Greenpeace responds
Aligning Greenpeace with organizations like The Nature Conservancy (‘The Stain in Sustainability’, Bingo!, NI 383) is both misleading and disingenuous. TNC openly accepts funding from any organization to pursue its work; Greenpeace, quite categorically, does not.

Greenpeace is an independent environment organization and has not and never will accept donations from governments or corporations. Greenpeace relies on contributions from individual supporters and foundation grants.

For over three decades, Greenpeace has existed to expose environmental criminals, and to challenge government and corporations when they fail to live up to their mandate to safeguard our environment and our future.

In pursuing our mission, we have no permanent allies or enemies. We promote open, informed debate about society’s environmental choices. We use research, lobbying, and quiet diplomacy to pursue our goals, as well as high-profile, nonviolent conflict to raise the level and quality of public debate.

One such goal was to make the Sydney Olympics in 2000 the ‘Green Games’. Greenpeace made a major impact, setting standards for all future Olympic Games. Through Greenpeace’s efforts the Sydney Olympics was a ‘car-free’ games for spectators and the Olympic Village was powered by renewable energy. However, Greenpeace was also openly critical of the Australian Government’s failure to clean up the toxic waste on the site.

Rest assured that Greenpeace’s core values have not changed since our conception in 1971. To insinuate that our values have changed due to some individuals’ choices once they had left the organization presents a hackneyed opinion of what actually constitutes environmental ethics.

Gerd Leipold Executive Director, Greenpeace International

More power
The NI deserves to be congratulated for a brilliant issue on nuclear power (Nuclear’s second wind, NI 382), that delved into the destruction at every level of the nuclear fuel cycle, and deconstructed the new ‘green’ marketing spin on a faltering nuclear power industry.

It was especially important to highlight the tireless Indigenous struggle to prevent uranium mining and the dumping of radioactive waste on land that is alive with stories, culture, and life. I do not know a single case where an Indigenous community has been adequately consulted with, or has consented, to either of these activities taking place on their land. There is a lot of strength behind this fight and the movement is growing...

Sophie Green Adelaide, Australia

It’s getting late
Many thanks for the excellent issue on nuclear power, which nevertheless fails to state the conclusion made inevitable by the information it so unflinchingly details: there is no means of energy production (except muscle power) without cost to the environment. It follows that there is no solution to our environmental problems without a major reduction in the energy consumption of those in developed parts of the world, a reduction which requires putting an end to their grossly selfish overconsumption. Overpopulation is not the major problem: a hundred people in an African village are less damaging to the environment than one rich baby in New York or London. And reducing the world’s population whilst increasing their consumption is no solution at all. Will the world’s affluent decrease their consumption? Luxury is as addictive as heroin. My prediction is that nothing much will be done until the environmental destruction has gone far enough to make affluent living impossible. And, then, of course, it will be too late.

Mtumiki Njira Derdepark, South Africa

Links in the chain
Re: ‘Blenheim & Bangalore’ (Essay, NI 382). Farmers continue to lose out, to be squeezed by the system that encourages huge agribusinesses to plough their corporate furrows deep and straight to the public purse, for it is the taxpayers’ money they are sharing out, not some anonymously donated benevolent fund. And what’s more, it’s doled out by those who are supposed, as our elected representatives, to follow our bidding.

What Rahul Rao fails to comment on is the connection (and complicity) overriding the relationship between subsidies in the developed world and falling agricultural commodity prices in the developing world – profit.

It is imperative that we all recognize that farming is one link in a chain. Similar disparities can be seen in the textile industry, manufacturing in general and the non-democratic imposition of privatization of utilities, to mention just a few more. We, the working people, are the majority, wherever we live. It’s time for a broader vision, for all working people to see their interests jointly advanced because they choose to work together as links in the same chain.

