Replies to post #3229 on Foreign Correspondence

[otraque]

Berlusconi 'Massacred' in Regional Elections

1 hour, 40 minutes ago World - Reuters
( Italy says "f--- you" Bushnic Berlusconi--welles)

By Robin Pomeroy and Gavin Jones

ROME (Reuters) - Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi suffered a crushing defeat at Italian regional elections, official results showed on Monday, a huge boost for center-left leader Romano Prodi's hopes of unseating him next year.

In what one of his defeated regional governors described as a "massacre," Berlusconi's center-right coalition appeared to have lost 11 of the 13 regions at stake, holding on to just two -- Lombardy and Veneto -- both in its stronghold in the north.


Prodi, who had said he would be satisfied by winning just one new seat, was delighted by his landslide victory.


"Today we have easily won in terms of the number of votes and the number of regions," he told a news conference.


"With this vote Italians are asking us to prepare to govern, to take the country forward."


The death of Pope John Paul on Saturday overshadowed the election but did not keep voters away. Turnout reached 71.4 percent, down just 1.7 percentage points from the last one.


Berlusconi had prepared his supporters for a poor result, saying he expected a mid-term backlash due to Italy's economic woes. But the outcome was far worse than expected.


Although the final count would not be finished until Tuesday, late preliminary results indicated the center-left had wrested six regions from government parties, giving it control of 15 of Italy's 20 regions.


Berlusconi made no comment, but Foreign Minister Gianfranco Fini, head of the right-wing National Alliance (AN) party, said the defeat was a bad omen for next year's general election.


"We need a lot of humility and great seriousness and them maybe the result in 2006 can still go the way of the center-right," he told talk show on RAI television.


"The government is weaker politically but that does not mean we will resign."


"MASSACRE"


Some opposition figures disagreed. "Berlusconi should draw the right conclusions and not prolong the agony for another year," said left-wing parliamentarian Antonio di Pietro.


A defeat in regional elections in 2000 prompted the then prime minister, the center-left's Massimo D'Alema, to step down -- ultimately making way for Berlusconi's rise.


Berlusconi ruled out resigning early even before the polls opened, saying he would see out his five-year mandate as the longest-serving premier in post-war Italian history.


The center-right appeared to have lost all three regions which parties and pundits saw as the most crucial: Puglia in the south, Lazio in the center and, probably, Piedmont in the north.


The defeat is the latest and most serious in a string of electoral setbacks for Berlusconi in local elections which have dented the premier's standing since taking power in 2001.





Francesco Storace, the pugnacious center-right president of the Rome region Lazio, said the results around the country had been "a massacre" for the center-right.

Prior to the vote, Storace said defeat in Lazio would herald a center-left general election victory. "If we lose in Lazio the successor to Berlusconi can only be Prodi."

Storace, from Fini's AN party, said he would not ask for a re-vote despite a controversy over a rival's alleged use of false signatures on electoral documents.

Alessandra Mussolini, the granddaughter of wartime dictator Benito Mussolini, was initially barred from the election but then readmitted by an appeals court.

"The verdict should rest with the voters, not the lawyers," Storace said. The margin of his defeat suggested he would have lost even if Mussolini had not divided the right-wing vote.

A fourteenth region, Basilicata, which is held by the center-left, will vote on April 17-18.

[StephanieVanbryce]

Democracy is not about to sweep Central Asia

Ahmed Rashid International Herald Tribune
Thursday, April 7, 2005


After Kyrgyzstan

LAHORE, Pakistan The overthrow of President Askar Akayev in Kyrgyzstan has raised the possibility of popular movements erupting elsewhere in the region. But in the other four Central Asian countries, where far more repressive regimes remain in power and no viable democratic opposition has been allowed to function, the resulting instability would be much greater.

Much of the blame for the current state of Central Asia must rest with the United States, Russia and China, which have failed to move the region's regimes closer to democracy.

Before the Sept. 11 attacks, Central Asia was a forgotten corner of the world. The leaders and regimes of Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan had barely changed since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 and they had refused to carry out desperately needed economic and political reforms.

After Sept. 11, when the United States leased military bases to conduct the war in Afghanistan, the region's peoples and regimes reacted in distinctly divergent ways. Most people embraced the U.S. presence in the hope that it would lead to American pressure on their regimes to carry out democratic reforms. The regimes, however, hoped the U.S. presence would strengthen their dwindling political legitimacy at home and bolster their international credibility.

