as well as for the murder of moderate Hutus considered friendly to the Tutsi "cockroaches." The broadcasts gave details on whom to kill and where to find them.
Dallaire and his troops were about to become spectators to genocide. As bodies filled the streets and rivers, the general, backed by a U.N. mandate that didn't even allow him to disarm the militias, pleaded with his U.N. superiors for additional troops, ammunition, and the authority to seize Hutu arms caches. In an assessment that military experts now accept as realistic, Dallaire argued that with 5,000 well-equipped soldiers and a free hand to fight Hutu power, he could bring the genocide to a rapid halt.
The U.N. turned him down. He asked the U.S. to block the Hutu radio transmissions. The Clinton administration refused to do even that. Gun-shy after a humiliating retreat from Somalia, Washington saw nothing to gain from another intervention in Africa, and the Defense Department, according to a memo, assessed the cost of jamming the Hutu hate broadcasts at $8,500 per flight-hour.
Dallaire's pain is palpable as he remembers his yearlong mission. His words, raw as a wound, make a grim contrast to the carefully parsed regrets of the world leaders who actually had the power to stop the genocide but turned away. He has just spoken at an Amnesty-sponsored conference in Atlanta on law and human rights, and he looks tired- older than his 56 years. His eyes are close set, raptor-like, but his gaze is warm and direct. "When you're in command, you are in command," he says. "There's 800,000 gone, the mission turned into catastrophe, and you're in command. I feel I did not convince my superiors and the international community," he says. "I didn't have enough of the skills to be able to influence that portion of the problem."
Three days after the Rwandan killings began, with Dallaire's troops running short of rations as well as ammunition, about l,000 European troops arrived in Kigali. The general watched with frustration as the well-armed, well-fed Westerners landed and left again as soon as they'd evacuated their own nationals. Then, after Hutu militias killed ~o Belgian paratroopers, Brussels withdrew all of its peacekeepers (the only significant Western contingent and the only one that was properly equipped) from the U.N. mission. Dallaire's depleted force was on its own.
Even as the already desperate situation worsened, Washington called for a complete withdrawal of peacekeepers. On April 21, after international pressure, the U.S. agreed to a limited force and supported a Security Council resolution slashing the force to 270 peacekeepers. U.S. Secretary of State Madeline Albright accurately described the tiny force as enough "to show the will of the international community."
Remarkably, with scant resources-indeed, with only one satellite telephone for the whole mission-Dallaire was able to maintain safe areas for those 20,000 terrorized Rwandans. But he could do little else, and the killing continued.
Eight years later, in daylight and in dreams, Dallaire still hears the cries of wounded children, the weeping of survivors, the voice of the man who died at the other end of a phone line as the general listened. He still can't escape the smell of death, the memories of hacked-off limbs scattered on the ground, and worst of all, he says, the "thousands upon thousands of sets of eyes in the night, in the dark, just floating and looking back" at him in anger, accusation, or eternal pleading.
With counseling for post-traumatic stress disorder, and a handful of pills a day, he is working to use his experiences to prevent another Rwanda. But the baleful ghosts remain, and the book he is writing about the slaughter is rousing them. "As I go over what I have written," he says, "more and more I see lost opportunities; more and more I see errors because of lack of intelligence or simply from mis-assessing a situation. I'd take a decision on the phone, and people would die within seconds. I was getting pressure from everybody not to use my soldiers." His voice fades to a whisper . "It's horrific because every day decisions were taken on life and death. Every day. Real people, real people."
We are sitting in a dark taxi and I can't see his face. He maybe remembering when the Belgian senate blamed him "at least partially" for the deaths of its paratroopers. Or he may be listening to his Rwandan voices. As we near his hotel, he says, "l always have people with me. Like tonight, I'll ask the guys at the desk to just check on me because I'm not supposed to be alone because it can go to extremes."
