new internationalist

INDIA / PAKISTAN After two months of sustained assault including round-the-clock bombing of rebel-held positions in northern Kashmir, India declares that the crucial vantage point of Tiger Hill has been recaptured.

ECUADOR A crippling series of national strikes protests the Government’s handling of the financial crisis and a 13 per cent rise in petrol prices.

COLOMBIA Raising the stakes COLOMBIA MEANS ONLY ONE THING to the West – drugs. The world’s biggest centre for the processing and export of cocaine, the words ‘Colombian’ and ‘cocaine cartels’ seem umbilically linked in the Western media. Yet Colombia has also had a political civil war for 35 years between a ruthless army and leftist guerrillas, with right-wing death squads plugging the gaps in between. JON SPAULL / PANOS PICTURES Admittedly the two arenas – drugs and revolution – are utterly confused. While the biggest guerrilla group, the Revolutionary Forces of Colombia (FARC), strongly disapproves of cocaine use it takes full advantage of the profits (estimated at $550 million so far) it gains from the drugs trade – by ‘taxing’ cocaine producers for protection money and charging them for shooting down narcotics-control helicopters. FARC control of the cocaine zone has ironically been strengthened this year by a rare peace initiative from the country’s new President, Andres Pastrana, who gave notice of his intention to talk peace by withdrawing troops from areas in the south, creating an effective demilitarized zone. The sincerity of this peace initiative seemed in doubt for much of the year. No serious talks materialized and instead Pastrana accepted a billion dollars’ worth of military aid from the US Government, provoking fears that the US was leaning towards a ‘military solution’. Colombia receives more US arms and equipment than any other country in the world bar Israel and Egypt. The money is ostensibly to tackle the drugs cartels and growers, fuelling a low-level air war with Blackhawk helicopters, satellite surveillance and cluster bombs. But there are also 200 US military advisers at work against the guerrillas in the south. Amnesty International points out that this was effectively ‘the same policy that backed death squads in El Salvador in the 1980s’, while campaigning journalist and NI contributor John Pilger warns of the similarities with Vietnam. Ordinary people’s verdict on all this was, however, crystal clear: they are desperate for peace. When in October President Pastrana announced that peace talks with FARC were to resume, there was an astonishing explosion of popular demonstrations for peace and against human-rights abuses right across the country. It was claimed that five million people turned out – around one in every eight Colombians. The last thing they want, it can safely be said, is to find themselves embroiled in a South American equivalent of the US-Vietnam War.

AFGHANISTAN President Clinton imposes sanctions on the Taliban regime in retaliation for its refusal to give up Saudi warlord Osama bin Laden to US justice. The Taliban pushes to take the last ten per cent of the country from the Northern Alliance.

CHINA makes public its neutron-bomb capability, a move interpreted as a bid to intimidate Taiwan. The Defence Minister says that the army is ready to protect China’s territorial integrity and ‘smash any attempts to separate the country’.

DR CONGO African defence and foreign ministers finally adopt a long-delayed draft ceasefire accord aimed at ending the war.

BURMA After an international outcry three-year-old political prisoner Thaint Wunna Khin is freed. She is the daughter of fugitive opposition activist Kyaw Wunna.

SIERRA LEONE Following a civil war that has claimed 50,000 lives, a power-sharing agreement is reached between rebel leader Foday Sankoh and President Ahmed Tejan Kabbah.

IRAQ An airstrike by US warplanes on a site outside the city of Mosul is the 58th in the northern no-fly zone since 28 December last year, when the US alleges Iraq began challenging its planes.

PAKISTAN Human-rights groups and lawyers claim the Government has executed more than 850 suspected criminals in fake shoot-outs with the police.

AFRICA UNICEF expresses anger that the West has spent billions on war in the Balkans yet less than one per cent of that on saving lives in Africa. UN High Commissioner for Refugees Sadako Ogata says only 60 per cent of her $137 million annual budget for Africa has been funded, compared with $265 million received from the West for the emergency programme in Kosovo.

MOROCCO King Hassan, the world’s longest-reigning monarch, dies aged 70. His son succeeds him: 35-year-old Mohammed VI.

INDIA Arundhati Roy, novelist and Save Narmada campaigner, visits some of the 60 villages which will disappear in the rainy season because of the Sardar Sarovar mega-dam. The West Bengal state assembly votes to change the English name of Calcutta to Kolkata (as the name is pronounced in Bengali).

TOGO To the amazement of pro-democracy groups, French President Chirac, on a visit, says President Eyadema was right to sue Amnesty International over its report on worsening human rights.

SOUTH AFRICA A new law compels all 2.5 million registered gun owners to reapply for licences and will ban nine out of ten guns.

IRAN Students, aggrieved by the slow pace of change since the election of President Khatami, protest in Tehran. The hard-line Ansar-e Hizbullah group attacks student dormitories at Tehran University, leaving six dead.

VENEZUELA President Hugo Chavez’s Patriotic Pole coalition wins a landslide victory in the elections, gaining more than 90 per cent of assembly seats. The leadership of opposition parties resigns en masse.

RUSSIA Around 35 per cent of the population, or 51.7 million people, received monthly salaries below subsistence level during the first half of 1999 – compared with 22 per cent in 1998.