For the past four years, the Bush administration has embraced the regimes rather than the peoples, as the Pentagon and NATO ran military bases out of Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan and the CIA sought countries where it could "render" suspected terrorists to be interrogated and tortured in secret by local intelligence agencies.

Uzbekistan is one of at least 10 countries where the CIA has rendered dozens of suspects. Until the revolution in Kyrgyzstan, U.S. diplomats at the State Department had fought a losing battle with the Pentagon and the CIA to adopt a more nuanced policy toward the regimes, using U.S. aid to bargain for economic and political reforms.

Today these beleaguered regimes need the U.S. stamp of approval far more than America needs the regimes. The utility of the U.S. bases in Central Asia is declining as Afghanistan slowly stabilizes. This year the Pentagon is spending $83 million to build permanent facilities at its far larger Afghan bases at Bagram and Kandahar. President Hamid Karzai is supportive of a long-term U.S. military presence in Afghanistan.

Meanwhile President Vladimir Putin has been seeking to reimpose Russian influence over former Soviet territory. Russia has military bases in Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, while Russian oil companies have a huge stake in Kazakhstan and virtually monopolize Turkmenistan's gas industry. Such ties suit the Central Asian regimes because Putin has no interest in pushing them toward economic reform or democracy.

China, a powerful neighbor and economic provider, has also increased its stake in the region, partly in order to better control its own restive Muslim population in Xinjiang Province. Beijing, too, has shown no desire to see democratic reform in Central Asia.

Since the end of the Soviet era, there has been a massive impoverishment of the people in Central Asia, with social services like education and health virtually collapsing in some states. The revolution in Kyrgyzstan was more to do with poverty and unemployment than with the slogans of democracy. Sooner rather than later, similar social and economic explosions can be expected in all the other states, where democratic forces are weak or nonexistent.

The people of Kyrgyzstan, the smallest, weakest and most impoverished country in the region, can certainly be proud that they have set in motion a potential move toward democracy that could have a far-reaching impact in the rest of Central Asia. But this quiet corner of the Muslim world will erupt in much greater violence and instability unless the United States, Europe, Russia and China come together in a concerted push for democratic and economic reforms.

(Ahmed Rashid is the author of ‘‘Taliban’’ and, most recently, ‘‘Jihad: The Rise of Militant Islam in Central Asia.’’)

See more of the world that matters - click here for home delivery of the International Herald Tribune.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/04/06/opinion/edrashid.html

[Amaunet]

Ecuador President Dissolves Supreme Court

Gutierrez was elected president in November 2002 after campaigning as a populist, anti-corruption reformer. But his left-leaning constituency soon fell apart after he instituted austerity measures, including cutting subsidies on food and cooking fuel, to satisfy lenders like the International Monetary Fund.

This is the same pattern recently seen in Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan. The United States sinks countries into a debt that they cannot hope to repay until conditions worsen and a U.S. manipulated mob takes control.

IMF program was a disaster too in Ukraine ,when President Victor Yushchenko was the Prime Minister and who was dismissed by its parliament . Thanks to the IMF, Kyrgyzstan now has the largest debt per capita in Central Asia, $ 2 billion equal to its GDP .If the money goes to cronies here , so it does in Iraq ; Iraq oil revenues of many billions of US dollars to US appointed Iraqi leadership and US taxpayers easy money to Halliburtons etc..
#msg-5946297

John Perkins, author of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, writes of Ecuador.

"The book was to be dedicated to the presidents of two countries, men who had been his clients whom I respected and thought of as kindred spirits - Jaime Roldós, president of Ecuador, and Omar Torrijos, president of Panama. Both had just died in fiery crashes. Their deaths were not accidental. They were assassinated because they opposed that fraternity of corporate, government, and banking heads whose goal is global empire. We Economic Hit Men failed to bring Roldós and Torrijos around, and the other type of hit men, the CIA-sanctioned jackals who were always right behind us, stepped in.

