Sustainable mountain development threatened in Asia-Pacific: FAO

KATHMANDU, May 13: Armed conflict and hunger are stalling efforts to reduce poverty and environmental degradation in the mountains of the Asia Pacific region, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) said today.

"Peace in the mountains is a priority for the UN’s International Year of Mountains (IYM) being observed in 2002, FAO informed delegates from 27 Asia-Pacific countries at the 26th FAO Regional Conference for Asia and the Pacific here.

The five-day conference, starting today is reviewing the status of agriculture and food security in the region. It also aims to energise efforts to promote sustainable mountain development in the region.

The year 2002 has been designated as the international year of mountains to increase awareness of the important role of mountain ecosystems and the challenges faced by mountain people.

FAO, the lead un agency for IYM activities, is advocating long-term action to improve their lives without threatening the fragile mountain ecology and prevailing social and cultural values.

As elsewhere in the world, mountains have a vital life-sustaining role as climate regulators and sources of water for drinking, food, electricity and industrial production in the region.

Four great Himalayan rivers - the Indus, Ganges, Brahmaputra and the Mekong — are a lifeline for more than 700 million people in South and Southeast Asia. The mountains also contain some of the world’s richest storehouses of biological diversity.

Armed conflicts have emerged as a serious threat to mountain ecosystems and their inhabitants with 23 of the 27 major armed conflicts in the world in the year 1999 being fought in mountain regions. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), Asia was the theatre of nine of the 25 major armed conflicts that took place across the world in 2000. Most of these were armed separatist struggles.

"Mountain areas are home to most of the armed conflicts in the world as well as many of the world’s poorest and least food-secure populations," FAO Director-General Jacques Diouf said at the global launch of IYM at the UN headquarters last year.

"As we begin commemorating the international year of mountains, conflict may be the single greatest obstacle to achieving our goals. Without peace, we cannot reduce poverty. Without peace, we cannot ensure secure food supplies. Without peace, we cannot even consider sustainable development," Dr Diouf added. FAO is urging countries to tackle the root causes of conflict in the mountains. "Seek out your unique role as peacemaker," Dr Diouf said, adding, "once you establish that role, your role in sustainable development and conservation of mountains will also become clear."

The world’s highest mountains, including all peaks of over 7,500 metres, are located in the Asia-Pacific region. These include the giant Hindukush-Himalaya range that stretches some 3,500 km from Afghanistan, crests South Asia and extends to Myanmar.

More than 140 million people live in the Hindukush mountains, which affects the daily lives of three times as many people in the plains and river basins below. At the other end of the region, is the relatively diminutive australian alps fringing the continent’s south-east coast.

Mountain regions in developing Asian countries have a high incidence of hunger and poverty because of difficult conditions for farming, livestock and fisheries, which are the main source of livelihood of their inhabitants, FAO said.

Limited marketing opportunities due to the physical remoteness of mountain areas, and unfavourable terms of trade, isolate mountain economies from lowland prosperity.

Poverty and a growing population, in turn encourage agriculture and forestry practices that are degrading mountain environments. The carrying capacity of the land has been exceeded in many places in the Hindukush mountains. As a result, forests on the upper slopes of these young mountains are being felled to provide land for cultivation, and meet the fuelwood, fodder and timber needs of the local people.

The stripping away of green cover from steep slopes is making them more prone to landslides during the heavy monsoon rains, which in turn, is impoverishing the soil and ecology, it added.

Sustainable mountain development points to the need to identify and promote niches for mountain products and services such as specialised farm produce, environment and people-friendly models for hydroelectricity generation and tourism promotion, non-wood forest products and handicrafts. An example is the successful large cardamom agroforestry in the eastern Himalaya in India, Eastern Nepal and Bhutan. The agroforestry system combines a low labour intensity, high value, non-perishable crop with shade trees that control soil erosion, maintain nutrient balance and provide fuel, fodder and timber.

