31/07/06, Spiegel, Israel Suspends Bombing for 48 Hours

Rice Hoping For Cease-Fire This Week

With international outrage growing after the bloodiest attack on Lebanese civilians yet by Israel forces, Jerusalem has ordered a 48-hour pause in bombings. The United States says a cease-fire may be possible this week, but Washington's failure to call for its immediate implementation has left allies disappointed.

Under pressure from Washington, Israel has suspended its aerial bombardment of southern Lebanon for 48 hours after Sunday's air strike that killed at least 56 people, including 37 children. United States Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said on Monday she believed a cease-fire between Israel and the Hezbollah guerrilla group in Lebanon could be forged this week.

The suspension will be used to investigate the attack on the village of Qana on Saturday night, and Israel also agreed to allow a 24-hour window for residents of southern Lebanon to leave the area if they wish, said US State Department spokesman Adam Ereli.

The halt to bombing is a seen as victory for US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, but her failure to call for an immediate cease-fire is likely to disappoint US allies alarmed at the hundreds of civilian casualties in the war.

At least 542 people have been killed in Lebanon, though the Lebanese health minister estimated the toll at 750 including unrecovered bodies, Reuters reported. Fifty-one Israelis have been killed in the war.

The Qana raid, the bloodiest single attack during Israel's 20-day-old war on Hezbollah, prompted Lebanon's government to call off scheduled talks with Rice and tell her she was not welcome until an unconditional cease-fire was in place. After shunning Rice, Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora, often a critic of Hezbollah, thanked those in the militia "who sacrifice their lives for the independence and sovereignty of Lebanon."

A cease-fire this week?

Rice told reporters on Monday in Jerusalem: "This morning, as I head back to Washington, I take with me an emerging consensus on what is necessary for both an urgent cease-fire and lasting settlement. I am convinced we can achieve both this week."

She said she would call for a UN resolution this week on the cease-fire and also the establishment of an international stabilization force for southern Lebanon, which she said she hoped could be deployed as soon as possible after the passage of a UN resolution.

Israel and the United States want to ensure that Hezbollah is eventually disarmed under a UN resolution.

"There is broad agreement that armed groups must be prohibited in areas where the international force is deployed," Rice said, adding that an arms embargo must be enforced.

Rice welcomed the 48-hour suspension of bombing, saying: "I have been deeply grieved by the tragic losses we have witnessed, especially the deaths of children, Lebanese and Israelis. Too many families have been displaced from their homes. Too many people urgently need medical care or are living in shelters," she said.

Israel: We regret incident

The police said the Qana raid flattened a three-story building where more than 60 displaced people were in the basement. Israel said it was unaware civilians were in the building and accused Hezbollah of firing rockets from Qana.

Israel said it regretted the incident but added that civilians had been warned to flee the village, located 11 kilometers from the Israeli border.

Israeli Justice Minister Haim Ramon said the 48-hour suspension did not mean the war was about to end. "This decision will allow us to continue the war over time and it will take off some of the political pressure, so I am sure this is the right decision for now. It is not stopping the war," Ramon told Israeli Army Radio.

"If it ends today it means a victory for Hezbollah ... and for world terror, with far-reaching consequences. Therefore this war is not about to end, not today and not tomorrow," he said.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair and German Chancellor Angela Merkel discussed the Middle East crisis by telephone on Sunday evening. Both "expressed their great regret and deep sorrow over the result of the Israeli air raid on Qana in which many innocent people, among them many women and children, lost their lives," said German government spokesman Ulrich Wilhelm.

As anger convulsed Lebanon and the Arab world, several thousand protesters chanted "Death to Israel, Death to America" outside the United Nations headquarters in downtown Beirut and some smashed their way into the building in a path of destruction.

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said Israel would "continue to act with no hesitation against Hezbollah" which has been firing rockets into Israel from southern Lebanon.

31/07/06, Rami Khouri, New massacre at Qana propels region into uncharted diplomatic terrain

Hizbullah's backing stiffens resolve of siniora government

BEIRUT: The Israeli attack that killed scores of elderly people and handicapped Lebanese children in a civilian shelter in the Southern Lebanese town of Qana early Sunday has triggered reactions that may prove to be a turning point in the current fighting, and perhaps even in the 58-year-old Arab-Israeli conflict.

Television images throughout the world focused Sunday on two parallel scenes: the removal of smashed bodies in Qana and an angry demonstration in front of the UN building in central Beirut, where a small number of enraged young Lebanese entered the facility and trashed parts of it.

Those sentiments of rage by Lebanese citizens are the core of wider feelings that may soon be translated into novel, and potentially historic, diplomatic dynamics. This was reflected most dramatically Sunday morning when Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora and Speaker Nabih Berri told a press conference that, in view of the massacre at Qana, the Lebanese government has nothing to discuss except an immediate and unconditional cease-fire.

Berri, a key link with Hizbullah, stated emphatically that all Shiites and Lebanese stand firmly with the government position. US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice then announced that she was postponing her scheduled Sunday visit to Beirut to discuss how to end this crisis.

The unprecedented nature of these moves comprises the convergence of five forces in the Arab world that have never come together as they do this week: impassioned public opinion, sustained armed resistance by non-state actors, firm government positions that align with both previous elements, non-stop mass media dissemination, and a sense of Israel's military vulnerability.

Many Lebanese and others in the region passionately debate Hizbullah's ultimate aims, often mistrust its motives, and question the wisdom of its abduction of two Israeli soldiers on July 12. Yet that abduction, the subsequent Israeli attacks against Lebanon's civilian infrastructure, and Hizbullah's continued resistance have now pushed the region into uncharted diplomatic territory. Hizbullah's strategy, tactics, and capabilities are at the heart of this process.

Hizbullah's response to the Israeli attacks includes four key elements: It has absorbed massive bombardment without its military, media or leadership capabilities being significantly diminished; it has retaliated almost daily with rocket strikes, progressively ever deeper into Israel; it has inflicted relatively heavy casualties on Israeli ground troops and forced them to withdraw from the Bint Jbeil area in Southern Lebanon; and, it has succeeded in synchronizing its diplomatic position with that of Siniora, thus tempering criticisms that it acts alone against the interests of Lebanon and its government.

28/07/06, Matthias Gebauer & Ulrike Putz, Israel and the UN, A Poisoned Relationship

The deaths of four UN observers in Lebanon has caused little outrage in Israel. Some blame the UN itself, since its troops there have failed to restrain Hezbollah. Israel and the UN have a long history of mistrust, and the tone isn't good for the prospect of a new peacekeeping force.

On Thursday the front pages of Israeli newspapers were following one topic -- war in the north. The army had suffered its worst losses so far, in an attack on a village that killed nine Israeli soldiers. Even the conservative papers were suggesting that the war against Hezbollah had gone a little off course.

Further back in the papers came brief updates of a story that has obsessed the international press since Tuesday: the bombardment of a neutral observation post in southern Lebanon that killed four unarmed UN peacekeepers. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert had apologized; Kofi Annan had been criticized for calling the bombing deliberate; investigations were underway. End of story.

The shelling of the UN post has been treated as a scandal in most of Europe, but it's been downplayed in Israel. Whether it was an irresponsible assault on the blue-helmeted UN troops has not become much of a debate. Mistakes happen. That's the explanation for an attack that has been officially dubbed an "occurrence."

Israel admits airstrikes were carried out near the UN post, but the prime minister's apology has dampened any political discussion. Some government insiders don't mind suggesting it was the UN's fault -- even the UN, they argue, admits that Hezbollah had set up positions close to the base.

Evidence for this version of the story so far is slim. Milos Strugar, a Beirut spokesman for the UN mission in Lebanon (UNIFIL), says there was no Hezbollah activity near the camp. In the past, "occasionally," some military maneuvers had occurred in the area. He also said the situation demanded an objective and thorough investigation -- by the UN as well as by the Israelis. And he emphasized that soldiers in the post had warned the Israelis several times that UN lives were in danger.

But as the investigation of the events unfolds, an e- mail sent by one of the UN soldiers to a Canadian broadcaster CTV could come under greater scrutiny. In the letter, Major Paeta Hess-von Kruedener -- a Canadian Forces soldier serving with the UN in South Lebanon who was killed in the attacks -- wrote that the area surrounding the patrol base was filled with a number of fortified Hezbollah positions from which its militants were firing rockets at Israel.

The text near the end of the e-mail couldn't have been clearer: "We have on a daily basis had numerous occasions where our position has come under direct or indirect fire from artillery and aerial bombing." But hte major didn't level any criticism. "This has not been deliberate targeting, but has rather been due to tactical necessity."

"Israel just doesn't try"

Nevertheless, Timur Goksel, an advisor for UNIFIL in south Lebanon for over 20 years, has his doubts about Israel's story. It has been his experience, he said, that Hezbollah doesn't operate near UNIFIL camps. "The militia has no interest in being observed," he said. Since UNIFIL reports every movement, Hezbollah would risk letting Israel in on its operations. "When Hezbollah gets discovered by UN troops, its missions break up," he said.

Goksel noted that assaults by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) on UNIFIL positions are sadly routine. "Israel doesn't do it on purpose; it just doesn't try" to avoid hitting the posts, he said. Pilots and tank drivers know they won't be punished for hitting a UNIFIL position. "The IDF makes its own politics," he said, "and that goes for foreign relations, too."

The lack of interest in the deaths of the four observers also illustrates a general attitude in Israel toward the UN. A poisoned relationship, marked by prejudice, has developed over many years between Jerusalem and the world body. The UN has proved to be a weak practical partner in helping Israel, many Israelis believe -- but strong when it comes to issuing statements against Israel from New York.

Is the UN to blame for the crisis?

On Wednesday evening Jan Egeland, the UN's Undersecretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, hit back against this attitude. He wanted to report what he'd seen in the crisis zone and call for a cease-fire. But Israeli journalists promptly asked him if the UN wasn't to blame for the new violence -- since the UN had, after all, failed to disarm Hezbollah. Egeland had no answer.

