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According to a new report, ‘South Africa’s discarded people’, by the Centre for Development Enterprise (CDE), thousands of people throughout this country are living the same way as they did when the political system of racial segregation and uneven economic development was legal.

"Displaced urban settlements are not towns in the conventional sense," says Ann Bernstein of CDE. "They lack commercial, industrial and other economic activities associated with urban development."

While in other countries people earning low incomes tend to live near their areas of work, the reverse is often true in South Africa. "The whole intention of the Apartheid system was to keep black people out of the cities," says Bernstein.

The result is a scattering of more than 60 such settlements housing at least ten percent of South Africa’s 40.6 million people mainly in or near what were the former black homelands.

Winterveld, about 40 km North of Pretoria is one such classic case of Apartheid planning. Here, the majority of the 220,000 people live in free standing shacks in a poorly serviced sprawling wasteland that was designed during the 1960s to direct black settlement away from Pretoria.

People in Winterveld who do work, must travel daily to Pretoria. Because there are no nearby industries, unemployment runs at more than 43 per cent, and local Government does not function properly in Winterveld.

"There is nothing here for us and when my son finishes school next year, we are moving to Pretoria," says Winterveld resident 48-year-old Ben Mmatli who wakes up at 4 a.m. each morning to go to work in a suburb in Pretoria. "I have been doing this for most of my life. I am tired now."

Mmatli moved to Winterveld at the height of Apartheid as a young boy with his parents who were forcibly removed from Pretoria to allow for the development of White Suburbia. He, like more than 40 percent of the inhabitants of Winterveld featured in the CDE report, want out.

The African National Congress-led Government has decided to upgrade the settlement. But Bernstein says this "is good money being thrown after bad decisions taken during Apartheid."

What to do with such settlements is only one of several policy challenges facing the new Government as it tries to redistribute scarce national funding. By 1990, for instance, the then Government was spending 175 million dollars annually to subsidise buses.

Industries that were heavily subsidised by the apartheid Government to locate near black settlements have since pulled out as subsidies dried up, because it was unprofitable to operate in the middle of nowhere.

"People living here are living below the average socio- economic levels in national terms," says Jeff McCarthy one of the researchers who compiled the CDE report. "This is because 100 percent of these people are black. Race is still the primary determinant of the quality of life in South Africa."

The exact number of such settlements is unknown. So is the exact number of people living in them.

"We have to unbundle the legacies of Apartheid," agrees Transport Minister Mac Maharaj. He, however, cautions against wholesale acceptance of the research findings, saying more public debate should be generated.

In the former homeland of Kwandebele, Natal province, for instance, the majority of the people living there do not want to move, Maharaj says. Hence, the Government has to plan to improve settlements around there.

"If we fail to change people’s lives, then our policies are not worth the paper they are written on," says Maharaj.

The report underlines one of the basic problems facing development workers in South Africa — a dearth of accurate statistics and knowledge on what has been happening in communities below the surface of race politics.

"The report serves as a reminder of the point that human settlement normally does and should follow economic forces and not vice versa," says Bernstein. (IPS)

The two houses of the US Congress — the senate and the house of representatives — had earlier approved the legislation.

"Work will now proceed for construction of the memorial, a centrepiece of which will be a statute of Mahatma Gandhi," according to a press release of the Indian Embassy. (UNI)

Talking to the Saudi newspersons accompanying Crown Prince Abdullah in Lahore yesterday, Mr Sharif said,"there are no terrorists in Pakistan who operate from here against any other country."

On the contrary, he said, Pakistan itself had been a victim of terrorism.

Replying to a question about neighbouring Afghanistan, he said, "it was very unfortunate that whatever happens there affects us as well and there is no other neighbouring country as much adversely affected by events taking place in another country, as Pakistan."

Mr Sharif said, "as Afghanistan is a land-locked country, its people use routes in Pakistan. However, he assured that terrorist activities would not be allowed through this conduit. We stood for the elimination of any form of terrorism from the soil of Afghanistan," he added.

Mr Sharif said, "we want stability in afghanistan because it is its instability which directly affects us."

Referring to the talks of UN representative with Pakistani and Afghan leaders, he said, "the talks have been very useful and constructive." (UNI)

Sanctions are a double-edged weapon and these may cause a loss for American Department decides to embargo a component on the pretext of it being of dual-use, importers would turn to America’s competitors.

These sanctions send a wrong signal. They will make Indian firms wary of opting for US projects because of the US export restrictions and will create a bias in favour of European and Japanese firms, the ambassador said.

The Clinton administration is currently preparing a list of companies for continuation of sanctions for dual-use items and according to US under secretary of commerce William Reinsch, the list would contain around 20 major entities in India and Pakistan.

The indirect costs of the embargo (on dual-use items) will be very severe because the small amount of US hi-tech dual-use equipment barred could cripple huge projects, Chandra said. (PTI)

That doesn’t mean historians have overlooked voyages by women explorers. For the most part, researchers say, the explanation is much more mundane: women through history moved to their mates’ communities to start families.

Over thousands of years, these short migrations apparently enabled women’s genes get around more than men’s, said researcher Mark Seielstad.

Seielstad, a fellow in the programme for population genetics at the Harvard School of Public Health, did the work with L. Luca Cavalli-Sforza and Eric Minch at the Stanford University School of Medicine. Their findings were published in the November issue of the journal nature genetics.

Another genetics expert said he suspects there’s more to the story.

The study used data on modern-day genes. It looked for the effects of men and women moving away from their native communities in ancient times and producing children somewhere else.

It relied on the fact that the Y chromosome is passed on only by fathers. In contrast, genetic material called Mitochondrial DNA, or NTDNA, is passed along only by mothers.

Both kinds of genetic material contain tiny variations that can be tracked in different populations. The more a specific variation is confined to a particular population, the less chance it has had to spread elsewhere through human migration.

The researchers found that U chromosome variations tended to be much more localized than MTDNA variations a sign that men weren’t migrating as much as women. The difference showed up when different populations on a single continent were compared, as well as in comparisons between inhabited continents.

The biggest reason is probably women moving to their husbands’ communities to start families, the researchers said. A smaller factor might be men with multiple wives, which would also suppress variation in Y chromosomes, but very few men have been able to afford that arrangement, the researchers said.

Seielstad said he and colleagues weren’t surprised by the result, because the idea of women moving to their husbands’ community is so common across cultures.

Michael hammer, a University of Arizona Geneticist, said that Seielstad’s conclusions make sense but that his own work suggests an additional twist.

Hammer’s genetic evidence agrees that women may have migrated more than men within continents. But between continents, it appears that occasional long-distance migrations by men have let them spread their genes more than women, he said. (AP)

Who applies sanction against the US? He asked an international gathering while speaking at a symposium sponsored by economists allied for arms reduction here.

In his key-note address, Gujral admired Japan’s commitment to nuclear non-proliferation but asked heter Japan would have remained a non-nuclear power had it not enjoyed protection of American nuclear weapons.

Charging the recognised nuclear weapon states with being dishonest in their profession of complete disarmament, Gujral said if this trend persisted, more countries might carry out nuclear explosions.

The restraint (by India not to conduct nuclear tests) could not have gone forever without loud and clear demonstration by the nuclear powers that they were honestly and truly moving towards complete nuclear disarmament, Gujral said in his key-note speech.

Such demonstration failed to come. The result was the Indian and Pakistani nuclear tests in May of which, he was neither proud nor ashamed but sad. (PTI)

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