Catégorie : World People

Linked with Chatham House, with The Russian and Eurasian Security Network RES, with the Centre for Russian and East European Studies CREES, and with Russian Analytical Digest RAD.

Bettina Renz is Lecturer in Defence Studies at King’s College London/ Royal Air Force College, Cranwell. She completed her MSc by research in Russian Studies at the University of Edinburgh and her PhD at CREES, entitled, ‘Civil-Military Relations in Post-Soviet Russia: The Case of “Military Politicians”’. From 2002-2003 she worked as a Research Fellow on the ESRC project, ‘The Securitisation of Contemporary Russian Politics’, and in 2004-2005 as a Research Fellow on an ESRC consultancy, ‘UK Social Science and Central and Eastern Europe’. From 2005-2006 she held an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Birmingham. Her research interests have included security sector reform, civil-military relations, media-military relations, « new » security issues, and the perception of security threats in Russia and in other post-Soviet states. Her current research focuses on the evolution of the Russian security sector with a particular emphasis on the topic of counterterrorism. She is Honorary Research Fellow at the Centre for Russian and East European Studies. (full text).

See: Lunchtime research seminars, summer 2007.

Bettina Renz – England

She contributed to ‘the russian analytical digest’, to be download on RES/latest Publications/No. 17: « Siloviki » in Politics – Russian Military Reform/March 20, 2007. (in german: russland analysen).

Biography: Dr Bettina Renz graduated with an MA and MSc from the University of Edinburgh and received her PhD on the topic of civil-military relations in contemporary Russia from the University of Birmingham in 2005. Her research interests have included security sector reform, civil-military relations, media-military relations, « new » security issues, and the perception of security threats in Russia and other post-Soviet states.

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Linked with The Institute for Liberty and Democracy ILD, with Peru police evict market traders, and with Hernando de Soto’s texts and videos.

Mr. de Soto is currently President of the ILD —headquartered in Lima, Peru— considered by The Economist as one of the two most important think tanks in the world. Time magazine chose him as one of the five leading Latin American innovators of the century in its special May 1999 issue « Leaders for the New Millennium », and included him among the 100 most influential people in the world in 2004. (full text).

His main thesis: Need for private ownership (for everyone) ! The main tenet of de Soto’s books is that people in developing countries lack such an integrated formal property system, leading to only informal ownership of land and goods. He argues that the fruition of economic success of American and Japanese capitalism relied on a clear system of property rights which was created during the times of the ‘frontier’ in America and in Pre-WWI Feudal Japan. The lack of such an integrated system of property rights in today’s developing nations makes it impossible for the poor to leverage their now informal ownerships into capital (as collateral for credit), which de Soto claims would form the basis for entrepreneurship. Hence farmers in much of the developing world remain trapped in subsistence agriculture. As such, he argues that this informal ownership should be made formal, for example by giving squatters in shanty towns land titles to the land they now live on. (full text).

Hernando de Soto – Peru

Peru’s most distinguished economist, Hernando De Soto, was among the key speakers at an event held by the Foundation for International Community Assistance (FINCA International) in New York City. (full text, May 16, 2007).

He says: « What my definition of capital is, for the purposes of this book, are all those values that are hidden in assets and that come forth when property is well defined. It’s much more interesting to talk to dead Americans than to live Americans, because dead Americans two centuries ago were facing the same problems we are now ». (full text).

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Linked with The Bainbridge Graduate Institute BGI.

Dr. Elisabet Sahtouris is an evolution biologist, futurist, author, and consultant to organizations. Sahtouris is a member of the World Wisdom Council and a fellow of the World Business Academy. She is a citizen of the United States and of Greece, with a Canadian Ph.D. … (full text).