The UNIFIL mission to Lebanon is often used as proof of the UN's weakness. According to a UN mandate the 2,000 troops remaining there can only be unarmed observers. Originally, 7,000 troops were charged with monitoring the withdrawal of Israeli troops after their first incursion to Lebanon. They were also meant to support the Lebanese government and keep militants from taking too much power.

Exactly the opposite happened. Hezbollah took over southern Lebanon almost immediately, and because of its weak mandate the UN stood by and watched. In some cases the observers even made peace with the militants. The best example for this relationship is the kidnapping of three Israeli soldiers in 2003: UN soldiers filmed the kidnapping but could do nothing to prevent it.

A history of reproach

The history of bad blood between Israel and the UN is even longer, though. There's only one instance of good relations with the UN, in fact, and it's quite old. On November 29, 1947, UN Resolution 181 divided Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state: the effective birth of Israel.

Since then, however, the Jewish state has been reprimanded regularly by the UN General Assembly. The worst decision came in May 1967. After Egyptian President Abdel Nasser demanded an end to the UN mission in the Sinai Peninsula, UN Secretary-General Sithu U-Thant pulled out his blue-helmeted troops without consulting the Security Council. Nasser sharpened his rhetoric against Israel and blocked the only road to Israel's port town of Eilat. On June 5, 1967, Jerusalem reacted with a pre-emptive strike. War prevailed.

The General Assembly has agreed on a number of resolutions since then that Israel interprets as a direct challenge to its right to exist. The Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) received "observer status" at the UN in 1974, though its charter called for building a Palestinian state from Jordan to the Mediterranean Sea. In November 1975, Resolution 3379 declared Zionism "a form of racism."

The General Assembly even rejected -- by a huge majority -- the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty signed at Camp David in 1978. Over and over, Israel was scolded for acting against extremists, and it came to consider most of the UN's suggestions to be utterly improper, even when they were justified.

Dim hopes for international peacekeepers

This tense history explains the arrogant attitude within Israel toward the UN. To many Israelis the world body looks impotent at solving problems. The example in Lebanon only serves as proof -- and the latest reaction to the deaths of the UN soldiers won't exactly smooth the way for a new team of international peacekeepers. Such a group would clearly need a mandate from the UN, and it's just as obvious that Israel would deal with new peacekeepers only if the mandate were clear and robust against Hezbollah.

Going by the diffident statements made by Israeli politicians, the country isn't anxious to lend its own troops to an international mission and would agree to such a project only under NATO leadership. The mission would have to allow Israeli soldiers to move on their own against planned attacks on Israel -- and the question of which NATO members would join the mission is one of the biggest stumbling blocks for upcoming diplomatic efforts.

Hezbollah would find the idea absurd. Even without US involvement, a NATO mission would look to them, inevitably, like a long arm of the great enemy in Washington meddling in their own back yard. Even Lebanon -- which kicked out Syria last year -- would need time to get used to a new foreign military presence.

31/07/06 , Val Ross, Rebirth of the Cool

"A lot has changed," Kuwabara says, looking not so much cool as happy. He fans photos across the boardroom table: Two small faces with dark heads and busy fingers, surrounded by bright toys. "I'm a father," he says.

His own father, Masao Kuwabara, who had been interned in the Second World War, died in August, 2002. At the funeral ceremonies, Bruce Kuwabara was reminded, "The Buddhist image of life is like an ocean . . . as one wave passes, another one is formed." Four weeks after the funeral, after a whirlwind courtship, he married Victoria Jackman, head of the philanthropic Jackman Foundation. Their son Thomas Masao (Mas) is now almost 3; their daughter Vita will be 2 in November. "I now think about the future more than I ever did before," Kuwabara said in his RAIC speech. "Everything is new again."

One of KPMB's many strong suits is making old architecture new again — such as the new atrium and concert hall rising behind Toronto's polychromatic 19th-century Royal Conservatory of Music, and the new spaces the team designed for Canada's National Ballet School and the Gardiner Museum of Ceramic Art, also both in Toronto.

Kuwabara grabs a felt pen (momentarily dismayed to realize that he's sketching on the back of a printout photo of Vita and Mas) to explain how he and Blumberg worked on the Gardiner: "We wanted the roof to set relationships with the building next door, and the Royal Ontario Museum across the street. These relationships aren't god-given. What the architect does is establish the latent potential of the site."

As well as harmonizing proportions and lines, KPMB replaced the building's pinkish façade with Indiana limestone to match its neighbours; the building, once set back from the street, was brought forward. A new third floor increased exhibition space; its generous windows reveal unexpected vistas of nearby rooftops and the ROM'scarved façade. "It's breathtaking," says Gardiner executive director Alexandra Montgomery, delighted by what has been done (on a modest $20-million budget). "It has changed the scale of the Gardiner without changing the essence."

While the Gardiner is proudly listed in The Architecture of Kuwabara Payne McKenna Blumberg, the book makes no mention of another KPMB project, Canada's National Ballet School. This disjointed a nose or two at the book's launch in 2004 (What, aren't we good enough? some balletomanes demanded).

The omission was understandable: Another architect, Philip Goldsmith, did the plan for the school's expansion. Goldsmith Borgal renovated the complex's old buildings, a Victorian-era school and a yellow brick 1856 mansion, and chose KPMB for the new elements. "At first, KPMB saw it as a joint venture. As it became more successful, they became more proud of their involvement," says Goldsmith.

Kuwabara only realized last year just how well the school turned out. Walking past one dark night, he looked up to see dancers in the bright studios, and noted the way dark alternated with light, old buildings with new. "I had a eureka moment," he says. What he values about the school now, he says, is, "It's not about itself alone. It's about the whole street."

Last year, Andrew Blum, contributing editor at Metropolis, the New York architecture magazine, moderated a panel with Kuwabara, his former teacher Jack Diamond, Daniel Libeskind and Will Alsop to talk about Toronto's cultural building projects. "Introducing Bruce was a bit of a joke," says Blum. "The other architects had one project each, while KPMB's name was on seven." As discussion grew heated, Kuwabara stayed cool and diplomatic. For Blum, Kuwabara's special qualities are "quietness, urbaneness, a sense of textures and materials — a sensitivity that is particularly Torontonian."

Lately, says Kuwabara, he has been reconsidering Toronto's peculiar challenges. When a young architect from Paris joined the firm, Kuwabara asked why he'd left for Toronto. "He told me, 'Paris is beautiful. But it's 19th-century. Here it's lively, there's old and new, high and low.' Toronto's architecture is polyglot. You either consider it a mishmash, or vital."

Kuwabara has made it his challenge to build harmonies in the cacophonous cityscape, but his interests are now moving in new directions. Eagerly, Kuwabara explains the key features of KPMB's Manitoba Hydro project in Winnipeg, which aims to be the world's most energy-efficient building of its size (22 storeys). It has geothermal shafts reaching deep into the Earth to regulate the temperature; stainless-steel cables with water dripping down to a pool in the main hall to serve as both art and humidifier. "If you'd told me . . . at architectural school that mechanical engineering would be a big part of our work, I'd say you were daft," says Blumberg. Now, "there's no question that this direction is our future."

In his gold-medal acceptance speech, Kuwabara recalled the tropical fish he had kept as a child. "Aquariums are finite ecologies, fragile environments within which everything needs to be balanced and maintained. . . . There is a strong connection between childhood passions and future careers." For years, Bruce Kuwabara erected a cool image; more recently he's constructed harmonies for our fractured cities. Now, he's thinking about how to build a more balanced, sustainable world.

31/07/06, Jack L. Granatstein, Conflicted over citizenship

We must understand the rights and obligations of being Canadian, says historian J. L. Granatstein

The crisis in Lebanon and the evacuation of almost 12,000 Canadians from that ravaged country have brought problems to light that suggest strongly Canada's urgent need for a serious review of its 1977 citizenship act. The last examination of citizenship by a parliamentary committee, in 1993, produced no action. Now the need for a new act is apparent, and the government should establish a royal commission on the rights and obligations of Canadian citizenship as a precursor to new legislation.

Such an examination must look at Canada's practice of permitting dual or triple or quadruple citizenship or more -- there is effectively no limit on the number of different passports a Canadian can hold. Before 1977, Canadians who acquired another nation's citizenship, except by marriage, lost their Canadian status. Until 1973, Canada required those who wanted its citizenship to renounce their former allegiance. The 1993 committee questioned the meaning of loyalty where people held dual citizenship, and suggested that this devalued the meaning of Canadian citizenship. The committee, in fact, recommended that a Canadian who voluntarily acquired another citizenship should cease to be a Canadian.

Was the committee correct? There are obvious advantages to Canada in dual citizenship in a globalized economy where millions of people travel each year, live and work abroad, or carry on business in different parts of the world on a daily basis. We benefit from having Canadians who can understand the customs of another nation and move smoothly through foreign bureaucracies. But is there still a downside to this practice, as the committee suggested? A royal commission must consider if Canadians should be permitted -- or perhaps encouraged -- to hold two or more passports.

But there still may be problems of dual citizenship. Should Italian-Canadians, for example, be allowed as Canadian citizens to vote for and elect representatives in the Italian parliament, as occurred in 2006? There are also onerous obligations that can fall on dual citizens abroad. China and Iran, for example, flatly reject the idea of dual citizenship and consider those born in their countries as theirs. Their citizens can be conscripted for military service, for example, if they return "home." What is Canada's position on this? Do we expect our embassies and consulates to make representations on behalf of dual citizens who get into legal difficulties in the country of their birth? For its part, is Ottawa willing to listen to Iranian or Chinese representations if a dual citizen broke Canadian law?

In a world of choices, should people be made to decide on their nationality? The Chrétien government forced Conrad Black to choose between his Canadian citizenship and a seat in the House of Lords. Lord Black chose the Lords. If an Italian-Canadian can vote in an Italian election, why can a British-Canadian not sit in the House of Lords and still be Canadian? Such matters need to be studied.

