People's Democracy

on file

THE statistics are shocking: 18,000 children worldwide starve to death every day, another 300 million more suffer from chronic hunger and 100 million cannot afford to go to school.

--- The Hindu, June 13

IVORY Coast president Laurent Gbagbo has accused the United Nations of treating African nations like “colonies,” by systematically siding with their former colonial rulers in decisions about the continent.

“The UN continues to treat us as though we were still colonies,” he said. “As far as Ivory Coast goes, the Security Council systematically turns to France,” Gbagbo told Angolan state media late yesterday (June 6), during a two-day state visit to the southern African state.

“Nowadays they are speaking of the reform of the Security Council. This does not interest me. I would like reforms in the heart of the UN,” he said, arguing that the world body was founded in 1945, at a time when most African nations were still under the colonial yoke.

--- The Statesman, June 8

GLOBAL military spending blasted past the trillion dollar mark in 2004, with the United States alone accounting for nearly half of the total because of its “war on terror,” the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) said on Tuesday (June 7).

Military spending reached 1.035 trillion dollars in 2004, or 162 dollars for every inhabitant of the earth, up from 956 billion dollars in 2003, it said in its annual report…..

The main explanation for the current level of, and trend in, world military spending is the spending on military operation abroad by the US and, to a lesser extent, by its coalition partners,” it said.

Washington alone outspent the entire developing world in military goods, accounting for 47 per cent of the worldwide figure.

--- Hindustan Times, June 8    

THE ILO, which observed the World Day against Child Labour on Sunday (June 12), estimates that there are one million children aged between 5 and 17 currently toiling in mines and quarries all over the world. While observing the day, ILO’s focus this year is on elimination of child labour in small-scale mines and quarries.

ILO says that a majority of these mines and quarries are not mechanised and operate without adequate tools or safety measures for the workers. The work exposes children to the risk of death and injury from tunnel collapse, accidental explosions, rock falls, exposure to toxic substances such as mercury and lead, and chronic health conditions such as silicosis, say ILO experts.

In some mines, children work in mines as deep as 90 metres with only a rope with which to climb in and out, inadequate ventilation and only a flashlight or candle for light. In many small mines, child workers dig and haul heavy loads of rock, dive into rivers and flooded tunnels in search of minerals, set off explosives for underground blasting and crawl through narrow tunnels only as wide as their bodies.

In quarries, children dig sand, rock and dirt, transport it on their head and back and spend hours pounding large rocks into gravel to be used for construction material for roads and buildings.

--- The times of India, June 13       

LAWYERS representing detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, say that there still may be as many as six prisoners who were captured before their 18th birthday and that the military has sought to conceal the precise number of juveniles at the prison camp.

One lawyer said that his client, a Saudi of Chadian descent, was not yet 15 when he was captured and has told him that he was beaten regularly in his early days at Guantanamo, hanged by his wrists for hours at a time and that an interrogator pressed a burning cigarette into his arm.

The lawyers, Mr Glive and Stafford Smith, of London, said in an interview that the prisoner, who is now 18 and is identified by the initials M C in public documents, told him in a recent interview at Guantanamo that he was seized be local authorities in Pakistan about October 21, 2001, a few months shy of his 15th birthday and taken to Guantanamo at the beginning of 2002. 

--- The Asian Age, June 14