Dallaire says that about 20 percent of troops and humanitarian workers on missions like his suffer much the same thing, as do 5 to 10 percent of diplomats. "They are casualties," he tells me. "High suicide rates, booze, drugs, pornography, finding themselves on skid row."
When Dallaire returned to Canada from Rwanda, he tried to drink himself into a stupor of forgetfulness. He raged at his family. He tried to kill himself In 2000 a few months after he was medically released from the Canadian Forces, he was found passed out drunk under a park bench in Hull, Quebec. "He was curled up in a ball," photographer Stephane Beaudoin, alerted by a police report, later told the Ottawa Citizen. "I never took a photo. I felt sad for him. I thought, 'This man has done so much for us. How did he come to be here?"'
Dallaire's reluctance to give himself credit for what he managed to accomplish certainly contributed to his breakdown. Asked directly, he admits saving people, "sometimes by the thousands, you know, just by giving appropriate orders to my troops." Past and present merge as Dallaire remembers one day when he, his driver, and aide-de-camp "were making our way through a large population move in the hills. It was raining and cold because it's fairly high up. And there this woman was, right there by the road, and people are walking around her, and she is giving birth. And so, as we're inching, the child came out. The woman, already emaciated, sort of picked up the child and then fell back. So we jumped out, you know, because nobody was stopping. The mother was dead. We tried to wrap the baby up as best we could, brought it back, and then other people sorted it out."
But Dallaire quickly returns to the people he failed to save and to the limits of his skills. "Thirty years ago when I joined the army, if somebody mentioned human rights, we immediately equated them with communists," Dallaire now says. The former career officer has come to believe that, along with the ability to attack and kill, soldiers must learn peacekeeping, negotiation, and human rights preservation. That belief is reflected in the war stories he chooses to tell. Rather than tales of derring-do, he offers anecdotes that plumb the moral ambiguities of modern soldiering.
"A young officer is entering a village," Dallaire recounts. "The village has been wiped out except for a few women and children still alive [in a ditch filled with bodies]. There is 30 percent AIDS in that area. There is blood all over that place, no rubber gloves. Does the platoon commander order his troops to get in there, into the ditch risking AIDS, and help?" The question, it turns out, is not an exercise in armchair ethics. "When I asked the platoon commanders, those from 23 of the 26 nations that sent forces said they would order their troops to keep marching. Commanders from three nations- Holland, Ghana, and Canada-were saved the complexity of the question because by the time they turned around their troops were already in the ditch."
Dallaire continues, his hands alive, his eyes still, the Gallic-tinted accent of his native Quebec growing more pronounced. "Or a soldier is watching two girls, 13 or 14, both with children on their backs, with a crowd spurring on the one with a machete to kill the other girl because she is different. What does the soldier do? Shoot the girl with the machete, possibly killing her baby? Shoot into the crowd? Do nothing?"
"Should I myself," he asks, "negotiate with a militia commander with gore on his shirt and his hands from the morning's work, making a joke, to get him to withdraw his gang so I can move thousands of people [to safety] Or do I pull out my pistol and shoot him between the eyes?"
"The corporal," says; Dallaire, returning to the soldier watching the machete-wielding girl, "tried to negotiate his away through the crowd to stop the attack but headquarters in his home country ordered him not to intervene. That corporal is now an injured ex-corporal," Dallaire says, and like the ex-general himself, a casualty of post-traumatic stress.
For all the blame he heaps on himself, Dallaire also faults the strictures that bound him in 1994 and that will have to change if the world is to avoid another Rwanda. The institution of peacekeeping missions, he says, is deeply flawed. Even if he had received the political and humanitarian training the job demanded, the U.N.'s rules would have robbed him of the ability to use his military skills. With thousands of civilians begging for protection as they were hunted down in their homes and churches,
"I could tell [the peacekeepers] to do things," he says, "but they would check with their country. The troops are under my operational command, but they remained under the ultimate command of their nations, so. . . if a national capital feels that a [rescue] mission is unwarranted, or too risky, or something, the soldiers can turn around and say, 'No, I can't do it."'
