When I left Germany 11 years ago I spent the last night at my Grandfather’s. He lived near Frankfurt and my flight left early in the morning, so he was going to drive me to the airport. My grandfather was of old Prussian stock, stubborn, proud and very conservative. I had never heard him talk much about the war; It was very clear he was very bitter about it. Years ago, my mom told me, he had written down his war experiences, but one night, in a fit of depression, he burned the papers.

So that night, in 1994, I was very surprised when, over a bottle of Bergsträsser wine, he began talking about the war. He reminisced about his adventures in arctic Norway, the march on Paris, the brutal east front and the heat of North Africa. He told me about run-ins with the SS he had had. He spoke of the Nazis with what seemed genuine disgust. He complained that those young, reckless SS officers had no respect for the values of the German Reichswehr, he said he was committed to. And he spoke of the horror of war, and the death and destruction the Reichswehr and the other armies spread across Europe.

My Grandfather’s war stories that night may have been shaky on historical accuracy, but they were an honest reflection of this old man’s desire, almost 50 years after the German surrender, to find some value, some meaning in this horrible experience. And maybe even to extract some honor or dignity from the defeat. This was the voice of an old man who was wallowing in self-pity, who never learned to move forward, never learned from the trauma in his life, and pass on lessons from his experience to a new generation. But it was also the voice of a generation buried under historical shame, crushing defeat and personal tragedy.

Read the rest of this entry »

S&P downgraded to “junk” status two of the largest automakers in the world, Ford and General Motors, because these companies have been thoroughly mismanaged:

… decades of management miscues … led Standard & Poor’s yesterday to cut the credit ratings of both the world’s largest car maker and Ford Motor Co. to junk-bond status for the first time. GM and Ford, once icons of American manufacturing, have blundered over issues ranging from design, vehicle size and fuel economy to union contracts and meeting the challenge from rivals such as Japan’s Toyota.

“They have a pretty bad track record on guessing the market,” says Thomas Stallkamp, 58, who was president of Chrysler Corp. before it was acquired by Daimler-Benz AG in 1998 and is now a partner at the New York buyout firm Ripplewood Holdings LLC. “They went with the sure bet, and the market moved around them.”
GM, Ford Stumbled to Junk on Designs, Unions, Japan’s Challenge – Bloomberg.com

Their marketing departments have brainwashed many Americans into a bigger-is-better attitude on personal transportation. They completely ignored the fact that we will run out of oil eventually. Now it is becoming increasingly clear that we will run out of oil sooner, rather than later, and we might be hitting world-wide peak oil before 2010. Even the heavily subsidized gas prices in the US are steadily increasing. With the gas price over $2.20/Gallon (55 cents/liter), SUVs are becoming a much less popular choice, despite the slick, macho ads on cable TV.

So the dino-fuel-guzzling SUV’s follow the fate of the dinosaurs, and they are dragging down the greedy, short-sighted companies that created them:

A broad, sustained, long-term strategy was missing, says Ian Beavis, 52, a former Ford marketing manager who launched the Lincoln Navigator SUV in 1997 and is now a consultant at the Shop LLC, a marketing firm in Long Beach, California.

“Short-term profits, that’s all that was driving it,” he says. “Everyone looked at how much they were making on Navigators and Expeditions and said, `Oh, my goodness, we can make more of this.”’

And why are short-term profits all they care about? Because the executive “compensation packages” are tied to short-term goals. The focus on the next quarterly earnings statement in corporate America has spawned some of the worst corporate scandals in history, and it has laid the groundwork for massive economic collapse, once we hit peak oil.

A few reports have emerged that paint a dire picture of the escalating violence in south-west Togo. Particularly the mountainous area known as the Plateaux, roughly between Kpalimé, 80 miles/120KM north of Lomé, to Atakpamé, 110 miles/170KM north of Lomé. Thomas Hofnung at the French Libération spoke by phone with a reporter in the regional center Kpalimé, who describes atrocities committed by the military as well as by militant opposition supporters. He reports that a gendarmerie official in Adéta (north of Kpalimé) had been beheaded, and that five civilians were killed in retaliation.

