GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – The “Great Successor”, Kim Jong-un, has officially been named the successor to his father, North Korean leader Kim Jong-il, 69, who died Monday 19 December of a heart attack while traveling, according to media reports coming out of the country. The son, who is reportedly in his late 20s, surfaced as part of N Korea’s political picture in 2010, when he was appointed to several senior posts, including military ones.
He spent some of his time in early adolescence at a state school in Bern.
South Korea has put its military forces on high alert; the two countries have officially been at war for more than 60 years and N Korea in recent months has been the target of much criticism from the West for its nuclear programme.
Links to other sites: CNN, Sydney Morning Herald, Reuters,
©2011 Chappatte, distributed by Globe Cartoon. More cartoons on Chappatte’s web site. Geneva-based Patrick Chappatte works for the International Herald Tribune, for Geneva newspaper Le Temps, and for NZZ am Sonntag. All cartoons reproduced with permission.
The United Nations special envoy to Cote d’Ivoire, YJ Choi, says that Laurent Gbagbo has agreed to surrender and that reports about attacks on the presidential palace in Cote d’Ivoire are not true. Choi says, “All the generals who are fighting for Gbagbo have deserted him, it is over. There is no army, there is no fighting.”
Reports continue to come in that there is still fighting throughout the country, and the possibility of a peaceful transition of power hangs in the balance Tuesday night 5 April.
Links to other sites: allAfrica/Radio France International, Reuters background on Gbagbo and rival Ouattara
AlJazeera video interview with UN special envoy Y J Choi
Asmara All Stars, band behind "Eritrea's Got Soul"
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Eritrea’s new album, “Eritrea’s Got Soul”, is one of the world’s best holiday gifts, for the power of the unlikely recordings to tell a story from a small African nation.
Three international albums in 50 years for a population of five million people with nine languages who have their own musical heritage but who have known little besides war led to French musician Bruno Blum working with Eritrean authorities to create a band called Asmara All Stars and to convince German company Out Here to produce the 13 tracks.
Government authorities, particularly authoritarian ones, are not often part of a popular new music album. Many of the musicians in the band are civil servants, regularly called on to play for the army, according to Radio France International’s (RFI) David Brown.
Blum insisted that he be given free rein, including bringing in a few musicians who are not civil servants.
Eritrea (photo: Out Here, Germany)
Brown writes that “French blues guitarist, songwriter, producer, music author, painter and cartoonist Bruno Blum was invited in 2006 by the official Eritrean Cultural Affairs Office to create a modern yet traditional sound from a country that has faced a cultural and economic blockade for the past decade.”
Five thousand European-based Eritreans in February 2010 gathered in front of the United Nations in Geneva, with other protesters marching in the US and Australia against what the groups labelled US-led UN sanctions against Eritrea.
The UN Security Council in December 2009 had voted an arms embargo and other sanctions, including a ban on travel by senior Eritrean officials, for destabilizing neighbouring Somalia.
World attention was drawn to Eritrea in June 2010 when a group of boat people from the country were dramatically rescued, with Geneva-based refugee organization UNHCR highly critical “of rescue operations in the region, where Italy, Malta and Libya have disputed who is responsible for picking up boat people in distress,” GenevaLunch reported.
RFI’s Brown recounts the tale of how the 14-member band put together the music and recorded it, despite many odds, from bureaucratic fights to marrying quarreling music styles.
Blum will be known to many English-speaking music fans for his version of Bob Marley’s “War”, featuring Haile Selassie’s original speech and the Wailers.
Eritrea’s history is a long and rich saga linked to its mineral resources, closeness to Egypt during the time of the pharoahs and its 1,600km of Red Sea coastline. It became an Italian colony in 1890, 21 years after the opening of the Suez Canal, then part of Italian East Africa in 1936, along with Ethiopia and Sudan.
It was ruled by the British under a UN mandate from 1941 to 1951, and, shortly after independence as a federation with its larger neighbour Ethiopia, was annexed as a province of the latter in 1952. “Lack of regard for the Eritrean population led to the formation of an independence movement in the early 1960s (1961), which erupted into a 30-year war against successive Ethiopian governments that ended in 1991,” according to Wikipedia. “Following a UN-supervised referendum in Eritrea in which the Eritrean people overwhelmingly voted for independence, Eritrea declared its independence and gained international recognition in 1993.”
The two nations fought again in 1998, a two-year border dispute that remains unresolved since UN forces pulled out, and Eritrea also went to war with Yemen. It has spent much of the past decade trying to feed its population and rebuild the economy, but with an unusually high proportion of workers in the civil service.
The country’s reputation internationally has suffered from a lack of information, with Reporters without Borders saying there is not a single foreign correspondent, and giving it a lower media rating even than North Korea. Travellers, including diplomats, have trouble obtaining permission to travel outside the capital of Asmara.
Eritrea’s single-party government continues in power despite a constitution that calls for a multi-party government.
Links to reviews of “Eritrea’s Got Soul”:
Deanne Sole / Pop Matters, Richie Troughton / The Quietus
Album (sample tracks, for-pay downloads)
Read full review of Eritrea’s Got Soul – Asmara All Stars on Boomkat.com ©
US combat forces will be leaving Iraq, “on time, as promised” President Barack Obama told a veterans’ group Monday 2 August.
