Posts in category: Uncategorized

I walk up Sonia Gandhi’s driveway, past guards toting Uzi machine guns, and can’t help thinking that when I came to interview Indira Gandhi (Sonia’s mother-in-law) on the eve of her great comeback and massive electoral win in 1980, I walked up to her front door and knocked. There were no guards and only one servant to let me in. Only four years later, however, Indira would be assassinated by two Sikh bodyguards as revenge for ordering the army’s attack on Sikh freedom fighters holed up at Amritsar’s Golden Temple.

I am ushered into Sonia’s office. She barely acknowledges my presence. “Buon giorno,” I say. There is no reply. I have been warned that she is cold. She doesn’t offer me a hand, but walks over and asks me to sit down.

Sonia is the Italian-born widow of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, who was cruelly blown to smithereens by a female Tamil terrorist, a member of the now-defeated Tamil independence struggle in neighboring Sri Lanka. (It was the Tamils who invented both the suicide bomber and its female variant.) Since 1998, Sonia has held the presidency of the Indian National Congress Party, though she rejected the offer of the post of prime minster in 2004.

“Do you mind if I begin with a personal question?” “Yes,” she says.

I pause, then continue: “Wasn’t it difficult to decide to go into politics, knowing the dangers and the terrible toll it has taken on your family?”

“I am at peace about that,” she replies. “I have thought it through.” Then she suddenly interjects, “I hope this isn’t an interview. I just want us to get to know each other a bit.” I remind her, perhaps a bit defensively, that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh (also a leader of the Congress Party) had arranged the introduction and said I could conduct an interview.

We continue, but I put down my notebook and lapse into a gentler, more conversational style. “Why did the pull of politics overcome your inhibitions?” I ask.

“Good afternoon,” the video begins, featuring a man in a drab suit directly addressing the camera. “My name is Rodrigo Rosenberg Marzano, and unfortunately, if you are watching the message, it is because I was assassinated by President Álvaro Colom.”

So begins the final testimony of Guatemalan attorney Rodrigo Rosenberg, who was shot and killed on Sunday in the country’s capital, Guatemala City.

In the video, which was recorded only days before his slaying, Rosenberg goes on to accuse not only the Guatemalan president of complicity in his yet-to-come demise, but also the president’s wife, Sandra Colom; the president’s private secretary, Gustavo Alejos; and a businessman, Gregorio Valdez.

Rosenberg, a respected lawyer, states in the video that he will be killed because of his professional work on behalf of Guatemalan businessman Khalil Musa and his daughter, Marjorie Musa, both of whom were gunned down in Guatemala in March.

Rosenberg states that the elder Musa was unaware, when named by Colom to the board of directors of Guatemala’s Banco de Desarrollo Rural S.A. (Rural Development Bank, popularly known as Banrural), that the body was being used as a center for the laundering of drug profits, the deviation of public funds, the siphoning off of state coffers on behalf of the president’s wife, and other nefarious activities.

Hippocrates, the father of modern medicine who lived 460-357 B.C., concluded that diseases were naturally caused and were cured by natural remedies. Opium, he wrote, was one of the latter. But he was also of the opinion that it should be used sparingly and under control.
If only our governments today could take such a sanguine and informed view of the use of opiates in medicine today.

No one needs a more enlightened attitude than the Western forces now operating in Afghanistan where they are committed to destroying the peasants’ main source of income.

The tough, no nonsense, eradication program has done as much as Western military action to push country people into the Taliban camp. The West has long been shooting itself in the foot.

Both the former president of Pakistan, Pervez Musharraf and the wise senior statesman and former finance minister Sartaj Aziz, who probably knows more about the economics of agriculture in Pakistan than anyone else, have told me that it would be more sensible for Western governments to help buy the poppy crop. This would solve two problems in one blow. First, it would help deal with the world-wide shortage of medical opiates which, according to the World Health Organization, are causing a “global pain crisis.” In Africa hundreds of thousands of people are dying in agony for lack of pain relief. Second, it would prevent the opium farmers of Afghanistan being driven into the arms of the Taliban.

I’m headed down to Bab al Mandeb—a narrow strait, spanning only 12 miles from the Middle East to Africa—to spend an afternoon with Abdalla Abrahem, a fisherman. He has spent is life trawling these narrow waters, but now he’s forced to venture ever further afield, near Somalia and Djibouti, to support his family.

Earning, at best, $10 a day, Abrahem lives along the arid Red Sea coastline in the small village of of Dobaba (pop. 600), a community in dire need of food assistance.

I arrived in this area after a three-hour drive from Taiz, about 70 miles away from the coast, descending down more than 4,000 feet through a lush, winding canyon dotted with palm trees and camels. By the end of the journey, the temperature must have increased by at least 30 degrees.

Upon arrival, it’s shocking to see that a human life actually exists in the middle of this unforgiving landscape. Families try to scrape by on the wind-swept plain. It’s one thing to not have enough to eat, but another thing all together to have to buy your own water.

Yemen isn’t just food insecure, it also faces a water crisis. Yemenis consume 2.8 billion cubic meters of water annually, but the nation’s aquifers supply only about two-thirds of that. Yemen imports the rest. The western part of the country, where nearly 90 percent of the population lives, is expected to run out of water entirely in only ten years.

In search of water, Yemenis are drilling deeper and deeper.

The average depth of a well in the village of Dobaba is nearly 1,000 meters—compared with only 40 meters only two decades ago. Nothing about this village is sustainable; but  few can afford to travel the long distance to Taiz. And they can’t pick up and move to the city, because their skill sets revolve around the sea.

The Myanmar governm