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An anti-Qaddafi fighter holds up his machine gun as he gesture to a passing car of people fleeing the besieged city of Bani Walid September 12. Forces of Libya's new rulers met "ferocious" street-by-street resistance during an assault on one of the last bastions loyal to Muammar Qaddafi, but were edging towards the ousted ruler's birthplace of Sirte. (Zohra Bensemra/Reuters)
Good Reads: Qaddafi loyalist town fights back, Guantánamo detainees, and Chinese villagers who don't officially exist
As stories go, it’s hard to follow Sept. 11, or even the 10th anniversary reminiscences of that terrible event.
But here are some stories that show why reporters get paid the big bucks, helping readers see what else is happening in the world.
In Libya, another son of former strongman leader Muammar Qaddafi has shown up in Niger, as the men we used to refer to as “rebels” start their assault on one of the last holdouts of Mr. Qaddafi’s loyalists. Is Qaddafi himself holed up in Bani Walid, or is he in his hometown of Sirte? The Monitor’s Scott Peterson reports on the fighting outside of Bani Walid, where loyalists are offering up tough resistance.
Back in Tripoli, the Los Angeles Times’s Patrick J. McDonnell meets up with a key member of Qaddafi’s former inner circle and pieces together the puzzle of how the regime made decisions in the last few days of its tenure. Why didn’t the Qaddafi family negotiate with the opposition?
The answer, as Mr. McDonnell sums up nicely at the top of his piece, is “Kadafi's stubbornness, his apparent failure to recognize the imminent peril and the desire of his son, Seif Islam, to inherit his father's position.” This, at least, is the version of truth according to ex-Deputy Foreign Minister Khaled Kaim, recently captured in hiding at a relative’s house and now being held at a rebel military camp.
Stories like this one can be golden, providing a window into the hidden world of a despot. But there are perils in basing a story on the perspective of a single individual, and particularly one who may have self-preservation motives. McDonnell makes all this clear in his story, and he notes that the interview “was monitored on and off by rebel commanders with limited English.” McConnell also includes the warnings of rebel leaders, one of whom says, "He should be arrested; he incited hatred.”
In the Washington Post, we find a useful reminder that it wasn’t only Americans who suffered during the past 10 years of war that followed the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Among the most obvious are the people of Afghanistan, including those arrested and detained at Guantánamo Bay Naval Base without trial, and recently released without judgment or apology by US forces.
The Post’s Ernesto Londoño catches up with Haji Sahib Rohullah Wakil, a grey-whiskered man from Kandahar who is now setting up a support group for other former Guantánamo detainees. He says that he doesn’t harbor ill will against the Americans, but he does think they should leave, for the good of Afghanistan.
“The existence of the foreign troops is an excuse for the Taliban” to fight, he said. “Once the foreign troops leave, the people will stand against them and defend their districts and provinces.”
Another former Guantánamo detainee, Haji Shahzada, has a darker view. “What they have done is created more enmity. Once the Americans go, they will leave behind a river of blood.”
Tales such as these, combined with very bad economic numbers, create the perception in the up-and-coming countries of Africa and Latin America that the Western world is on a sharp decline. For many countries – such as Nigeria which recently decided to shift its foreign currency reserves from US dollars to Chinese yuan – the future lies with emerging economic powers like China.
If so, it may be worth taking a closer look at how Chinese society works, and what portions of Chinese society benefit and suffer from the central-governing decisions made in Beijing.
The Telegraph’s Peter Foster visits the village of Blue Dragon Mountain. It’s a village that officially doesn’t exist. Central planners condemned the village, and bulldozers leveled it in 1998 to make way for a reservoir to provide drinking water to the nearby city of Harbin. The residents of Blue Mountain Dragon were then given a small amount of compensation, but it was not enough for them to relocate to new cities and new homes, so many villagers returned.