Agbessi told me last night that he called friends in that region, who confirm these reports and paint an even worse picture. They report that the military arrested teachers and clergy, and rounded up a number of kids at a High School. Several people he knows had to flee or hide, for fear they might be arrested.

The increasing level of violence in that part of the country, and the descriptions of the killings, lead me to believe that the local, traditional militias known as Asafo may have been mobilized. During the strike of 1990, these militias killed or chased out all government representatives in the area and took over. These guys are fascinating and scary. Even the soldiers are scared of them. The bloodshot eyes in the painted face of an “active” Asafo stare at you from a corner of the human soul that few of us can bear to face.

As painful as it is … remember!

The hollow wail of the traditional Jewish shofar cut through the air of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi death camp in southern Poland on Thursday, signaling the start of a huge march in memory of the Holocaust.

Some 20,000 people from around the world, Jews and non-Jews, set off under grey skies on Thursday to make their way from the main camp to Birkenau, where at least 1.1 million men, women and children, most of them Jews, were exterminated by the Nazis.
March of Living Marks Holocaust – Deutsche Welle

[NOTE: this was originally posted on Global Voices Online, a project at the Berkman Center at Harvard. Check out their daily roundups of blogs across the globe. Global Voices is a fantastic resource, if you’re interested in world wide blogging.]

By Jurgen and Agbessi .

It’s official: Faure Gnassingbe has inherited the family business from his daddy, Gnassingbe Eyadema: ACME Dictators Inc. – Exploiting Togo since 1967. Like father, like son, Faure was installed by a military coup on Feb. 6, the day after Eyadema died. After some international pressure he pulled back and performed a perfect bait-and-switch maneuver. He retreated, called elections, and then used the de-facto single-party state apparatus to pull off an Eyadema-style fake election, complete with stolen ballot boxes, army raids on opposition offices and fire bombed cultural centers. Dad would be proud.

So what is really going on in Togo? Don’t ask the journalists. The BBC, AFP and Reuters all reported reliably about the crisis. But they provide very little background. The regional media are mostly concerned about the crisis spilling into the neighboring countries. The Togolese media are too close to the fire for clear-headed analysis. The ruling RPT’s rag just sings the Eyadema – uh, I mean Faure – song. The opposition’s LeTogolais has more depth, but still tows their party line.

Read the rest of this entry »

Hardly surprising: Togo’s constitutional court, anointed by the the ruling RPT, announced that the the RPT’s “candidate” Faure Gnassingbe will be Togo’s new ruler:

The opposition, desperate for change after 38 years of rule by Gnassingbe’s father, refused to concede defeat on Tuesday.

“The results are unacceptable, we are going to mobilise the population because we have no other option,” Jean-Pierre Fabre, leader of the main UFC opposition party, told IRIN. “Our only option is to resist by all the means available to us constitutionally.”
Father-son transition made official as thousands continue to flee – Reuters Alertnet, 03 May 2005

So Baby Eyadema is going to take over the family business. The billions of dollars Eyadema squeezed out of this poor, troubled country for his clan apparently are not enough.

The military is brutally terrorizing the civilian population in Togo and thousands are fleeing to Benin and Ghana.

The UN refugee agency (UNHCR) said that more than 9,000 refugees had been registered in Benin and around 7,500 in Ghana. Many of the most recent arrivals were from Be, said Rafik Saidi, the agency’s regional representative.

Many of the refugees claimed they were harassed by security forces in Togo and some were suffering from bullet wounds.

The government last week put the casualty toll at 22 but a spokesman for the six-party opposition coalition, Yawovi Agboyibo, said this weekend that 106 people had died and hundreds had been injured.

At the offices of Togo’s Human Rights League, one man told IRIN that his brother had been shot dead at 10 p.m. on Sunday “by men in fatigues”. His wife and four children were beaten up so badly that one daughter was in hospital and his 14-year-old son could no longer see.

“We don’t know why, they said nothing. They just stormed into the house. Now my brother is in the morgue,” said the resident of the Lome suburb of Baguida, who did not want to be identified.
TOGO: More than 16,500 flee as edgy Lome awaits official poll results – IRIN, 2 May 2005

It would appear as if the military is intentionally stirring up this conflict ahead of the announcement of the official “election” results. The RPT must love all the footage on CNN and the BBC of screaming opposition protesters with burning barricades in the background. That way they can be seen as “restoring order” when they shoot unarmed civilians.