She says: « I think it was during my postdoctoral fellowship, when I was in Manhattan in New York City and saw so many social problems — people who were becoming homeless, being evicted, breathing foul air. I caused some unrest at the Museum of Natural History because they had paid a lot of money to do a very expensive pollution exhibit. This was around 1969. At the same time, the museum was belching black smoke all over northern Manhattan so women couldn’t hang their laundry out in the vicinity. I pointed out the contradiction between their pollution exhibit and what they were doing themselves. So there were many little lessons in seeing that science has such blinders on that it does not relate itself to the larger society ». (full text).

Elisabet Sahtouris – USA & Greece

• Look at all her Scholar Articles on Google:
• Read: Evolving Our Beliefs to Evolve Our Lives;
• Look at Lifeweb;
• Look at her website;
• Look at her writings;
• Read: Seeing The Post Corporate World, Life After Capitalism.

Listen to her videos:

• After Darwin pt1, 9.25 min, April 2007;
• After Darwin pt2, 8.39 min, April 2007;
• After Darwin pt3, 3.28 min, April 2007;
• UN Forum on Our Common Humanity, November 29, 2006.

In her unique approach, called Living Systems Design, Sahtouris applies the principles of biology and evolution to organizational development so that organizations may become more functional, healthy living systems, with increased resilience, stability, and cooperation.

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He is an Egyptian political author. He currently lives in Dakar, Senegal. He is born September 3, 1931 … After finishing his thesis, Amin went back to Cairo, where he was from 1957 to 1960 manager of Études de l’Organisme de Développement Économique. Subsequently Amin left Cairo, to become advisor in the Ministry of Planning in Bamako (Mali) from 1960 to 1963. In 1963 he was offered a fellowship at the Institut Africain de Développement Économique et de Planification (IDEP). Until 1970 he worked there as well as being a professor at the university of Poitiers, Dakar and Paris (of Paris VIII, Vincennes). In 1970 he became a chief of the IDEP, which he managed until 1980. In 1980 Amin left the IDEP and became a director of the Third World Forum in Dakar. (full text).

… Amin argues for a globalization based on the needs of the periphery, not the center, and for “de-linking” development from capital investment … (full text).

He says: ”History has proven that capitalism, like all social systems, is able at each stage of its expansion to overcome its own permanent contradictions, but not without worsening the violence with which they will be experienced by succeeding generations. This is not at all foreign to the Marxian spirit, which I express in the proposition that the human enterprise remains underdetermined, that it is not foreclosed by some necessity that is tied to the development of either the productive forces or any other metasocial force. More than ever humanity is confronted with two choices: to let itself be led by capitalism’s unfolding logic to a fate of collective suicide or, on the contrary, to give birth to the enormous human possibilities carried by that world-haunting spectre of communism ». (full text).

Samir Amin – Egypt

Listen to this video: Mangoro Dja. Entrevista Samir Amin, 8.51 minutes (in french with spanish subtitles);

Read: U.S. Imperialism, Europe, and the Middle East, November 2004.

… This commitment to reflection, debate, and self-critique continues to flourish, as exemplified by the rich reader/sourcebook ‘A Political Programme for the World Social Forum WSF‘. Compiled recently by Jai Sen and others at the India Institute for Critical Action: Centre in Movement (CACIM), the volume serves as a framework for ongoing dialogue about the Bamako Agreement, itself an ambitious attempt to articulate a political platform for the WSF spearheaded by Samir Amin and the World Forum for Alternative (WFA) … (full text).

Find: his articles on Google Scholar.

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Linked with the International forum on globalization, and with the Foundation for deep ecology. And with Jerry Mander of November 30, 2007.

He is an American activist best known for his book ‘Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television’ (1977), and for his contribution to a book on an unrelated topic, ‘The Great International Paper Airplane Book’ (1971). Mander worked in advertising for 15 years, including five as partner and president of Freeman, Mander & Gossage in San Francisco. In 1971 he founded the first non-profit advertising agency in the United States, Public Interest Communications, which worked on campaigns to prevent dams in the Grand Canyon, found Redwood National Park, and stop the American project to build a supersonic transport. He is currently the director of the International Forum on Globalization and the program director for Megatechnology and Globalization at the Foundation for Deep Ecology. (full text).