And by doing so, the villagers of Blue Dragon Mountain ceased to exist. Electricity was cut. ID cards were rescinded. Children who leave the village can’t get salaried jobs, so they are forced to do casual labor. With no official ID, residents can’t open bank accounts, can’t apply for medical insurance, and can’t even purchase a railway ticket.
It’s a situation that affects perhaps tens of millions of Chinese, Foster writes, adding, “Pressure to change the resident's registration system is building, but China's authorities are also reluctant to give up on a system that allows them a key measure of control over China's development, preventing the kind of slums seen in other BRIC nations like India or Brazil.”
IN PICTURES: Libya landmarks
Estonia's rise, encapsulated in a piano's history
• A local, slice-of-life story from a Monitor correspondent.
If anything encapsulates the post-Soviet resurrection of this tiny Baltic country, it is the grand piano company that bears its name, Estonia.
Created by Steinway-trained Estonian piano master craftsman Ernst Hiis, the Estonia piano soon caught the ear of music lover Joseph Stalin. In the 1950s, the dictator ordered Mr. Hiis to be the sole manufacturer of concert pianos for the Soviet Union. The glory Stalin brought Estonia pianos, however, was largely tied to Soviet markets and didn’t survive the Soviet collapse.
But then a young Estonian pianist vowed to buy the company and bring its pianos to their past grandeur. “We didn’t want to get into mass production,” Indrek Laul, Estonia Pianos’ owner since 2001, says. “We wanted to focus on high-quality, handcrafted grands, and we went directly to the US.”
Enlisting his parents – a famous choirmaster and a chief accompanist at the Estonian National Opera – to test the instruments, Mr. Laul has sold roughly 400 handmade grand pianos to the United States yearly, propelling Estonia to the top of the high-premium piano world, with a sound quality equivalent to those of major European brands and prices up to half those of a German Steinway, Bösendorfer, or Bechstein.
Pianomaking has a 200-year history here. “Estonia has no oil, nothing we can drill for, so music has always been our ... natural resource,” Laul says.
President Obama speaks to a joint session of Congress at the Capitol in Washington, Thursday, Sept. 8. Watching at right are Vice President Joe Biden and House Speaker John Boehner. (Kevin Lamarque/AP)
Good Reads: World reaction to Obama's jobs speech
If there is anything that can knock Libya from the top headlines, it is America’s 9.1 percent unemployment rate, and President Obama’s speech on the jobs crisis last night before a joint session of Congress did just that.
Europe and Asia’s preoccupation with America's unemployment rate is easy to understand. The US consumer economy still drives that of much of the developed world, as Americans buy Volvos, BMWs, and Toyotas, Nokias, Blackberries, and Samsungs, and it puts lots of European, Asian, and yes, Canadians to work. As much as the rest of the world might hate to admit it, a stalled or failing American economy means a stalled or failing British, French, Japanese, and even Chinese economy as well.
Here’s a look at how the world’s press viewed what many see as President Obama’s first campaign speech of the 2012 election season.
Britain’s left-leaning newspaper, the Guardian, lists many of the bigger chunks of what it calls a “strongly partisan” $447 billion jobs plan, the biggest piece of which is a $175 billion payroll tax cut for workers. It then moves quickly into the politics of the moment, which makes this bill so important.
Obama’s speech was combative at times, and the Guardian’s Ewen MacAskill captures this line that would not have been out of place in Britain’s own “Prime Minister’s Questions":
"This isn't political grandstanding. This isn't class warfare. This is simple math."
"The question is whether, in the face of an ongoing national crisis, we can stop the political circus and actually do something to help the economy," he said.
Obama added: "Ultimately, our recovery will be driven not by Washington, but by our businesses and our workers. But we can help. We can make a difference. There are steps we can take right now to improve people's lives."
In the right-leaning Economist magazine, the writer – who is traditionally unnamed – rightly points out that some measures in Obama’s bill, such as numerous proposed tax cuts, are likely to get bipartisan support, while simple make-work infrastructure projects are likely to face Republican opposition. In such a case, Obama is likely to hit the campaign trail and blame congressional Republicans for obstructionism. This, the Economist notes, wins points for cleverness, but may miss a chance at actually turning the US economy around.