Most of the day I was busy translating Agbessi’s recent posts, but here is some miscellaneous stuff I recently discovered and found interesting:

KONONO No1 – wow, these guys rock! L’Ambience!

Technorati Watch Lists as RSS feed in Mozilla Thunderbird!

The Google Toolbar 3 Beta (IE-only) has a spellcheck feature that checks web forms for misspeled words. Great blogging tool! The controversial autolink feature is easily turned off in the options.
(via smallegan)
More? Here you are: PRO and CON.

Enjoy!

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was a troublemaker, but torching a Goethe Institute goes too far:

A German cultural centre has been gutted in an arson attack in the Togo capital, Lome, in the latest outbreak of violence after disputed elections.

The early morning attack by masked men wearing black comes after Togo’s interior minister accused Germany of supporting the opposition.
BBC – German centre firebombed in Togo

After the RPT bludgeoned the opposition in Togo into submission, they are now trying to “get even” with the Germans, who are sheltering Francois Esso Boko, the former Interior Minister. The German Embassy is well-guarded, but the Goethe Institute, a newly renovated German cultural center in downtown Lomé, was obviously vulnerable.

The blaze destroyed 8000 books, a number of computers, a vehicle and gutted the building. The damage is said to be several 100,000 Euro. The Tagesschau has more details (in German). Boy, those RPT thugs sure showed those Germans what they are made of!

This AP photo illustrates the RPT-style democracy in Togo of the last 38 years. Agbessi, over at Au Village has a first hand account of what it was like to be at the receiving end of the soldier’s boots.

What this picture does not show clearly is that the two men are most likely from different ethnic groups in Togo. But whether they are Kabyé or Ewe, they are both getting screwed by the RPT regime – and they both lost the last election.

One very important aspect of the turmoil in Togo is always carefully avoided by the press: the ethnic dimension. Most of the security forces are Kabyé, but in most of the country outside of Kara the Kabyé life in small enclaves. Historically they are farm workers and sharecroppers; They lived and worked on land others owned. Often they were treated miserably, sometimes they were brutalized by the people around them. Under Eyadema, they were recruited into the armed forces and police. Some became the regime’s henchmen. Now they are scared that they will be killed and brutalized if the RPT loses its grip on power, so they are willing and capable of just about anything to keep the RPT in power.

Yet, there always was discontent and grumbling among the rank-an-file and among the Kabyé not directly related to the Gnassingbé clan. When I was in Togo, over ten years ago, I spoke with Kabyé and with soldiers who were tired of Eyadema and his clan. The soldiers were never paid well. The Kabyé outside Pia (Eyadema’s hometown) saw very little benefit from the RPT regime.

The opposition needs to reach out these folks and gain their trust. Pronouncing Akitani president won’t defeat the RPT. The opposition needs to write “Peace” on their banners, not “War” to try to make it credible to their compatriots from all regions of Togo that they will fight for their rights, too. The opposition needs to reassure the Kabyé that they will have representation in a new government and a post-RPT Togo. And most importantly, the opposition needs to reach out to the soldier in the picture above, and tell him that they are fighting for him, too. Because he is getting screwed, too, by the RPT.

The clear winner of the election is the power elite: the Pia-based Gnassingbé clan, the generals, the arms-traders, the French post-colonialists, and the drug mafia. This clique of bloodsuckers has been sucking dry the people of Togo. They profit from death and bloodshed. The violence in the streets plays straight into their hands, because it reinforces the fear and distrust among the Togolese people.

Togo is home to 37 ethnic groups and Togo needs to become a place that makes diversity its strength. Otherwise it won’t much matter who runs the country, because there will always be violence and fear.

With the glaciers melting and the barrel of crude headed to new heights (in April!) the idea of using renewable, lower-emissions fuels has even penetrated the Lifestyles section of our local “paper of record:”

With the average price for a gallon of gas hovering around $2.22 — you could indulge in a vanilla chai for that or buy a pound of chuck roast — it’s no wonder that more North Carolinians are considering used hush puppy grease a viable fuel source.