Well, the company I worked for was a company named Chas. T. Main in Boston, Massachusetts. We were about 2,000 employees, and I became its chief economist. I ended up having fifty people working for me. But my real job was deal-making. It was giving loans to other countries, huge loans, much bigger than they could possibly repay. One of the conditions of the loan–let's say a $1 billion to a country like Indonesia or Ecuador–and this country would then have to give ninety percent of that loan back to a U.S. company, or U.S. companies, to build the infrastructure–a Halliburton or a Bechtel. These were big ones. Those companies would then go in and build an electrical system or ports or highways, and these would basically serve just a few of the very wealthiest families in those countries. The poor people in those countries would be stuck ultimately with this amazing debt that they couldn’t possibly repay. A country today like Ecuador owes over fifty percent of its national budget just to pay down its debt. And it really can’t do it. So, we literally have them over a barrel. So, when we want more oil, we go to Ecuador and say, “Look, you're not able to repay your debts, therefore give our oil companies your Amazon rain forest, which are filled with oil.” And today we're going in and destroying Amazonian rain forests, forcing Ecuador to give them to us because they’ve accumulated all this debt. So we make this big loan, most of it comes back to the United States, the country is left with the debt plus lots of interest, and they basically become our servants, our slaves. It's an empire. There's no two ways about it. It’s a huge empire. It's been extremely successful.
#msg-4948785

-Am

Ecuador President Dissolves Supreme Court


But his left-leaning constituency soon fell apart after he instituted austerity measures, including cutting subsidies on food and cooking fuel, to satisfy lenders like the International Monetary Fund.


Updated 10:14 AM ET April 16, 2005


By MONTE HAYES

QUITO, Ecuador (AP) - President Lucio Gutierrez declared a state of emergency in the capital city of this Andean nation and dissolved the Supreme Court, saying the unpopular judges were the cause of three days of pot-banging street protests in Quito.

Although they had opposed the court that was appointed by the president's congressional allies in December, his political foes immediately labeled its summary dissolution an act of a dictator.

Speaking in a televised address to the nation Friday night with his military high command standing behind him, Gutierrez said he was using the powers granted him by the constitution to dismiss the justices. In explaining their dismissal, he said opposition to their appointments was causing the protests.

"The measure ... was taken because Congress until now has not resolved the matter of the current Supreme Court, which is generating national commotion," he said.

The state of emergency placed the military in charge of public order and suspended individual rights, including the right to free expression and public assembly.



Early Saturday, the military command went on television to give its implicit support to Gutierrez. Adm. Victor Hugo Rosero, head of the armed forces, said the only purpose of the state of emergency was "to recover the order, peace and tranquility lost during the last days."

Despite the restriction on public meetings, thousands of residents poured into Quito's streets Friday to protest the measures, shouting that Gutierrez, a former army colonel before his election in 2002, was a dictator.

"I want him to go and the congress, too. All the politicians have shown themselves to be corrupt," said Jorge Mora, 43, a civil engineer, accompanied by his 9-year-old daughter, who was waving a small yellow, blue and red Ecuadorean flag.

Quito Mayor Paco Moncayo, a retired army general and a leader of the opposition Democratic Left party, criticized the military command for supporting Gutierrez's actions. "The president can't dissolve the court. We are living in a dictatorship and this decree unmasks the dictatorship," he said. "We are calling for civil disobedience."

Street protests began Wednesday in response to an impromptu suggestion of a local radio station that residents of Quito form a nocturnal pot-banging caravan. They increased in numbers until at least 10,000 people _ banging pots and sticks and shouting "Get out, Lucio!" _ were marching in the streets as Gutierrez made his announcement Friday.

The court crisis was set in motion in November when the former justices sided with opposition politicians in a failed effort to impeach Gutierrez on corruption charges. Gutierrez then assembled a bloc of 52 lawmakers in the 100-seat unicameral congress, which voted in December to remove the judges. Legal experts said the vote ran contrary to Ecuador's constitution.

Opponents say Gutierrez cut a deal with former President Abdala Bucaram to stack the Supreme Court and clear Bucaram of corruption charges as payback for key votes Bucaram's political party provided last year blocking the impeachment drive against Gutierrez in congress.

The court cleared Bucaram of the charges and he returned to Ecuador earlier this month after eight years in exile.

In a bid to ease the political backlash, in late March Gutierrez proposed a judicial reform that would replace the new court and establish new methods for selecting judges. The legislature has not acted on the proposal.

Gutierrez was elected president in November 2002 after campaigning as a populist, anti-corruption reformer. But his left-leaning constituency soon fell apart after he instituted austerity measures, including cutting subsidies on food and cooking fuel, to satisfy lenders like the International Monetary Fund.

http://dailynews.att.net/cgi-bin/news?e=pri&dt=050416&cat=news&st=newsd89ghrfg0&src=....
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=22558