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Kansat: the tip of the iceberg
   The Kansat incident that hogged the media headlines for months has ended at least for now following an agreement reached last Sunday between the government and the leaders of the Kansat movement. The government agreed to accept almost all the demands of the protesting people of Kansat and undertook to implement them in a month’s time. The victorious leaders of the Kansat movement – as a matter of fact, it was an uprising – warned the government that if the agreement was not implemented as agreed to, they will go back to movement again.
   What happened at Kansat was not very complicated. After months of irregular power supply and repeated requests for improvement by the Kansat residents to the managers of the local Pally Bidyut Samity (PBS) – the local agents of the Rural Electricity Board (REB) – were ignored, the agitated Kansat residents protested and in the process manhandled some of the PBS employees. The incident could have been nipped in the bud if the local administration was responsive to the public demand and mindful of its own responsibility. However, the arrogance of power apparently blinded the bosses of local administration and allegedly aided by the local ruling alliance M.P., applied all the coercive measures at its disposal to suppress the movement. It backfired as the people stood up to fight for their just cause. Deaths and destruction followed for weeks and months and a visibly shaky administration finally backtracked and compromised.
   The government in Dhaka made a blunder by ignoring when it was brewing and leaving the party’s local and regional leaders to tackle the Kansat agitation. As a result more force was applied, more people were killed and wounded by police firing and the situation went out of total control. Ruling BNP’s local MP for Kansat and Rajshahi City Mayor, who is also an MP and minister in charge of Chapainawabganj district were allegedly responsible for the deterioration of the Kansat situation. The administration’s arrogance has resulted in the death of 20 people and scores of injury and dozens of arrests, not to speak of destruction of properties. Both the MPs have proved their immaturity in handling such a predictable situation and brought ignominy for the BNP-led four-party government.
   Unfortunately for this government, the administration did not learn any lesson from the mistakes of the Kansat incident. The day the local electronic and print media was awash with the agreement reached between the government and the leaders of Kansat movement, the policemen on duty at the Chittagong stadium to ensure that the second test cricket match between the host Bangladesh and the world champion Australia is held peacefully, beaten up some of the newsmen mercilessly who went there to cover the event on flimsy ground. What followed next is now history and needs no further elaboration in this Diary.
   
   A wake up call
   Analysts tend to believe quite firmly that the way the government has been rather mismanaging its troubled power sector and failed to implement any of the proposed new power generating plants, incidents like that of Kansat should have taken place much earlier. It is not that the concerned officials or the minister were not aware of what was happening in their ministry. With the information available now from various sources within the government, it seems that they have deliberately chosen to create such an anomalous situation. No other available explanation could possibly justify such bizarre developments.
   For example, media reports quoting Rural Electricity Board sources claim that during the last almost five years, REB has doubled the number of its consumers from 15 million to 30 million, transforming it as the country’s single largest customer of electricity in the country. According to REB sources as quoted in the media, its normal consumption has now reached about 1,900mw but it is managing to get anything between 500mw and 600 mw of electricity per day from PDB. So REB or for that matter the PBSs who are actually working in the field, cannot satisfy their customers’ need and have to literally face the music.
   What did the power ministry do during this intervening period to match not only the REB network expansion but also to meet the growing demand of industrialization? It totally failed to implement any of the proposals for new power generating plants that were in the pipeline. Two of those new power plants with a capacity to produce 450mw each were cancelled at the last moment even after getting them sanctioned by the government and the World Bank and a few other international agencies agreed to partially fund the project in the private sector. The ministry gave no meaningful explanation for the cancellation.
   REB was established in this country in 1978 with assistance from the US AID to expedite the government’s rural electrification programme. Over the years, REB has done a good job and rightfully earned a rare reputation amongst the donor community of being a doer in Bangladesh. The rapid expansion of REB network – 80,000 kilometres of power distribution line – in the last five years was, in fact, was a much faster growth than it has achieved in the past and for that the concerned officials should be congratulated. But the power ministry under which the REB functions have failed to match REB’s record by correspondingly expanding the country’s power generation capacity. This has created a grave mismatch in demand and supply of power in this country and the Kansat incident is an offshoot of that mismatch. This could have happened anywhere in the country and unless the power ministry, which tends to suffer from a lot of complacency, wants to avoid a real catastrophe, should pull up its socks and become ready to quickly sort out if any such problem breaks out.