At least the bottom line is often what sparks interest in the biodiesel movement, which is shooting out tendrils quickly across the state. Chances are greater than ever before that the Volkswagen in the next lane is running on what once bubbled in someone’s Fry Daddy.
Southern fried fuel, Raleigh N&O, Apr 22, 2005

That story was published just a few days after I wrote about my trip to the Biofuels Coop, which caught the attention of the N&O blogwatch. Just a coincidence, I’m sure.

BTW – I cancelled my subscription to the N&O after 8 years, when they ran a front-page story about US soldiers getting baptized 2 days before the start of the invasion of Iraq.

Looks like the opposition in Togo has decided to seek a showdown with the ruling RPT. The unity candidate Bob Akitani announced that, in fact, he won Sunday’s election. Based on information from opposition observers at the polling stations, the opposition claims that it won all districts, except Kara, the home and stronghold of Eyadema’s family and the ruling RPT, LeTogolais reports.

The BBC quotes Akitani:

“We must fight with our lives if necessary,” [Akitani] said, claiming the poll had been rigged in favour of Faure Gnassingbe, the former leader’s son.

The BBC report calls Akitani the loser of Sunday’s poll. Looking at the current situation in Togo, with the leadership on both sides hell-bent on confrontation, it looks more like the Togolese people lost the election.

Reuters spoke to Olympio:

“Lome is burning,” main opposition leader Gilchrist Olympio told Reuters by telephone from Ghana, where he lives in exile. “But the only solution is to come to a political settlement … otherwise we are going right into the abyss.”
Reuters – Apr 26, 2005

Shortly after the RPT announced its victory, “the sky over Lomé was black from the smoke of tires” according to the BBC’s correspondent Elizabeth Blunt.

LeTogolais reports that shortly before the announcement, the military was deployed across the city. The heavily armed soldiers apparently took any excuse to shoot at civilians and brutalize protesters.

« Nous les avons vus arriver par camions entiers et se mettre en place peu avant que les résultats des élections soient annoncés » raconte Laurent AKPOVI, enseignant à Lomé et résident à Nyékonakpoè, un des fiefs de l’opposition dans la capitale togolaise. Lourdement armés et massivement positionnés aux points stratégiques du quartier, les groupes de militaire n’ont pas hésité à tirer à balles réelles aussi bien sur les passants que sur les poches de manifestants qui commençaient par se constituer dès l’annonce des résultats.
LeTogolais – 26/04/2005

Faure, I guess your daddy would be proud of you.

The ruling RPT announces what it calls “provisional election results” declaring victory for its candidate, Faure Gnassingbé, a son of Gnassingbé Eyadema, who ran Togo for 38 years.

The candidate of Togo’s ruling RPT party and son of the former leader has provisionally won Sunday’s presidential election, an election official says.

Faure Gnassingbe got 60% of the vote, said the election commission head.
BBC NEWS – Ruling party ‘wins’ Togo election

As the RPT is in complete control of the election process and has a history of manipulating elections, I doubt that the opposition is going to accept this “victory.” It is now up to the RPT to reach out to the opposition in order to prevent trouble in Togo.

A bit late, but hopefully not too late:

Leaders of Togo’s two main parties have agreed to form a government of national unity following presidential elections marred by violence and claims of fraud.
BBC NEWS – Togo leaders ‘to form coalition’

Presuming that Faure Gnassingbé will assume power, based on yesterday’s tainted election, he will have to move quickly and boldly in building bridges to the opposition. Preferably by including prominent opposition leaders in meaningful positions in a “government of national unity.”

Plasmodium Falciparum is an ancient, accomplished killer on a global scale. It is one of the parasites that cause malaria, the disease that brought the Roman Empire to its knees, killed peasants and popes, and continues to ravage the population of many tropical regions of the world. Only massive use of DDT in the 1950s eradicated malaria from most of Europe and North America. Yet the disease still claims one million lives every year:

There are at least 300 million acute cases of malaria each year globally, resulting in more than a million deaths. Around 90% of these deaths occur in Africa, mostly in young children. Malaria is Africa’s leading cause of under-five mortality (20%) and constitutes 10% of the continent’s overall disease burden. It accounts for 40% of public health expenditure, 30-50% of inpatient admissions, and up to 50% of outpatient visits in areas with high malaria transmission.
WHO/RBM Infosheet

United Nations Decade to Roll Back Malaria initiative has declared April 25 Africa Malaria Day to raise awareness of this global killer.