The UN body said a primary aim was to integrate mountain and lowland economies. However, realistic and market-based prices must be ensured for mountain resources and produce. It is also important to promote local value addition to primary produce of mountain regions, improve post-harvest systems particularly storage systems for traditional crops, and provide basic physical and social infrastructure. The economic, environmental and social costs of externally driven resource extraction in the mountains must be accounted for.

As stewards of mountain ecosystems and the ones who live most intimately with the consequences of their destruction, mountain people must contribute their knowledge, perspectives and participation to efforts to protect mountain environments and alleviate poverty.

Another key requirement for sustainable mountain development is the availability of accurate information. Recent efforts to tackle the data scarcity on mountain ecosystems in the region include the Mountain Agricultural Systems Information Files (MASIF) being developed by the Kathmandu-based International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD).

There is also need for the collection and analysis of data at regional, national and sub-national levels on population dynamics, natural resource inventories, economic output, poverty and other social indicators of mountain areas. (UNI)

Asia’s newest country is also the poorest

DILI, EAST TIMOR, May 13: Tiny East Timor, counting down to its independence in a few days, is Asia’s poorest country and will need considerable international assistance in the years ahead, the United Nations said today.

The UN Development Programme (UNDP) said in a report that East Timor was Asia’s poorest nation in terms of financial and human development, with annual per capita GDP of just 478 dollars.

Its human development indicators put it among the world’s 20 poorest countries — alongside nations such as Rwanda and Angola.

East Timor will declare independence in the early hours of May 20 following centuries of Portuguese colonisation and, more recently, 24 years of brutal Indonesian rule.

"Now that independence is achieved, the problems of poverty and economic growth still remain to be tackled and considerable international assistance will be needed in the years ahead," said the report, released on the eve of a two-day meeting of foreign donors in the capital, dili.

The UNDP said war-ravaged Afghanistan did not fall under its definition of Asia.

East Timor, home to some 740,000 people, has been under UN administration since late 1999 after an overwhelming vote to break free from Indonesian control triggered an orgy of violence and looting from pro-Jakarta militias who opposed the move.

That widespread destruction has made the job of the East Timorese even harder, and the statistics paint a bleak picture.

More than 40 percent of the population live below the national poverty line of 0.55 dollars per day, with many Timorese engaged in subsistence agriculture, the report said.

Over half the population is illiterate, life expectancy is 57 years of age, very few people have received adequate education and more than 50 percent of infants are underweight, it said. Discussions with donors are expected to focus on a vision for national development and strategies to reduce poverty.

Donors will also pledge more aid for a fledgling nation about half the size of Belgium and slightly smaller than Hawaii. It was not clear how much donors have already committed to East Timor since the violence of the independence vote.

While economic growth would be a problem when the UN scales down, the report said Timorese could draw on their determination for freedom to help build the world’s newest nation.

"Through the long years of colonisation and occupation, the people of East Timor retained an unquenchable desire for freedom. That kind of courage and determination should serve them well in the years ahead," said the report.

One of the main determinants of East Timor’s future would be how it used petroleum revenues estimated at 7 billion dollars over two decades from 2004, the UNDP report said.

East Timor and neighbour Australia and will sign a treaty over developing gas fields in the Timor Sea on May 20. Royalties will be split 90:10 in East Timor’s favour.

Another problem for East Timor would be the range of languages spoken in the territory, the report added.

East Timor authorities have decided to make portuguese the language of school instruction, although a household survey last year concluded only five percent of the population spoke it compared with 82 per cent for tetum, the main local language.

Tetum is regarded as too limited for the modern world.

Both Tetum and Portuguese are considered national languages by the constitution, the UNDP report said. Bahasa Indonesia, a symbol of Jakarta’s harsh and unwelcome rule, was spoken by 43 percent of East Timorese, according to the household survey. (AGENCIES)

Globalisation swamps sounds of Africa

GRAHAMSTOWN, SOUTH AFRICA, May 13: Globalisation threatens to swamp the sounds of Africa, source of much of the world’s music, according to one of the continent’s leading music experts.