In the end, the Economist writes, “Mr Obama's a dead man walking unless the economy turns around or he finds a way to somehow pin the still-flailing economy on the Republicans. Mr Obama's bill is a not-so-plausible way to achieve substantial growth, but, together with his speech, it's a savvy first stab at winning re-election by out-manoeuvring the right.”
The Monitor’s own Brad Knickerbocker lays out the proposals and the politics of Obama’s jobs-bill speech here. While Obama is usually a restrained public speaker, Mr. Knickerbocker writes, this speech was “his "Give 'em hell, Harry!" moment, reminiscent of Harry Truman's come-from-behind re-election in 1948.”
For those who speak French, it’s worth reading the piece by Le Monde’s Washington correspondent Corine Lesnes, who captures much of the pomp and theater that somehow escapes the attention of other writers.
Perhaps the strangest foreign reaction to Obama’s jobs plan is the non-reaction of China’s main English language newspaper, the China Daily. In today’s edition, dated Sept. 9, 2011, it leads with a piece by Xinhua News Agency that quotes liberally from an opinion piece written by Vice President Joe Biden in Thursday’s edition of The New York Times. Headlined, “Biden says China makes US more prosperous.”
Surely the intention of Biden’s op-ed was neither to upstage his boss nor to imply that China would do the lion’s share of work in uplifting the American economy, but rather to remind Americans that trade with China is often more mutually beneficial than Americans are led to believe.
Perhaps the China Daily's front page is a case of cultural projection, an assumption that it is the speeches of leaders and not the choices of voters that set grand policies in motion. In any case, the China Daily story highlights those quotes from Biden’s opinion piece that would play well in Beijing.
"I remain convinced that a successful China can make our country more prosperous, not less. As trade and investment bind us together, we have a stake in each other's success."
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Tiger Woods on the Old Course’s 18th hole. (Shaun Best/Reuters/file)
In Scotland, a view of the greens gives home a hefty premium
• A local, slice-of-life story from a Monitor correspondent.
Here in this veritable home of golf – where the sport is said to have been invented – real estate is at a premium. At an asking price of £1.75 million ($2.9 million) for 1,985 square feet, the double upper apartment on a street called The Links in this pretty seaside town is situated in one of the most exclusive property rows in the world. “Probably the finest view in the golfing world.” Or so say the property developers charged with offloading a multimillion-dollar apartment with a front-row seat over the sport’s most famous hole.
The increasing popularity of golf over the years coupled with the unobstructed views of the 18th green of the lauded Old Course have put apartments on The Links among Scotland’s most expensive per square foot. The last one to sell on the street (measuring 2,279 square feet) is thought to have far outstripped its £3.75 million (about $5.5 million) asking price.
A former rebel fighter removes Qaddafi slogans next to a pre-Qaddafi flag at the last checkpoint between Tarhouna and Bani Walid, Thursday, Sept. 8. Libya's former rebels have surrounded the ousted dictator Muammar Qaddafi, and it is only a matter of time until he is captured or killed, a spokesman for Tripoli's new military council said Wednesday. (Alexandre Meneghini/AP)
Good Reads: Qaddafi's pest fixation, Libya's missing weapons, and a former hostage returns to help Somalia
Libyan strongman Muammar Qaddafi may be down, but he is not out of the country; or at least that is what he said in his most recent audio message, as broadcast by a Syrian television station and reprinted by a number of newspapers, including Britain’s top international newspaper, the Guardian. Shiv Malik and Lizzy Davies, now based in Tripoli, quote this rather charming example of Qaddafian prose.
"The youths are now ready to escalate the resistance against the 'rats' [rebels] in Tripoli and to finish off the mercenaries. All of these germs, rats and scumbags, they are not Libyans, ask anyone. They have cooperated with Nato."