And what are the obligations of citizenship? Should these not be described and accepted by those to whom we grant citizenship? At the moment, the only requirements are that an applicant for Canadian citizenship be reasonably fluent in English or French and be able to answer a few simple questions about history, geography and Canada's political system. Is this sufficient? We expect Canadians to be willing to serve in the military in wartime to defend our territory and our freedoms, for example. Is this still a reasonable expectation?

Should Canadian citizens be able to serve in foreign militaries? Many Canadians of Israeli origin return to Israel to do military service there. Others volunteer for the U.S. forces. Should their Canadian citizenship permit this, or might it forbid participation in combat? And what do we do when someone returns "home," as some of Serb and Croat origin did during the wars that tore Yugoslavia apart in the 1990s, and takes the field against Canadian soldiers trying to restore peace? If one of those militiamen killed a Canadian soldier, would this be murder or simply an accident of war? Do Canadians turn a blind eye to such behaviour? In an age of increasing ethnic violence and terrorism, such questions need examination.

Then, what are the obligations of government to citizens abroad? The Israeli-Hezbollah conflict made more than 40,000 Canadians eligible for evacuation by Canada. Many of these putative citizens had lived in Lebanon for decades, their only link to this country being their passport. Consider Rasha Solti, who wrote in The Globe and Mail (July 22): "I hold a Canadian passport, I was born in Toronto when my parents were students there. I have never gone back. I left at age 2." Ms. Solti's passport was clearly her bolthole to let her come to Canada if she ever needed to do so. Did Canada owe her anything?

Obviously, the government has some responsibility to assist Canadians caught up in a conflict. But those holding this country's passport for convenience's sake, who renew every five years without visiting, let alone living, in Canada? This needs careful study, and the Harper government has indicated that this question concerns it. The royal commission should examine this too.

No Canadian wants to create categories of citizenship, but perhaps there is another way to limit the use of our passports as a public convenience. In the United States, all Americans, no matter where they live or how many passports they carry, must file an income tax return as a fundamental continuing obligation of citizenship. Essentially, the U.S says that those who want to be part of it must help to pay. Canada imposes no such requirement. A royal commission might want to examine this approach because all who pay income taxes are unlikely to forget their Canadian citizenship, wherever they live. Moreover, should the filing of annual tax returns not be a requirement for adults at home or abroad seeking renewal of a Canadian passport?

Such questions are not simply technical matters. Instead, they go to the heart of national identity. Does Canadian citizenship mean something? Or is Canada just a hotel into which people can check when it suits them, as novelist Yann Martel famously put it, and check out when their own interests so require? Citizenship matters. It is in Canada's national interest that its people understand and accept that there are rights and obligations that come from being Canadian.

J. L. Granatstein writes on behalf of the Council for Canadian Security in the 21st Century (http://www.ccs21.org).

31/07/06, Lysiane Gagnon, Is this a bias I see before me?

If Louise Arbour, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, had her druthers, Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt would have been tried as war criminals, since countless civilians were killed by Allied bombing throughout Europe during the Second World War.

This is the eerie conclusion of Ms. Arbour's hasty and somewhat biased intervention in the war in Lebanon. A few days ago, she declared that "indiscriminate shelling of cities constitutes a foreseeable and unacceptable targeting of civilians," and condemned "the bombardment of sites with alleged military significance, but resulting invariably in the killing of innocent civilians." And she warned that "this could engage the personal criminal responsibility of those involved, particularly those in a position of command and control."

By these standards, the war against the Nazis should be considered unjustifiable. Put aside the destruction of Dresden, a decision now widely denounced. Most cities under German control were bombed and many of their inhabitants killed, and so were sites of "military significance" such as bridges in populated towns, airports, factories and so on, and this is how, in part, that war was won. And what about the hundreds of civilian deaths caused by NATO's humanitarian mission in Kosovo?

Ms. Arbour was cautious not to openly take sides, but the subtext was very clear: Only Israel targets what its army believes (sometimes wrongly) are "military sites" (Hezbollah usually targets civilians); and the human casualties of Israeli bombings are much larger than those resulting from Hezbollah's attacks on Israel.

This makes Israel the culprit. The implication of Ms. Arbour's statement is that Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert might follow Slobodan Milosevic in the dock at the International Criminal Court. (Ms. Arbour was once the chief prosecutor for the United Nations war-crimes tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia.)

The former Supreme Court of Canada judge didn't bother to explain what a country should do when it is attacked by terrorist groups that stockpile their arms in "ordinary" houses, launch their rockets from densely populated areas and generally use innocent civilians as human shields.

She didn't condemn Hezbollah's previous incursions across a UN-sanctioned international border. And she didn't condemn terrorism, which essentially targets civilians. Does sending explosive-strapped teenagers to kill other kids in Israeli pizzerias fit with Ms. Arbour's conception of human rights? Does she think a movement the stated aim of which is the annihilation of a country shows respect for human rights?

Is Ms. Arbour comfortable with the UN Human Rights Council, one of the organizations she oversees as high commissioner? The council is a recent reincarnation of the discredited Human Rights Commission (Libya was actually elected its chairman in 2003). In 2001, the UN World Conference Against Racism in Durban turned into an ignominious circus dominated by vicious anti-Semitic rhetoric.

The problem is, the new Human Rights Council doesn't seem much different from the old Human Rights Commission. It still includes such well-known human-rights champions as China, Cuba, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Algeria. At the council's inaugural session in June, Israel was the only country officially castigated for violating human rights. The council's first "extraordinary session," on July 6, focused exclusively on Israel's operations in Gaza. A resolution, adopted 29-11, didn't mention that these operations were in response to a Hamas attack on Israeli soil a year after Israel had withdrawn from Gaza.

This is not exactly what Ms. Arbour had said when the council was created in February by the UN General Assembly. She declared then that "the council will be required to review on a periodic basis the human-rights record of all countries, beginning with its members." Obviously, a majority of council members had another agenda.

It will be interesting to see, in the coming months, whether Ms. Arbour is able to withstand this close companionship with a group devoted to the demonization of Israel.

27/07/06, Greg Mason, Why grieving parents forgave Reena's killer

VANCOUVER -- You have to wonder what Suman Virk and her husband, Manjit, are made of.

It wasn't that long ago that Reena Virk's parents sat in a Victoria courtroom and first heard what happened to their 14-year-old daughter the night of Nov. 14, 1997. How seven young teenagers -- six girls and a boy -- lay a horrible beating on Reena before two of the seven dragged her to the water and finished her off.

Imagine hearing how your child was punched and kicked as many as 18 times in the head, causing her brain to swell. How the blows to her stomach caused severe damage to her abdominal wall and liver and pancreas. How the blows about her face caused her eyes to swell shut.

Imagine listening as a pathologist described how your child's half-naked body was discovered in a shallow inlet eight days after the attack, her tongue clenched between her teeth, the likely result of a grand mal seizure, often suffered by people who have head injuries.

Imagine, too, listening to him describe the terrible bruising found on your child's back, a sure sign she lay in the fetal position for much of the attack, defenceless, trying to protect herself as best she could.

And then, imagine this: It's the fall of 2005, just six years after hearing all that in court, and you're in the back room of a small church in Mission, B.C., and who walks through the door but one of the two people convicted of killing your daughter. A young man you wanted dead not that long ago.

And minutes later you're hugging him.

How in God's name do you find it in your heart to do that, Ms. Virk is asked over the phone.

"Actually," she says in a soft, kind voice, "it's because of God we did it."

Warren Glowatski, who was convicted in 1999 of second-degree murder in Reena's death, recently hugged his victim's parents again, during an aboriginal healing circle that was part of his parole hearing.

It was at the hearing that Mr. Glowatski, who was 15 at the time of the attack and is now 23, was granted unescorted temporary passes. The exchange of hugs mirrored their meeting last fall, but their encounter in the church was much harder on the parents than the parole-board meeting was.

"It was very emotional," Ms. Virk recalled.

"There was nothing between us. No table, nothing. We were able to ask him questions."

Like why he did it.

"He didn't really have an answer," she said. "He just said he got caught up in the moment. There was no real motive."

The Virks are Jehovah's Witnesses. Ms. Virk said her religion teaches forgiveness, and as followers in the footsteps of Jesus she and her husband must practise forgiveness, too.

There aren't many religions in the world that don't preach turning the other cheek, and yet I'd bet most people flocking to churches and mosques and temples today could never do what the Virks did.

"It wasn't easy," Ms. Virk said. "As I said, we wanted him dead for taking our child away. But then we realized eventually that he did feel genuine remorse for what he did. He started working with the restorative justice group. He apologized many times. And we had to consider that he came from a very troubled upbringing that likely contributed to what happened."

At their first meeting everyone cried. And cried and cried.

Mr. Virk said they needed to forgive Mr. Glowatski so he could make the most of his young life. And also so he and his wife could release some of the anger that had built up inside them.

"If we didn't forgive him he'd carry a heavy heart around with him for the rest of his life," Mr. Virk said in an interview.

Now only he and his wife will have to.

Kelly Ellard, after a third trial, was convicted last year of second-degree murder in Reena's death. She maintains her innocence.

Ms. Virk once wanted Ms. Ellard dead too. Now she feels sorry for her because, she said, she's so obviously messed up.

The Virks still cry for their daughter, especially when they think of milestones she would have reached were she alive. Her mother says Reena would have been 23 this year, maybe thinking of starting a career, thinking of marriage, who knows.

"Every day is hard," she said. "Hopefully, with what we were able to do with Warren it will allow him to move on, to let go of his nightmare. Unfortunately for us, the nightmare will never be over."

Imagine that.

25/07/06, Erin A. Weir, It's more than photo ID

Canada is an exception to a powerful rule; for the most part, this world of ours is not a safe place to be. That passport is piece of home.