Radio, television and tape players are drowning out the complex rhythms of the Zimbabwean Mbira or Thumb Piano, the haunting twang of the single-stringed South African Uhadi bow and even the thunder of the Akadinda, Giant Marimbas with which Uganda’s Baganda people saluted their rulers.

"Globalisation is a big threat to traditional African music," South African Musicologist Andrew Tracey told newsmen.

"It is especially a threat to casual music, entertainment music, music which does not a have a strong social function. Casual music for courting, for walking, for an evening’s entertainment, that is the first music to be replaced by new media," he said.

Tracey is Director of the International Library of African Music, curator of the continent’s finest collection of traditional music and instruments and maker of African instruments for academics and musicians exploring their musical heritage.

Demonstrating the sounds of a small, five-stringed Ugandan Harp, he explains that this instrument from the around the source of the nile spawned the concert harp of the present day.

"The harp moved from Africa to Egypt, possibly with the labourers who worked on all the construction efforts there. The harps found in Egypt in 3,000 bc are almost identical to harps that are still played in Uganda today," he said.

Tracey’s library is in a small bungalow at the end of a Winding Lane on the Rhodes University Campus in Grahamstown.

Two hours from the nearest airport, it’s not the sort of place one would happen upon by chance, but for ethnic music experts it is a place of pilgrimage to swap musical, historical and academic notes with a leading authority on Africa’s musical tradition. Hundreds of instruments collected by tracey, his father Hugh and his son Paul, adorn the walls of the library. In its archive are hundreds of thousands of songs on tape and vinyl.

"I am often asked if we are losing a lot of African music. The answer is yes and no.

"There are parts of Africa where traditional music is still very strong, largely those parts that are less industrially developed, like Mozambique, where the Portuguese did very little to develop the region," he said.

But in cities and the more developed regions such as South Africa, modern music and imported culture are overwhelming tradition. Recorded music is swamping the sounds of Africa.

Across town from Tracey’s library, in a grindingly poor apartheid-era township, his African musical instruments factory is making another key contribution to the preservation of Africa’s sounds and its musical skills.

The factory makes a range of traditional instruments for local musicians, for Africans trying to revive the sounds of their heritage and for export to the United States, Europe and Asia.

"The factory is very much an arm of what happens here at the library. It’s very closely linked," Tracey said.

Tracey’s father started to collect African instruments and music while farming in Zimbabwe, then Rhodesia, and founded the library in 1953. He began to make instruments partly to save the technology and skills and partly to help fund his library.

"African instruments need to be better known and better provided. There are so many people in modern Africa who would play traditional instruments if only they had them," Tracey said.

He feels too many of the factory’s products goes overseas and too little into the rest of Africa, but he believes the tide is turning.

"Demand is growing. Africans are suddenly more interested in looking for their roots. It is a process that has come down from ghana and it’s happening in all African countries after independence, this wanting to find out who we really are." The whine of sanders and the repetitive plink of tuners adjusting the metal keys of a consignment of Kalimbas going to Japan fade as factory manager Christian Carver and Vuyani Libi, leader of their Marimba Group, gather a foursome to play on a set of four Marimbas just completed for a school in Britain.

In the workshop where the frames and stands for these wooden xylophones take shape, three others pound out a rhythm on a set of Djembe drums built in the egg-timer style of the Ivory Coast.

"We have doubled our production over the past two years, and I’m confident we’re going to keep growing at the rate we are now," Carver said.

"Kalimbas or thumb pianos are our mainstay, and locally Marimbas are becoming very popular... What I’m hoping to do is to start making other more complex african instruments — the ones no one else can make," he said. "Some of these old fence posts are more than 100 years old — and the trees were probably about 150 years old before they were cut," Carver said.