He says: ”The point is the way new technologies are introduced to us without a full discussion of how they are going to affect the planet, social relationships, political relationships, human health, nature, our conceptions of nature, and our conceptions of ourselves. Every technology that comes along affects these things. Cars, for example, have changed society completely. Had there been a debate about the existence of cars, we would have asked, do we want the entire landscape to be paved over? Do we want society to move into concrete urban centers? Do we want one resource – oil – to dominate human and political relationships in the world? The Gulf War resulted from our choice of the car a hundred years ago ». (full text).

Read: How I moved from advertising glamour to anti-globalisation fervour, 2006. (full text).

Jerry Mander – USA

Some of Jerry Mander’s many videos on YouTube:

• Interview, 6.23 minutes, March 18, 2007;
• Globalisation and Indigenous Culture, 3.40 minutes, January 8, 2007;
• Globalisation and Indigenous Culture, 4 minutes, November 28, 2006.

He says also: « Our culture lacks a philosophical basis, an understanding of the appropriate human role on earth, that would inform these developments before they happen.

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Linked with Does one have to fight tyranny with the instruments of the tyrants?

Dick Marty is a member of the Council of States of the Swiss Federal Assembly and a member of the Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly, where he is President of the Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights. As special rapporteur for the Council of Europe he was asked to give a report on the alleged existence of CIA secret prisons in Europe. In 2007 he received the Swiss Award in the category of politics. On February 1st, 2007 he was invited to the University of Neuchâtel (Switzerland), where he gave a lecture entitled: « Research on Phantom Airplanes and Secret Detention Centres: Does one have to fight tyranny with the instruments of the tyrants »? (full long text, May 18, 2007).

Same text/same date on Global Research.ca.

CIA agents’ testimony to boost new report into secret renditions: Swiss Senator Dick Marty said yesterday that the latest volume of his report for the Council of Europe into the alleged secret transfer of terrorist suspects by the United States will include statements from disgruntled CIA agents. « They spoke to me because they found what was happening to be disgusting », Marty said in an interview with Swiss newspaper La Liberte. « Their statements will help to ‘strengthen the findings of the first report’ published on June 6, 2006, on the secret activities of the CIA in Europe », Marty said. The latest volume of his report will be presented to the Council of Europe on June 8 in Paris. (full text, May 5, 2007 AFP).

Dick Marty – Switzerland

An Opportunity Seized: In its zeal to please U.S., Romania tramples foreigners’ rights, by Paul Radu, International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, May 24, 2007.

CIA secret rendition exposed, May 4, 2007.

Put the word GUANTANAMO in the search tool of YouTube and find more than 2000 shorter or longer Videos.

Read: Information Memorandum II, by Rapporteur Dick Marty, Switzerland, Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe.

Listen to this Videos (all three in italian):

• Voli segreti CIA, il caso Al Kassim, 11 minutes;
• Voli CIA, Giornalisti nel Mirino, 10 minutes;
• Voli CIA, l’Europa indaga, 12 minutes.

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Malek Chebel was born in the Algerian town of Constantine in 1953. He studied in Algeria until 1980 and then in Paris, where he now lives. As a psychologist, anthropologist and sexologist, an indefatigable archaeologist of the world of the Arabian and Islamic imagination, he has published major works on the real and imaginary Arabic world of Islam: ‘Le corps dans la tradition au Maghreb’, ‘La Formation de l’identité politique’, ‘L’Esprit de sérail’, ‘La Féminisation du monde’, ‘L’Encyclopédie de l’amour en Islam’, ‘Dictionnaire des symboles musulmans’, ‘Traité du raffinement’, Payot, 1999, etc.

He is an advocate of plain language and his preference is for highly meticulous analyses and rational arguments. He endeavours to gain a better knowledge of the basic writings of Islamic culture by studying them academically. Click on the links and listen to his speaks … (full text).