My most valuable possession is not a house, or a car, or an iPod. It is a little blue book with CANADA stamped across the front in neat gold print -- just 24 (formerly) blank pages and an unflattering picture: my Canadian passport.

I did nothing to earn it. It is mine by right, by accident of birth; a jackpot in the universal lottery. The official cost is just $87 CAD, but for millions of people it is completely, absolutely unattainable -- the stuff of dreams.

I used to think of my passport as a sort of all-purpose ticket to the world. But, the more time I spend filling up those little blank pages, the more I realize that the real value of my passport lies not in the places it takes me, but in the promise of where (and to what) I can always return. Adventure with an escape hatch: The world on a platter, with the option to buy, lease, or go home.

Still, it sometimes takes a crisis to remind me just how lucky I am. For days now the papers have carried front page stories of the mass exodus from Lebanon, hundreds of thousands of expatriate Canadians, Brits, Americans, all boarding boats and buses destined for safer places. Like clever rats fleeing a sinking ship, the world is mounting a total withdrawal. Of course, not everyone can leave.

I am expatriate Canadian. Born and raised in the quiet suburban monotony of Mississauga, Ont., I have spent time in some of the world's least monotonous places: Rwanda, Liberia, Democratic Republic of Congo, and now Ghana -- an oasis of relative calm in the otherwise tumultuous assortment of countries that make up West Africa.

Against the best advice of family and friends I have chosen a career -- a life -- that will surely take me again and again into the most difficult, dangerous regions of the world. But for all the hazards, this life is ultimately my choice. Every risk that I take and every hardship I endure is one that I have consciously taken on. I can be comfortable in the most uncomfortable of circumstances, safe in the knowledge that I am really just a tourist here. When the water runs out, or the bullets start to fly, I am one of the privileged few who will be shuttled off to safety. Home -- with all the stability and security that that entails -- is just a plane ride away.

Evacuation scenarios play themselves out again and again, often with little press coverage or international awareness. In the book Shake Hands With The Devil, Romeo Dallaire (force commander of the ill-fated UN mission to Rwanda and witness to the wholesale slaughter of thousands of civilians) wrote about the efficiency and professionalism with which Canadians were rounded up and shipped quietly out of harm's way. Other foreign embassies and consulates made similar arrangements, with the French famously evacuating even the embassy dog. In the end it was just the Rwandan people left behind with a handful of foreign peacekeepers and aid workers to witness the spectacle of a society come completely undone.

Eleven years later, in Kigali, Rwanda's capital, a young man greeted me in quiet French. He came from Congo, where one of the most protracted and vicious conflicts was (and, to some extent, still is) playing out just three hours away. When the troubles started in Congo -- when rebels started mutilating civilians, when children were being kidnapped and taught to fight, and when husbands were forced to watch as their wives and daughters were systematically gang-raped -- there was no quick clean exit, no bureaucrats to help him escape. He had fled on foot to Rwanda, one of the poorest, most densely populated countries on earth, a country still recovering from its recent bloody history, and still preferable to the hell left behind him. He was waiting to make a refugee claim.

I was just waiting for an interview.

At this moment people from some 82 countries have similar stories to tell. There are the big conflicts of course, wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Lebanon that rate time on the evening news. But there are also dozens more, in Chad, Sri Lanka and Haiti, the jungles of Colombia, and the forests of Congo -- all of which have ordinary people living in fear. Canada is an exception to a powerful rule; for the most part, this world of ours is not a safe place to be.

In Ghana, I am reminded of this a half-dozen times a day. Every taxi driver who proposes marriage, every street vendor who asks for help with a visa application, every desperate person who would give (or risk) anything to have a safe place to hide when politicians and warlords and world leaders fail them -- all of these people recognize much more acutely than I do the value of my little blue passport, and of the freedom of choice that it confers.

So, as we wait anxiously for news of family and friends in the world's hot spots, as we berate the government for moving too slowly to evacuate Beirut, even as we mourn the loss of eight of our own, all of us should take a moment to recognize what it means to be a Canadian in this world, and to appreciate the heartbreaking rarity of a safe place to go home to.

Erin A. Weir works for the Conflict Prevention Management and Resolution Department of the Kofi Annan International Peacekeeping Training Centre in Accra, Ghana.


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Globe: After building Afghan school, B.C. humanitarian shot dead

Globe, July 26 2006, Mark Hume, After building Afghan school, B.C. humanitarian shot dead, (Source).
Globe, July 27 2006, Editorial, Mike Frastacky's work, (Source).


Globe, July 26 2006, Mark Hume, After building Afghan school, B.C. humanitarian shot dead, (Back).

VANCOUVER -- Before he was murdered this week near the school he had helped build in a remote and dangerous part of the Hindu Kush mountains, Mike Frastacky, a rumpled, bearded Canadian carpenter with a sense of humour and a blunt manner, hung a plaque that was full of hope.

It was dedicated to the many friends who had responded to his e-mails appealing for financial donations, and he had carried it with him on one of his frequent trips to northern Afghanistan from his home in Vancouver.

"This school was built to improve the future of the children of the surrounding communities so that together they can build a country where Afghans feel safe and look towards their tomorrows with hope and confidence," the plaque read.

That hope and confidence were shattered in the predawn darkness Monday when a group of armed men invaded the house where Mr. Frastacky was sleeping and shot him.

"Shock. Disgust. Anger. Sadness," were the words a friend, Jashed Kator, used yesterday in a telephone interview from Los Angeles to describe the reaction of the local residents in Afghanistan, where Mr. Frastacky had been trying to build a better future.

For the past four years, the 56-year-old finishing carpenter and skilled builder of wooden boats had spent all of his spare time and most of his money constructing a school near Nahrin, in a wild and largely lawless part of Afghanistan about 160 kilometres north of Kabul.

Mr. Frastacky took a calculated risk in entering the area, which was outside the normal operating range of Canadian troops in Afghanistan. Surrounded by friends and supporters, he felt safe at first. But this summer he had grown worried, as he watched the Taliban and groups of warlords extend their control.

Recently, in addition to logistical challenges, he had to deal with pamphlets that threatened to burn down any school that taught girls, as his did so proudly.

Mr. Kator, who lives in Los Angeles and whose family worked with Mr. Frastacky on the school project, said the gentle humanitarian was murdered because he opposed corruption.

"He was staying in my father's home in Nahrin. It was a hot night and his bodyguard and translator were sleeping in the front yard. Mike was in his bedroom in the house.

"They beat up the bodyguard and translator very, very badly and demanded to know: 'Where is the foreigner?' They got him. They put him in the bathtub and shot him."

Mr. Kator, who is devastated by the killing of a "good, good man," said the area has become lawless. He said Mr. Frastacky had no tolerance for corruption. He fired a school principal and several teachers for demanding bribes from parents so that their children could attend the school, which serves 600 students from 10 nearby villages.

More recently, he said, Mr. Frastacky had exchanged words with a group of armed men who were trying to seize a 14-year-old girl, demanding she be given for marriage by holding a gun to her mother's head.

"Mike saw that with his own eyes. He was very blunt. He told them not to come around there any more."

Mr. Kator said the group, which roams through the community at will, is heavily armed and provides support to corrupt local politicians. He believes the people who murdered Mr. Frastacky have used their influence to have others blamed.

"Three men have been arrested for supposedly killing Mike, but they are all innocent. The bodyguard [Nawab Khan], the translator [Liaqat Hayat] and a school superintendent [Noor Aga] have been accused. But they had nothing to do with this murder."

Mr. Kator said Mr. Frastacky helped fund the project with money inherited from an aunt. "She told him, 'Use this money for a good cause.' So that's what he was doing," he said.

"He did it out of the love of his heart," said Mr. Frastacky's sister, Luba Frastacky, who had been growing worried about his safety.

"His e-mails this summer were increasingly pessimistic about the future of Afghanistan because the Taliban were back in control," she said in a telephone interview from the Toronto area.

Ms. Frastacky was shocked to hear her brother's friends have been accused of killing him. "There is absolutely no way [they] can be implicated in his death," she said.


Globe, July 27 2006, Editorial, Mike Frastacky's work, (Back).

Mike Frastacky did not have to be in Afghanistan. He was not a soldier, a diplomat or an employee of an international aid agency. He was simply a concerned Canadian of uncommon courage who chose to bring his organizational and building skills to a remote part of an extremely dangerous country. His goal was modest yet crucially important: to put up a school for children of the war-ravaged region, "so that together they can build a country where Afghans feel safe and look towards their tomorrows with hope and confidence."

Mr. Frastacky, 56, represented everything the Taliban and other enemies of democracy despise, and for that he paid with his life. His murder by unidentified gunmen is a grim reminder of what we are up against as we fight those who would keep Afghanistan imprisoned in the Dark Ages, and underlines why we cannot afford to leave until the job is done.

During the past four years, Mr. Frastacky devoted considerable time, energy and money to his humanitarian project. The school, with places for 600 students from nearby villages, is modern, secular and open to girls as well as boys. The Taliban, who tolerate none of these attributes, threatened to burn it down. It was not an idle threat. Elsewhere, they have done just that simply to keep girls from being educated.

Mr. Frastacky did not take the threats lightly, but he was prepared to defend what he valued. This led him to remove a corrupt school principal and teachers who demanded bribes from families seeking admission for their children. It also led him to stand up, unarmed, to thugs who are used to getting what they want from frightened, unprotected villagers and who are in league with corrupt officials. In one instance, he stepped in when a group of armed men tried to seize a 14-year-old girl for a forced marriage. Yet he understood and respected the differences between traditional Afghan society and Western ways. His final project at the school was a wall to create separate playgrounds for girls and boys, because girls were not allowed to share the same play area.

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Globe: Mounties want to delay review of man's death

Monday July 24 2006, Mounties want to delay review of man's death, Shannon Kari, Globe and Mail

RCMP quashes group's complaint over fatal shooting involving officer

VANCOUVER -- The RCMP is attempting to delay a review by its civilian oversight agency into its conduct in the death of Ian Bush, who was shot during a scuffle by a Mountie in October in the Northern British Columbia community of Houston.