Tens of thousands of troops still in Iraq are being pulled out and will be gone by 31 August. The end of the war that cost $800 billion coincides with the arrival in Afghanistan of 30,000 additional US troops, and the insistence by Obama on the timing of the end of the war in Iraq is being widely perceived in the media as an effort to calm fears that the US role in Afghanistan will drag on longer than promised.
Links to other sites: The Globe & Mail, Canada, New York Times, National Public Radio, Xinhua
Former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair made a long-awaited appearance Friday morning 29 January in front of a war panel reviewing how and why the country entered a war with Iraq. A key factor, he has told the panel, was the changed perception of risk after the attacks of 11 September 2001. Blair is appearing in an all-day session until 17:00 UK time; the panel can be seen live on BBC.
Photo: Gaya Mageswaran/International Federation, © International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – The horrors of the battle of Solferino 150 years ago 24 June brought into being the international Red Cross and Red Crescent movement, based in Geneva. To mark the day, Swiss media have been focusing on numerous events taking place in the region:
Le Temps mentions the week-long celebrations organized by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), and highlights the coming together of volunteers of the 186 national Red Cross and Red Crescent societies at Solferino, in Italy. Three hundred young people will retrace Henri Dunant’s trip back to Geneva from Solferino: Dunant was the Geneva businessman who witnessed the battle and returned home determined to help change things.
TSR reports that starting 22 June at ICRC headquarters 20 runners will run a relay in 20km stages all the way to Solferino, where they will join the hundreds of volunteers from the national societies. TSR also mentions that Geneva’s jet d’eau fountain was illuminated in red Wednesday, 24 June.
The Tribune de Genève details the relay race to Solferino from Geneva, and notes that 12 of the runners are ICRC staff members. They arrive Saturday 26 June.
Swissinfo commemorates the occasion with a special section that includes photos and background articles on the Red Cross in the news.
Geneva is the headquarters of both the ICRC, which offers its services in instances of armed conflict, and of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC), which coordinates the activities of the 186 individual national societies. The IFRC has its own page for the events being commemorated.
Solferino would have been just another bloody battle to be forgotten in northern Italy 150 years ago, but for the fact that it moved one man, Dunant, to start something that has helped untold victims of warfare since then. Geneva’s Dunant saw the battle of Solferino, 24 June 1859, that pitted French and Piedmontese forces against the Austrians, and then helped to organize assistance to the abandoned wounded on the battlefield.
He went away with the germ of an idea that brought into being the Red Cross and Red Crescent movement and won him the first Nobel Peace prize in 1901.
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - Several international aid agencies working with internally displaced people (IDPs) in northwest Pakistan have called for a more rapid deployment of funds in order to help the estimated 2.4 million (IDPs) who fled fighting in the Swat valley in May 2009, even as more arrive daily from the conflict areas. Most of the IDPs have found shelter not in camps but with friends and family. This hospitality is now being sorely tested as more and more families are arriving at camps, says the UNHCR (UN High Commissioner for Refugees).
UPDATE 07:45 The BBC reports the Sri Lankan government as saying bodies of Tamil Tiger leaders have been found as “brushing up” operations continue. The country’s Tamil Tigers have accepted defeat after 25 years of fighting, with their head of international relations saying on their web site Sunday 16 May that the “bitter end” had been reached. Sri Lanka’s President Mahinda Rajapakse told a group of G11 developing countries leaders meeting in Jordan Sunday that he is “proud” to have declared victory over the Tamil Tigers Friday 16 May, after cutting off rebel access to the sea. About 50,000 civilians fled the fighting in recent days, 36,000 on Saturday alone, reports the BBC, quoting army sources. The government had announced previously that no more than 20,000 civilians remained in the area, although 16 May the pro-Tamil tamilnet.com reported that fighting, including heavy artillery, continues in the area and that thousands of wounded civilians remain trapped. Al Jazeera, Christian Science Monitor
By Jared Bloch
Writer/Director Peter Kerekes
What happens to the war effort when the Army chef spoils the food? As one character in Peter Kerekes “Cooking History” proclaims, “there is no war without food.” And maybe no successful war campaign without good food.
The premise for this alternately wry and sobering movie evolved out of a conversation between Kerekes and his father. “The idea was to collect stories from ordinary people, and to show how they can, and have changed history,” Kerekes told Geneva Lunch during a conversation on the final day of the 2009 Visions du Réel Film Festivalin Nyon.
The BBC reports that Israel has confirmed it is sending reservists to the Gaza Strip. Nearly 1,000 people are reported dead as the war in Gaza enters in its 17th day.
Reuters reports that the “fiercest offensive in decades” continued Monday in the Gaza Strip, with Israel readying troops and tanks for a ground attack that looks increasingly likely. Three people were killed in Israel by rockets launched from Gaza. The wire service credits medical officials in Gaza as saying 335 people are dead and some 700 injured following Israeli air attacks. Related stories, Jerusalem Post, Al-Jazeera
The continuing rape of girls and women in the Democratic Republic of the Congo as part of the ongoing war and internal strife there, and the lack of global interest and attention, combine war and racial prejudice in a way that bodes ill for the country’s future, argues one of the group’s working to help the victims. CNN