He says: « In France, Muslim girls want to wear the veil at school, whereas in Qatar, 200 girls demonstrated to be allowed to go to school without a veil … and: A Muslim Cleric is Better Received When He Speaks to People Who Are Frustrated and Have No Prospect of Sensual Pleasure ».

Malek Chebel – Algeria & France

Manifeste pour un Islam des lumières (Broché), de Malek Chebel (Auteur).

He says also: ”Europe is too lenient with Islamists … Fundamentalist Muslims are true fanatics. They consider progress the enemy of Islam […] They are narrow-minded ideologues who use the Koran to achieve sinister political aims … We must acknowledge that it is European, Western and modern countries that grant Islam the possibility to express itself, whereas at the same time, the sharia is being strongly fought against in a few Arab countries … As a Muslim, I feel more protected by the higher democratic principle of the [secular] nation-state than by the sharia, which is interpreted by the religious authorities as they wish, sometimes according to their moods … Sharia has never been a model of good governance in the Arab world. In any case, it must be separated from the political sphere … Too much space is given to Islamists in the media. The more space you give to fundamentalist Islam, the less there is for enlightened Islam. And it is the latter you need in order to live. Only enlightened Islam is compatible with world civilization, with Europe, and with the spirit of the [French] Republic. But times are difficult for moderate people ». (full text).

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Linked with The Manthan AIF-Award, with Body mass politic, and with ‘We are 30 years behind China in terms of development‘.

He is a well respected and clear-headed Indian economist. He was educated in Presidency College, Kolkata, Delhi School of Economics and Trinity College, Cambridge). He has worked at Presidency College (Kolkata), Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics (Pune), Indian Institute of Foreign Trade (Delhi), National Council of Applied Economic Research (Delhi) and as Consultant, Department of Economic Affairs, Ministry of Finance, Government of India. He was also the Director of a project known as LARGE (Legal Adjustments and Reforms for Globalizing the Economy), set up by the Ministry of Finance and UNDP to examine legal reforms. Books Authored or co-authored. (full text).

He says: “It is important to change not only the base and the basket of commodities, but also the method and processes used to compute these indices, which have been strongly criticized. Even the time taken for data collection is pretty long. These things must improve for the indices to be effective”. (full text).

Free download: A message of empowerment, a 174 pages pdf-text by Bibek Debroy.

Bibek Debroy – India

His columns on the Financial Express.

The Indian economy is fast losing competitiveness, not because RBI chose to inject some exchange rate volatility for various reasons but because the economy’s readiness to handle a permanently higher level of aggregate demand has been stopped in its tracks. That is the crux. The UPA government is part of the problem not only because it is an “unproductive asset” (acknowledge Bibek Debroy) but also since it is pursuing CPA—a counterproductive agenda. One should not deny India’s communists their credit in this state of affairs. (full text, May 15, 2007).

Read:

• Back to lazy banking, May 9, 2007;
• Wish he were duty-bound, March 1, 2007;
• Call it disparity, not rural-urban divide, November 30, 2006;
• Improving India’s Investment Climate, April 11, 2005;
• We must scrap Pay Commissions, July 2004;
• Integrating the Rural Poor into Markets, 2004.

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Linked with the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq OWFI, and with Honor Killings in the New Iraq, The Murder of Du’a Aswad.

She says: « After this war started on Iraq I immediately decided to go back to set up an organization and to be the voice for free women there, and since the beginning, in my organization, we decided to do demonstrations, to do campaigns, to make petitions, and to see whatever is needed. And it started with speaking out against the human trafficking of women, and we were the first to demonstrate. It was a few months after the [March 2003] beginning of the war – in August 2003 – we started that. But later on, our work was mainly on sheltering women from honor killings, and also on seeking out the reports of women’s trafficking, and later on in the last two years we found out – especially after the breakout of the scandal at the Abu Ghraib prison, we found out that it is very important to have a presence in all the women’s prisons and see what’s happening there. So, we managed to become regular visitors to the central prison – it’s called Khadamiyah, a women’s prison, and we interviewed all the women in there, and we found out terrible things happening before they reached the prison. Six of them, actually, spoke out about being assaulted, about being raped, some of them serially raped by the staff of the police station before they reached the prison. So, we decided: This is a program that we will have to pursue immediately. And the surprise here is that most of this work we do with very minimal funding – mostly depending on volunteer work ». (full text, May 18, 2007).