Germs, rats, scumbags. Sounds like a Tarantino movie.
Meanwhile, in Tripoli, the New York Times’ David D. Kirkpatrick introduces us to one of those ger... – sorry, to a former Qaddafi propagandist and press minder who switched sides just as soon as the rebels came to town. Now he does the same kind of propaganda and press handling job for the rebels. There’s a kind of pragmatism in this behavior found in many war zones, and Kirkpatrick explains it well here.
“As the curtain falls on Colonel Qaddafi’s Tripoli, many of its supporting actors are rushing to pick up new roles with the rebels, the very same people they were obliged not long ago to refer to as 'the rats.' Many Libyans say the ease with which former Qaddafi supporters have switched sides is a testament to the pervasive cynicism of the Qaddafi era, when dissent meant jail or death, job opportunities depended on political connections, and almost everyone learned to wear two faces to survive within the system.”
Adel Sennosi, a former Qaddafi Foreign Ministry official now working with the National Transitional Council, put it this way:
“The way the system worked, everyone had to be part of it – all of us. If we say, ‘Get rid of whoever was part of the system,’ we would have to get rid of the whole population.”
The Monitor’s Scott Peterson is also in Tripoli, chronicling the worrisome disappearance of heavy weaponry from Qaddafi’s arsenal.
According to researchers for Human Rights Watch, thousands of surface-to-air missiles have gone missing, including sophisticated Russian made SA-24 missiles that mimic the US “Stinger” missile. While it is plausible that Qaddafi’s own forces have taken these weapons to carry on the fight, it is also possible that these weapons have been sold or given to other dangerous groups, such as Al Qaeda.
Peter Bouckaert, the emergencies director of Human Rights Watch (HRW), sums it up well here:
“If these weapons fall in the wrong hands, all of North Africa will be a no-fly zone. That’s the Western concern. But what poses the biggest danger to Libyan people – as we know from Iraq – is what’s laying right behind you ... all of these tank shells and mortars, because that’s what people turn into car bombs.”
Up in Mogadishu, Geoffrey York profiles a young Canadian photojournalist, Amanda Lindhout, who has returned to Mogadishu two years after being released from a 426-day hostage ordeal.
On Aug. 23, 2008, Ms. Lindhout and Australian photojournalist Nigel Brennan were kidnapped by Somali gunmen (along with Lindhout’s translator and two drivers) and held for $2.5 million ransom. Today, she has returned to Mogadishu as the head of her own relief organization, using her own personal story to help raise funds and to urge forgiveness and generosity to the less fortunate.
Setting up her own aid group has drawn a fair amount of criticism from other aid agencies, who don’t fault her motives, but say that she is part of the problem of spreading aid resources too thinly to make any real difference. But Ms. Lindhout explains why she felt compelled to help the Somali people, and to return to Mogadishu.
“It was a promise that I made to myself in captivity. If I made it out alive, I would do something for Somalia. I had an understanding that my kidnappers were a product of their environment.”
IN PICTURES: Qaddafi: A look back
Taiwan considers tax breaks and cash for having babies
• A local, slice-of-life story from a Monitor correspondent.
Taiwan announced earlier this summer that it had the world’s lowest fertility rate, raising fears that economic productivity will drop in 10 years and cause the island to fall behind its industrialized Asian neighbors after decades of trying to keep up with them.
Just 0.9 children were born per woman on the island of 23 million people last year, declining steadily since its ideal replacement rate of 2.1 in 1982, the Ministry of the Interior said in a statement.
Taiwan follows urbanized, industrialized peers Japan, South Korea, and Singapore, places where women have become more interested in getting university degrees to pursue high-stress careers that may preclude them having children. City dwellers also fret about child-care costs in the face of other expenses.
But other Asian governments have made headway in encouraging couples to have more children. Singapore began offering baby bonuses, including cash, in 2001, for example. Japan has pushed for more automation while encouraging elders, women, and foreigners to take jobs.
