Auteur/autrice : Heidi Barathieu-Brun

Udo Ulfkotte – Germany

Linked with THE WORLD – upside down.

Udo Ulfkotte (born 20 January 1960), in Lippstadt, Germany is a professor and journalist, renowned as a security and intelligence services expert, as well as a critic of Islamic extremism. His was formerly an editor for one of Germany’s main dailies, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ).

Dr. Ulfkotte studied jurisprudence and politics at Freiburg and London. He was an advisor to the Kohl government. Between 1986-1998, Ulfkotte lived predominantly in the Islamic states of Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Oman, United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Jordan. (full text about his work).

He says: ”Islam is slowly but surely taking a grip on the European culture, … traditional values, customs and judicial standards are gradually customized to meet Muslim requirements ». (full text).

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Udo Ulfkotte – Germany

He says also: « On the Interneht, Islamists celebrated the statements of the Office of the Prosecution in Frankfurt . Most of the media joined them in their triumph. Suddely I was a criminal. Old friends started avoiding me, neighbors started to refuse to accept packages for a “criminal”, and my wife lost her means of income. A picture of her offices from the outside appeared in a yellow-journalism newspaper and made sure that the clients of her accounting service were warned not to do business with a “criminal”. As her lease ran for another 12 months, my wife had to pay rent for a full year without income from clients, collateral damage from the German security authorities. At the same time, Lueneburg Universitry had decided to give me a full professorship. Now I have to wait for the criminal charges against me to be dismissed ». (full long text).

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Champa Devi Shukla – India

Linked with Rashida Bee – India.

She is one of the 1000 women proposed for the Nobel Peace Price 2005.

Champa Devi Shukla has been a leading figure in the international campaign seeking justice for the survivors of the 1984 Union Carbide Gas Tragedy in Bhopal. Starting with protests and rallies in India, Champa took her fight against Union Carbide Company (UCC) and its partner, Dow Chemicals, to the streets of New York and other American cities. Dow Chemicals is today fighting a series of cases filed by Champa and other protesters.

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Champa Devi Shukla – India

Champa was awarded the 2004 Goldman Environmental Prize for bringing the Bhopal disaster to the international center stage. It has been over two decades since the Union Carbide methyl isocyanate gas leak killed more than 30,000 people in Bhopal – the worst industrial disaster in history. The survivors, and the subsequent generations, continue to suffer the consequences of the disaster. But in 52-year-old Champa Devi Shukla, the survivors found new hope. For 19 years now, she has been a leading figure in the international campaign to seek justice for the victims.

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Rashida Bee – India

Linked with Champa Devi Shukla – India.

She is one of the 1000 women proposed for the Nobel Peace Price 2005.

She says: “A woman’s life involves discarding relationships that she has known from infancy and adopting strangers as her own … If she can face the world outside at such a fundamental level, then why should any other struggle for empowerment scare her”.

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Rashida Bee – India

Rashida Bee is a leading personality in the global campaign to secure justice for the survivors of the 1984 Union Carbide Gas Tragedy in Bhopal, the biggest industrial disaster in history. Rashida took her fight with Union Carbide Company and its giant partner, Dow Chemicals, to the streets of New York. Dow Chemicals is battling a series of cases that Rashida and other protestors filed against it.

Rashida received the Goldman Environmental Prize in 2004 for internationally center-staging the Bhopal disaster. On December 3, 1984, the Union Carbide Company’s (UCC) methyl isocyanate gas leak (MIC) progressively killed more than 30,000 people in Bhopal, the worst and most shameful industrial disaster in history. Among many others, 48-year-old Rashida Bee, a providential survivor, has been a leading personality in the global campaign to get justice for the survivors, direct and indirect.

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Index April 2007

Robert Springborg – England

Linked with Geneva Centre for the DEMOCRATIC CONTROL OF ARMED FORCES DCAF, with 4th General Conference of the ECPR, and with Political Islam and Europe.

Robert Springborg holds the MBI Al Jaber Chair in Middle East Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London and is Director of the London Middle East Institute.

He says: ”We stop the Mohamed Atta’s of the future in the same way that it seems to me to deal with the rest of Egypt and the third world. We help them to develop. That one needs to see opportunities in this society, opportunities for economic development, for the practice of one’s profession, for the expression of one’s beliefs and that can only come about with higher rates of economic growth and as presently constructed, this economy is incapable of taking advantage of opportunities provided by globalisation and is indeed threatened by that globalisation so there needs to be some reconfiguration of the relationship between the first world and the third world and Egypt to enable that development to occur more successfully because if there is not, then there will be protests of various sorts whether of the Islamist variety or others and they will continue odd infinitum so the answer in my mind is one word, it’s development ». (full text).

Look at: Oil and Democracy in Iraq, edited by Robert Springborg, Publication Date 23 Jan 2007: This is the first major study of the alternatives confronting Iraq as it seeks to rebuild its vital oil industry while simultaneously constructing a new political system. A key challenge facing the country is to allocate the revenues oil generates in a way that avoids economic and social instability. Reviewing the present status of the industry, the authors – including Clement Henry, Massoud Karshenas, Roger Owen, Mona Said and John Sfakianakis – use comparative analysis to suggest how it might best be rebuilt. This book is an important and timely assessment of Iraq’s oil industry. (full text).

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Robert Springborg – UK AU USA Egypt etc.