The national police force sent a letter to the B.C. Civil Liberties Association last week saying its complaint into the shooting of the 22-year-old mill worker has been terminated.

The civil liberties group filed a complaint with the RCMP last fall, as it does after any death in the custody or at the hands of the RCMP. Mr. Bush was shot at the local RCMP detachment after he was detained for having an open beer in public.

Unsatisfied with the force's response, the civil liberties group requested a review of the shooting by the Commission for Public Complaints Against the RCMP.

The RCMP letter, which was written by the head of its internal affairs unit in B.C., cites a section of the RCMP Act as authority to quash a complaint.

"Further investigation is not necessary or reasonably practicable at this time," said the letter, which noted that the RCMP criminal investigation has been reviewed by the New Westminster police.

"The complaint has been terminated, because there is an ongoing process that is not yet complete," said Corporal Tom Seaman, a spokesman for the RCMP.

Cpl. Seaman said the B.C. Civil Liberties Association may file a new complaint once the criminal investigation process is over.

The findings of the police investigation were turned over to the Crown more than a month ago to determine if any criminal charges will be laid. A spokesman for Crown counsel in B.C. said Friday it was still reviewing the file.

The Bush family says it has been told virtually nothing by the RCMP about what happened the night of Oct. 29, other than that there was a scuffle at the station between Mr. Bush and Constable Paul Koester, the arresting officer. Minutes later, Mr. Bush lay dead with a bullet in the back of his head.

Jason Gratl, president of the civil liberties group, said this was the first time in any of its complaints that the RCMP Act has been invoked to shut down the process. He said the group does not believe the RCMP has the authority to delay the complaints commission from conducting its review and said this would not interfere with the criminal process.

"There are elaborate procedural protections," for every RCMP officer, Mr. Gratl said. He said the chairman of the complaints commission can make recommendations or call a public hearing, but has no disciplinary authority.

The attempt to terminate the complaint "begs the question, what do they want to hide," Mr. Gratl added. He accused the RCMP in B.C. of using stalling tactics in cases where someone has been shot by police or has died in custody.

The RCMP led the investigation into the death of 16-year-old Kyle Tait, who was a passenger in a stolen car when he was shot and killed by Constable Todd Sweet of the New Westminster police last August. The RCMP investigation of the officer's conduct in the shooting of Mr. Tait was not forwarded to the Crown until last month and it is still reviewing the file. Constable Sweet, who has been a defendant in four lawsuits alleging excessive force, two of which are ongoing and two of which were settled out of court, is on administrative duties. They include the training of police recruits at the Justice Institute of B.C.

The lengthy period to investigate and then determine whether there should be charges in these cases also delays a mandatory coroner's inquest.

The B.C. Coroner's Service confirmed Friday that it will hold an inquest in January into the death of Kevin St. Arnaud, who was shot to death in December 2004 during a police chase by an RCMP officer in Vanderhoof.

The Crown announced in February, 14 months after the shooting, that no charges would be filed. The RCMP complaints commission is reviewing the conduct of the police force in that case.

"Ideally, we would hold an inquest within 12 months of the death occurring," said Jeff Dolan, the assistant deputy chief coroner of B.C.

Foreign Affairs: Jorge G. Castañeda, Latin America's Left Turn

Latin America's Left Turn, Jorge G. Castañeda, Foreign Affairs, May/June 2006

Summary: With all the talk of Latin America's turn to the left, few have noticed that there are really two lefts in the region. One has radical roots but is now open-minded and modern; the other is close-minded and stridently populist. Rather than fretting over the left's rise in general, the rest of the world should focus on fostering the former rather than the latter -- because it is exactly what Latin America needs.

JORGE G. CASTAÑEDA is the author of Utopia Unarmed: The Latin American Left After the Cold War and Compañero: The Life and Death of Che Guevara. Having resigned as Mexico's Foreign Minister in 2003, he is currently Global Distinguished Professor of Politics and Latin American Studies at New York University.

A TALE OF TWO LEFTS

Just over a decade ago, Latin America seemed poised to begin a virtuous cycle of economic progress and improved democratic governance, overseen by a growing number of centrist technocratic governments. In Mexico, President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, buttressed by the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement, was ready for his handpicked successor to win the next presidential election. Former Finance Minister Fernando Henrique Cardoso was about to beat out the radical labor leader Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva for the presidency of Brazil. Argentine President Carlos Menem had pegged the peso to the dollar and put his populist Peronist legacy behind him. And at the invitation of President Bill Clinton, Latin American leaders were preparing to gather in Miami for the Summit of the Americas, signaling an almost unprecedented convergence between the southern and northern halves of the Western Hemisphere.

What a difference ten years can make. Although the region has just enjoyed its best two years of economic growth in a long time and real threats to democratic rule are few and far between, the landscape today is transformed. Latin America is swerving left, and distinct backlashes are under way against the predominant trends of the last 15 years: free-market reforms, agreement with the United States on a number of issues, and the consolidation of representative democracy. This reaction is more politics than policy, and more nuanced than it may appear. But it is real.

Starting with Hugo Chávez's victory in Venezuela eight years ago and poised to culminate in the possible election of Andrés Manuel López Obrador in Mexico's July 2 presidential contest, a wave of leaders, parties, and movements generically labeled "leftist" have swept into power in one Latin American country after another. After Chávez, it was Lula and the Workers' Party in Brazil, then Néstor Kirchner in Argentina and Tabaré Vázquez in Uruguay, and then, earlier this year, Evo Morales in Bolivia. If the long shot Ollanta Humala wins the April presidential election in Peru and López Obrador wins in Mexico, it will seem as if a veritable left-wing tsunami has hit the region. Colombia and Central America are the only exceptions, but even in Nicaragua, the possibility of a win by Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega cannot be dismissed.

The rest of the world has begun to take note of this left-wing resurgence, with concern and often more than a little hysteria. But understanding the reasons behind these developments requires recognizing that there is not one Latin American left today; there are two. One is modern, open-minded, reformist, and internationalist, and it springs, paradoxically, from the hard-core left of the past. The other, born of the great tradition of Latin American populism, is nationalist, strident, and close-minded. The first is well aware of its past mistakes (as well as those of its erstwhile role models in Cuba and the Soviet Union) and has changed accordingly. The second, unfortunately, has not.

UTOPIA REDEFINED

The reasons for Latin America's turn to the left are not hard to discern. Along with many other commentators and public intellectuals, I started detecting those reasons nearly fifteen years ago, and I recorded them in my book Utopia Unarmed: The Latin American Left After the Cold War, which made several points. The first was that the fall of the Soviet Union would help the Latin American left by removing its geopolitical stigma. Washington would no longer be able to accuse any left-of-center regime in the region of being a "Soviet beachhead" (as it had every such government since it fomented the overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz's administration in Guatemala in 1954); left-wing governments would no longer have to choose between the United States and the Soviet Union, because the latter had simply disappeared.

The second point was that regardless of the success or failure of economic reforms in the 1990s and the discrediting of traditional Latin American economic policies, Latin America's extreme inequality (Latin America is the world's most unequal region), poverty, and concentration of wealth, income, power, and opportunity meant that it would have to be governed from the left of center. The combination of inequality and democracy tends to cause a movement to the left everywhere. This was true in western Europe from the end of the nineteenth century until after World War II; it is true today in Latin America. The impoverished masses vote for the type of policies that, they hope, will make them less poor.

Third, the advent of widespread democratization and the consolidation of democratic elections as the only road to power would, sooner or later, lead to victories for the left -- precisely because of the social, demographic, and ethnic configuration of the region. In other words, even without the other proximate causes, Latin America would almost certainly have tilted left.

This forecast became all the more certain once it became evident that the economic, social, and political reforms implemented in Latin America starting in the mid-1980s had not delivered on their promises. With the exception of Chile, which has been governed by a left-of-center coalition since 1989, the region has had singularly unimpressive economic growth rates. They remain well below those of the glory days of the region's development (1940-80) and also well below those of other developing nations -- China, of course, but also India, Malaysia, Poland, and many others. Between 1940 and 1980, Brazil and Mexico, for example, averaged six percent growth per year; from 1980 to 2000, their growth rates were less than half that. Low growth rates have meant the persistence of dismal poverty, inequality, high unemployment, a lack of competitiveness, and poor infrastructure. Democracy, although welcomed and supported by broad swaths of Latin American societies, did little to eradicate the region's secular plagues: corruption, a weak or nonexistent rule of law, ineffective governance, and the concentration of power in the hands of a few. And despite hopes that relations with the United States would improve, they are worse today than at any other time in recent memory, including the 1960s (an era defined by conflicts over Cuba) and the 1980s (defined by the Central American wars and Ronald Reagan's "contras").

But many of us who rightly foretold the return of the left were at least partly wrong about the kind of left that would emerge. We thought -- perhaps naively -- that the aggiornamento of the left in Latin America would rapidly and neatly follow that of socialist parties in France and Spain and of New Labour in the United Kingdom. In a few cases, this occurred -- Chile certainly, Brazil tenuously. But in many others, it did not.

One reason for our mistake was that the collapse of the Soviet Union did not bring about the collapse of its Latin American equivalent, Cuba, as many expected it would. Although the links and subordination of many left-wing parties to Havana have had few domestic electoral implications (and Washington has largely stopped caring anyway), the left's close ties to and emotional dependency on Fidel Castro became an almost insurmountable obstacle to its reconstruction on many issues. But the more fundamental explanation has to do with the roots of many of the movements that are now in power. Knowing where left-wing leaders and parties come from -- in particular, which of the two strands of the left in Latin American history they are a part of -- is critical to understanding who they are and where they are going.