To catch up, Taiwan is leaning toward subsidies and tax breaks.
“The main difference between Taiwan and other Asian countries is that its birthrate is going down while other countries have been picking up since 2005,” said Yang Wen-shan, sociology institute researcher at Academia Sinica in Taiwan.
In this photo taken Sunday, Sept. 4, Mayor Cox Elorde of Bunawan township, Agusan del Sur Province, pretends to measure a giant crocodile which was captured by residents and crocodile farm staff along a creek in Bunawan late Saturday in the southern Philippines. (AP)
Giant crocodile captured in Philippines; more may be found (VIDEO)
There are crocodiles and then there are giant crocodiles.
A group of hunters and villagers in the Philippines captured an estimated 21 foot-long saltwater crocodile Saturday evening in Bunawan, over 500 miles southeast of the capital, Manila.
Local residents had been fearful of crocodile attacks since a fisherman and young girl had gone missing over the past year.
It took three weeks to hunt down the giant crocodile and nearly 100 people to take it out of the water.
“The community was relieved,” wildlife official Ronnie Sumiller said of the capture, but added: “We’re not really sure if this is the man-eater, because there have been other sightings of other crocodiles in the area.”
For the crocodile the locals have dubbed 'Lolong,' a planned ecotourism park in the Philippines will be his future home.
Filipino crocodile hunters are already planning to head back out into coastal waters and find another, even larger, crocodile.
“There is a bigger one and it could be the one creating problems,” Sumiller told The Associated Press by telephone from Bunawan.
IN PICTURES: Giant reptiles
China's richest citizens: Soda and the Internet help fuel the growing Hurun Rich List
As more and more 30-something Chinese buy their own apartments and sit in them sucking down $1 soft drinks while they surf the Internet, it is clear who is really profiting by China's growth.
In a survey of China’s richest citizens published Wednesday, the top spot went to a man whose company makes the heavy machinery used to build apartment blocks. Second spot went to a soft drinks manufacturer. Third spot to the country’s leading Internet entrepreneur.
Liang Wengen, China’s new richest man according to the Hurun Rich List, saw his fortune balloon this year along with the value of the company he founded, the Sany Group. He owns 58 percent of the firm, the biggest manufacturer of concrete pumping machinery in the world.
His $11 billion fades into insignificance on the world stage. When he had $8 billion six months ago, according to Forbes, he ranked only 114 among global billionaires.
Still, that is not bad for a man whose first business venture, according to one media report here, was buying a herd of goats on the eve of the New Year in 1986 because somebody had told him he could earn a $3 profit per goat.
What he had not realized, though, was that the price of goats would drop as soon as the festivities were over. Left with a lot of goats on his hands, Mr. Liang lost a lot of money.
Since then, he has built the small welding machinery company that he founded with three friends in 1989 into one of the largest engineering machinery companies in China and is proud of the high prices it charges.
“Sany’s products are reliable,” Liang said on a visit to Washington earlier this year. “I hope US customers can be reassured about the quality of products made in China,” he added, pointing out that one of his firm’s cranes was used to help rescue the 33 men stranded underground for 10 weeks in a Chilean copper mine last year.
The 2011 Hurun Rich List identified 271 dollar billionaires in mainland China, up from 189 last year, but Rupert Hoogewerf, who compiled the list, said in a statement that there are actually likely to be nearly 600 billionaires here.
Many of them, however, prefer to keep their wealth hidden. Not least from the taxman.
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Good Reads: Global sympathy post-9/11, low Afghan Army recruiting, and the battle for Afghanistan
The upcoming 10-year anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks seems to be on everyone’s minds these days as that disruptive event continues to percolate through global politics.