He says also: « My impression of Iraq [when I worked there] is that it had been the most effective developer of human resources of any Arab country other than Lebanon. It had built fine institutions in terms of health, education and other human resources. The Iraqi people were talented and great to work with, which makes the present situation all the more tragic. By the early 1980s, before I left, I visited the front with Iran during the Iran-Iraq conflict. The Iraqis had built substantial recreation centres underneath the bunkers with fine fittings and fixtures, with the help of many immigrant workers, including Koreans. It was a pretty opulent situation with Iraqi soldiers commuting to and from Baghdad, almost as weekend soldiers, probably a very different situation than their Iranian counterparts. The Iraqi army was almost a carbon copy of the Red Army under Stalin, with political commissars who were present calling the shots over military commanders ». (full text).

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Mirta Susana Clara – Argentina

She is one of the 1000 women proposed for the Nobel Peace Price 2005.

She says: « The photos of the prisoners humiliated by the Americans in Iraq remind me of my husband tortured in 1976, when the Argentinean military tied him up and took him on parade » … and: « With our companions in Switzerland and Spain, we are working to build ‘The place for ex-political prisoners’. It will be a place to recover the historical memory of what has happened ».

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Mirta Susana Clara – Argentina

She works for the Municipal Government of Buenos Aires, and for the Lanas National University.

After six years in prison, Mirta Clara, her daughter and son, and the rest of society, slowly, began to become familiar with each other again. Her husband had been killed by the Argentinean military regime (1976-1983). Through her professional specialty, psychology, she tries to construct inclusive policies to help the people excluded by society. Some of them have been affected directly or indirectly by genocide, others have been excluded by unemployment and its consequences, the greatest of which is poverty.

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Kurt Vonnegut – USA (1922 – 2007)

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (November 11, 1922 – April 11, 2007) was an American novelist known for works blending satire, black comedy, and science fiction, such as Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), Cat’s Cradle (1963), and Breakfast of Champions (1973), (see books, texts, bio, references, footnotes etc., on wikipedia).

The remaining picture on his official website.

But see also ‘thE vOnnEgUt wEb‘.
He says: “Don’t use semi-colons. They stand for nothing … they only show you’ve been to college.” He follows this by commenting “All American literature is about how bad it is to be American”. A list ensues, including the Scarlet Letter, Death of a Salesman and Moby Dick. (full text).

And also: “All I wanted to do was support my family,” Vonnegut wrote in 1999. “I didn’t think I would amount to a hill of beans”. (full text).

On wikipedia you’ll get the links to most of the (american) obituary writings, (scroll down).

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Kurt Vonnegut – USA (1922 – 2007)

Watch theis Google-Video: 37.59 min. the infinite mind;

ok, just go to Google-Video, put his name in the search tool, and you find pages of more Google-videos from or about Kurt Vonnegut.

And here some YouTube-Videos:

Kommaly Chanthavong – Laos

She is one of the 1000 women proposed for the Nobel Peace Price 2005.

She says: « We strengthen the position of women by giving them a dependable income and thus improving the chances of their children » … « I learned to weave from my mother when I was six years old, and I loved it » … « I met many desperately poor families displaced from rural areas without any marketable skills, so I started to teach the women how to weave silk » … « Our greatest challenge is to compete against cheaper, low-quality » … imports ».

Read: the cycle of silk production.

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Kommaly Chanthavong – Laos

She works for the Phontong cooperative for the production of silk, with the Lao Sericulture Company named Mulberries.

Kommaly Chantavong (born 1950) is a farmer’s daughter from the mountains of eastern Laos. When her village was bombed by the Americans in 1961, she fled to Vientiane. In 1976, she founded a cooperative for the production of silk, which she still heads. The cooperative teaches mostly women traditional skills in raising silkworms, making natural dyes and weaving traditional patterns. The successful marketing of the products provides a fair and steady income to several hundred families that used to be very poor.

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Michael Parenti – USA

Linked with Third World Traveler, with Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch, with Lori Wallach – USA, with How the Free Market Killed New Orleans, with Economy and Human Rights – one, with The Peninsula Peace and Justice Center PPJC, and with The Human Condition Series.

He is an internationally known award-winning author and lecturer. He is one of the nation’s leading progressive political analysts. His highly informative and entertaining books and talks have reached a wide range of audiences in North America and abroad. (more on his Homepage).

He says: « The enormous gap between what US leaders do in the world and what Americans think their leaders are doing is one of the great propaganda accomplishments of the dominant political mythology ». (Third world traveler).

Listen to his Google-videos:

Read: Mystery: How Wealth Creates Poverty In The World, By Michael Parenti, 24 April, 2007, Countercurrents.org.

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Michael Parenti – USA

He received his Ph.D. in political science from Yale University. He has taught at a number of colleges and universities, in the United States and abroad. Some of his writings have been translated into Arabic, Bangla, Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Serbian, Spanish, Swedish and Turkish.

Listen to some of his many YouTube-videos:

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Lijuan XIANG – China

She is Laureate for the Prize for Women’s Creativity in Rural Life.

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Lijuan XIANG – China

She works for a kindergarten she created for rural children.

There are not many places where rural children have access to kindergartens, especially in Third World countries.

After successfully working in the city kindergarten of Dongyue Township, Xiang Lijuan (30) of Dong Yue Xiang Ping Qiao village (Sichuan Province) decided to return home to open a kindergarten for rural children.

Obstacles were immense. She had the care of an elderly mother and a two year old child. With no classrooms, no teachers, no equipment and no money, all she had was a dream and an unbending, unrenting will. First, she had to negotiate with local schools and government. Then she approached banks and large city kindergartens for support. After endless efforts, she secured a 60’000 yuan loan (US$ 7’500), which enabled her to open her Sunflower Kindergarten in 2002 with adequate equipment and professional teachers.

Under her expert leadership, each teacher became a loving mother to the children. After only three years, the success was so striking, she obtained a much more important loan, enabling her to expand to a larger, more professsional set-up in a better environment, allowing her to better incarnate her dream that rural children, too, have a right to the best.

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