   
   Why REB succeeded?
   Knowledgeable sources aware of different government ministry’s inability to use up the budget allocations in due time sheepishly question what is the secret of REB for achieving so much within such a short period? Reports say REB spends about Tk. 4 to Tk. 5 billion (Tk. 400 to 500 crore) annually for its expansion of power distribution line. Sceptics suggest that companies having connections with the coalition government are supplying some of the expensive materials that are being used by REB for the power distribution network. Materials being used are locally manufactured such as concrete poles and transformers are more expensive than imported wooden poles and transformers. While concrete pole lasts much longer than the wooden ones, the same cannot be said about the imported transformers.
   The Pally Bidyut Samity (PBS) is the local cooperative body that gets the REB agency to manage both distribution of power and collection of bills from the consumers of its defined area. It borrows fund from REB for developing the system and pays back in five years. Currently, REB has a total of 70 PBSs and while majority of them are still loosing money in running their affairs, many others are making money. One argument is that if the costs of developing the power distribution network could be reduced by using imported wooden poles and transformers, the liability of the PBSs would have been correspondingly reduced.
   Currently, only about 30 per cent of the country is being provided with electricity with of course the usual frequent interruptions. The government has a programme of providing power to all by 2020 or within the next 14 years time. Keeping this in mind the REB has been developing its own distribution network. However, the way the government is tackling the mismatch in the demand and supply of power in the country at the moment, it appears that the plan to provide electricity to all by 2020 will remain a mere pipedream.

Cheney, the Neocons and China
   Robert Dreyfuss’ article ‘Vice Squad,’ about the Office of the Vice President in the American Prospect) is the best piece I’ve seen in awhile on the neoconservatives and their persistent influence in the Bush Administration. But it also places the neocons’ Middle East preoccupation in wider perspective.
   Dreyfuss notes that the OVP is ‘very difficult for journalists to penetrate’ because of its extraordinary, unprecedented degree of secrecy. Even so, ‘a Prospect investigation shows that the key to Cheney’s influence lies with the corps of hard-line acolytes he assembled in 2001. They serve not only as his eyes and ears, monitoring a federal bureaucracy that resists many of Cheney’s pet initiatives, but sometimes serve as his fists, too, when the man from Wyoming feels that the passive-aggressive bureaucrats need bullying.’
   Among key staff members, Dreyfuss lists the disgraced Lewis ‘Scooter’ Libby, formerly Cheney’s chief of staff and top national security adviser; current top security adviser John Hannah; current chief of staff David Addington; national security advisers Eric Edelman and Victoria Nuland (wife of neocon heavy Robert Kagan); Middle East specialists William J. Luti, and David Wurmser; and Asia hands Stephen Yates and Samantha Ravich. He also lists an array of technocrats, lobbyists, domestic policy gurus and communications directors. (For an official enjoying about 18% approval, Cheney has a large PR staff.)
   Dreyfuss describes how on numerous occasions one of Cheney’s ‘acolytes’ has intervened to overturn decisions made by the State Department, CIA or other government bodies to produce the result Cheney desires. For example, in February 2005 King Abdullah of Jordan on a Washington visit urged the U.S. to bolster Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, the Fatah leader, to counter the power of the new popularly elected Hamas administration. The State Department was inclined to agree, but Hannah stepped in, arguing Cheney’s view that the entire Palestinian Authority was now irrelevant. (Washington has since cut nearly all ties to the Palestinian Authority.)
   Cheney consistently gets his way, controlling what information reaches President Bush, who has little interest in details. An ‘insider deeply involved in U.S. policy toward North Korea’ described the decision-making process. ‘The president is given only the most basic notions about the Korea issue. They tell him, ‘Above South Korea is a country called North Korea. It is an evil regime.’ … So that translates into a presidential decision: Why enter into any agreement with an evil regime?’