ORIGINS OF THE SPECIES

The left -- defined as that current of thought, politics, and policy that stresses social improvements over macroeconomic orthodoxy, egalitarian distribution of wealth over its creation, sovereignty over international cooperation, democracy (at least when in opposition, if not necessarily once in power) over governmental effectiveness -- has followed two different paths in Latin America. One left sprang up out of the Communist International and the Bolshevik Revolution and has followed a path similar to that of the left in the rest of the world. The Chilean, Uruguayan, Brazilian, Salvadoran, and, before Castro's revolution, Cuban Communist Parties, for example, obtained significant shares of the popular vote at one point or another, participated in "popular front" or "national unity" governments in the 1930s and 1940s, established a solid presence in organized labor, and exercised significant influence in academic and intellectual circles.

By the late 1950s and early 1960s, however, these parties had lost most of their prestige and combativeness. Their corruption, submission to Moscow, accommodation with sitting governments, and assimilation by local power elites had largely discredited them in the eyes of the young and the radical. But the Cuban Revolution brought new life to this strain of the left. In time, groups descended from the old communist left fused with Havana-inspired guerrilla bands. There were certainly some tensions. Castro accused the leader of the Bolivian Communist Party of betraying Che Guevara and leading him to his death in Bolivia in 1967; the Uruguayan and Chilean Communist Parties (the region's strongest) never supported the local Castroist armed groups. Yet thanks to the passage of time, to Soviet and Cuban understanding, and to the sheer weight of repression generated by military coups across the hemisphere, the Castroists and Communists all came together -- and they remain together today.

The origin of the other Latin American left is peculiarly Latin American. It arose out of the region's strange contribution to political science: good old-fashioned populism. Such populism has almost always been present almost everywhere in Latin America. It is frequently in power, or close to it. It claims as its founders historical icons of great mythical stature, from Peru's Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre and Colombia's Jorge Gaitán (neither made it to office) to Mexico's Lázaro Cárdenas and Brazil's Getúlio Vargas, both foundational figures in their countries' twentieth-century history, and to Argentina's Juan Perón and Ecuador's José Velasco Ibarra. The list is not exhaustive, but it is illustrative: many of these nations' founding-father equivalents were seen in their time and are still seen now as noble benefactors of the working class. They made their mark on their nations, and their followers continue to pay tribute to them. Among many of these countries' poor and dispossessed, they inspire respect, even adulation, to this day.

These populists are representative of a very different left -- often virulently anticommunist, always authoritarian in one fashion or another, and much more interested in policy as an instrument for attaining and conserving power than in power as a tool for making policy. They did do things for the poor -- Perón and Vargas mainly for the urban proletariat, Cárdenas for the Mexican peasantry -- but they also created the corporatist structures that have since plagued the political systems, as well as the labor and peasant movements, in their countries. They nationalized large sectors of their countries' economies, extending well beyond the so-called commanding heights, by targeting everything in sight: oil (Cárdenas in Mexico), railroads (Perón in Argentina), steel (Vargas in Brazil), tin (Victor Paz Estenssoro in Bolivia), copper (Juan Velasco Alvarado in Peru). They tended to cut sweetheart deals with the budding local business sector, creating the proverbial crony capitalism that was decried much later. Their justifications for such steps were always superficially ideological (nationalism, economic development) but at bottom pragmatic: they needed money to give away but did not like taxes. They squared that circle by capturing natural-resource or monopoly rents, which allowed them to spend money on the descamisados, the "shirtless," without raising taxes on the middle class. When everything else fails, the thinking went, spend money.

The ideological corollary to this bizarre blend of inclusion of the excluded, macroeconomic folly, and political staying power (Perón was the dominant figure in Argentine politics from 1943 through his death in 1974, the Cárdenas dynasty is more present than ever in Mexican politics) was virulent, strident nationalism. Perón was elected president in 1946 with the slogan "Braden or Perón" (Spruille Braden was then the U.S. ambassador to Buenos Aires). When Vargas committed suicide in 1954, he darkly insinuated that he was a victim of American imperialism. Such nationalism was more than rhetorical. In regimes whose domestic policy platform was strictly power-driven and pragmatic, it was the agenda.

These two subspecies of the Latin American left have always had an uneasy relationship. On occasion they have worked together, but at other times they have been at war, as when Perón returned from exile in June 1973 and promptly massacred a fair share of the Argentine radical left. In some countries, the populist left simply devoured the other one, although peacefully and rather graciously: in Mexico in the late 1980s, the tiny Communist Party disappeared, and former PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party) members, such as Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, Porfirio Muñoz Ledo, and the current presidential front-runner, López Obrador, took over everything from its buildings and finances to its congressional representation and relations with Cuba to form the left-wing PRD (Party of the Democratic Revolution).

More recently, something funny has happened to both kinds of leftist movements on their way back to power. The communist, socialist, and Castroist left, with a few exceptions, has been able to reconstruct itself, thanks largely to an acknowledgment of its failures and those of its erstwhile models. Meanwhile, the populist left -- with an approach to power that depends on giving away money, a deep attachment to the nationalist fervor of another era, and no real domestic agenda -- has remained true to itself. The latter perseveres in its cult of the past: it waxes nostalgic about the glory days of Peronism, the Mexican Revolution, and, needless to say, Castro. The former, familiar with its own mistakes, defeats, and tragedies, and keenly aware of the failures of the Soviet Union and Cuba, has changed its colors.

CASTRO'S UNLIKELY HEIRS

When the reformed communist left has reached office in recent years, its economic policies have been remarkably similar to those of its immediate predecessors, and its respect for democracy has proved full-fledged and sincere. Old-school anti-Americanism has been tempered by years of exile, realism, and resignation.

The best examples of the reconstructed, formerly radical left are to be found in Chile, Uruguay, and, to a slightly lesser extent, Brazil. This left emphasizes social policy -- education, antipoverty programs, health care, housing -- but within a more or less orthodox market framework. It usually attempts to deepen and broaden democratic institutions. On occasion, Latin America's age-old vices -- corruption, a penchant for authoritarian rule -- have led it astray. It disagrees with the United States frequently but rarely takes matters to the brink.

In Chile, former President Ricardo Lagos and his successor, Michelle Bachelet, both come from the old Socialist Party (Lagos from its moderate wing, Bachelet from the less temperate faction). Their left-wing party has governed for 16 consecutive years, in a fruitful alliance with the Christian Democrats. This alliance has made Chile a true model for the region. Under its stewardship, the country has enjoyed high rates of economic growth; significant reductions in poverty; equally significant improvements in education, housing, and infrastructure; a slight drop in inequality; a deepening of democracy and the dismantling of Augusto Pinochet's political legacy; a settling of accounts (although not of scores) regarding human rights violations of the past; and, last but not at all least, a strong, mature relationship with the United States, including a free-trade agreement signed by George W. Bush and ratified by the U.S. Congress and Washington's support for the Chilean candidate to head the Organization of American States. U.S.-Chilean ties have continued to prosper despite Chile's unambiguous opposition to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in the UN Security Council in 2003.

In Uruguay, Vázquez ran for president twice before finally winning a little more than a year ago. His coalition has always been the same: the old Uruguayan Communist Party, the Socialist Party, and many former Marxist Tupamaro guerrillas, who made history in the 1960s and 1970s by, among other things, kidnapping and executing CIA station chief Dan Mitrione in Montevideo in 1970 and being featured in Costa-Gavras' 1973 film State of Siege. There was reason to expect Vázquez to follow a radical line once elected -- but history once again trumped ideology. Although Vázquez has restored Uruguay's relations with Cuba and every now and then rails against neoliberalism and Bush, he has also negotiated an investment-protection agreement with the United States, sent his finance minister to Washington to explore the possibility of forging a free-trade agreement, and stood up to the "antiglobalization, politically correct" groups in neighboring Argentina on the construction of two enormous wood-pulp mills in the Uruguay River estuary. He refused to attend Morales' inauguration as president of Bolivia and has threatened to veto a bill legalizing abortion if it gets to his desk. His government is, on substance if not on rhetoric, as economically orthodox as any other. And with good reason: a country of 3.5 million inhabitants with the lowest poverty rate and the least inequality in Latin America should not mess with its relative success.

Brazil is a different story, but not a diametrically opposed one. Even before his inauguration in 2003, Lula had indicated that he would follow most of his predecessor's macroeconomic policies and comply with the fiscal and monetary targets agreed on with the International Monetary Fund (IMF). He has done so, achieving impressive results in economic stability (Brazil continues to generate a hefty fiscal surplus every year), but GDP growth has been disappointing, as have employment levels and social indicators. Lula has tried to compensate for his macroeconomic orthodoxy with innovative social initiatives (particularly his "Zero Hunger" drive and land reform). At the end of the day, however, perhaps his most important achievement on this front will be the generalization of the Bolsa Familia (Family Fund) initiative, which was copied directly from the antipoverty program of Mexican Presidents Ernesto Zedillo and Vicente Fox. This is a successful, innovative welfare program, but as neoliberal and scantly revolutionary as one can get.

On foreign policy, Brazil, like just about every Latin American country, has had its run-ins with the Bush administration, over issues including trade, UN reform, and how to deal with Bolivia, Colombia, Cuba, and Venezuela. But perhaps the best metaphor for the current state of U.S.-Brazilian relations today was the scene in Brasilia last November, when Lula welcomed Bush at his home, while across the street demonstrators from his own party burned the U.S. president in effigy.

The Workers' Party, which Lula founded in 1980 after a long metalworkers' strike in the industrial outskirts of São Paulo, has largely followed him on the road toward social democracy. Many of the more radical cadres of the party, or at least those with the most radical histories (such as José Genoino and José Dirceu), have become moderate reformist leaders, despite their pasts and their lingering emotional devotion to Cuba. (Lula shares this devotion, and yet it has not led him to subservience to Castro: when Lula visited Havana in 2004, Castro wanted to hold a mass rally at the Plaza de la Revolución; instead, Castro got a 24-hour in-and-out visit from the Brazilian president, with almost no public exposure.) Lula and many of his comrades are emblematic of the transformation of the old, radical, guerrilla-based, Castroist or communist left. Granted, the conversion is not complete: the corruption scandals that have rocked Brazil's government have more to do with a certain neglect of democratic practices than with any personal attempt at enrichment. Still, the direction in which Lula and his allies are moving is clear.

