Foto por Steeven Woodward - Jubilee Debt Campaign - Flickr

One of the most deplorable and, to some extent, unkown elements of the world financial system created by globalisation are the so-called 'vulture funds'. These scavengers are investment funds based usually in the US or tax-havens like the Virgin Islands, which use different mechanisms to exploit the poorest countries.Renaud Vivien y Gaspard Denis describe their method : "this consists of buying on the secondary debt makets, at a discount price, developing countries' debt, without their knowledge, and then to force these countries, via judicial decisions, to pay back the debt at a higher price, this is the initial amount plus interests, sanctions and the costs of the proceedings".

Benefitng from the financial needs of developing countries, often involved in costly civil wars, private banks lend money, which then these vulture funds recover (plus interest), using the judiciary systems of developed couentries. African countries, like DRC have suffered this, according to Vivien and Denis. Thus in 2004 the vulture fund FG Hémisphere, based in Delaware (USA) bought an $18 million debt from SNEL (the public electricity company in DRC). Hemisphere took DRC to court and was awarded ¡$104 million!, an amount that will only be repaid through the seizing of the next 15 years' profits made by SNEL.

The most recen case begins today at London's High Court. There two vuture funds, Hamsah Investments and Wall Capital - based in the Caribbean - are recaliming $20 million from Liberia. This amount equals 5% of the total budget of the country, which only in 2003 ended a 14-year-long civil war. Although details are unclear, according to the BBC, the debt refers to an agreement signed between Lineria and the US' Chemical Bank in 1978, for a total of $6.5 million.

Vulture funds are but a manifestation of the inequalities that characterise the global economic sytem, and of the degree to which the international institutions established during globalisation answer only to the needs of the most powerful actors. Thus it is only because European and US courts accept these cases, whilst returning Pinochet to Chile (UK), or refusing to sign the Rome Treaty (US) that vulture funds exist.

Countries like Belgium - victim in the past of vulture funds herself - have already outlawed vulture funds in ther countries. Similar initiatives have appeared in the United Kingdom, and in the US, but have not become legislation yet.

The only way of ending this despicable actions, which probably will grow as a result of the current economic crisis, is through international cooperation. Eitther through the adoption of the Calvo Doctrine, as Vivien and Denis propose, according to which " all goods, material and immaterial, are under the Sovereign State's law and where a dispute may arise, will be judged by national courts", which would make vulture funds' actions illegal. Or through a concrete action of the international community which would outlaw vulture funds in all countries at once.

Via the blog A Bombastic Element (which I've been really enjoying lately), I found this wonderful story about Liberian cooking. It's an audio slideshows from the NYT's "One in 8 Million" series, chronicling the heroic and quirky in the lives of everyday New Yorkers.

It features Eliza Smith, 62, a Liberian who immigrated to the US in 1969 who cooks traditional food from her country in her Queens apartment. According to the story intro, her husband, who was from South Carolina and died in 1986, loved her traditional Liberian recipes. So did their friends, and in the mid-1990's, one asked if he could pay her to cook for him weekly. Soon, neighbors and friends of friends were calling, asking if they could come by and eat in her kitchen or take meals home. She also catered weddings, graduations and other parties. She charges $15 to $20 a meal, and sends most of her profits to a Liberian elementary school.

Although the photos by Todd Heisler are in black and white and I would have liked to see the colours of Ms Smith's food - especially the combination of meat and the fish that she says makes Liberian food different and "funky", the story is lovely and well worth checking out. And I loved this quote by Ms Smith which I think can be applied to African cooking in general:

I just can't cook enough for me, I don't know how to do that. I come from a large family, we were 12 kids and when we cook, we cook a lot of food for everyone to have.

We've had it up and running for some time now, but we're happy to officially state that the Bambara version of Maneno is now fully functional. This is all due to the ongoing work of Boukary Konate in Mali. He has toiled constantly on this version to make it work and we thank him a great deal for it.

It hasn't been easy to get this working. Earlier, we wrote about the problems in implementing this language interface. If it hadn't been for the SIL keyboard, it just wouldn't have been possible. And this is a shame really as there is no reason for this character set not to work.

One other nasty thing we discovered is that the Bambara characters simply will not work on version 6 of Internet Explorer. This is bad as around 20% of the Maneno traffic uses that browser and as Boukary found out, a great many of the computers in Bamako still use this browser that was originally released in 2001 and has been a kick in the face to web developers ever since. Explorer 7 and 8 are fine as are any versions of Firefox, Chrome, Opera, and Safari. Leave it up to Microsoft to ruin the party...

