Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe (c) at the EU-Africa summit in Lisbon, Dec. 9.

Despite committing themselves to a new partnership of equals, European and African leaders wound up a summit meeting Sunday (Nov. 9) in open conflict over trade deals between the two continents and over human rights violations in Zimbabwe.
President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe used the final day of the meeting to denounce Continental European critics of his government as being ill-informed stooges of the country’s formal colonial master, Britain. Prime Minister Gordon Brown of Britain stayed away from the two-day meeting in Lisbon to protest Mugabe’s presence.
While Africans closed ranks around Mugabe, refusing to criticize a government that is accused of persistent human rights abuses and of impoverishing its citizens, a more serious division emerged over trade.
The European Union is negotiating a series of Economic Partnership Agreements, designed to replace existing deals with African countries, and wants to reach an agreement on them by the end of the year.
The EU says that if they fail to do so, African countries could lose tariff-free access to European markets under rules laid down by the World Trade Organization.
“It’s clear that Africa rejects the EPAs,“ President Abdoulaye Wade of Senegal said at a news conference, claiming the support of the president of South Africa, Thabo Mbeki. “We are not talking any more about EPAs, we’ve rejected them.“
Rifts over the two issues dominated the first meeting between EU and African leaders in seven years, souring the atmosphere at a gathering designed to help Europeans retain their traditional influence in Africa.
That has been challenged by the rise of China, which has pursued an aggressive strategy of African investment, offering loans and contracts that do not include conditions relating to transparency and good governance.
The Lisbon meeting ended with an ambitious action plan, covering a range of issues from immigration to climate change, and a promise to meet again in 2010, possibly in Libya.
The verdict on the meeting at which 80 countries were represented was predictably mixed. The host, Prime Minister JosŽ Socrates of Portugal, said it would “go down in history because of its spirit of mutual equality between states.“
The campaigning groups Save the Children and Human Rights Watch, however, issued separate statements decrying the lack of concrete achievements.
African countries with the lowest incomes are not affected because they are protected under WTO rules.
But slightly richer countries--most notably Namibia, which has refused to initial a deal-- could be hit severely if tariffs were introduced Jan. 1.
The trade deals the countries have been asked to sign cover goods only. But a clause in the agreements would oblige African countries to start negotiations on the eventual opening up their domestic markets in areas including services--something many African nations are reluctant to contemplate.
Britain is pressing for an EU pledge not to impose tariffs on African countries should they refuse to sign the agreements by Dec. 31, and President Nicolas Sarkozy of France said that Europe should not “bleed dry“ poor countries.
On Sunday, JosŽ Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission, promised that some form of negotiation could continue into next year, but his officials said it was far from clear that the deadline set for the end of this year would be lifted.
Aid agencies are pressing for clear concessions.
“This summit could be a wake-up call for European leaders if they realize that there are big problems with these deals,“ said Amy Barry, trade spokesperson of Oxfam.
Mugabe’s presence, meanwhile, provided a reminder of how the legacy of colonialism complicated the relationship between the two continents, as African leaders rejected criticism from Europeans of human rights in Zimbabwe.
Mbeki appealed to European officials to allow Africans to solve their own problems.
Earlier, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany issued a strong denunciation of the situation in Zimbabwe that was supported by the Netherlands, Denmark and Sweden.
Mugabe responded to the statement Sunday, referring to his critics as “Gordon’s gang of four,“ in reference to the British prime minister.
“Does the German chancellor and the other pro-Gordon Brown people really believe they know better than SADC and the African Union? We have to fight this arrogance,“ he was quoted as saying by European diplomats present in the meeting.
The EU’s foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, who spoke after Mugabe, pointed out that Merkel had reflected an agreed position of the EU, while Jan-Peter Balkenende, the Dutch prime minister, told reporters he was proud to be a member of the “gang of four.“
Despite the attention that his attendance attracted, Mugabe kept a relatively low profile in Lisbon, refusing to make any statements to the media. IHT.COM