Asked to name one of the countries that ordered its soldiers not to move injured Rwandans to safe areas, even when Dallaire told them to, the general hesitates for a long time before saying, "Bangladesh." It was the Ghanaians, he adds, who performed most humanely.
With the exception of the Red Cross, the non-governmental organizations were clueless, Dallaire says. "When they started sending people in, they kept sending me assessment teams. Assessment teams! 'Listen, I don't need a goddamn assessment team. I need food, medical supplies, water for 2 million people, and I've got to feed them twice a day. Get the shit in here. We'll sort out the distribution.' "
If Dallaire's anger at those who did too little is fierce, his fury at world leaders who feigned ignorance and did nothing is white hot. He cannot forget, for example, that President Clinton stopped for a few hours in Kigali in 1998, after it was all over, and with the engines of Air Force One running, said he was sorry; he didn't know.
Or that David Rawson, the U.S. ambassador to Rwanda at the time of the mass murders, waited a month before declaring a "state of disaster," and then dismissed the slaughter as "tribal killings." Calling what happened in Rwanda "tribal" conflict made intervention seem futile. U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Prudence Bushnell, who had pushed hard for the U.S. to "neutralize" Hutu hate radio, later explained to author Samantha Power, "What I was told was, 'Look, Pru, these people do this from time to time."'
The designation of "tribal" conflict also nicely avoided the word "genocide." Had a major power or the U.N. invoked that term in time, all states that were signatories of the 1948 convention on genocide would have been obliged to condemn the slaughter and act to stop it.
Avoiding the word did not however avoid the fact. "They knew how many people were dying," Dallaire says, no matter what word they used. "The world is racist," he says bitterly. ,' "Africans don't count; Yugoslavians do. More people were killed, injured, internally displaced, and refugeed in 100 days in Rwanda than in the whole eight to nine years of the Yugoslavia campaign," he says, and there are still peacekeeping troops in the former Yugoslavia while Rwanda is again off the radar. f "Why didn't the world react to scenes where women were held as shields so nobody could shoot back while the militia shot into the | crowd?" he asks. "Where... boys were drugged up and turned into child soldiers, slaughtering families?...Where girls and women were systematically raped before they were killed? Babies ripped out of their stomachs? ...Why didn't the world come?"
Dallaire supplies his own answer: "Because there was no self-interest....No oil. They didn't come because some humans are [considered] less human than others."
Nonetheless, Dallaire still calls himself an optimist. Despite its troubles, he believes that the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, which operates out of Arusha, Tanzania, "is one of those great potential instruments of the future." His own job, he says, won't be done until the tribunal finishes its investigation. "My duty as force commander who ultimately became head of mission will not end until the Arusha Tribunal says it doesn't need me to testify anymore, or when the tribunal decides to hold me accountable."
There is virtually no chance the international court will blame him. The question is whether he'll one day stop blaming himself. "The work I'm doing helps," he says, referring to his campaign to stop the use of children as soldiers. Counseling seems to be helping, too.
"One day after a couple hours of therapy," he says, "we're sitting there, and, you know, to-ing and fro-ing. I all of a sudden felt joy in my stomach. You know when you feel happy in your tummy? And I had not felt that in the seven years since Rwanda. All of a sudden I said, 'jeez, I feel, I feel better."' Dallaire stopped, tilted his head as if to listen to his own words and broke into a smile as sweet as warm winter sun. "My therapist let me savor that-and then we talked. And at the end of it, I said, I think I have moved from survival to living. And maybe to getting better."
The world, he knows, has not. Without the political will and institutional mechanisms to stop it, "Rwanda" will happen again.

Terry J. Allen is editor of Amnesty Now. She has reported for numerous U.S. and international newspapers and magazines, including the Boston Globe, American Prospect, and Salon.