If you happen to be visiting Bamako anytime soon, bring a new copy of Firefox to install anywhere you find a machine dragging along with IE6. It'll make life a lot easier from a linguistic point of view. Otherwise, take a look at the Bambara version of Maneno. Hopefully it will reach out to more native speakers of the language and open up access to get more of the language online as opposed to just French or English.

As the BBC reported, the country of Benin now has the dubious distinction in joining the EU no fly list. I say the country because every single airline has been banned from flying in to the EU on account of safety issues. This is not the first time this has happened to an entire country in Africa unfortunately:

The list also imposes a total ban on airlines based in Equatorial Guinea, Kyrgyzstan, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Swaziland, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Gabon - save for Gabon Airlines and Afrijet, which have exemptions for a small number of aircraft.

You'll notice Kyrgyzstan in that list and Kazakhstan has also had most of its airlines banned. So, it's not like the regulators are singling out the continent of Africa, it just so happens that they majority of their list is based there. It also happens that there are a greater number of European-based flights to Africa than to Central Asia and lemme tell ya, they ain't cheap.

Is this list justified? Probably to some extent. As shown with accidents on this one from Angola will probably never make you want to fly again. But, the US and Europe aren't without their accidents. Percentage-wise, they definitely have less than Africa as a whole and if given the choice, I would rather not fly on most African airlines with the exceptions of Kenya Airways or South African Airways.

It does make me wonder if it's just a wee bit profit driven because if the only airline that can fly from Benin to Europe is Air France it does make it easy for them to charge whatever they want as there is next to no competition. Such is life I suppose and to be honest, the only serious crash in Benin I can find on the interweb was back in 2003 which was a Lebanese charter flight. Maybe the Benin airlines are indeed problematic. Maybe it's a money grab. Whatever the case, it's a rather severe limiting of options for the people of Benin to connect with the rest of the world.

I'm assuming that this mothballed fleet isn't going to be coming back in to service again anytime soon...

The World Affairs Council of Northern California is, according to their website, the largest international affairs organization on the West Coast of the US. Apparently it was founded by community leaders in 1947 out of the interest generated by the founding of the United Nations in San Francisco in 1945, and their mission is "to engage the public in the exploration of international issues and opportunities that transcend borders". Although it is on my street only a couple of blocks away, somehow I had never attended one of their events until last week for the screening of the documentary film Pray the devil back to hell.

Pray the devil back to hell is about the role of a group of women in ending Liberia's 14-year civil wars in 2003. They had suffered for too many years, and most importantly had seen their children suffer for too many years (war is all their children had known), and so they decided to get together and do something about it. The main narrator of the story is Leymah, who brought all the women of the Christian churches together into a group called the Christian Women's Initiative and began issuing a series of calls for peace. As the president of the Liberia Female Law Enforcement Association, a policewoman named Asatu was invited to the launch of the Christian Women's Initiative. She was so moved by what she heard that she stood up and pledged to mobilize the Muslim women of Liberia to help bring peace to Liberia. And she did, creating the Liberian Muslim Women’s Organization. Liberian Mass Action for Peace came into being when the two organizations joined. It was the first time Christian and Muslim women had worked together in Liberia.

Eventually thousands of women - ordinary mothers, grandmothers, aunts and daughters, both Christian and Muslim - came together to pray for peace. Then they decided to pressure the government publicly, by rallying every day at the market in front of the Presidential Palace. Wearing white t-shirts and signs with messages such as "Women are crying for peace" or "Our nation needs peace", they stood day after day, rain or shine, bullets or no bullets, demanding peace.

After ignoring them repeatedly and refusing to meet with them, they finally forced then President Charles Taylor to receive them and to promise to attend peace talks in Ghana. A delegation of the women then traveled to Ghana to continue to apply pressure on the warring factions during the peace process, which stalled for several months. In the end, the women got so frustrated with the lack of seriousness of the peace negotiations, that they locked all the delegates inside the meeting room and refused to let them go until they reached some agreement.

When the Peace Accords were finally signed and Charles Taylor was exiled to Nigeria, the women were satisfied with what they achieved but had no intention to continue their civil society work. One of them said "peace is not an event, it's a process", and so a lot needed to be done still for the peace to stick. A clear example of the importance of civil society came when a UN Peacekeeping Mission was created in Liberia and they started the DDR process (disarmament, demobilization and reintegration), not listening to anyone because they were the "experts" and so they knew what to do. However their first attempts at disarming the combatants failed, and the women had to advise them .