We have been talking only about Turkey’s counterterrorism fight in the recent months. Neither the attacks of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) nor the struggle against the terrorist organization ceases to be in the spotlight.
Also never out of the spotlight are the slain PKK members and our security officers we lose to our fight against the PKK. For months we have been living with cross-border operation scenarios triggered by the PKK terror. We have people saying, “If it is the homeland in question, all the rest is but detail.“
What I want to talk about is this “detail“ part. After reading my article, you decide whether it is really an unnecessary detail or a real war Turkey has to wage on terrorism.
Above all, reducing the struggle of a country like Turkey merely to a counterterrorism struggle would be the greatest of mistakes. We should also scrutinize the socioeconomic conditions that facilitate the terrorists’ jobs and look for remedies.
Ultimately, fighting terrorism is not possible only with an armed struggle, and we should know that what threatens Turkey is not only terrorism, because the “other war“ Turkey has to fight is maybe more important than its war against terrorism. It should also be known that Turkey will have more successful results in its security-oriented wars in the event it wins its other war against poverty, destitution and employment.
You must have read the news article about the minimum wage in Turkey, covered on the front page of Sunday’s Zaman. If you haven’t, you must definitely read it to understand where Turkey’s essential problems stem from.
The article explains with striking examples how the minimum wage of 3 million people in Turkey is far from providing for even the lowest standard of living, revealing the minimum wage reality that concerns our 13 million citizens with all its ramifications. It clearly emphasizes that Turkey’s “other war“ is definitely not an unnecessary detail.
Today an employee being paid minimum wage makes YTL 419 (or $358) a month. Millions of people who earn this amount live in large families of four, six or more and have to set aside most of this amount for the rent of their slum houses that are devoid even of the most basic human requirements.
According to Confederation of Turkish Labor Unions reports, a family of four needs YTL 697 monthly just to buy food and YTL 2,200 monthly to cover mandatory expenses like food, rent, transportation, health and education.
That is, a person paid the minimum monthly wage has no means of providing for his family’s food, clothing, education or health needs.
Despite the 134 percent rise in their wages in the last five years and although this pay rise is much higher than the 59 percent rate of inflation increase, it doesn’t make much difference in their struggle to survive in the utmost of poverty.
The minimum wage’s having risen above the rate of inflation doesn’t give much consolation, either, as it is so low that it seriously hurts human dignity.
In fact experts state that the people in Turkey who benefited the least from 43 percent in growth in the Turkish economy in the last five years are minimum wage earners.
If the inflation rate and the rate of the economic growth were to be applied to the minimum wage increase, the amount in question would have to be YTL 640 ($548). But the government is planning for the minimum wage raise to be between 6 and 8 percent.
This small raise draws criticism even from employers hard put to keep up with international competition. The strange thing is that when you look at it from the perspective of employers, it doesn’t seem quite possible to say that they are not right. The biggest responsibility here falls on the government because the government can at least forego insurance premiums and taxes on minimum wage earners.
Maybe it will strike you as paradoxical, but the minimum wager earners--who live below the hunger level, to say nothing of the poverty level--perhaps make up the relatively fortunate segment of Turkey because the ratio of unemployed to the general population is nearly 10 percent.
A total of 376,000 university graduates are looking for a job today. The number in question is estimated to rise by 86,000 this year.
Although it is the 17th largest economy in the world, Turkey’s ranking of 84th among 177 countries in the 2007-2008 United Nations Development Program (UNDP) Human Development Report (HDR) explains everything. Having risen to 84th place from 92nd in the “index“ in the last five to six years through its economic performance, in the area of “human development“ Turkey lags behind even Armenia, which attracts attention with its poverty level.
Also, Turkey ranks last in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) region with regard to the human development index.
Bulent Kenes
TODAYSZAMAN.COM