Overall, this makeover of the radical left is good for Latin America. Given the region's inequality, poverty, still-weak democratic tradition, and unfinished nation building, this left offers precisely what is needed for good governance in the region. If Chile is any example, this left's path is the way out of poverty, authoritarian rule, and, eventually, inequality. This left is also a viable, sensitive, and sensible alternative to the other left -- the one that speaks loudly but carries a very small social stick.

POPULISM REDUX

The leftist leaders who have arisen from a populist, nationalist past with few ideological underpinnings -- Chávez with his military background, Kirchner with his Peronist roots, Morales with his coca-leaf growers' militancy and agitprop, López Obrador with his origins in the PRI -- have proved much less responsive to modernizing influences. For them, rhetoric is more important than substance, and the fact of power is more important than its responsible exercise. The despair of poor constituencies is a tool rather than a challenge, and taunting the United States trumps promoting their countries' real interests in the world. The difference is obvious: Chávez is not Castro; he is Perón with oil. Morales is not an indigenous Che; he is a skillful and irresponsible populist. López Obrador is neither Lula nor Chávez; he comes straight from the PRI of Luis Echeverría, Mexico's president from 1970 to 1976, from which he learned how to be a cash-dispensing, authoritarian-inclined populist. Kirchner is a true-blue Peronist, and proud of it.

For all of these leaders, economic performance, democratic values, programmatic achievements, and good relations with the United States are not imperatives but bothersome constraints that miss the real point. They are more intent on maintaining popularity at any cost, picking as many fights as possible with Washington, and getting as much control as they can over sources of revenue, including oil, gas, and suspended foreign-debt payments.

Argentina's Kirchner is a classic (although somewhat ambiguous) case. Formerly the governor of a small province at the end of the world, he was elected in the midst of a monumental economic crisis and has managed to bring his country out of it quite effectively. Inflation has been relatively controlled, growth is back, and interest rates have fallen. Kirchner also renegotiated Argentina's huge foreign debt skillfully, if perhaps a bit too boldly. He has gone further than his predecessors in settling past grievances, particularly regarding the "dirty war" that the military and his Peronist colleagues waged in the 1970s. He has become a darling of the left and seems to be on a roll, with approval ratings of over 70 percent.

But despite the left-wing company he keeps, Kirchner is at his core a die-hard Peronist, much more interested in bashing his creditors and the IMF than in devising social policy, in combating the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas (FTAA) than in strengthening Mercosur, in cuddling up to Morales, Castro, and Chávez than in lowering the cost of importing gas from Bolivia. No one knows exactly what will happen when Argentina's commodity boom busts or when the country is forced to return to capital markets for fresh funds. Nor does anyone really know what Kirchner intends to do when his economic recovery runs out of steam. But it seems certain that the Peronist chromosomes in the country's DNA will remain dominant: Kirchner will hand out money, expropriate whatever is needed and available, and lash out at the United States and the IMF on every possible occasion. At the same time, he will worry little about the number of Argentines living under the poverty line and be as chummy with Chávez as he can.

Chávez is doing much the same in Venezuela. He is leading the fight against the FTAA, which is going nowhere anyway. He is making life increasingly miserable for foreign -- above all American -- companies. He is supporting, one way or the other, left-wing groups and leaders in many neighboring countries. He has established a strategic alliance with Havana that includes the presence of nearly 20,000 Cuban teachers, doctors, and cadres in Venezuela. He is flirting with Iran and Argentina on nuclear-technology issues. Most of all, he is attempting, with some success, to split the hemisphere into two camps: one pro-Chávez, one pro-American.

At the same time, Chávez is driving his country into the ground. A tragicomic symbol of this was the collapse of the highway from Caracas to the Maiquetía airport a few months ago because of lack of maintenance. Venezuela's poverty figures and human development indices have deteriorated since 1999, when Chávez took office. A simple comparison with Mexico -- which has not exactly thrived in recent years -- shows how badly Venezuela is faring. Over the past seven years, Mexico's economy grew by 17.5 percent, while Venezuela's failed to grow at all. From 1997 to 2003, Mexico's per capita GDP rose by 9.5 percent, while Venezuela's shrank by 45 percent. From 1998 to 2005, the Mexican peso lost 16 percent of its value, while the value of the Venezuelan bolivar dropped by 292 percent. Between 1998 and 2004, the number of Mexican households living in extreme poverty decreased by 49 percent, while the number of Venezuelan households in extreme poverty rose by 4.5 percent. In 2005, Mexico's inflation rate was estimated at 3.3 percent, the lowest in years, while Venezuela's was 16 percent.

Although Chávez does very little for the poor of his own country (among whom he remains popular), he is doing much more for other countries: giving oil away to Cuba and other Caribbean states, buying Argentina's debt, allegedly financing political campaigns in Bolivia and Peru and perhaps Mexico. He also frequently picks fights with Fox and Bush and is buying arms from Spain and Russia. This is about as close to traditional Latin American populism as one can get -- and as far from a modern and socially minded left as one can be.

The populist left leaders who are waiting in the wings look likely to deliver much the same. Morales in Bolivia has already made it to power. López Obrador in Mexico is close. Although Humala in Peru is still a long shot, he certainly cannot be dismissed. Such leaders will follow the footsteps of Chávez and Kirchner, because they have the same roots and share the same creed. They will all, of course, be constrained by their national realities -- Morales by the fact that Bolivia is South America's poorest nation, López Obrador by a 2,000-mile border with the United States, Humala by a fragmented country and the lack of an established political party to work with.

Still, they will tread the same path. Morales and Humala have both said that they will attempt either to renationalize their countries' natural resources (gas, oil, copper, water) or renegotiate the terms under which foreign companies extract them. López Obrador has stated that he will not allow private investment in PEMEX, Mexico's state-owned oil company, or in the national electric power company. He has given away money right and left in Mexico City, financing his magnanimity with debt and federal tax revenues. Morales has deftly played on his indigenous origins to ingratiate himself with the majority of his country's population, to whom he is promising everything but giving very little. Morales and Humala have received at least rhetorical support from Chávez, and Morales' first trip abroad was to Havana, his second to Caracas. Humala, a retired lieutenant colonel in the Peruvian army, has confessed to being an admirer of the Venezuelan president. Like Chávez, he started his political career with a failed coup, in his case against Alberto Fujimori in 2000. López Obrador's deputy, certain to be the next mayor of Mexico City, has openly declared his admiration for Chávez and Castro, despite having been a high-level official under Salinas.

What will prove most damaging is that the populist left loves power more than democracy, and it will fight to keep it at great cost. Its disregard for democracy and the rule of law is legendary. Often using democratic means, it has often sought to concentrate its power through new constitutions, take control of the media and the legislative and judicial branches of government, and perpetuate its rule by using electoral reforms, nepotism, and the suspension of constitutional guarantees. Chávez is the best example of this left, but certainly not the only one: López Obrador has already committed himself to "cleaning up" Mexico's Supreme Court and central bank and opposes any autonomy for the country's infant regulatory agencies.

This populist left has traditionally been disastrous for Latin America, and there is no reason to suppose it will stop being so in the future. As in the past, its rule will lead to inflation, greater poverty and inequality, and confrontation with Washington. It also threatens to roll back the region's most important achievement of recent years: the establishment of democratic rule and respect for human rights.

RIGHT LEFT, WRONG LEFT

Distinguishing between these two broad left-wing currents is the best basis for serious policy, from Washington, Brussels, Mexico City, or anywhere else. There is not a tremendous amount Washington or any other government can actually do to alter the current course of events in Latin America. The Bush administration could make some difference by delivering on its promises to incumbents in the region (on matters such as immigration and trade), thereby supporting continuity without interfering in the electoral process; in South American nations where there is a strong European presence, countries such as France and Spain could help by pointing out that certain policies and attitudes have certain consequences.

But there is a much bolder course, a more statesmanlike approach, that would foster a "right left" instead of working to subvert any left's resurgence. This strategy would involve actively and substantively supporting the right left when it is in power: signing free-trade agreements with Chile, taking Brazil seriously as a trade interlocutor, engaging these nations' governments on issues involving third countries (such as Colombia, Cuba, and Venezuela), and bringing their leaders and public intellectuals into the fold. The right left should be able to show not only that there are no penalties for being what it is, but also that it can deliver concrete benefits.

The international community should also clarify what it expects from the "wrong left," given that it exists and that attempts to displace it would be not only morally unacceptable but also pragmatically ineffective. The first point to emphasize is that Latin American governments of any persuasion must abide by their countries' commitments regarding human rights and democracy. The region has built up an incipient scaffolding on these matters over recent years, and any backsliding, for whatever reason or purpose, should be met by a rebuke from the international community. The second point to stress is that all governments must continue to comply with the multilateral effort to build a new international legal order, one that addresses, among other things, the environment, indigenous people's rights, international criminal jurisdiction (despite Washington's continued rejection of the International Criminal Court and its pressure on several Latin American governments to do the same), nuclear nonproliferation, World Trade Organization rules and norms, regional agreements, and the fight against corruption, drug trafficking, and terrorism, consensually defined. Europe and the United States have enormous leverage in many of these countries. They should use it.

Finally, Washington and other governments should avoid the mistakes of the past. Some fights are simply not worth fighting: If Morales wants to squabble with Chile over access to the sea, with Argentina over the price of gas, with Peru over border issues and indigenous ancestry, stand aside. If, for whatever reason, López Obrador wants to build a bullet train from Mexico City to the U.S. border, live and let live. If Chávez really wants to acquire nuclear technology from Argentina, let him, as long as he does it under International Atomic Energy Agency supervision and safeguards. Under no circumstances should anyone accept the division of the hemisphere into two camps -- for the United States, against the United States -- because under such a split, the Americas themselves always lose out. Such a division happened over Cuba in the 1960s and over Central America in the 1980s. Now that the Cold War is over, it should never happen again. So instead of arguing over whether to welcome or bemoan the advent of the left in Latin America, it would be wiser to separate the sensible from the irresponsible and to support the former and contain the latter. If done right, this would go a long way toward helping the region finally find its bearings and, as Gabriel García Márquez might put it, end its hundreds of years of solitude.

