Raúl Alfonsín, the former President of Argentina, has died. He was 82. Raúl Alfonsín was the first civilian President after the military dictatorship of the 1970s and the 1980s. Mr. Alfonsín led Argentina through difficult times, governing Argentina from 1983 to 1989, a time of upheaval that included three failed military coup attempts, hyperinflation and food riots.
Raúl Alfonsín, whose presidency in the 1980s symbolized the return of democracy in Argentina and other Latin American nations after an era of military dictatorships, died Tuesday at his home in Buenos Aires. He was 82.
The cause was lung cancer, said Dr. Alberto Sadler, who had been treating Mr. Alfonsín.
A passionate spokesman for human rights, Mr. Alfonsín governed Argentina from 1983 to 1989, a time of upheaval that included three failed military coup attempts, hyperinflation and food riots. He won wide praise for prosecuting the military dictators who had preceded him in office.
His government’s inability to manage a sinking economy forced him to step down several months before his term was to end, but he remained a respected and influential political figure. When he handed over power to Carlos Saúl Menem, it was the first time in 61 years that an elected Argentine president had passed the presidential sash to an elected president from a different political party.
“My inspiration comes from an ethic, rather than an ideology,” Mr. Alfonsín once said in an interview, “an ethic that believes in the freedom of man.” He liked to call himself “the most humble Argentine,” and his rumpled suits and shabby trench coat became his trademarks.
In this extended interview, Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf discusses the position of women in Liberia, the country’s recovery and relations with the United States.
Come, home America. Instead of trying to run the world, let us tend our wounded society. Let go inflated claims of global dominance. Instead, redeem the fundamental values and sacred principles of the national inheritance. Do not resign from the world. Rejoin it on more practical and promising terms.
San Francisco Progressive Prespectives presents William Greider, the National Affairs Correspondent of The Nation and formerly for Rolling Stone and The Washington Post. Mr. Greider will speak on the themes addressed in his new book Come Home, America.
Time: Tuesday, March 31st at 7:00PM
Place: First Unitarian Universalist Society, 1187 Franklin Street (at Geary) in San Francisco.
“In our country, at our different borders, arms are coming in, Stinger missiles are coming in, rocket launchers are coming in, heavy equipment is coming; it should be stopped. Whoever the antistate elements are, they are destabilizing the country.” – Rehman Malik, a senior adviser in Pakistan’s Interior Ministry
It probably has yet to dawn on the Pakistanis that stopping the flow of weapons is actually their job. Controlling one’s borders is one of those pesky tasks that goes with being a nation-state. Certainly, it is not easy but Pakistan has another problem more serious than stinger missiles, rocket launchers or other heavy equipment coming in. Pakistan has been destabilized for quite some by what’s being taught in the nation’s madrassas. Again, it is a failure of the Pakistani state to provide alternative schools that has led to burgeoning of these Islamic academies. In 1980 at the start of the Afghan war, the number of madrassas in Pakistan was under 300. Today the number approaches 25,000.
Funded by the Saudi government and by wealthy Gulf Arabs, the madrassas teach either Deobandi school or the Wahhabi school of Islamic thought. The madrassas’ ideological role in producing extremist worldviews coupled with hands on terrorist training in Pakistan has become increasingly evident, especially after the suicide bombers in the July 2005 London bombing were reported to have attended Pakistani madrassas. An editorial by a leading Pakistani newspaper described madrassas as “the incubator of personalities that later lead Muslim society to extremism and violence.” Unregulated and protected by elements of the ISI who see in the madrassas a weapon against India and the Americans in Afghanistan, the madrassas are a world onto themselves and now represent an existential threat to Pakistan.
Prof. Dr. Hans Jansen is a Professor in Leiden, the Netherlands, and a specialist in political Islam. He was Houtsma professor for Contemporary Islamic Thought in the Department of Arabic, Persian and Turkish at the University of Utrecht until his retirement in 2008.
The essay “De opmars van de islam” (“The advance of Islam”), was published in: Profetisch Perspectief, Volume 14, Spring 2009, Number 62, pp. 45-50; and on the Dutch website HoeiBoei, March 20, 2009. Though highly skeptical of Islam, Dr. Jansen makes an unusual argument on tackling the advance of Islam. From the International Free Society:
In less than four centuries Christianity was able to win the Roman Empire over to itself. This happened from the bottom up, without force or violence, without government intervention or support. On the contrary, the government of the Roman Empire, by persecuting Christians from time to time, hindered Christianization with force and violence.
During the period the Roman Empire was being Christianized, the process occurred more or less in what is now known as the Middle East, plus in Europe up to the Danube and the Rhine. That doesn’t mean to say that there were no Christians outside that area. By about 300-350, to the east of the Roman Empire in Persia, a fair number of Christians could be found (later known as the Nestorians). Also just outside the borders of the Roman Empire there lived the Armenians and Georgians, who by about 300 were not only majority Christian, but had adopted Christianity as a state religion. In the Roman Empire that happened shortly thereafter.
The Muslims managed to conquer roughly the same area as that of the ancient Roman Empire in about a century, with the exception of Western Europe, where they were stopped in France by Charles Martel (732), and with the exception of Turkey and the current Balkans, where the Muslims were stopped by the Eastern Roman Empire, the Byzantines, until the middle of the fifteenth century.
Security forces have ended a siege that dragged on for eight hours at a police training centre in Lahore. It is the second major attack there in just the past month adding to the growing instability inside the country.
For the moment, Pakistan’s armed forces have emerged from this shootout on top, but as the casualties are counted, the debate over Pakistan’s vulnerabilities has only begun. Al Jazeera’s Clayton Swisher reports.