The website of Pray the devil back to hell describes it as:

A story of sacrifice, unity and transcendence, Pray the Devil Back to Hell honors the strength and perseverance of the women of Liberia. Inspiring, uplifting, and most of all motivating, it is a compelling testimony of how grassroots activism can alter the history of nations.

I usually find these kinds of descriptions to be exaggerated, but in this case I have to say I really did find the story of these Liberian women to be truly inspiring. Probably also because they are all also very charismatic and break all stereotypes about women and about victims of war.

At the end of the movie screening there was a discussion with Paul van Zyl, who is a lawyer from South Africa that at 25 was the Executive Secretary of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa. He's also a co-founder of the International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ), an organization which assists countries pursuing accountability for past mass atrocity or human rights abuse. During the discussion he stressed the importance of involving women in peace processes, because their huge knowledge and expertise has been historically completely ignored in that regard. It may seem obvious, but sadly "experts" often take things for granted and never ask or listen to the women.

One of the things he said that struck me the most was that while the filmmakers were researching archive footage for their movie, they found tons and tons of images of men with guns. But they could hardly find anything on the civic peace movement started by the women. So they had to look at discarded pieces of footage from various TV networks, and little by little collect small bits and pieces to tell the women's stories. Most journalists had been too busy talking about atrocities and power struggles to notice the peace efforts of the women.

For nearly my entire life, the NASA Space Shuttle has been taking to the heavens, pulling we mere mortals from the face of this planet to the reaches of a space that we've just begun to scratch at. Of course, shedding off our gravitational coil is not without its risks and we have lost a couple of the shuttles over the years. One might think that strapping yourself on to a massive liquid hydrogen-fueled rocket is a pretty risky proposition, but those diligent eggheads have gone to amazing lengths to make sure that as many possibilities are taken care of in the event of a MIDS (Moment of Incredible Deep Shit) overtaking the shuttle launch.

I happened to be browsing through the Wikipedia page for N'Djili Airport in Congo DRC when this one sentence stuck out at me, "It is an alternative landing site for NASA's Space Shuttle." Huh? I mean, sure, they've got a runway and it pretty much works, but this is a rather sordid airport. In fact, after passing through it, I felt compelled to write a survival guide, despite the fact I was seeing it at a vastly improved state than just a few years ago. But still, in the event of a MIDS with the shuttle, they would land it there? This required more research.

As it turns out, there are a number of locations in Sub-Saharan Africa that are on the list of potential emergency landing spots in addition to N'Djili including: Banjul, The Gambia, AFB Hoedspruit, South Africa, and Roberts International Airport, Liberia. It should be noted that out of these, only Banjul is designated as a true emergency landing site. The other three are just there for when things go seriously, seriously bad and they essentially have no option short of breaking apart. Why is Banjul so optimal given that it's in a country only 40km wide and 250km long? Well, this is explained:

Since September 1987 [following the Challenger crash], Banjul International Airport (BIA) has been among four selected locations in the world designated as augmented emergency landing sites and recovery locations for the United States Space Shuttle. B1A is adjacent to the capital, 13 degrees north of the Equator, on a flat plane, seven miles inland from the Atlantic Ocean. NASA space shuttles, launched eastward in a ballistic trajectory over the Atlantic, fly directly over Banjul, thus making it an ideal location for emergency landings. In addition, The Gambia's dry season from November to May provides favourable weather conditions, with generally good visibility for emergency landings.

A best case scenario in an emergency means landing in Banjul. For a slightly worse case and the reason that one of the other three sites would be a Transoceanic Abort Landing. This is a landing attempted in the first 30 minutes after lift off. I still don't even know how they would pull that off given the wicked velocity they're traveling to escape gravity.

In you might be wondering how on earth they would secure a space shuttle if it were to land at one of these sites, well NASA has again though of that as least in the case of Banjul:

During the week preceding a shuttle launch, a team of NASA mission-support specialists and medical personnel from the United States Department of Defence arrives in Banjul to activate the TAL site. They work closely with BIA's twenty specially trained security officers, and with the Gambian Fire and Rescue Service, which remains fully operational during this period.

Of course, if the shuttle makes it back down, then again, they have a very nifty way to get it back to Florida which is this puppy. While a shuttle tacked on to the back of a 747 isn't the most attractive or graceful of things, I do have to admire the simplistic approach they took to getting it home in that hey, these two things fly, stick 'em together and fly 'em. And if you're thinking that your last plane ticket was pricey, try spending $1.7 million to just truck that thing back across the US. I can't even imagine what it would cost from another country.

The shuttle taking off with Banjul Airport in the upper right and N'Djili in the lower right. All images from Wikipedia.