Prime Minister Gordon Brown continues to have a difficult time. His problem arises from the need for funds to run the Labour Party.
Tony Blair, his predecessor, was interviewed by the police over accusations that honors (a seat in the House of Lords) had been promised to Labour Party fund donors.
It was eventually decided that there was insufficient evidence to prosecute anybody over these allegations.
Allegations were also made against both the Labour and Conservative Parties that they were accepting loans from rich people, knowing that the lenders had no intention of asking for their money back.
This was a way around the rule that donations had to be declared while loans did not.
It has recently emerged that some donations to the Labour Party from a property developer in the Newcastle area were channeled through third parties so that the donor could remain anonymous.
This is illegal and the chairman of the Labour Party has resigned. This is not, however, the end of the matter, as it is alleged that other senior party figures knew who the real donor was and accepted donations from him through third parties, including the donor’s secretary and solicitor.
The donor claims he wanted to avoid publicity and that he gained nothing from his donations. Unfortunately, Newcastle is where one of the worst cases of civic corruption in recent years has been exposed. Suspicious people argue that there is no smoke without fire.
There is no suggestion that Brown, the son of a Presbyterian minister in Scotland, is in any way implicated in dishonest dealings over party funds. He was quick to condemn the affair and has demanded full cooperation from the Labour Party with police investigations made at the behest of the electoral commission.
But coming on top of other administrative blunders, not least of which has been the loss of two computer disks revealing sensitive personal details on about half the taxpaying public, the affair has undermined Brown’s reputation for efficiency and competence. He has been accused by a former top civil servant of a Stalinist approach to doing business.
More recently he has been compared to “Mr. Bean,“ the bumbling British comedy-film character.
New legislation that tightens rules on party funding cannot be postponed much longer. It is widely argued that there should also be rules not only on how much can be spent during an election campaign but also in between elections.
There was surprise at the amounts that candidates for the recent election of the deputy leader of the Labour Party received and spent. Harriet Harman who was elected to this post has admitted receiving a sum of money indirectly from the donor behind the current scandal.
It would be wrong to conclude from the present fuss that politics in Britain is generally corrupt. The evidence is that it is a great deal less corrupt than in most other democratic countries. Moreover, much less is spent on political campaigning in Britain than in other countries.
Anyone who has been following the campaigns of the Republican and Democratic candidates for the 2008 American presidential elections will have noted the huge sums being collected and spent by the candidates.
Some ask whether the money collected has been spent wisely; others wonder whether it is necessary to collect such extravagant sums. When the election takes place, the outcome will depend on the results in a small number of districts where no particular party prevails.
This underscores a serious problem not only in the United States but in other states that claim to be democracies.
In a single-member constituency system, where the candidate with the most votes is declared the winner and there is no element of proportional representation or transferable vote, the votes of the minority count for nothing.
This situation is exacerbated when constituency boundaries are manipulated or rigged to ensure that one party can be certain of winning the seat. In Britain the task of fixing constituency boundaries is delegated to an independent commission.
JAPANTIMES.CO.JP

Palestinian construction workers build new houses in a development in the West Bank Jewish settlement of Ariel, Nov. 26.

It is impossible to announce the beginning of a new settlement at the end of Annapolis and say you truly desire peace. The good intentions of Israel, as it has pronounced them with regards to peace, are simply lies. Just because Israel’s decision to build more homes on occupied land comes on the heels of the Annapolis summit does not make the move any more appalling.
Building more settlements on Palestinian land is against the law, pure and simple, regardless of Annapolis.
Every time a settlement, building or even an apartment is built where it should not be in the occupied territories, it eats up that much more Palestinian land which was ultimately to be part of the Palestinian state.
If Israel goes ahead with building Har Homa, the settlement will never be demolished. In the past 10 years, nearly 3,500 demolition orders for settlements have been issued but just over 100 have been carried out, the Peace Now group says, citing government figures.
According to Peace Now, only 107 of 3,449 settlements over the past decade have been dismantled in the same period--just three percent.
It is helpful that the United States has voiced a rare criticism of Israel for this decision.
Condoleezza Rice’s comments on this new group of settlements--that they will not help build confidence when it is needed most-- coming as it does after Annapolis and on the eve of the beginning of negotiations, is welcome.
So, too, is the criticism of the project by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.
But ofcourse, words are not enough and, in the case of Israel, have never been. The US, as the sponsor of Annapolis and the road map which explicitly forbids the building or extension of Jewish settlements, and the United Nations, which is part of the Quartet backing the road map and Annapolis, must see to it that the 300 new houses planned for Har Homa, a settlement in East Beit-ul-Moqaddas--designated as the future Palestinian capital--are not built.
The Israeli argument is that the houses are part of plans drawn up seven years ago and it too can be easily shot down.
If Tel Aviv is really interested in a peace settlement, then it should do away with the plans altogether.
Since Israel was able to evacuate angry Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip three years ago, it should not be too difficult to put a halt to a settlement which is still on the drawing board.
Another complicating factor is the Hamas faction which has dismissed the process begun in Annapolis, saying it will not achieve the state the Palestinians want. Hamas will pounce on the Har Homa issue in order to support its case.
Israeli and Palestinian negotiators are due to meet for the first time since Annapolis. Har Homa will undoubtedly be high on the agenda and could conceivably stall the meetings from the very first day. Already, there are hugely difficult issues that need to be resolved, more settlements just add one more problem on an already long and crowded list.
If the US administration genuinely hopes the Middle East peace talks will conclude before President Bush leaves office, than it will have to deal with Har Homa quickly and forcefully.
ARABNEWS.COM