Interior advisor Rehman Malik told a press conference that the investigators had obtained crucial ‘leads in their investigation from the arrested suspects. On the basis of these leads we hope to reach the culprits shortly.’ He said the details of investigations in would be released to the media in two days.
The security forces captured an alleged assailant said to be of Afghan origins from the near-by fields a couple of hours before the school was secured. Two hand-grenades, a knife, a walkie-talkie set and a passport in his name were recovered from him. Another three attackers blew themselves up to avoid arrest when the security forces launched the final operation to secure the centre in the afternoon.
Another three men suspected to be involved in the attack were also taken into custody when they were trying to escape from the building premises in police uniforms. They were removed to an unidentified place for interrogation.
There were contradictory reports about the number of attackers just as no two post-event accounts, even those which came from the government officials, matched.
Eye-witnesses claimed that at least 10 men had attacked the police school, located on the GT Road at the Manawan village, a few kilometers from the Wagha border with India. But senior police officers, who took part in the operation, said it was unclear as to how many gunmen were involved.
‘There’s a strong possibility that some of them might have left the place after helping their fellow attackers capture the building by throwing hand-grenades at the trainees in the morning,’ a police official told Dawn.
The injured were removed to the hospitals for treatment. But none of them would be allowed to leave without security check as the investigators suspected some assailants might have mingled with them in order to escape arrest.
Malik said the Afghan suspect belonged to the outfit of Baitullah Mehsud, adding that the planning for the assault was done in the tribal areas of the NWFP. He did not rule out the involvement of a ‘foreign hand,’ saying all these terrorist outfits were receiving weapons and funds from outside the country. He said the attack was impeccably planned.
The security forces recaptured the police centre only after a sustained heavy firing that continued for several minutes. The troops on the ground were aided by heavy firing from an army helicopter during the final shootout with the attackers.
About 780 police trainees and 100 school staff – instructors, policemen, cooks, etc, were present inside the centre when the attack began. The eyewitnesses said the attackers launched their assault by throwing hand-grenades from different sides of the centre’s building and opening indiscriminate firing on the trainees drilling in the parade ground.
The attack panicked the trainees and their instructors as they ran for cover. Many managed to scale the outer walls to escape. Others rushed inside the building before the assailants took many as hostage before digging in for a long fight. The eye-witnesses said the gunmen did not face any resistance before taking over the control of the school because of inadequate security arrangements.
Subsequently Elite force, Rangers and army were also called in to assist the police at the scene. Rangers and elite force troops were deployed on the rooftops of near-by buildings. Four surveillance helicopters continued to monitor the movements and positions of the gunmen.
The police celebrated their successful operation by firing into the air on the rooftop. The policemen were hoisted onto shoulders, there were slogans in favor of the army, the rangers and the police and a procession ensued.
Several hundred civilians poured in from close-by localities to watch the operation despite the ‘curfew-like’ conditions in the area. The worried families of the police trainees and others trapped inside the school also arrived and emotional scenes were witnessed. Residents of the area stood on their rooftops despite intermittent cross-firing.
As part of Al Jazeera’s Mexico in the Crossfire special on the devastating impact of the illegal drugs trade, Al Jazeera’s Shihab Rattansi spoke to Jorge Castañeda, former foreign minister for Mexico who left office in 2003, for his thoughts about US claims that Mexico is on the brink of becoming a “failed state”.
The Arab League summit has often served to highlight the deep divisions between its members.
But Arab leaders meeting in Qatar were able to agree on their support for Omar al-Bashir, the Sudanese leader wanted for war crimes in the western Darfur region.
For all the progress seen in India’s transformation into a modern global economy, the country remains strongly tied to the traditions of its caste system, which largely governs where Indians work and in what jobs.
Worldfocus special correspondent Martin Himmell reports on the lowest form of work, for members of India’s lowest class.
Over the weekend, a Canadian research group reported that a cyber spy network had hacked into the computers and, by extension, secret documents of governments and private organizations in 103 countries.
The network, called Ghostnet, is based mainly in China. Among the computers it targeted were those of Tibets spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, and Tibet’s government-in-exile in India. Scholars say the operation may have helped identify people in Tibet who talk to exiled Tibetans, putting those in Tibet at risk of reprisals from the Chinese government, which controls Tibet.
The Canadian researchers said the spying activity they found was just the tip of the iceberg. Keith Epstein, an investigative reporter in BusinessWeek’s Washington D.C. bureau who specializes in cyber security, joins Martin Savidge to discuss Chinese cyber spying, what information is at risk and defense systems.
A vast electronic spying operation has infiltrated computers and has stolen documents from hundreds of government and private offices around the world, including those of the Dalai Lama, Canadian researchers have concluded.
In a report to be issued this weekend, the researchers said that the system was being controlled from computers based almost exclusively in China, but that they could not say conclusively that the Chinese government was involved.
The researchers, who are based at the Munk Center for International Studies at the University of Toronto, had been asked by the office of the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan leader whom China regularly denounces, to examine its computers for signs of malicious software, or malware.
Their sleuthing opened a window into a broader operation that, in less than two years, has infiltrated at least 1,295 computers in 103 countries, including many belonging to embassies, foreign ministries and other government offices, as well as the Dalai Lama’s Tibetan exile centers in India, Brussels, London and New York.
The researchers, who have a record of detecting computer espionage, said they believed that in addition to the spying on the Dalai Lama, the system, which they called GhostNet, was focused on the governments of South Asian and Southeast Asian countries.