With tea over, Carver began to seal and address boxes of Kalimbas destined for the United States, keeping Africa’s sounds and traditions alive against a tide of tinny noise that, like mankind itself, can trace its origins to the heart of the continent. (AGENCIES)

US postal employee introduced Massood’s
assassins: Post

WASHINGTON, May 13: The United States authorities believe an american postal employee helped draft a letter of introduction used by two men who posed as journalists to assassinate Afghanistan’s Northern Alliance leader Ahmed Shah Massood.

A summer 2001 conversation about the letter allegedly surfaced in hundreds of hours of wiretaps involving Ahmed Abdul Sattar, the Washington Post said today quoting a US official familiar with the case.

Authorities charged last month that Sattar, 42, had served as the New York-based "Communications Center" for an Egyptian terrorist group directed by a blind muslim cleric from his US prison cell.

Sattar has not been charged with involvement in the September 9 slaying of "Lion of Panjshir" — General Massood. But the Egyptian national who allegedly drafted the letter with Sattar, Yassir Sirri, has been charged in London with conspiring to murder Massood. Sirri has denied involvement.

The US official said authorities remain uncertain whether Sattar knew the letter would be used in the attack on Gen Massood, which took place in Northern Afghanistan two days before the September 11 terrorist strikes on Washington and New York.

"It is clear that this was a letter for these two guys," said the official, who asked not to be identified. "But how much sattar knew about the mission is not clear."

The Post said that the conversation about the letter added another dimension to the case against sattar, who was described in last month’s indictment as "a surrogate" for the imprisoned cleric, Sheikh Omar Abdul-Rahman. Abdul-Rahman was convicted in 1995 of plotting to blow up several New York landmarks, including the World Trade Center.

Authorities believe the case of Sattar, a naturalised US citizen who came here from Egypt in 1982, provided a window on the domestic activity of global terror networks and a way to understand the relationships between Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda organisation and other extremist groups such as Abdul-Rahman’s Gama’a Al Islamiyya, or the Islamic group. Satar has pleaded not guilty to the charges. Sattar arranged contacts with global terrorists, disseminated propaganda and helped prepare at least one "Fatwa" (religious edict) that offered a moral rationale for committing violent acts, the indictment alleged. "He was the Islamic group’s point man in North America," said the federal official. "He served as a communications facility for their worldwide network. He is very important."

Until 1997, Sattar had Government clearance as a paralegal to visit Abdul-Rahman in federal prisons. Even as the Government was tapping his phone, Sattar, a 13-year veteran of the US Postal Service, was drawing a 40,000 dollar salary for a job with the main post office on staten island that included picking up priority mail from secure areas of the John F Kennedy international airport. That job ended when he was abruptly transferred to a desk job at a remote branch on staten island after the September 11 attacks.

Authorities said they waited to arrest Sattar because of the vast amounts of information they were gathering — not just about him, but also about high-level members of the islamic group.

"It was not just sattar we were listening to," the federal official said. "We were listening to everybody. It was a gold mine."

Sattar never hid his devotion to Abdul-Rahman or his views on US policy. A frequent spokesman for the Islamic movement, he told "Frontline" in 1999 that he viewed the 1998 bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania as "part of a war" against Islam that had been "declared by the American Government." He called Bin Laden "an inspiration" and said he had "sympathy for people who hate, or, let’s say...Understanding of why people show their hate toward the United States."

Authorities opened a wiretap on Sattar’s home phone under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which allows the Government to monitor suspected spies and agents of foreign terrorist organisations.

According to Sattar’s indictment, an Islamic group leader requested Sattar’s assistance in expanding the organisation’s presence in the United States in early 1999. The group had taken responsibility in 1997 for a massacre in Luxor, Egypt, in which 58 tourists and four Egyptian security officers were shot and hacked to death. Before fleeing, the assailants scattered leaflets demanding Abdul-Rahman’s release one was inserted into the slashed corpse of a victim, according to Sattar’s indictment. The indictment alleged several contacts between Sattar and the Islamic group: In 1999, it said, Sattar held telephone conversations with a group leader, Rifa’i Taha Musa, debating the effectiveness of a cease-fire the organisation had declared.