Veteran Washington Post correspondent Keith Richburg writes a fine piece looking into how and why the United States gained the world’s sympathy after the 9/11 attacks, and then lost it rapidly because of its unilateral foreign policy in conducting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
American politicians may not have gotten the memo, and may feel betrayed by the world's waning support for US policies. But the enduring legacy of the past decade is lost influence for the US, lost confidence in its leadership, lost respect for its effort to champion ideals such as democracy and human rights.
"Perhaps the Iraq invasion — the months-long public debate, the huge antiwar rallies around the globe, the failure to find any weapons of mass destruction — was primarily responsible for the fraying of that post-Sept. 11 global solidarity. Or maybe it was reports of abuses and civilian casualties at the hands of US troops. Maybe the world simply tired of the conflicts after a decade."
"Or, as also seems likely, the shift was at least partially inevitable, because the post-Sept. 11 solidarity was always artificial and fragile."
The New York Times’ Ray Rivera reports from the southern Afghan city of Kandahar on why young Pashtun men refuse to join the new Afghan Army. This is no simple domestic issue in a faraway landlocked country. With American troops drawing down and preparing for a full withdrawal, this is a serious problem for Afghanistan to be unable to recruit soldiers to defend its own territory.
Mr. Rivera gets this fine quote from Mahmood Khan, a member of parliament from Kandahar, a city that one would reasonably expect to be a firm supporter of its hometown boy, President Hamid Karzai. But it isn’t.
“If you go and talk to ordinary Afghans in Kandahar, they believe the government will collapse in a week or two. People are still kind of under the spell of the Taliban. They believe it is not only stronger than the government, but that their intelligence is stronger. They can find out very soon if your son or brother is serving in the army.”
And if anyone would doubt just why Afghan men would want to avoid army service, just take a look at Monitor staff writer Anna Mulrine’s Part 1 of a series of war correspondence from Afghanistan’s Kunar Province, with the men of Havoc Company, 3rd Brigade, 25th Infantry Division. Like Mark Bowden, author of Black Hawk Down, Ms. Mulrine pieces together the facts through interviews with participants in a recent battle, and the result is a very real idea of how difficult the task of fighting the Taliban really is.
The story starts with a troop-carrying Chinook helicopter clipping the tree line and tumbling 80 feet to the forest floor below, exploding in flames. Miraculously, no soldier died. But, as Mulrine writes, “those who crawled out of the burning fuselage were to face the fight of their lives come daybreak.
“No longer would Havoc's mission be to descend into an area that US commanders had nicknamed "the Gambir jungle" – thick with pines and undergrowth and interlaced with a complex network of caves – to relieve the besieged 1st Platoon. Instead, it would stay on this high outcrop and bar the back door against Taliban reinforcements seeking to join the battle below – a five-day-long brawl that, at one point, had the company commander asking his troops, "Can you hold your line?"
Homegrown superstars hold special appeal in Bhutan
• A local, slice-of-life story from a Monitor correspondent.
In Bhutan, television viewers have been glued to their sets for the past four months watching “Druk Superstar,” the local version of “American Idol.” Here, where TV was first introduced in 1999, the viewing diet is rich with Indian soap operas and South Korean music shows, so any home-grown program in the national language, Dzongkha, is embraced with enthusiasm. In particular, “Druk Superstar” featured traditional songs Bhutanese people have always sung.
By international standards, the look of “Druk Superstar” was modest: The stage was a small platform on the studio floor draped in red carpet, while a flimsy sheet of plastic printed with the show’s name and logo formed the backdrop. There were no designer outfits; rather, everyone was dressed in traditional Bhutanese garb. There are no official ratings, but each week the show received up to 100,000 text-messaging votes from viewers watching at home – in a country of just 750,000 residents.
“People enjoy watching our own people singing traditional songs,” says Kencho Dorji, the program’s producer.
“Entertainment in Bhutan has been dominated by Bollywood and Western music, so we came up with the idea of our own people singing our own songs on television,” he says.
The winner, Ulab Leki, a popular comedian, beat out 27 other contestants.
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