   Lawrence Wilkerson has referred to the Vice President’s office as the centre of a ‘cabal’ that pressed for war on Iraq and built the case by cherry-picked dubious intelligence. That it’s a powerful nest of neoconservatives intent on ‘regime change’ in Syria and Iran is no news. That the simple-minded, bellicose president leans on Cheney for advice and thereby empowers an alliance of aggressive nationalists and neoconservatives to set foreign policy is no news either. But Dreyfuss sheds new light on Cheney’s perception of the world, and the role that China plays within it.
   Cheney’s leading China specialist, Stephen Yates, and several other staffers (including Libby) worked for California Congressman Christopher Cox in the 1990s during the investigation into Chinese political influence in the US that followed allegations of Beijing contributions to the Clinton-Gore presidential campaign. The long report they produced maintains that China is a looming threat and rival, with its rapacious need for Middle East oil and designs on Taiwan. Charles W. Freeman, a former US ambassador to China who has known him many years says that Yates, as well as neocons Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, formerly top officials in Donald Rumsfeld’s Defence Department, ‘all [see] China as the solution to ‘enemy deprivation syndrome.’’ (You need some unifying enemy after the collapse of the Soviet Union.)
   I’ve hesitated about whether to apply the word ‘neoconservative’ to persons like Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld. I tend to follow the Christian Science Monitor list. Paul Wolfowitz, Libby, Douglas Feith, Richard Perle, Richard Bolton, and Elliott Abrams are intellectuals absorbed in the project of using U.S. military power to remake the Middle East to improve Israel’s long-term security interests. (Hannah, David Wurmser, Eric Edelman, and other White House staffers not on the Monitor’s dated list also fall into this category.) Ultimate decision-makers Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld on the other hand are sometimes referred to as ‘aggressive nationalists.’ They are no doubt Christian Zionists, but are probably most interested in transforming the ‘Greater Middle East’ in the interests of corporate America in an increasingly competitive world. They’re probably more concerned about the geopolitics of oil and the placement of ‘enduring’ military bases to ‘protect U.S. interests’ than the fate of Israel.
   Dreyfuss’ article suggests that Cheney (and thus, the administration) sees China as the biggest long-term threat to those interests. If conflict with China is inevitable, it makes sense to have US bases in Afghanistan, Kyrgyzstan, Iraq and maybe Iran and Syria. If China is dependent on Middle East oil, it makes sense for the US to be able to control how and where it flows from the Caspian Sea and Persian Gulf oil fields. It makes sense to cultivate an alliance with India, risking the accusation of nuclear hypocrisy in doing so. It makes sense to ratchet up tensions on the Korean Peninsula, by linking North Korea to Iran and Iraq, calling it ‘evil,’ dismissing South Korea’s ‘sunshine diplomacy’ efforts and encouraging Japan to take a hard line towards Pyongyang. It makes sense to get Tokyo to declare, for the first time, that the security of the Taiwan Straights is of common concern to it and Washington. It makes sense to regain a strategic toehold in the Philippines, in the name of the War on Terror, and to vilify the growing Filipino Maoist movement. It makes sense for a man like Cheney, who decided on Bush’s staff in late 2000, to seed the cabinet with strategically-placed neocons who have a vision of a new Middle East. Because (1) that vision fits in perfectly with the broader New World Order and US plans to contain China, and (2) the neocons as a coordinated ‘persuasion’ if not movement, with their fingers in a dozen right-wing think tanks, and the Israel Lobby including its Christian Right component, and the academic community, are well-placed to serve as what Dreyfuss calls ‘acolytes.’
   They are equipped with a philosophical outlook that justifies the use of hyped, imagined threats to unite the masses behind rulers’ objectives and ambitions, to suppress dissent and control through fear. They’re inclined to identify each new target as ‘a new Hitler,’ and to justify their actions as ‘an answer to the Holocaust.’