On October 3, 2000, the indictment said, Musa called Sattar and discussed a Fatwa that Musa had written in Abdul-Rahman’s name.

The next day, Sattar allegedly called Sirri — the Egyptian charged in London with conspiracy to murder Massood — and read him the edict, entitled "Fatwa mandating the bloodshed of Israelis everywhere." It appeared the next day on a web site run by Sirri, according to the indictment.

The edict called on "brother scholars everywhere in the Muslim world to do their part and issue a unanimous fatwa that urges the Muslim nation to fight the Jews and to kill them wherever they are."

In January, the Wall Street Journal reported that it had purchased a looted IBM desktop computer in Kabul that had apparently been used by leaders of Al Qaeda. Among the documents on the computer’s hard drive was a letter written last may requesting an interview with Massood.

The request, the journal reported, carried the name of Yassir Sirri of the Islamic observation center in London. But the computer indicated it had been written by a user named Mohammed Zawahiri, a possible reference to Bin Laden’s top lieutenant, Ayman Zawahiri, according to the paper.

The US official familiar with the recorded conversations between Sirri and Sattar said "at least one" was clearly about the contents of an interview request to be sent to Massood. On the tape, the official said, the two men "can be heard discussing in some detail how to write such a letter and how it should read," with Sattar commenting on certain passages.

Massood was mortally wounded by a bomb hidden inside a television camera that was detonated during an interview.

The US official said there is no clear evidence linking Massood’s slaying to September 11, nor is there evidence suggesting that Sattar or Sirri had advance notice of those attacks. (UNI)

Arafat says foreign powers support suicide bombers

JERUSALEM, May 13: Palestinian President Yasser Arafat said Palestinian militants carrying out suicide attacks in Israel were supported by foreign powers.

Asked in a cnn interview if he would do everything possible to stop suicide bombers, Arafat said: "No doubt. This is my policy from the beginning. Although, there are some — I don’t want to say their names — some international powers supporting this."

Arafat declined to answer when asked if the foreign powers were Iraq or Iran — which the United States accuses of supporting terrorism. Both countries deny the US charges.

In January, Israel seized a ship in the red sea which it said had been smuggling 50 tonnes of Iranian-funded arms to the Palestinian authority in the Gaza Strip.

Arafat at first denied the charge but under international pressure, a court set up in his Ramallah headquarters last month convicted a Palestinian authority paymaster for complicity.

But on CNN, Arafat again dismissed the smuggling charge.

"Do you think the Iranian Government would give us weapons? when have they given us weapons?" he said. "I ask you a question: Is this ship can pass through the suez canal? never. The Egyptians would not accept it."

Israel accuses Arafat of having links to the militants — a charge he denies — and the Sharon Government and the United States have demanded he acts strongly to halt the attacks.

Palestinians are waging a 19-month-old uprising against Israeli occupation in much of the West Bank and Gaza Strip outside their main towns and refugee camps which had won self-rule under an initial peace process frozen since 2000.

At least 1,349 Palestinians and 474 Israelis have been killed in the violence, marked by Palestinian bombings and ambushes and Israeli Army incursions into self-rule zones. Arafat said that after a leader of the militant Islamic group, Hamas, praised the latest suicide bombing near Tel Aviv which killed 15 people, Palestinian security forces arrested 24 Hamas leaders and members.

He still did not know who was behind that attack, he said.

Arafat was apparently speaking before Israel’s ruling Likud party dealt a further blow to prospects for West Asia peace talks by voting late yesterday against any future establishment of an independent Palestinian state.

He said he thought that Palestinians were close now to establishing their independent state "side-by-side with Israel, with the Israeli Jewish state".

Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat said the Likud vote undermined prospects for a peace agreement, showed the true intentions of Israel and would increase Palestinian frustration.

Arafat said he planned to attend a US-proposed West Asia peace conference if it was held at the level of heads of state. (AGENCIES)

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