Janet Surman Mugla, Turkey

Hitler Youth
Re: the dispute over the nature of Pope Benedict XVI’s membership of the Hitler Youth (Letters, NI 382). I was born and lived in Upper Silesia from 1930 to 1946. I was a member of the Hitler Youth (HJ). Baldur von Schirach, the Minister for Youth, insisted that every German boy had to be a member of the Hitler Youth and every German girl had to be a member of the BDM (Union of German Girls).

This decree was usually endorsed/enforced by way of edicts from the Gauleiter (Provincial Party Leader) through the Kreisleiter (Local Nazi Leader) right down by way of the school principal to the class teacher.

I never signed any document making me a member of the HJ. The fact of my membership is there all the same.

The interpretation/implementation of the decrees from above (even in Nazi Germany) obviously depended on the commitment/dedication/fanaticism of the local functionaries. Believe me, our functionaries in the Gleiwitz/Gliwice district were totally dedicated to and infatuated with Hitler’s cause and dream.

Joachim Kloss Sunbury, Australia

Tibet’s autonomy
Re: ‘Railway to the top of the world’ (Essay, NI 381) – nowhere does Erling Hoh acknowledge that Tibet is an independent country which was brutally invaded by the Chinese in 1950 and illegally occupied ever since. The Chinese Government has no right to be building a railway through territory which does not belong to it – at a cost, as the author did manage to point out, which far exceeds the paltry amount it has spent on health or education in the country.

This disparity in ‘investment’ is because the Chinese authorities have no interest in the health or well-being of the Tibetan people, who have been systematically persecuted, tortured and imprisoned by the Chinese military for decades. Hoh even refers to the country as the ‘Tibet Autonomous Region’ – the name the Chinese use euphemistically for a nation with no autonomy.

Kate Barker Amersham, England

Creative peace
I applaud you on The Challenge to Violence (NI 381). We need to hear that not only are there peaceful solutions to violence but also positive results of these solutions. How refreshing to hear that there are countries without armies!

I have recently returned from attending the International Women in Black Conference in Jerusalem. We were 750 women from 44 countries who used silent vigil and civil disobedience to promote peace. During our stay we visited Bil’in on the West Bank (now under siege) and gathered with the villagers facing the soldiers, machine guns and razor wire. We were yelled at and spat at by settlers as we stood in silent vigil in the Salfit region. We listened to Palestinian women cry for their dead and imprisoned children, we heard young Palestinian women talk about being imprisoned at 14 for over 6 years. We saw a house demolished to make way for the Wall, and spoke to neighbours who knew their homes were next. And amid all this sadness and destruction what they wanted of us was that we go home and speak of what we saw. We heard Israeli women say ‘Not in our name. Boycott us. Sanction my country and those countries that also profit.’

The Challenge to Violence has reminded me that, great though the struggle is, determination and creativity can succeed.

Wilma Davidson Canberra, Australia

Collective rights
Ike Oguine’s View from the South was outstanding (NI 381). The recognition of the importance to people of collective identities is indeed an advance in understanding. It is, therefore, disappointing that the British Government should be so resistant to ratifying the UN treaty on collective rights.

James Myles Aberdeen, Scotland

Dismay and delight
I was dismayed that Dr BR Ambedkar found only passing reference in Combating Caste (NI 380). He infused self-respect and hope into the soul of Dalits. The chief architect of the Indian Constitution, Ambedkar had the courage to resign his post as Minister of Law in the first post-Independence cabinet on the issue of women’s rights cutting across all castes.

As one of the founding members of the National Campaign on Dalit Human Rights I was delighted by the Keynote making visible the long forgotten, much neglected and systemically oppressed community of Dalits to the international community. The two pieces on African caste discrimination are eye openers for many.

The caste system is a new species of genocide whose meaning and implications the global human rights discourse and international legal regime are yet to fathom. Congratulations to the NI for its never-too-late effort to uncover this shameful ‘hidden apartheid’ of the dominant castes!