Open Democracy: Sue Branford, Brazil’s historic test

Brazil’s historic test, Sue Branford, 19 - 6 - 2006, Open Democracy

The urban warfare in São Paulo between a powerful criminal gang and the city's military police is fuelled by Brazil’s vast social and racial injustices, says Sue Branford.

Sue Branford reports from Latin America for the BBC and the Guardian. She is co-author (with Jan Rocha), of Cutting the Wire: the Story of the Brazilian Landless Workers' Movement (Latin America Bureau, 2002) and (with Hugh O'Shaughnessy) of Chemical Warfare in Colombia: The Costs of Fumigation (Latin America Bureau, 2005)

The Brazilian authorities have every reason to be grateful that the soccer world cup in Germany arrived just in time to divert people's attention from the crisis of violence and confrontation in the country's (and South America's) largest city, São Paulo. The two laboured victories against Croatia and Australia have left Brazil's people and media worrying about their team's performance, hopeful that the players will raise their game when they need to, and as absorbed as ever in the permutations and personalities of the squad (is Ronaldo overweight; is the 36-year-old Cafu past his best; can the team cope with the Argentinean threat?).

For a country engrossed in the month-long spectacle, these are the questions that matter. But when it is all over, and Brazil's players return home in triumph or disgrace, Brazilians as a whole will return to face a far starker and less glittering challenge: the condition of the country's criminal justice and prison systems, and the deeper realities of social exclusion and inequality this system is founded on.

An urban civil war

When a nation is absorbed in the fate of its yellow-jerseyed heroes a continent away, it's not the moment for the Primeiro Comando da Capital (First Capital Command / PCC), São Paulo's most powerful criminal gang, to put on another show of strength.

Indeed, the jailed PCC leaders will be cheering on the Brazilian side with their compatriots. Along with mobile-phones and DVD players, they have widescreen, plasma television sets in their comfortable cells; and like millions of citizens on the outside, they will toast Brazilian victories (or drown sorrows) with a good few glasses of Brahma lager.

Yet the reprieve for the authorities may be shortlived, and a repeat of the wave of urban attacks and prison riots from 11-19 May 2006 not long in coming. Then, the PCC stunned Brazil when it organised a wave of violent actions across the state of São Paulo, Brazil's industrial heartland. The authorities had been alerted by informers that the PCC was planning a prison rebellion for 13 May – Mothers' Day in Brazil, when family visiting regulations are relaxed – and thus ordered the transfer of more than 500 PCC members to a high-security prison. But the PCC also has its informers inside the security services; it learned of the plan, and at short notice coolly brought forward its planned revolt by three days.

On the night of Thursday 11 May, riots erupted in almost 100 prisons. At the same time gang members, armed with machine guns, attacked police stations all over São Paulo state. At the weekend, they continued the operation: bombing police stations, destroying city buses, and ambushing police vehicles.

By the morning of Monday 15 May, the 19 million inhabitants of São Paulo were understandably jittery. When rumours proliferated on the internet that the PCC was about to unleash an even bigger and more violent round of attacks, people panicked. Schools, offices and shops shut at midday and people headed for home amid enormous traffic jams.

In fact, the PCC had by then called off its attack, apparently after making a secret deal with the authorities. Even so, what for many Brazilians turned out to be the worst aspect of the whole affair was still to come. The military police, infuriated by the death of some forty policemen and prison guards in the PCC campaign, launched its own retaliatory killing spree. Its intention from the beginning was simple and brutal: to kill PCC members or sympathisers.

A message on one police website read: "For every Mike ["military policeman" in the organisation's argot] who has fallen, two criminals must die." Another was even more sinister: "It's time to cleanse São Paulo, to get rid of this filth in our midst." Over the next few days 122 "suspected criminals" were killed in the city. Eye-witness accounts reported that men dressed in black and wearing hoods drove into shanty-towns and shot people sitting in bars or outside their houses. Antônio Funari, the São Paulo police ombudsman, said that at least twenty-eight of these victims had no criminal record.

The episode had a huge impact on the city's population. Before 11 May, many paulistas – particularly among the middle classes – had scarcely heard of the PCC. They now know that it is a large organisation with 140,000 members in the state's jails and another 500,000 in the wider society; that it is partly funded by a well-organised system of monthly contributions with different rates for prisoners and free members; and that it has built up a large network of informers, from lawyers to taxi-drivers.

The scale of the gang's activities and ambitions is remarkable. A federal police report says that the PCC is responsible for at least 20% of the transport and high-value crimes in the country. In just one spectacular robbery, in Fortaleza (northeast Brazil) in August 2005, the gang seized three tonnes of bank notes with a total value of 164.8 million reais (£40 million).

The PCC's power: three sources

Why has the PCC been so successful? This is the most painful question of all for many middle-class paulistas. Amid their soul-searching, three answers suggest themselves.

First, the PCC's main recruiting ground is the prisons. It has been known for years that Brazil's prisons are a humanitarian disgrace: overcrowded, with cells meant for three people containing twelve; rife with drugs; lacking any rehabilitation policy; and characterised by administrative chaos that leads to many prisoners being detained long after they have completed their sentence.

Heidi Cerneka from the Catholic church's prison ministry – who in 2002 commented that "(public) space" in São Paulo "is identified more and more with violence, danger and abandonment" – points out that the PCC is the only organisation that has done something for these abandoned people: "Through their campaigns they have reduced the level of violence in prisons; they have won better visiting rights, even paying for coaches for family members who have to travel long distances, and they have provided defence lawyers for their members."

The PCC is also utterly ruthless, Cerneka says: "They defend to the death their members but they have no qualms in assassinating anyone who betrays them or owes them money."

Second, the authorities are making this bad situation even worse. Paulo Sérgio Pinheiro, one of Brazil's most committed human-rights defenders, has been saying for years that the government should dismantle the repressive public-security bodies set up by the military dictatorship in the late 1960s. The military police were created in that era to combat leftwing guerrillas, and today use the same tactics to target criminals in shanty-towns; it is a refocusing of their efforts without a rethinking, and one that fails to take account of the very different nature of the security challenge.

The military police's attitude can be gauged from the slogans that its officials have adopted. Saulo de Castro de Abreu, the secretary of public security in São Paulo state, has repeatedly said: "A good bandit is a dead bandit buried in the moon." Ruy Ferraz Fontes, a top detective from São Paulo's department of investigation into organised crime, has a sign printed on his door: Direitos humanos para os humanos direitos ("Human rights for right-thinking humans"; if the Portuguese pun does not translate well, the sentiment is plain). The words reflect and fuel actions: the military police are accused year after year of the systematic flouting of human rights, including the cold-blooded murder of hundreds of suspected criminals.

Third, an even more serious problem lies behind the expansion of the PCC. Brazil is one of the most socially unjust societies in the world. Around 46% of national income goes to the richest 10% of the population, while the poorest 50% earn only 13.3%. Moreover, Brazil's social (and racial) apartheid is paralleled in the existence of two systems of justice: one for the well-off and another for the poor. Members of the (largely white) middle and upper classes are very rarely sent to a common jail. As Brazilians say, prisons are for pobres, pretos e putas (the poor, black people and prostitutes).

The lot of the poor is a routine denial of justice. In early June 2006, cross-fire between the police and a criminal gang in a school in a Rio de Janeiro shanty-town wounded seventeen children. When the mothers arrived, the school was a scene from hell: wounded children screaming, panic-stricken youngsters hiding under desks, blood on the walls, desks and clothes. Yet there was hardly any investigation or follow-up, and the story was scarcely reported in the papers. No one expects those responsible to be punished.

I myself had a maid from a São Paulo favela whose husband and son had tried to protect the daughter of the family's neighbour from sexual abuse by her father. The abusive neighbour killed the two men. The devastated maid repeatedly complained to the police, but the neighbour was never even arrested.

Two worlds

President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the centre-left president inaugurated in January 2003, has helped the poorest of the poor. A greatly enhanced social-welfare system has meant that the income of the poorest 10% of the population has risen by 23% in these three years, far more than the national average. This policy will almost certainly ensure that Lula is re-elected for a second term in October 2006. But the president's extremely cautious economic policies – under the guidance of his ex-finance minister Antonio Palocci (who resigned on 28 March 2006 after being implicated in the convulsive mensalão [vote-buying] scandal which dominated the country in 2005) have produced low growth levels and the creation of few new jobs.

The socially excluded in Brazil remain excluded, and crime is growing. Around 340,000 Brazilians are behind bars today; the number is expected to rise to 500,000 by 2008. This scale of increase suggests that Brazil should be opening a new prison every fortnight. There is no sign of this, guaranteeing a further deterioration of jail conditions and a recurrence of rioting.

The Primeiro Comando da Capital offers the predominantly young men caught up in its activities a kind of future, something that official Brazilian society fails to do. The PCC's income, derived largely from robberies and drug-trafficking, is estimated at approximately one million reais (£244,000) a month. It is reported to be opening petrol filling-stations and transport companies to facilitate the laundering of these funds.

Millions of poor, black Brazilians will passionately cheer their country's football team if it caps its efforts in Germany by retaining the world cup. They can see in the exploits of talented youngsters from modest backgrounds such as Ronaldo, Ronaldinho and Kaka a projection of their own dreams. These skilful and fortunate few have found another route to riches, but it is a melancholy reality amid soccer's joyful carnival that many Brazilians left behind have few options of survival, protection or escape except to join gang networks like the PCC.