   They have served Cheney well, and he them so far. They’re all being exposed, maybe weakened. But as Dreyfuss states at the end of his article, ‘The true measure of how powerful the vice president’s office remains today is whether the United States chooses to confront Iran and Syria or to seek diplomatic solutions. For the moment, at least, the war party led by Dick Cheney remains in ascendancy.’
   CounterPunch, April 20, 2006 . Gary Leupp is Professor of History at Tufts University, and Adjunct Professor of Comparative Religion

The fallout from Chernobyl, the world’s worst nuclear accident, will be 10 times more deadly than previously thought and will cause almost 100,000 people to die from cancer in coming years, Greenpeace says.
   Twenty years after Chernobyl’s fourth reactor exploded, sending a radiation-lined cloud into the atmosphere, the green, anti-nuclear campaign group alleged that the human consequences of the disaster have been woefully and deliberately underestimated.
   Ukrainian children suffering from cancer, listen to music at the children’s hospital in Kiev Tuesday, April 18, 2006. Greenpeace said Tuesday in a new report that more than 90,000 people were likely to die of cancers caused by radiation from the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, countering a United Nations report that predicted the death toll would be around 4,000. The differing conclusions underline the contentious uncertainty that remains about the health effects of the world’s worst nuclear accident as its 20th anniversary approaches. The world will mark the 20th anniversary this month of the explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, which sent a radioactive cloud across Europe. (AP Photo/Oded Balilty)
   It accused the pro-nuclear lobby of systematically trying to play down the scale of the tragedy for cynical public relations purposes. As the 20th anniversary of the accident looms, the truth about how many people have fallen ill or died as a result of the radiation leak has become the subject of a fierce debate between those who support nuclear power and those who don’t. It is not an idle academic debate - establishing how serious Chernobyl really was has taken on cardinal political importance as the UK and continental Europe consider commissioning a new generation of nuclear reactors to compensate for dwindling oil and gas stocks.
   With its new report Greenpeace became the latest interest group to enter the fray. It cited demographic data which showed that some 200,000 people appear to have already died in Ukraine, Belarus and Russia, the area most heavily contaminated, as a direct result of the 1986 Soviet-era accident. The total number of directly attributable cancer cases in that region was set to soar to 270,000, it added, of which 93,000 would be fatal.
   Greenpeace said its findings proved that nuclear energy was too dangerous and should be shelved. ‘Each one of these statistics has a face,’ it noted grimly. The accident occurred when an unnecessary experiment to test the reactor’s performance went badly wrong and it exploded. Greenpeace said it was a lesson the world should not forget.
   ‘The [emissions] from this one reactor exceeded the radioactive contamination by the nuclear weapons used at Hiroshima and Nagasaki by one hundred times. It has become clear that one nuclear reactor can contaminate half the Earth.’
   The group’s findings sharply contradicted those in a report compiled by various United Nations agencies (including the International Atomic Energy Agency) and the World Bank released in September. It claimed the disaster would ultimately claim the lives of between 4,000 and 9,000 people and said that, although serious, its impact had been vastly exaggerated.
   It said that fewer than 50 deaths could be directly attributable to the accident so far, that people who contract thyroid cancer have a 99 per cent survival rate, and that many of those who have died in the contaminated area (which has a population of about five million) were killed by lifestyle diseases caused by drinking and smoking.
   Controversially, it spoke of ‘persistent myths and misperceptions about the threat of radiation’. Dr Michael Repacholi, the coordinator of the WHO’s radiation and environmental health unit, said: ‘The health effects of the accident were potentially horrific, but when you add them up using validated conclusions from good science, the public health effects were not nearly as substantial as had at first been feared.’
   Vladimir Chuprov of Greenpeace Russia said yesterday that the pro-nuclear lobby had hijacked the UN’s report to ‘whitewash’ the truth about Chernobyl. That, he said, was why Greenpeace needed to issue its own report compiled by 52 scientists.
   Establishing how serious Chernobyl was has been made harder by the fact that the 18-mile exclusion zone around the reactor in modern-day Ukraine has become a vibrant unplanned nature reserve, prompting some to say that the accident does not seem to have been as bad as first thought.
   Independent / UK, April 19, 2006