Aloysius Irudayam SJ Madurai, India

Charmless change
The old neighbourhood ain't what it used to be, discovers Reem Haddad.

It used to take me a good 20 minutes to reach my car, parked a few metres away from my home in Gemaizeh – one of the few quarters of Beirut to retain its original pre-civil war charm. There was the grocer to greet, the butcher to chat to, the old Armenian shopkeeper to shake hands with, and the cobbler who would insist that I admire some newly repaired shoes. I always ended up being late for appointments.

But these days it takes me only a few minutes. Most of my friends are gone, replaced by restaurants and pubs.

‘I can’t keep up with the businessmen coming to my shop,’ says Nimr, who has run his herb and spice shop for over 30 years. ‘I have been doing this all my life. I don’t want my shop to become a restaurant. But they keep coming and pestering me.’

Most of the shopkeepers do not own their shops but rent them according to the ‘old rent’ system of the 1970s which has not been adjusted for inflation. Because the Lebanese pound plunged in value from a couple of Lebanese pounds to the US dollar in the mid-1970s to the present rate of 1,500 to the dollar, many landlords receive a tiny rental income and are eager to be rid of their tenants. But eviction requires the landlord to pay the tenant 40 to 60 per cent of the property’s value as compensation.

Entrepreneurs come to Gemaizeh offering to pay the evacuation fee to tenants and modern rental rates to the landlord, theoretically keeping everyone happy.

But some shopkeepers are renting under the modern law – and they are far from happy.

‘I was paying a fair sum of rent before Gemaizeh was “discovered”,’ says Anwar, my local grocer. ‘Now, the owner keeps raising the rent. It has almost tripled in less than two years. I can’t afford it. He wants to push me out so he can turn this place into a pub.’

It all started three years ago when a traditional coffee shop was renovated. For years it had been the meeting place of old men. They would spend the entire day smoking, drinking coffee, playing cards and backgammon and spending very little money. One day I arrived to find dozens of them standing on the sidewalk looking lost. Their shop had suddenly been closed. A month later, a fancier-looking coffee shop opened. I still bump into some of the old men just walking aimlessly up and down the street, unable to afford the new café prices.

Shortly afterwards, an upmarket patisserie and restaurant opened up and became popular with chic Beirutis. And before long, investors descended with open wallets.

Gemaizeh was once an important Roman road, linking the city centre to villages further up the coast. It later became a souk where farmers set up stalls and sold their goods. The stalls became shops with homes above them.

My father laughed when I moved here six years ago. ‘It’s like a village,’ he said, as he walked along a street filled with traditional Lebanese townhouses in desperate need of renovation. Dozens of dusty family-run shops lined the street, most of them small. I immediately fell in love.

Before long, I got to know all the shopkeepers. Many times, one or the other would run over to carry my grocery bags to my building or escort me home under their umbrella when I was caught in a sudden rainstorm. My first pregnancy was noted early on and I received endless winks and conspiratorial smiles. When I reappeared on the street after giving birth to my daughter, Yasmine, they rushed to praise and coo.

Two years later, my son, Alexander, was born. Very few were left to admire him. Most of my shopkeepers were gone. Since most fell under the ‘old rent’ category, they were handsomely paid. So I suppose I should be happy for them.

But I’m not. I miss my butcher who would take his time cutting the meat to my strict specifications. I yearn to buy the wrinkled tomatoes that the old Armenian man displayed every day. I’m lost without the tailor and the newspaper shop. Even my three-year-old daughter seems disturbed. ‘Where are all the amous?’ she asked, using the Lebanese expression for ‘uncles’.

I had no answer but took her to have lunch at Le Chef. Once Gemaizeh’s only restaurant, it is a family-run business that has been operating since the 1950s and serves traditional Lebanese food. I was glad to see that it remains filled with customers. I’m not the only one who prefers the old Gemaizeh.

Reem Haddad works for the Daily Star in Beirut.