One problem with malaria is its high correlation with poverty. It mostly impacts poor, and often unstable countries, and within those countries, mostly the poorer populations. So there is not much money to be made developing new, fancy drugs.

Read the rest of this entry »

This looks like a last-ditch effort of the African Union to pull Togo away from the abyss of civil war: The Nigerian president and AU president Olusegun Obasanjo met individually with Faure Gnasignbé and Togolese opposition leader Gilchrist Olympio in Abuja today, reports republicoftogo.com (offical Togolese government site).

[UPDATE: the BBC also mentions the meetings in Abuja.]

Not good:

Armed men have raided the headquarters of Togo’s opposition, shortly before presidential election polls closed.

The attackers, some in military uniform, took computers which the opposition was planning to use to collate results from the day’s polling.
Raid overshadows Togo elections, BBC, 24 April, 2005

I guess the RPT is worried about the results …

Akitani has already denounced the election as marred with fraud.

[UPDATE: Voice of America and Agence France Presse report several serious injuries and at least three deaths following violent incidents after the polls closed.]

Voters in Togo are flocking to the polling stations today for a stark choice under difficult conditions. The unity candidate for the opposition, Bob Akitani, is facing off against the frontman of the ruling RPT, Faure Gnassingbé, the son of the late strongman of Togo, Gnassingbe Eyadema.

After weeks of turmoil and violent clashes between the militants of the RPT and the opposition, this election already has one loser: the ECOWAS/CEDEAO. After Faure was installed by the military after Eyadema’s death, they intervened vigorously and forced Faure and the generals to back down. However, the ECOWAS accepted Abass Bonfoh as the interim head of state, and Bonfoh was just as illegitimate as Faure.

More recently, opposition leaders, and the subsequently sacked Interior Minister François Esso Boko warned that this election should be postponed, because of the serious potential for it to tear the country apart, and to drag the country into civil war. The opposition is unlikely to accept any unfavorable result, as every agency involved in running the election is stocked with RPT agents, and the country has a decade-long history of rigged elections that kept Eyadema in power.

Considering the conditions, the ECOWAS should have forced the Bonfoh administration to postpone the election and helped the country prepare conditions for elections that both sides can accept. As it is, the ECOWAS took the path of least resistance, and showed off its inability to provide meaningful leadership in West Africa.

No matter what the election results will be, Togo has difficult times ahead. The opposition appears to be unprepared to accept a repeat of past “elections” and let the RPT cling to power. Should, by some miracle, the opposition win, its leaders will have to face an entrenched power elite of army brass and the family of Eyadema, rich and powerful from decades of sucking the country dry. Either scenario, I’m afraid, will play itself out on the backs of the hard-working people of Togo.

Togo closed its borders Friday in preparation for the elections on Sunday. Hours before, the Interior minister François Esso Boko called for a postponement of the “suicidal electoral process” during a 2 AM meeting with foreign diplomats and the press.

While the RPT is deriding Boko as having gone crazy, the opposition has put on the war paint. As bizarre as the circumstances of Boko’s announcement were, he was certainly closely involved in the election preparations and knows what is going on, as Olivier Bocco points out:

Le ministre togolais de l’intérieur sait de quoi il parle, puisque c’est son ministère qui a la haute main sur l’administration électorale. Il sait de quoi il parle puisque, dans cette matière, les archives du ministère, si elles existent, doivent être fort documentées et instructives. Il vaut mieux tard que jamais, dit-on ! – LeTogolais.com

The RPT also accuses Boko of angling for a job in a new government, which is laughable, because as the Interior Minister he most certainly was involved in the rigging of the elections to prevent a new government. So his best chance at job security would have been to shut up and help rig the vote. But he decided to speak out, knowing, I’m sure, that he was ending his political career and possibly putting his life in danger.

The fuse is lit in Togo, and Boko’s announcement shows that the RPT leaders are fully aware that they are playing with fire. It would seem that they figure that unrest and violence are likely going to play out in their favor. And the opposition, for its part, does not seem inclined to accept another defeat in a rigged contest lying down.