Read: Feminists Yanar Mohammed of Iraq and Dr. Sima Samar of Afghanistan on the Dire Situation for Women Under U.S. Occupation and Rising Fundamentalism, May 14, 2007.

Irak-photos: bombed people.

Yanar Mohammed – Irak

She works for Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq OWFI.

The 2007 honorees receiving the Eleanor Roosevelt Award for Global Women’s Rights were Dr. Sima Samar, chair of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission and highest-ranking female in the Afghan government; Yanar Mohammed, founder and president of the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq; Dr. Rebecca Gomperts, founder of Women on Waves, a mobile clinic offering safe abortions and inspiring legalization campaigns internationally; and Laurie David, environmental leader and producer of the Oscar-winning film, An Inconvenient Truth. (full text, May 18, 2007).

Read: Bringing feminism to Iraq, May 10, 2007.

Read: Women Under Attack, The Talibanization of Iraq, May n09, 2007.

Read: Voices from the Front—Women Face a “Mutilated Beast”. May 01, 2007.

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Ghiyās ol-Dīn Ab’ol-Fath Omār ibn Ebrāhīm Khayyām Neyshābūrī, or Omar Khayyam, born: May 18, 1048 in Nishapur, Iran (Persia) – died: December 4, 1131), was a Persian poet, mathematician, philosopher and astronomer. He is best known for the collection of poetry, the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. (full long texts about him, the Khayyam’s shrine, his time as Student, writer and poet, Mathematician and Astronomer, his view about Islam, his poems as a sceptic, but also Miscellaneous and References, you’ll find all on wikipedia).

He said: « Up from Earth’s centre through the Seventh Gate I rose, and on the throne of Saturn sate, And many knots unravel’d by the road; But not the knot of human death and fate ». (full text).

See: his tomb as a modern monument.

Omar Khayyam – Iran (Persian, 18 May 1048 – 04 December 1131)

Professor Marcel Conche (in french) from the french Sorbonne, calls him ‘the Islamic Voltaire’/Voltaire en terre d’islam. (Found in ‘Les nouveaux penseurs de l’Islam, RevueLe Nouvel Observateur, hors-série, avril-mai 2004’).

The great Persian mathematician, astronomer, freethinker and epigrammatist, who derived the epithet Khayyam (the tentmaker) most likely from his father’s trade, was born in or near Nishapur, where he is said to have died in AH 517 (AD 1123). At an early age he entered into a close friendship both with Nizam-ul-mulk and his schoolfellow Hassan ibn Sabbah, who founded afterwards the terrible sect of the Assassins. When Nizam-ul-mulk was raised to the rank of vizier by the Seljuk sultan Alp-Arslan (AD 1063-1073) he bestowed upon Hassan ibn Sabbah the dignity of a chamberlain, whilst offering a similar court office to Omar Khayyam. But the latter contented himself with an annual stipend which would enable him to devote all his time to his favorite studies of mathematics and astronomy. His standard work on algebra, written in Arabic, and other treatises of a similar character raised him at once to the foremost rank among the mathematicians of that age, and induced Sultan Malik-Shah to summon him in AH 467 (AD 1074) to institute astronomical observations on a larger scale, and to aid him in his great enterprise of a thorough reform of the calendar. The results of Omar’s research were a revised edition of the Zij or astronomical tables, and the introduction of the Ta’rikh-i-Malikshahi or Jalali, that is, the so-called Jalalian or Seljuk era, which commences in AH 471 (AD 1079, 15th March). (full text).

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